Tim Smith had always been lucky. It was like a spotlight shone on him, like the world in many small, subtle ways, moved itself around to make space for him, to ensure things would go his way. When Tim Smith needed something, the world delivered.
So it was, that on a sunny day in June, Tim found himself in a bright, shiny lab with a brand-new name badge hanging proudly from his neatly starched white coat. The name badge read: Tim Smith, Assistant Build Technician.
The question now, was what he was supposed to be building.
Tim took a long, happy breath and allowed his fingers to tickle the air above his keyboard. His computer sat in front of him, glowing expectantly, awaiting his instructions. The desk lamp shone over him, a beneficent angel of inspiration, and the whole of his bright, shiny lab – OK, so not his exactly, but pah, mere details – radiated with possibilities.
His fingers hovered.
Yes, where to start? Dr. Heffleton Pfleeg had not been very specific. He had talked a lot, yes, but most of it had unwoven itself faster than Tim could knit it together and the remnants of the conversation/briefing/induction now lay in a confused tangle under his desk. Tim was not overly concerned. He was sure he’d work it out, and anyway, Dr. Pfleeg had since marched off exclaiming something about hydrogen and might not be back for hours. Until then, Tim had his log-in details, he could take his time and explore. Get to know whatever it was Pfleeg, and now he, were working on and decide for himself how to proceed.
It was a simple question of focus, Tim reminded himself: Start at the bottom and work up. This proved to be no easy task. Pfleeg’s filling system was like the chaotic mind of a heavily dissociative, illiterate Goldfish, and after a few hours of cheerful safari-ing through the maze of garbled, half-hatched, almost plans, Tim had ascertained that they were either working on some form of micro robot that could be injected into the blood for no reason he could ascertain, an organism than seemed designed to digest rotting waste and fart out electricity (the logic of which Tim mistrusted) or what looked to be a giant robot equipped with laser guns and mounted jetpacks. This last one was in a file labelled ‘Top Secret’ mainly populated by pictures of Iron Man.
Tim sat back and frowned. Not one for pessimism, he nevertheless had the vague inkling that his new boss may in fact be out of his chaotic, dissociative, Goldfishy mind. This posed certain immediate and not inconsiderable problems.
Tapping his finger gently on his lower lip, Tim considered his options. Pfleeg had been financed for the next three years by The Council of Innovation and Science, to produce Works of Social Utility and Extraordinary Merit. Everyone knew that The Council of Innovation and Science was simply the fancy, self-appointed title of the eccentric, Multi-Billionaire, Rodreeden Zimmerhalf, who had not been seen in person for nearly thirty years and conducted all of his interviews by hologram wearing a cat mask. He was widely rumoured to be dead, living on Mars, living in an alternate dimension, a fiction of someone else’s imagination, dangerously insane or at least two of the above. This, the way Tim saw it, provided him with something of a golden opportunity. He was smart, ambitious and now – suddenly – well-financed. He had a nice new white coat, a brand new name badge, a shiny, new lab at his disposal and was answerable only to one batshit crazy scientist and another batshit crazy billionaire.
This was it. The chance he had been waiting for.
Tim glanced around surreptitiously and withdrew a data key from his trouser pocket. He inserted the key into the computer and, throwing another furtive glance over his shoulder, clicked open the drive. There it was: His masterpiece in the making. Even taking his relentless good fortune into account, he had assumed it would take him a few years, or at least a couple of intense, brown-nosing months, to get into the position where he could pursue his dream unhindered. Even in his wildest imaginings – and Tim could imagine as wildly as the best of them – he hadn’t thought he’d be free to develop his beloved brainchild on his first day.
Time to begin then, no reason to delay – cue the creative genius montage: Some energetic music, a series of visual clues to show time passing: now he comes in in sunglasses, now in a winter coat, a strategic increase in the degree of inventive disarray, plenty of close ups of brow furrowed, hand dragged through hair, lip bitten. We see the construction take shape; a machine emerging slowly, complicated wiring, metal banged into shape, tongue trapped between teeth as the final adjustments are made. Then, finally, the inventor’s eyes shine, he stands back and smiles. The music stops.
Flashback to when Tim was seven.
There’s seven year old Tim. A bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, handsome boy, beloved by well-balanced parents, smart, good at sports and popular. We see him here on a windy football field. Tim has the ball and is running for goal. He’s going to score. The seven year old defenders are panicking and the red-faced, fat kid in goal has an adorable expression of panic across his pasty face. Tim swings back his leg, eyes pinned on the goal, balancing balletically on his toes and the crowd cheers… then, suddenly, the budding sports star falters. No-one, himself included, had noticed that his shiny black football boots were too loosely tied, and now, with the strain of the balletic toe stand, they do not offer adequate stability. The boy wobbles. The speed with which his kicking foot is swinging majestically for the ball is too much. The boy teeters. The balancing foot seems to give way under him. The boy falls. The crowd groans, the goal is not scored and the other side win on penalties.
It wasn’t important. It didn’t matter. No-one cared – junior five aside league not being something anyone over the age of seven gives more than a nonchalant half-shit about – and so it was forgotten by everyone almost immediately. Everyone except the boy. The boy for whom this one instance of bad luck was like a malignant thorn in his side, waking him at night with the feeling of falling, causing him to check his shoe laces forty or fifty times a day and giving him an entrenched, long-lasting and poignant hatred of football boots.
But now, finally, he would be free. Against all the odds, against the dictates of reason and the limitations of physics, he had succeeded. This was it. The earth-shatteringly amazing invention that would undo the one dark spot on his otherwise faultless existence. The brainwave that would make his fortune and propel him into the history books.
Tim Smith, Assistant Build Technician, had invented a time machine.
The time machine sits in front of him, waiting expectantly, and Tim feels the full weight of this moment: He is about the change history. Quite literally.
Tim grins. To be a creator is to be God, in a way; to bring things into existence; to grant life to new ideas and then watch them grow, expand, exceed your wildest imaginings; to exist out there in the world as proof that you yourself existed; to act as your legacy; to show that you won.
Tim took a deep breath, double-checked his shoe laces for the thirtieth time that day and punched in the date, time and place he wished to reach. With a dignity befitting the gravity of the situation, he climbed into the machine and plugged himself in.
Anyone else in Tim Smith’s position at that moment would probably have felt an edge of uncertainty. A slight, panicky sensation as their mind wound through the various messy, inauspicious outcomes of such an experiment. But not Tim. Tim Smith, beloved golden child of fate, chosen beneficiary of providence, he on whom fortune could not but smile, he would obviously get it perfect on the first try. And if not, well, that was what the time machine was for.
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