Kim opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling.
“Enough”, she said.
The ceiling stared back at her as indifferently as it always did.
Kim had taken as much as she could bear. Today was the day everything would finally change and she was going to be the one to change it. Why not? She was, after all, one of the most well-respected Temporal Physicists in the world. Just last year The Governing Board of United Earth Nations had named her ‘Most likely to change the world (or destroy it)’ and for three years running she had been awarded the grant for ‘Undisputed Geniusity’ by The Council of Innovation and Science, one of the leading funding organisations of dangerously speculative scientific research in the known universe, famous for the mind-bending scope of its vision for the future and for being mildly illiterate. There was only one problem, one thing standing in her way; a congenitally forgetful, probably insane, four foot nine, pot-bellied, white-haired, horn-rimmed spectacle-wearing problem that had no intention of going anywhere. Her boss: Dr. Heffleton Pfleeg. She just needed to get Pfleeg out of the way somehow and then…
When Kim arrived at the research facility where she worked, Pfleeg was fiddling with his Time Machine.
“Hold the phone, Tim!” Pfleeg declared, when she entered. “Sit down, strap in and cellophane up, I’m close and this is gonna be big.”
“It’s Kim,” said Kim, fully aware that he wasn’t listening.
“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’m close, now I’ve nearly done it. I am mere milibeats away from discovering the secret to time travel.”
Kim rolled her eyes and tried not to sigh out loud.
Pfleeg continued to mutter and exclaim to himself while Kim wondered whether the legal loophole allowing for acts of catastrophic destruction when undertaken for the good of science, would apply to her taking a mallet to the shiny dome of Pfleeg’s balding cranium. She could claim ‘diminished responsibility’ due to an episode of ‘mad scientistitis’. That might fly… It was the era of the hero scientist after all, you could get away with pretty much anything these days if you just claimed to be inventing something mind-bogglingly, ground-breakingly ridiculous. Just a few years back, Professor Gilbert O’Sullican had accidently imploded Mars while trying to develop his teleportation machine and had got off with a caution and an admonishing head shake. Surely, in comparison, Pfleeg’s skull was a small price to pay…
She was roused from her reverie by Pfleeg declaring that he couldn’t possibly time travel on an empty stomach and where the hell was Jeremy – he meant Jessica – the lab assistant, who must immediately fetch his banana and tuna sandwich or face the consequences.
Kim, without thinking to much about it slipped quietly into hiding behind the door. Pfleeg blustered on for about ten minutes until eventually realising he was alone. Then he blustered on a little longer, turned on all the machines in the lab and then turned them off again, burst briefly into a song about an isotope and then, his resources for self-amusement apparently exhausted, announced to the empty lab, with something of a flourish, that he was going in search of nourishment and would be back directly.
Kim, behind the door, was now thoroughly uncomfortable, but it seemed her gamble had paid off. As soon as Pfleeg was gone – judiciously locking the door behind him – she emerged victoriously. Pfleeg would allow no one else to touch his Time Machine and jealously guarded any equipment that could be used to construct a rival. He practically lived in the lab and on the few occasions he left it, locked it securely against intrusion. Neither her, nor Jess, were permitted entry without Pfleeg being present and the bumbling idiot had been inventing and promptly uninventing time machines for years. He was trapped in an infinite cycle of finally getting close to the secrets of time travel, then forgetting what he was doing and dismantling everything only to arrive back at square one and start the whole thing all over again. It was enough to send someone with the patience of a hydrogen atom, completely loop-de-loop and Kim did not want to lose her mind over this shit. It was time to take action. So now all she had to do was invent time travel before Pfleeg could get back from lunch and uninvent it again.
The Time Machine sat on Pfleeg’s work bench. To uninstructed eyes it did not look much like a time machine. To be honest, it looked a little like an over-wired blender with an old microwave timer attached to it. Appearances could however be deceiving. Pfleeg’s memory was about as dependable as a solar-powered submarine, but his intellect was razor sharp. Under the casing, a radiometer was attached to a high-powered hydrabattery and a brand-new temporal spectrometer was wired to the timer. Oh yes, Pfleeg knew what he was doing.
Kim, who after years of watching Pfleeg work knew exactly what she was doing, worked quickly. She reversed the spectrometer and installed a Tempolaxidator to the radiometer to improve temporal liquidity. She contabulated the wavomitry drive to light speed and set it in reverse. The Triptometer was set to release hyperstitional relativity at about 8blillion megaclicks a millosplice, which she estimated should be fast enough. Finally she checked the spatio-dissolvarity readings and adjusted the permeability metrics. She smiled to herself. She was ready.
Pfleeg could be back any minute so there was no time to waste. Kim plugged herself to the unit, set the timer and hit the button. There was a click, a spark and then a heavy electrical whirring sound which grew steadily in intensity. The Time Machine began to shake from side to side and then the room was bathed in an intense white light which slowly receded into a pinhole dot and plunged everything into darkness.
When she could see again Kim was standing on a street next to a building site which looked very vaguely familiar. There was bed sitting in the middle of the building site and a little boy with a football was standing nearby, staring at her.
“Hello.” Said Kim.
The little boy blinked.
There was someone in the bed, Kim realised. Someone was waking up, sitting, stretching and looking around in confusion. Kim recognised the duvet cover before she recognised herself.
“Shit.” Kim muttered, “That’s not right.”
She bent down so that the other Kim waking up in the bed on the building site wouldn’t see her and adjusted the Tempolaxidator, checked the Triptometer was working properly and put in new coordinates.
The little boy was looking frantically between her and the other Kim, his mouth hanging open.
Kim hit the button and there was another blinding flash.
Now she was back in the lab but it wasn’t her lab. There was a pregnant woman sitting at a computer eating a bowl of soup. Kim was about to introduce herself when out of nowhere, two women appeared. One of the women was Jess, the research assistant, the other was…
“Crap.” Kim swore, fiddling with the machine again as Jess and the other Kim gaped at the pregnant woman, who seeming to sense them, looked round, jumped and dropped her soup.
Flash of light.
Now she was in the research institute canteen. God damnit, what the hell was going on? The canteen was empty but for Pfleeg, who was arguing with the lunch lady about cucumbers. Neither of them had noticed her presence and it was then that Kim had an idea. Pfleeg, deeply engrossed in his phylogenetic debate about cucumbers did not feel her clip a set of wires to the back of his lab coat. She set the timer and hit the button.
Flash of light.
She and Pfleeg now stood in an abandoned building. No, not abandoned because ahead was a large metal door with light stretching from underneath it. There was no time to think about that now though. Kim unclipped the wires from Pfleeg’s coat, reset the timer and hit the button before Pfleeg had yet noticed he was no longer in the canteen and was still holding forth on cucumbers.
Flash of light.
Finally back in her own lab now, Kim turned the machine off. She stared at it for a long time. She wasn’t entirely sure what she’d invented but it definitely wasn’t a Time travelling Machine. No, not time travel but maybe… Maybe something even more exciting…
She grinned to herself. Now, with Pfleeg out of the way, left wherever the hell she had left him, she would be free to keep working on it in peace, to run more experiments, to explore the exciting possibilities of the machine she had constructed…
At that moment the lab door opened and Pfleeg entered carrying a banana and a tuna sandwich.
They both jumped and blinked confusedly at each other.
The realisation dawned on Kim slowly.
“Oh shit.” She groaned, allowing her head to drop forward. “I disappeared the wrong bloody Pfleeg.”
The right Pfleeg, looking at the machine behind Kim on the bench, went a deep shade of mauve-scarlet, marched past her and uninvented it with a rapidity which would have been surprising to anyone unaware of all his previous experience with the uninvention of Time Machines.
This Kim watched him glumly as another Kim in another lab somewhere tried to work out why her boss had disappeared from the laboratory canteen and whether this was in any way related to cucumbers.