The Animal Inside-Amaya Jiwe

Return Of The Mack...

"Mm, delightful." My father commented, digging into his breakfast, a grapefruit. Amaya and I sat across from him, her with a bran muffin and me with eggs. We both smiled at him as he looked up childishly, enjoying his breakfast.

"Let me get this straight. This ship can make any kind of food you imagine, and you four picked grapefruit, a bran muffin, eggs, and..." She observed as Sara carried her food over to the table. "Oatmeal."

"After you try everything, you go back to the basics." Sara tried to explain.

"I lived my whole life eating rations and bland food." She countered, taking out her plate from the food fabricator- a stack of pancakes."From now on, I eat like a queen."

Amaya smiled at her friend. "I'm glad you left 1942."

"Actually, I wanted to talk to you guys about going back to 2042. Or better yet, 2041." Before she even said it, the four of us knew what was coming next. "I was thinking, 'why is my family dead when I'm on a time machine?'"

Sara knew she had to be the one to let her down. "Unfortunately, that's not how it works."

"I thought you could change the past." Zari's voice became defensive as she turned to face the captain.

"We can correct the past. And the future. But we can't change it." Amaya clarified.

"Why not?"

"Because by doing so could cause unforeseen, possibly even disastrous consequences." My father answered.

"It's like a temporal butterfly effect." I added, trying to clarify my father's vague words.

Zari snapped. "Try not doing something that would save your brother's life."

"Does a sister count?" Sara asked, deflecting her eyes to the table.
"What about a fiance?" I added.

Before Zari could say anything, Nate's voice appeared over the intercom. "What's up, shipmates? I got exciting news to share. Team meeting in ten minutes. And, Mick, I have beer."

XXX
Mick stared at the beer on the parlor table before picking it up. "One lousy beer for breakfast."

Nate turned around in apparent shock. "It's breakfast?"

"Yeah." Ray walked up to his side. "What time did you go to bed last night, buddy?"

"I didn't. Drank a lot of coffee. Can you tell?" He threw his hands in Ray's face. "Woah!"

"Nate, why are we staring at the anachronism map?" Sara asked, getting him back on track.

"Because, Captain, I did a deep dive on the data. And the anachronisms we created, at first glance, seem scattershot- random. But since history is cause and effect, I decided to do a little experiment. I folded a linear timeline onto itself following the mathematics of the golden ratio." Those of us who didn't know science stood there confused with others, the others being my father and Ray, stared at him intrigued. "Follow me." We all followed the energetic man onto the bridge. He stood in front of the computer, waiting for Gideon. "Dammit, Gideon, that was your cue."

"My apologies, Dr. Heywood." The hologram of the anachronism map appeared.

"Ah, see, the anachronisms form a pattern."

"I should have guessed." My father muttered. "Though time may be broken, like all matter in the known universe, it still possesses a mathematical harmony."

"Not exactly." Jax looked up at the two strays on the map. "What about those two?"

"Those two are outliers. The first one is Seattle, 1942."