Gently into the good night

Chapter Seven - Discovering Pegasus

"Good morning, kiddo" I hear Uncle's voice echo in the room; he sounds genuinely happy and excited. "What time is it?" I ask closing my eyes and trying to avoid the sunlight from blinding me. "It's seven" He responds like it's the natural time to be up on the first day of vacation. "Can't I sleep in a little more? It's holiday time." I say in the drowsiest tone possible so I'm able to convince him to let me sleep in. "Well if you were back home in Manchester it would be 12. I'm sure you would be up then." He says. "But I'm in Florida" I say defending myself. "Your body clock can't change within a few hours kiddo" he responds smartly. Why am I even arguing with him? Anything I say in his disagreement will be disproved by some theory. I don't have much content to argue considering the fact I'm not even done with high school. There is no point to this argument; it's officially declared that I have lost.

In the dining hall there are exactly five seats. We sit randomly and I ask "What's for breakfast?" Uncle places a few plates on the table and we all are so excited for American breakfast but when we see the plates of food they looks like the most unappetizing thing in the entire breakfast history of my life. Burnt bread, undercooked sausage, burnt bacon and congee ,which is the only decent thing on the plate which looks edible and it will probably not cause diarrhea . "Well, my cook is off for the weekend so I had to cook myself, hope you like it." Uncle's says with a bright face, which might be too bright because I find myself squeezing my eyes. Jordan's smile turns upside down after looking at the food. "That explains it all" Paul says under his breath. "Well, I'm off to my lab. Please help yourself" Uncle says and runs to the basement in haste.

In the evening while Paul and Jordan go out for a little grocery shopping which they were obliged to do as long as they are allowed to cook themselves, I go to uncle's basement where he sits on an old worn out rag and scribbles something on a piece of paper. There is a black board on the adjacent wall and the board is full of equations which appear as scribbles to my eyes because there is nothing on the board I understand except the letters and numbers separately. All of it looks so intimidating that I force my eyes to shift their vision to something else understandable. My eyes fall on an object in the corner of the room it looks like a car, it is a car. I stare at it for a while, it looks complex with tons of mechanism and physics involved in it which is beyond my ability to understand "Why is your car in the basement?" I ask bluntly. "That's the time machine" Uncle says and he gestures me to follow him. We walk closer to it. "I call it the Pegasus" he says proudly with a deep breath. "Why Pegasus? Isn't Pegasus supposed to be a winged horse? And this looks more like the fusion of a car and a complexity to the level infinity." I say giggling a little. He laughs a little and says "When I was small my mom read this story to me where a princess fell in love with a commoner, he was later assassinated by her father because he wanted to omit the commoner from his daughter's majestic life. Then one day while she was crying for her lost love a Pegasus came to her and assured her that it could take her to the past so that she can change the boy's fate. So, the Pegasus took her to past and the princess warned the boy and saved his life. I always loved the idea of stopping the evil in the past this way we can improve our future or present, either one. The Pegasus was the time machine in the story and that's why I named it Pegasus." He says with ecstasy in his voice and eyes. I look at it for a while, well if it can bring magic to somebody's life I would love to call it Pegasus as well. "Does it work? Have you tried it yet?" I ask. Uncle shakes his head in disappointment and says "Not yet but I was planning to soon, I hope it does" I feel a curiosity generate in me and suddenly I want to know everything about it "How does it work?" I ask. Uncle open's door and shows me a panel "You see the green panel, it for setting the time you leave. For example you are leaving on 7th of October at 5:10PM then you insert it here and the red panel is for what time you want to go. This only works for the past till now because maybe the future isn't there yet, I have made it's working as simple as possible. There is a book for understanding its working. It's kept in that drawer" He says pointing towards the third drawer of a table that's positioned under the back board. "Why not the future and only the past?" I ask. He looks at me a little startled, probably at my eagerness to know "When you are traveling to the past you are basically traveling to yesterday's reflection, its complex physics kiddo. You see those equations on the board? I have six sets of fifty pages each which is the continuation of this. I have developed it over forty years and I started building this over the last twenty five years" he says and begins to solve some other equation. I look at it and I feel it's going to hospitalize me. "And what are you doing?" I ask him. "I'm not able to figure out the time relation" he says, I look at him so puzzled that he senses the necessity for an explanation so be begins to explain "When you are going back in time you are basically going a billion light years away, you are not on the same earth. You are but not technically. You are in a junction of a few billion identical universes. The speed of time varies in each so at some places time moves faster and some places slower, it's based on the general relativity theory so I'm trying to figure out the time relationship between our earth and a few specific one's. " I just nod, I'm so bank. I understand what he means but even imagining the fact that someone can analyze such complex data takes me aback.