Through Time

As a child, I was fascinated by stories of time travel. When I became an adult, I worked tirelessly to make it a reality. Years of hard work paid off when I finally managed to build a portable time machine. But that same day, the machine malfunctioned for a brief moment and sent me back thousands of years through the passage of time. I woke up to find myself in ancient Rome; I was just outside the colosseum. Two guards looked at me with furrowed brows. As they began to approach me, I got up and ran without a second thought.

The soldiers chased me through the town, but I managed to lose them by dissolving into a crowd near some markets. I then made my way into some nearby woods and soon found myself near a village. Sticking to the thickets and shrubs, I tried to activate the time machine, but it didn’t work. I had no other option but to steal some clothes and find work nearby. I did heavy labor by day and tried gathering whatever scraps I could to repair my time machine by night, but it soon proved to be futile. I was stuck there.

Days became months, and months turned into two entire years in the blink of an eye. It was still an interesting time to be in, I thought, for it was during that same year that Julius Caesar was assassinated. Just three days after his death, I noticed a new wanderer enter the village. He seemed familiar, but I was uncertain. It was only when he approached me that I realised who he was. It was Frank Morris, one of my colleagues.

“Tatiana! I’m so glad to see you.”

“Frank, how long have you been in this timeline?”

“Around six months now. When we found that both you and the time machine were missing, we could have only assumed that you were stuck in another timeline.”

“How did you know which time I was in, though?”

“Even though it malfunctioned, the system had still recorded the time and coordinates. We just had to build another machine from scratch and send someone to get you.”

It appeared that the second machine that they had made was also damaged in the process of the time jump. However, the damage to Frank’s device was minor. I was glad I never got rid of my first device. During the week that followed, we repaired the second device; it was fully operational in no time. We went out into the woods at night and started the machine.

To our surprise, two people who had ventured into the woods caught us operating the machine. Their eyes were agape as they watched the machine glow. The two strangers prepared to attack us, but we were transported out of that timeline almost instantly. Moments later, Frank and I found ourselves in a familiar site: we were back in our lab, where the rest of the team awaited us.