My name is Henry Danville and for the last three years the Federal government has paid me thirty-five thousand dollars a year to work from home. That thirty-five thousand, zero hundred dollars and zero cents is a carefully measured amount. It keeps me doing my work, it keeps me fed, and it’s just enough to keep me happy. Thirty-five thousand is also a small enough figure to ensure that I don’t go too far from my work station for any significant amount of time.
The suits do not think I know this, but I do.
The government pays me this salary because on April 11th in the year 2016, I sent one of my cats (although as far as ownership of barn cats goes, I might as well claim to own the birds that fly overheard) five minutes into the future.
Time travel is something I have been obsessed with ever since my undergraduate physics professor showed a clip from an old episode of Star Trek where Kirk folds a piece of paper to demonstrate the folding of space time. He draws a line between the two points, skipping most of the paper by passing over the fold.
I saw that clip for the first time in 1986. It turns out time travel works something like that, or at least I’m pretty sure it does (even now I’m not certain), I just had to figure out how to fold the paper.
I became a professor myself, teaching subatomic particle physics to grad students. I was a good professor. I graded papers quickly, my class averages never dipped below 70%, and I never slept with any of my students (if I told you how often one of them tried it you would not believe me, I’m not an especially handsome man). The whole time I was teaching, I only really cared about time travel. I can’t say that the jump forward in time would have meant anything special to me, only that I had accomplished what no one else could. What other men could only dream of. My peers laughed at me openly, even some students chuckled when I broached the subject, but I never stopped trying to fold the paper.
Then I retired and converted my savings to electrical equipment. Thus began my real work. My first breakthrough was the alpha temporal producer, or ATP for short. In simple terms, the ATP is Kirk’s pen. ATPs provide a little bit of ink, and if you get enough of them going, you can draw the whole line.
I never had a family, maybe I had wanted one once but it never happened, and it certainly can’t happen now. I have been told in so many words by men in black suits and black sunglasses that any distractions to my work will not be tolerated.
The time machine, or Grandma Bee (my great great Grandma Bee lived to be one hundred and five and I always figured she had found some way to cheat the system) has three main parts. There is pad A which the subject is placed on, and pad B where they show up. The control panel houses a start switch, a display screen, and a few buttons. There is also about four hundred and twenty thousand dollars of electrical equipment stringing the whole contraption together. Another hefty sum of money is in the garbage in the form of wires and machines of my own design that didn’t work properly, or didn’t work at all.
Grandma Bee Model 2 (model 1 had blown a hole in the roof of my house, and after that I moved my work to the barn) was not even supposed to be turned on when it finally worked.
I was on my knees on the barn floor, tinkering with one of the three ATPs sitting between pad A and pad B, when the toe of my right boot brushed the second ATP, adjusting its position slightly and crossing a few bald wires that I was in the process of covering. At the same time, an orange kitten wandered onto pad A and another cat, who had inexplicably hopped onto the control panel, brushed against the on switch.
If these three things had not happened in the same instant then I might never have a story to tell, but they did and now I do. It may seem like an extraordinary coincidence, and for years I believed that too, but now I have reason to wonder.
Whether divined by a cosmic presence, something a little closer to the mainland, or just the work of two cats and my stray boot, Grandma Bee Model 2 turned on. There was no great explosion of light, no shriek of terror from the cat, and certainly no hurrah or eureka from me. There was a low beep, and I turned just in time to see the unfortunate cat disappear. All that was left behind was dark grey smoke rising in lazy spirals from the ATPs. The inside of the barn smelled like a Swanson Dinner microwaved for seven hours on the high-power setting.
The cat was gone. I could hardly believe my eyes. I ran to the control panel and inspected the settings. Grandma Bee was set for five minutes, as always. Everything was just as it had always been, except for this time I moved an ATP and crossed some wires, and this time it had worked. Maybe.
Try to imagine my situation. If you are young and unburdened by having committed the majority of your years to a single pursuit you may be unable to understand, but try. Picture me waiting there, my eyes exploding out of my head. Imagine the sweat dripping from my forehead, and my hands pressed so hard against the control panel that they turn white. Picture a sad old man waiting for the results of his entire life’s work, thrust into his anxiety by accident.
After two minutes of waiting, the control panel sparked and turned itself off before I could grab the fire extinguisher. After four minutes and thirty seconds, Grandma Bee Model 2 turned back on.
I had programmed the message myself, but when the green letters popped up on the control panel display it gave me such a shock I thought my heart was going to stop.
PREPARE TO RECOVER.
“Get ahold of yourself Henry,” I muttered.
A second low beep, and a fizzle from the three ATPs, and the cat appeared on pad B. It was missing its tail and one of its ears. In the time that it took for me to run over to it, half excited half scared out of my wits, the cat had given a single weak mewl and flopped onto its side, stone dead.
I carried the body to an empty worktable. After an autopsy, I discovered that the poor thing’s liver and one of its lungs were gone too, presumably to wherever its tail and ear were. I also discovered that bottom of all of the cat’s paws were burned as black as the bottom of a frying pan, and still hot.
I logged it all in my notebook, where until now I had only been able to chronicle failed adjustments to Grandma Bee Models 1 and 2. Instead of “some cat” I named him Armstrong in my report and vowed to give him a hero’s funeral before returning to my work.
When I turned to bring the body outside for burial, I saw Armstrong’s missing parts lying on pad B in a pool of scabbed blood. His liver, lung, and ear were charred black and unrecognizable, and his tail was on fire.
I buried Armstrong and his parts under the apple tree in the back garden. I’m pretty sure the black suits dug him up and whisked his bones away for testing. I woke up one day, perhaps a week after I had told the government about the cat and the suits had shown up, and the dirt where I had buried Armstrong was disturbed.
I could dig him up and see for myself, but I don’t really want to know. I also don’t think the suits would like it very much if I started doing some extracurricular investigating. They are still watching me. They have had some staff changes since the incident of course, and they don’t come and say hello anymore, but they’re still watching from a distance.
Anyways, after I made the mistake of reporting my work and the suits got involved, things really got moving. At the start the suits were polite. Maybe someone had warned them that I turned a cat inside out and set whatever fell off of the body on fire, I had heard as much whispered about me between two of them who thought I couldn’t hear them, but if they feared me they had no reason to. The guns on their hips would have snuffed me out quite effectively, cat killer or not.
They came in black SUVs. While most of their team secured the property, one of them explained my situation. He told me about the government grant of thirty-five large, and told me I was doing work that the president himself was proud of. I was told America was behind me in spirit, even if the operation was classified for the time being, and then I was offered a notepad and a blue pen.
“Write down the equipment or parts that you need,” one of the suits said. “We’ll have whatever you need for your work brought in ASAP.”
I didn’t like the way he said brought in like I was under quarantine.
“Will it come out of my thirty-five large?”
“Not a penny Mr. Danville.”
I took the notepad.
“Good enough.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what I needed given that Grandma Bee had gone off by accident, but I had a good idea that I needed to build a few more ATPs if I wanted to get a whole cat from A to B, so I scribbled down the component parts. After that I put some desserts and books, and just for gags I wrote porn. The suit accepted the note, scanned it, and pocketed it without a twitch. It was all there the next morning. The equipment was in the barn, the food in the kitchen, and one the agents had stacked five copies of Playboy on the back of my toilet.
“What if I think of something else later?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure you fellas don’t have a public phone line.”
“Make a note, put in your neighbor’s mailbox. Make sure you put it in an envelope. Sign it, and we’ll take care of it in 48 hours, tops.”
“Which neighbor?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
George and Marcy Klayson live about a quarter mile down the road one way and Ben and Carol, I forget their last name, live a half mile the other direction. They are my closest neighbors. Since that day, I have dropped notes for electronic parts, food, and whatever else I think of in both mailboxes tens of times, but I haven’t seen my neighbors once. I don’t think I will ever see them again.
After sending several hundred mice through Grandma Bee Model 2 (mice are cheaper than cats), I decided two things were required for me to send something as large as a person for more than five minutes.
I had an idea that the suits were thinking about jumping people through stretches of time best measured in years and not minutes, and for that I would need a lot more ATPs, bigger ones too if I could work it out.
By early 2018 I had come up with an ATP design that could get the job done. I called my new design the SATP (S for supermassive), and this time I did get a couple of the suits to help with construction and erecting the thing. It took a crane to stand it up when the SATP was built. I think the suits were worried that someone might see it, but the SATP fit neatly inside of my grain silo. There might be an issue if someone wandered too close and wanted to have a look at whatever was making the humming noise, but the suits weren’t letting anyone near me. In three years, not a single car or truck or bicycle has gone by my property without a suit climbing out of it.
The second thing I needed to do, which I completed very recently, was a reworked construction for pad B. The SATP allowed me to effectively send my squealing subjects through spacetime for up to ten minutes forward, but GBM3 was being put under extra strain when it was trying to figure out how to orient the subject’s physical being when it dropped it off.
The new design is simply a hole, or if you like (and the suits certainly seem to) Portal B. Portal B is a metal circle that hangs in midair, and the cats simply fall through it. I have theories as to why this helps, but they are no more than that. All I can say for sure is that the mice started coming through without their feet burned off, and that the rate of missing organs went down from 5 in every 6 mice to 1 in 2.
The addition of portal B allowed me to send subjects ahead for up to an hour without risk of cataclysmic system failure. It also persuaded me to rename my creation the Grandma Bee Model 3, or GBM3 for short. The old systems had concentrated on getting the job done however possible, now the goal was efficiency.
If you, dear reader, are been paying attention you may be wondering if I have tried, to send subjects backwards.
I have tried. Subjects sent back simply disappear, and that makes sense of course because I am ahead and am not able (or willing) to go back further to watch them appear, but nothing has showed up. If future me is sending mice back, I’m not getting them for one reason or another. I tried to send one back to the day before and it disappeared just as expected, but I have no memory of a mouse showing up without reason. I have decided to let it go. I suggest you do the same if you don’t want to tie your head in knots.
The suits became impatient after the jump in progress resulting from the SATP. Forward progress only serves to increase their appetite for greater progress, and I’ve done my best to keep up with their desires.
After the construction of three more SATPs, and this brings our story to the day before yesterday, we were able to successfully send a person forward. I do not know anything about the man, only that he was tattooed heavily, very pale, and nearly catatonic. The suits told him what to do and he obeyed, and in that way, I suppose we were very alike.
We sent him forward five minutes. By then I fully expected the experiment to be a success and I was not disappointed. His breathing was steady, his pupils dilated when I shone at them with my flashlight, and he was able to track the movements of my finger. The bottoms of his feet were a little warm, but they cooled off quickly enough and most importantly he remained alive. He didn’t speak, but he hadn’t said a word since they pulled him out of the black SUV parked in my driveway. After the test, they packed him into the SUV again and drove away.
The next day, the suits came back with the tattooed man and told me they wanted him sent forward by ten minutes. I complied.
He went ten minutes just fine, and then the suits demanded he be sent on a half hour jump. I refused, not because I didn’t think it would work, but because the machine needed some time to cool and I still did not know the full effects of multiple jumps forward. The suits threatened me, and I gave in.
He went an hour, the three, then five. In the time between each jump the suits stood politely silent. They were content to watch the experiments, and almost as if it were an accident, most of them were positioned in front of the barn’s exit points. I badly needed a coffee, and one of the suits came back with a full pot. He was smiling, but because of the sunglasses I couldn’t tell if the smile was reaching his eyes or not.
After the nameless man jumped five hours I called it off. His feet were suffering first degree burns (though he did not complain) and it was almost midnight by this point. The experiment was over, I said, but it was not to be.
They said I could go to bed, but I had to send him on a twenty-four hour jump first. I refused. We had not even sent a mouse that far, but they insisted. It was him or me. I’m sad to say that by this time the suits must have gotten a pretty good idea of how to recreate Grandma Bee Model 3 in the event of my passing, and I believed their threat.
I sent him. Gods help us I sent him, only I didn’t send him forward one day. In the instant before I pressed the big green button, one of the suits who had crept silently behind me grabbed under my arms. I let him and didn’t fight back, and why would I? I was ok with not dooming the tatoo’d stranger. The suits shouted at the guy who grabbed me, all but one. That one brought his gun up and before the others could react they were all dead. The barn smelled like smoke again.
I screamed. The tattooed man drooled a little, but otherwise did nothing at all.
At gun point, the one who had shot his peers told me I was going to send the guy forward a full year.
“He’ll die,” I said. “His feet won’t just burn up. He’ll catch fire and die. The STAPs will probably explode and we’ll die too.”
“They won’t,” the suit said. “They won’t explode, and Mr. LaFleur here won’t die. We’ve had the boys in the lab take a look at GMB3. We gassed your bedroom and had you out like a lightbulb for three days, plenty of time for them to get a good idea of what’s going on here.”
“If they’re so smart then what do you still need me for?”
“They’re not that smart,” the suit said. He made a face at me, his mouth twisted in half frustration half laughter, like he had an inside joke on me, but he had to step in dog shit to get it.
They already tried to recreate it back at the lab, I thought. But it didn’t work. It almost did though, or it had worked poorly, because this guy is about to tell me what they did right and what I’m doing wrong.
“Still,” the suit said, “The boys in white had some interesting ideas for modifications. I don’t understand a word of it, but I’ve got the binder in the car and I think you’ll understand just fine. You’re going to make those changes, then send him, or the two of us will send you right now.”
I won’t bother with the details of what happened before I made the tattooed guy, apparently named Mr. LaFleur, jump forward. I protested some more and lost the fight. The suits showed me the changes in a black binder marked CLASSIFIED and they made sense. They made a lot of sense actually.
I applied the changes after putting up another fight and getting the butt of a gun smacked across my face. I was exhausted. I don’t know what time I finished but the sun had come back up and started on its way down again. I asked for another coffee and the suit who had held me back from the control panel suggested I eat shit.
I told them when I was done. The suits led LaFleur forward onto pad A again, and even though they had scrambled his brains some part of him must have known what was up, because he seemed to dig in his heels just a bit on the way.
I pressed the green button when he was on pad A, I wanted to do it when the suits were setting him up but they were wise to me and were very careful not to step on the launch pad. That same low beep and Mr. LaFleur disappeared. The SATPs groaned and I thought we were done for, but then they fell silent.
“We’ll be back,” said one of the suits.
“One year,” said the other. “Don’t try and run.”
Before they could leave, the SATPs started groaning again, and Portal B made a strange snapping rumbling noise. Like someone taking a piss on a snare drum during an earthquake. A purple circle spread, covering the whole area of Portal B. The suits looked at each other, then me. I shrugged but looking back I think I had an idea of what was happening.
Something flew out of the purple. A black shadow, angry, it streaked through the air like a tear of paper spinning and twisting in the wind. It was giving off enormous amounts of heat, so much so that there are still black burn marks on my shirt from where it passed by me. The phantom flew up to the north wall of the barn, smashed through it, and went up into the sky. Then it was gone. It’s still out there somewhere.
One of the suits rounded on me.
“What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I just… I don’t know.”
I had an idea, a couple of ideas actually, but before I could give voice to them something else came out of portal B. A long robotic tentacle. It snaked out slowly, with the speed that a fisherman reels in a lure, only this one was coming towards us. It had a translucent white skin, like liquid glass, and beneath the skin I could see wires of a hundred different colours, twisting metal, and what looked like thin blue veins crisscrossing throughout.
It had a golden disco ball on the tip and by the way the tentacle was moving, that ball might’ve been an eye. It crept towards us without a sound or smell, then stopped in front of the first suit. I stayed perfectly still, but the other suit, the one that had grabbed me and told me to eat shit, tried to run.
He got a few steps towards the nearest exit but he never had a chance. The golden disco noticed him somehow, and the golden ball opened up. A red beam shot at him and it sounded like the guns the Stormtroopers fire in Return of the Jedi. It zapped through the back of the suit’s head, and he went down like a sack of potatoes. His brains poured out in streamers in front of him.
The golden disco ball went for me next. It scanned me up and down and I closed my eyes. I bit my lip so hard it started to bleed, and then the tentacle just left me alone. It returned to the remaining suit and after a quick once over, used its laser to cut him in half lengthwise.
Then the tentacle went away, but not back into portal B. It pulled itself through one of the barn doorways into the outdoors. For a while all I could see was the unending length of wire and metal unfurling from Portal B. Then it stopped, and I heard the laser firing again. Then there was a titanic crash that made the earth shake, then the laser started up again.
It’s destroying the SATPs, I thought, and I was right.
It cut them diagonally at the base, like a lumberjack cuts an oak, and the SATPs were falling one by one, with no timber to signal their demise. If the tentacle had sent one of the massive machines falling into the barn I would’ve been a pancake, but even then, I did not run. I was too scared to move.
When the four SATPs were done with, the tentacle began to retreat back into portal B. I wanted to run and hide before the golden disco ball came back, in case it changed its mind about me, but I was still paralyzed with fear. It took one look at pad A before shredding it into flaming oblivion as I feared it would. The control panel got the same treatment.
When the control panel was destroyed, there was nothing to power portal B, and it shut down. The purple distortion that the tentacle was coming out of went with the power, and the machine was severed. Everything that had been sticking out of portal B smashed into the ground and didn’t get up. When I finally gathered the courage to investigate the thing, I saw that the cut was totally smooth. The rest of it, whatever the tentacle was attached to, was still in its own time, but the tentacle was stuck in 2019.
To this day – and I suspect for another year at least – I do not know for sure what that shadow creature was that came hurtling out of portal B. I have a theory though, I believe that creature is what was left of Mr. LaFleur after his jump forward. I think the trip burned him and flipped his organs inside and out a hundred thousand times and somehow it transformed him into something unrecognizable as a human.
My theory goes further.
I think someone on the other side of that year knew La Fleur was coming, received him, and then sent him back. Whether he was a warning or an attack I can’t say. Maybe both. I have a horrible feeling that someone was me. I think in that version of the future something terrible happened because of GBM3 and future me decided the only thing to do was go back and destroy it.
I don’t know what could cause me to want my life’s work destroyed, just like I don’t know why the men in suits wanted LaFleur to jump forwards a year. I can guess. I can guess that if LaFleur was ok when the two of them returned in a year, they would have taken turns jumping forward, maybe ten years at a time. Maybe they each stuck a chunk of cash in an investment account and wanted to skip the waiting period between a few thousand dollars and a few million. If that sounds stupid to you then good, it sounds ridiculous to me too, I can only guess.
I am going to rebuild the time machine. I have to. The suits will kill me if I don’t. I see a black SUV drive by sometimes, and I still haven’t seen my neighbors. Not a single soul.
Whatever my reason future me had – will have – for destroying my life’s ambitions, I hope I have avoided it, because it’s also possible that I had nothing to do with that tentacle. It’s possible that by the time a full year has come and gone, artificial intelligence is in full swing and it doesn’t like us. Maybe that happens in a hundred years, or two hundred, and they came back to break GMB3 because it was the only chance we, mankind, had. Or maybe all of that, or none of it. I expect I will know it a years’ time, or less.
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