The Girl & the Machine Read Free

left with what looked like a glass cylinder that could wrap around it, much like the little tubes that drive-through banks used to get money to the tellers. Attached to it was another tube, but this one was made entirely of metal with a small glass pane near the top. Franklin stood in front of it looking into the glass pane. The metal tube was about the same size as he was, and the glass plate was even with his face. Behind the contraption was a jumble of metal boxes, exposed circuit boards, and bundles of wires and coiled tubing illuminated by blinking LED lights.
    “Forgive the mess,” Heather said.
    “What is this?” Franklin asked, staring at up at the gleaming metal.
    “The time machine,” Heather said.
    Franklin stared at her as if waiting for her to laugh again and tell him this was all a joke. As a time traveler, he probably shouldn’t think that such a machine was impossible but… But it was.
    “This is what I’ve been working on, pretty much my entire time here,” Heather said. Her voice was very serious. “In fact, this is really what I’ve been working on since I met you. I’ve always been fascinated with this kind of technology, I’ve always felt like it was possible, but I never dared to actually work on it. Why would anyone waste their time working on a time machine? I knew the theory and the science, but it was impossible right? And then you. You, from the future. And somehow just knowing that it was actually possible was enough for me to make it actually happen.”
    “So…does it work?” Franklin asked, unable to take his eyes away from the gigantic machine that hummed with life.
    Heather walked around the machine, lovingly touching the metal, stroking it as she would stroke a lover’s skin. “Theoretically, yes. We’ve done all the tests and studies that we could possibly do. But we cannot make it actually work.” She looked up at him. “Not without you.”
    “Me?”
    Heather nodded. “We need you—or more precisely, we need your genetics.”
    Franklin looked down at his hands, then back up to Heather.
    “There’s something in your blood, in your DNA, that gives you the ability to travel. A mutation.”
    “Like the X-Men?”
    Heather laughed, but again Franklin noticed there was no humor in the sound. “Sort of,” she said. “Anyway, without this mutation, the time machine won’t work. We need you to make it work.”
    “How?”
    “It’s very simple,” Heather said. “What happens is, you step into the machine, we program it for whatever time and place you want, the machine reads your genetic code, and then it uses your own genetic mutation to send you exactly where you want to go—past or future.”
    Franklin stared at the machine, trying to think of all the things that he could do with it. Time travel could be rather mundane when one is limited to your own timeline. With a machine like this, he could see the dinosaurs. He could see whatever happened to humanity a hundred years—a thousand years—several millennia from now.
    “Yes, hello?” Heather said. Franklin looked up and realized she was using her cell phone. “One large.” She glanced up at Franklin. “You like pepperoni?” Franklin nodded. “Large pepperoni,” Heather said into the phone. She hung up. “We have to eat,” she said to Franklin. “It’s going to be a long night.”
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    T hey sat at the base of the machine on either side of the greasy pizza box, using napkins as plates. The pizza came from some local place rather than a chain, but the only difference between it and any other pizza he could get was that the crust was far too big and lumpy.
    Franklin sat with the machine behind him. It felt as if it loomed over him, watching his every move. He ate the pizza nervously.
    “Most people can’t travel through time at all,” Heather said. “Obviously. But since you can go to the past, there’s really no reason why you can’t also go into the future.”
    “I just assumed it’d make a