TIME & TIED: AWARENESS

ARC 1.1 - Of The Device

PART 2b: TIME OUT 2

"What the hell are you doing?"

Frank jumped at the unexpected voice and banged his head on his desk lamp. "Ow!" He turned to see Carrie standing behind him, staring accusatorially. "I'm trying to figure out how this time machine works," Frank reminded her. "How long have you been awake?"

Carrie had fallen asleep on the couch in the corner of his basement lab soon after they'd arrived. (Well, he called it a basement lab, it was more an unfinished section of the basement that his parents let him use for performing scientific experiments.) He supposed he couldn't really blame her for nodding off, given that it had been 1am at the time, and she had been dealing with some measure of emotional stress. Moreover, it had left him the time he needed to investigate – so far with limited success.

Rubbing his head, Frank glanced over at his wall clock. Geez, it was almost eight in the morning.

"Just long enough to realize that it's now ten past seven and I'm still apparently trapped in this nightmare of the past," Carrie replied huffily. "What have you been doing for the last several hours, ogling me while I slept?"

Frank threw the screwdriver he'd been using to probe the thing down onto the floor. "I have been fiddling with technology I barely understand, attempting to discover how this damn machine works without completely wrecking it in the process, all for your benefit! I'm not exactly doing this for my health either, in fact I've been awake for almost twenty-four hours straight now! It's not even ten past seven, it's almost eight, but your watch is wrong because it's still on your time, as anyone with half a brain could have figured out by now!"

There was a moment of stunned silence.

Then Frank spoke up again, reaching down for the screwdriver. "Look, I'm sorry, I'm feeling a bit frazzled, I didn't mean to--"

"No," Carrie interjected. Her voice softened. "I'm the one who should apologize. I do appreciate what you're doing here. Don't think I'm not grateful. It's only... I'm a lot more used to being in control of my surroundings. The fact that I have no control over what's going on any more is scaring me Frank, it's scaring the hell out of me. I don't like feeling this way and I don't know what to do about it. So please... maybe if you tell me what you've figured out, there's some way I can help? I'm not as dumb as I act sometimes. Really."

Frank blinked in surprise at the obvious sincerity in her tone. He was reminded of how she'd been sobbing hours before. Difficult as it was to see Carrie as a damsel in distress, at the least, the situation wasn’t exactly in her favour.

"All right,” Frank said. “First, I need a quick break. You can clean up your knee and we can grab a quick bite of breakfast. The machine isn't going anywhere, and my parents aren’t likely to bother us, dad’s out of town and mom wanted to sleep late this Saturday."

"Saturday? But it's only Fri--" Carrie stopped. "Right. Saturday for you. Spoke without thinking."

Frank smiled back wryly. "There's hope for you yet."

***

Carrie stuck a bandage on her knee and cleaned up with a facecloth while Frank prepared some cereal and eggs. She also grabbed one of his larger T-shirts to wear. After eating, the two teenagers returned downstairs.

"Oddly enough, I think the device is based on some sort of time travel roulette," Frank explained. "So your slot machine analogy isn't too far off."

"Then the destination is generated randomly? You can't specify an arrival date?" Carrie inquired. This did not bode well.

"Well, yes and no," Frank answered. "First of all, the thing was pretty much dormant until I dropped a coin in. That must have completed a circuit, as things lit up like a Christmas tree. Now, the paths which appear to control the readout for month and day, those are random. Or I can't see any way to specify the date directly short of, I don't know, manipulating subatomic particles on the fly. However, I think there's a way of "rigging the game" on those, so to speak. Meaning that, at least 8 times out of 10, you'll end up when you want to be."

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"You're not instilling me with a lot of confidence here," Carrie remarked, a hint of annoyance creeping back into her tone.

"The real problem," Frank continued undaunted, "is the four digits indicating year. At first, some of those seemed to be fixed, namely here in the 21st century. But when I dropped in a second quarter, a different circuit was tripped, freeing up all four of them. Implying travel that would jump the century mark, and moreover, leading to the hypothesis that the more money you put in, the farther through time you can travel... but possibly, only into the past. I'm not sure how to change that, and I don’t want to drop in more coins for fear of compounding the problem."

"Well there must be SOME way," Carrie stated, peering down into the device. She knew enough to recognize the circuit boards, but that was it. Crud, she really might be of limited help. "If you've dropped a couple coins in here, where did they go?"

"Into that silver box towards the front, though I don't know what goes on in there. I didn't want to completely dismantle anything for fear of destroying the device completely." He sighed, stretching his neck to work some kinks out of it. "What might help is seeing what goes on when the machine activates, and how it resets. But even setting aside that risk, activating it requires resetting the lever, which closes the top back up. So we wouldn't see what happens anyway."

Carrie glanced absently around Frank's makeshift ‘lab’. "Well, you've got lots of junk sitting around here," she said. "Can't you whip up some sort of miniature video recorder device, then hook it into the system to monitor everything?"

Frank shook his head. "Who do you take me for, James Bond's Q?" He paused. "Though... wait, I do have a mini camera, and I could tape it in place, then set it to continually record..." He started searching through a drawer. "But as I said, activating this device IS risky. It's very possible that we’ll become stranded in another time period."

He didn’t say it out loud, but Frank seemed at the least intrigued by the idea of time travel. Plus, Carrie reasoned he was running out of ways to learn more by simply continuing his poking and prodding.

"Well, I have nothing to lose, so I might as well try it,” Carrie remarked. “You don't have to come along.” Frank paused in his searching to give her a rather pointed look. "Oh... I guess you'd need to come in order to keep fiddling with the mechanism," Carrie clued in. After all, it could get tedious if she had to recruit new help in every time period she went to.

Frank nodded back at her. "Honestly, at this point the only alternative I can think of is giving it to the Canadian government for study. But then they'd probably take it apart and take you away for testing. I think we want to avoid that." He surfaced from the drawer with a small gadget in his palm. "Give me a minute and I'll set everything up."

It took closer to twenty minutes. But soon everything was in order. "Okay, when I say pull, we'll both pull on the handle," Frank confirmed as he readjusted the device on his desk. "If nothing happens, I’ve got data. If we jump back in time, I’ve got data, a few tools on my person, and a roll of quarters in my pocket, which will hopefully allow me to reset it for a return. If I can’t reset it, or if it really is only one way travel... well, uh, in theory, it can’t be, because you know I’m going to be going to high school here in town for the next two years."

"Unless my being here is changing your past," Carrie pointed out.

"Yeah... I was trying not to think about that," Frank said, frowning. He exhaled. “Oh well. Either way, this is sure to be a lot more exciting than a couple years in high school could ever hope to be.”

He caught Carrie’s eye. “So, we go after three. 1... 2... 3... PULL!”

***

They both yanked. There was a flash of light, Frank felt like he was somehow being sucked into a void, and then he lost consciousness - but it soon came back to him due to the terrible roaring noise in his ears. It sounded like a jet engine!

Blinking, Frank finally managed to take in his surroundings. It was a jet engine. He and Carrie were sitting out on the tarmac at what looked like an airline terminal. What in the world?

"Hey, what are you kids doing out here?” came a shout from a man driving a baggage handler cart.

"Went out the wrong door!" Frank shouted back. He tucked the time machine device under one arm and then grabbed the arm of Carrie, who seemed to have frozen up, before taking a couple steps towards the terminal building, pulling her along.

"You might have mentioned that this thing travels through space too!" he accused his companion. It sounded like Carrie said something in reply, but Frank couldn't hear her over all the ambient noise. "What?" he called out.

Carrie stopped allowing herself to be dragged along, bringing Frank up short. "I said, what’s the date on the device?!" Carrie repeated, grabbing Frank's arm back, her nails digging into his skin.

"Ow! What--" Frank cut himself off, staring nervously at Carrie. If she had seemed a bit out of sorts over the last several hours they'd been together, right now she looked downright spooked. So Frank pulled the time machine up to show her the readout.

Carrie started to shake. "Oh God. Oh God no..." She tore herself away from Frank and began sprinting towards the terminal. She was crying again. "Mama!" Carrie screamed. "Oh God, Mom, don't get on the plane...!"