There was a lurch, the sound of space being torn apart, and, with a thundering crash, Elliot slammed through the fourth dimension. The Argus 7-D groaned one final time, and then went silent. Elliot closed his eyes and exhaled between his teeth. With grudging acceptance, he came to realize the trial he had unwittingly been put to.
“Son of a bitch.”
Elliot had never approved of the way that M3775 tested their employees for promotions. He wasn’t afraid of time travel; the company made sure that all of their repairmen (or women), went as far forward and as far back as their machines would allow for their initial training. He had seen the very fringes of human existence on Earth and had found it to be relaxing. There really wasn’t much of anything if you went far enough forwards or backwards. Earth ended as it began… barren and cold.
His gripe lay with the deceit. All of the stories were the same. The company assigned a repairman to travel back with a recently “repaired” machine. In reality, it had been intentionally sabotaged and stripped of its tools and spare parts. As the repairman traveled, the machine would crash into some unknown time. There, the repairman would have to fix the Argus and return to the present. The idea was to test innovation, but Elliot felt like that was bullshit. In a real scenario, one would have tools and parts at their disposal. Per company policy, each Argus had a partner machine, in case of a break down. If the time traveler did not return soon, it was assumed they had failed, and the partner machine was sent back to retrieve them. People came back scratched up and cursing, but very rarely did it make them better at their job.
But, a promotion was a promotion.
Unclipping the buckles confining him to his seat, he looked up and removed the panel in front of the engine. It took him a moment to realize that one of the cogs was stripped. He didn’t see any other damage. These tests were kept simple. A problem with the onboard computer would be impossible to deal with if one crashed into the Cretaceous period.
The screen flashed in front of him. A system analysis of the particles in the air came to show that he was now in the year 1864. There was a good chance of him being able to find the materials he would need, given that Denver in this time would be a sizable mining town. Hell, he’d even had family in the budding city. Elliot’s several times great grandfather had been a sheriff here. He had died protecting his community from a stranger that blew into town, leaving behind three sons. If it weren’t for Elliot’s time constraints, it might be interesting to meet him.
He reached over and removed a gun belt from the box on his left, a precautionary tool each machine was equipped with, and the only resource not removed for these tests. Taking a deep breath, he grounded himself in this reality, and exited the vehicle into the present past.
The Argus 7-D was a cube comprised of hundreds of tiny cameras that captured the images of its surroundings, and then projected those images onto panels to give off the illusion of being invisible. This was important as the time machine could not be steered so much as placed within the timeline. To have a cube suddenly manifest itself in the middle of a town square would be incredibly conspicuous.
In this case, the Argus had emerged from the fourth dimension and obliterated half of what appeared to be a saloon. Elliot exited the vehicle to air heavy with the smell of sawdust. The patrons backed away in terror of the man who materialized from a door that appeared from nowhere. Around him lay the bodies of those he had inadvertently blown to pieces, fragments of barstools, and glass bottles. Elliot regarded the room, his eyes moving from the prostitutes to the customers, before the squeak of the batwing doors opening and the clicking of spurs drew his attention.
The world around him sank into déjà vu. The brown eyes that watched him were ones that he had seen many times in the mirror. They had been passed down through generations, along with the last name that adorned the approaching sheriff’s badge.
It was important to ground yourself when you interacted with the past. When one encountered a relative or even a past self, not matter how unlikely, it was easy for the mind to slip into a disassociation of sorts. Elliot was aware that the sheriff was aggressively addressing him, but his mind had begun to fragment and twist.
So this was the fate of his deceased forefather, killed by a stranger who literally just appeared in town. His head felt like it was going to split, so Elliot turned his thoughts to the present, to a noise or an object that was concrete. A light flickered. He glanced down at his grandfather’s spurs that caught the sunbeams streaming in from the tattered ceiling above.
An idea crossed his mind.
One of the first rules that the company taught its employees was that their job was to observe, not interact. This, of course, was already made impossible by the fact that Elliot had decimated most of the building around him. But there was an asterisk that read: better to leave bodies than knowledge.
It was a morbid rule, but one that Elliot had come to accept. In some cases, it was even considered a responsibility. It was easy to be indifferent about death if you HAD to kill certain people because that’s how it had always happened. It was simply company policy.
His decision was made for him. The sheriff, unnerved by the silent stranger in front of him, had stopped shouting and was reaching for his .44. So, to protect himself and the future, Elliot removed the pistol from its holster, pulled the trigger, and put a bullet between his ancestor’s ribs.
Surprise broke across Elliot’s kin’s face. He staggered backwards, crashed through the swinging doors, and collapsed. The spurs of his boots continued to spin. Elliot knew that he needed to move quickly. The men around him were soon to react to the murder of their beloved sheriff, and Elliot doubted that they would accept any explanation of time travel as an excuse. He lunged across the room and removed the spurs from his ancestor’s boots as the mob stirred. Returning to the Argus, he shut the door.
Inside the nest of wires and circuits, Elliot once again removed the panel in front of the engine and held the spiked wheel up to the broken cog. It was close, although whether it was sturdy enough to withstand the intense vibrating of the craft was another issue. Outside the cube, a bullet whined off the camouflaged structure. Elliot knew that nothing short of dynamite would breach the hull.
Once the spur was screwed in place Elliot closed the panel and started the machine. There was a hum, followed by the rise and fall of lights, and the Argus came to life. The sound of muffled yelling rose from outside of the time machine. Elliot ignored it. Soon, he would be on his way back home. He toggled a sequence of switches and buttons, and the machine began to shudder. Elliot closed his eyes and prayed that the engine would be able to vibrate at a high enough frequency to allow it to move forward through time and not backwards.
The craft lifted, as if gravity had loosened its grasp on it. Then, there was a crack and Elliot felt the acceleration of the Argus at it surged into Time. He could not be certain in which direction.
After a minute there was another loud snap as the ship exited the time stream. Elliot hoped he wouldn’t have to kill another one of his relatives. The Argus settled around him. He removed the panel and noted that the spur was still in place and had maintained its form. That was good.
It was only after he’d exited the craft, the pistol belted to his hip, to see all those well-dressed men standing in front of him, that he knew he’d succeed. Simultaneously, a horrible thought crossed his mind. A champagne bottle popped, and he remembered the look in the patriarch’s eyes as he toppled backwards onto the dust caked boardwalk.
It could have been a coincidence that, out of the entire history of the Earth and human existence, Elliot’s craft had happened to descend into his ancestor’s time. The unlikelihood of such an event being entirely uncalculated was… concerning.
Next to him, a shareholder clapped him on the shoulder and congratulated him while his boss inspected his handiwork.
Somewhere in time, his forefather, arms crumpled beneath him like crushed butterfly’s wings, lay motionless in the dust.
Genre: Science Fiction
Character: Repairman
Event: A Promotion
The Word and The Song 