Kim opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. Déjà vu, she thought. The ceiling stared back at her as indifferently as it always did.
Kim rose and showered, like she always did. Then she brushed her teeth, staring in the mirror at her own reflection. It surprised her to see how young she still looked. She certainly didn’t feel it.
Kim returned to her bedroom, got dressed and pulled back the curtains. A magpie regarded her curiously from a branch outside her window and a small child with a football ran past, kicking the ball ahead of him. In many ways today was just like yesterday and the day before it, the day before that and every other day previous, and maybe it was. Or maybe not. Maybe today was the day everything would finally change.
Kim ate breakfast – porridge with honey – as always – then she left for work.
The Top Secret Lab where Kim worked was known affectionately as The Genius Bunker, because everyone who worked there was an undisputed genius of some kind or another. Kim was herself also an undisputed genius, although she would often wearily expend energy she didn’t have disputing this. At sixteen she had obtained a PhD, graduating in the top of her class, at eighteen she had secured a much sought after scholarship to a highly acclaimed research institute and at twenty she had been taken on as the assistant to the Universe’s most renowned Temporal Scientist: Dr. Heffleton Pfleeg, an unconventional but undisputed genius who had never bothered to learn her name.
As was one of the most well-respected Temporal Physicists in the world, great things were expected of her. Kim, however did not remember ever having been interested Temporal Physics. Ever since she was a small child she had wanted to be a doctor. Her mother had died from something mysterious during the later hyperbolic years when everyone was dying from something mysterious. Kim had grown up with a kind but mostly absent father in a world obsessed with infection control and sterilisation; her first kiss at age fourteen had been conducted through latex and at twenty-eight she had only ever had unprotected physical contact twice and once was by accident. It was therefore to be expected that she would be drawn to medicine. Somehow though, she had ended up in temporal research. Kim did not remember making this decision. It was simply how things had turned out.
She had been working with Pfleeg for almost a decade now, a decade which, to Kim, felt like at least a hundred years. She worked ten hour days, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, meaning she could rarely remember which month it was, let alone which day. For Kim, every day was the same. She should look for a new job of course, but unfortunately she didn’t really have the time.
Over the years, she and Pfleeg had worked exclusively on Time Travel. To date however, they had never succeeded in so much as causing the odd hour to fly by. Now that The Governing Board of United Earth Nations had initiated a new funding program specifically for time travel research, Pfleeg insisted he was finally close. Kim hoped he was right, she wasn’t sure she could take things dragging on like this much longer.
When Kim arrived at the research facility, Pfleeg had just finished inventing their time’s first Time Machine for the third time that week –Time Machines had a troubling propensity to uninvent themselves, something which spoke volumes about the wisdom of inventing them in the first place, a wisdom no one spent any time whatsoever concerning themselves with – and was getting ready to run the first test.
“Hold the phone, Tim!” Pfleeg declared, when she entered. “Sit down, strap in and cellophane up, this is gonna be big.”
“It’s actually K-…”
“They’ve been calling me a genius for years, Tom, years. Genius? Pah! I’ll show um genius…”
“My name’s actually K-…”
“But now I’ve done it, now I’ve really done it. I may have just discovered the secret to time travel.”
Kim congratulated him for the third time that week.
“Want to know how it works?”
“Actually, I already…”
“It’s simple really, any moron could have done it had they had my explosive creativity and thirty years of expertise in temporal physics and quantum spectomitry. I’ve basically just contabulated the wavomitry drive to light speed and set it in reverse. The triptometer will release hyperstitional relativity at about 8blillion megaclicks a millosplice and the resultant power surge will tip the relopathology into statial verbometry, causing a chain reaction which will intercept linear time allowing the temporal spectrometer, here, to reset the timer, here, and then we’ll be right on time wherever we are.”
“Yes, that’s…”
“Genius I know. Have you set the date?”
Kim took a deep breath, and punched in the date and time for the third time that week. “Please”, she murmured to herself. She stepped back and nodded to Pfleeg. This could change everything, she thought, or, as Pfleeg extended his finger, it could change nothing at all...
Pfleeg’s finger hit the button, there was a click, a spark and then a heavy electrical whirring sound which grew steadily in intensity.
“Err…” Kim glanced at Pfleeg whose face was lit by the excess of lightbulbs and whose eyes were flashing dangerously. “Maybe we should move a little further back…?”
The machine was rocking from side to side and whirring alarmingly, the lights flashing on and off and sparks jetting from the contraption which seemed to be ready to explode.
“Err…” Kim said again.
And then the room was bathed in an intense white light which blinded them, before slowly receding into a pinhole dot and plunging everything into darkness.
They stood there in silence for a moment.
“I… Did you… What just happened?” Jess whispered.
Tim blinked and turned to stare at the machine. “I’m not sure…” He said slowly, “But I think something might have happened…”
“Did it work?”
“I don’t think so…”
Tim had a suspicion something was up, an inkling that something or someone was interfering with their research. After all, these skips had been increasing in frequency, his gammacolate had disappeared the day before and his lab had been emitting a faint but steady aura of negatively charged kilmophogs for weeks. That and a markedly higher density of nanoquadrants than could be readily explained by the time of year or the current atmospheric spectometrics. The Tempolaxidator was still buzzing alarmingly and the pregnant woman was waffling on about fluctuations in spaciotemporal linearity going two-dimensional.
Most people in this situation would feel a sense of alarm, confusion and might possibly begin to question their sanity. Kim Smith felt weary and a touch despondent.
Dr. Heffleton Pfleeg, was sitting opposite her, looking at her through narrowed eyes.
“The bed’s probably still there if you want to go and check.” She told him
“Why would your bed be on a building site?”
“Good question.”
“Teleportation?” He suggested accusingly.
“I don’t know.”
“Well what else could it be?”
“Time travel?”
That morning, something had gone terribly, awfully and irreparably wrong. Kim Smith had known it would and that morning, when the streaming sunlight had woken her, she knew the Bad Thing had finally happened.
There were two things that lead her to this conclusion. The first, was that she had overslept; the streaming sunlight suggested it was long past six thirty when her alarm should have woken her. The second, and slightly more alarming indication that something had gone badly wrong, was the fact that her bed was standing on a building site, when it should, by all rights, have been standing in her bedroom.
Kim opened her eyes and stared at the bedroom ceiling. Déjà vu, she thought wearily. The ceiling stared back at her as indifferently as it always did. She rose and showered and brushed her teeth, staring in the mirror at her own reflection. In many ways today was just like yesterday and the day before it, the day before that and every other day, or maybe, today was the day everything was going to change.