TIME WARS

Chapter 1

        INFINITI Laboratory 17,New Delhi
                        October 18,2022

Cold coffee, two sugars and a ballpoint pen. Dr.Rohan Khanna didn't need a lot to stay functional at night except his self proclaimed bare necessities. The coffee kept him awake, just as it had done every year of the last fifteen of his career as an experimental physicist. The pen served the purpose of keeping his hands busy as it was very important to not sit idle.

He wouldn't need it for too long tonight though.

The time travel experiment he had been working on for nearly his entire career and dreamt of since childhood was nearly finished, a phrase that he had been dangling over to the board of directors for the last year. They wanted to see some results of their multi-million dollar investment after all.

As he leaned back in his chair and thought about calling his research partner from across the ocean in the United States, he glanced ever so slightly towards the machine, the beautiful machine with all its gears waiting to be put into motion and history waiting to be created. Right here, in this state-of-the-art facility which had become both his home and workplace.

As he looked above the gears and into the pre-made space for time travellers to enter and leave this timeline, he noticed a sudden flash of brightest blue. He shot up with a huge surge of adrenaline, pen in hand and knocking over the coffee all over his clothes. He had the briefest of moments to feel thankful for choosing cold coffee before the blue light intensified even further. The Machine started shaking and the gears started rotating out of control, all making a great noise. A screen showing time went haywire and instead of showing the correct time of 01:45:25, it now read 88:88:88 while flickering feebly.

Shielding his eyes with his arm, barely daring to see or believe what was happening, he saw a projectile fly through the machine and fall straight into the now empty coffee cup.
And just like that, everything went back to normal. No more shaking gears, no loud noises, no flickering time screens and certainly no 3 pointers from another timeline into an empty coffee cup.

Rohan got up, surprised to find himself on his knees, and looked inside the coffee cup. He went weak in the knees, tried unsuccessfully to lean against his chair and fell down for the second time that night. He screamed loudly and went pale, paler than the whitest sheet of paper ever made.

What he saw could not be happening.
What he was seeing was impossible, improbable.
What he was seeing was a wedding ring, but it was no ordinary wedding ring.

It was the same ring he had bought for his research partner last week.
It was the same ring that his research partner and now-wife had exchanged a couple of days ago to get married. 

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                      Pasadena, California
                October 17,2022,12:15 PM

In the comforts of the bedroom in his cosy apartment in downtown Pasadena, a man of about 35 called Ethan Hudson was quietly debating over either getting lunch or calling his wife at work just to check up on her day. He'd started calling her a lot lately at random times of the day, missing her presence at home. They'd only been married recently after all and had had no vacation thanks to her gruelling schedule at QuickCure, the Pharma company she works at.
He finally decided to go out to get some pizza and stretch his legs before sleeping in for the day. He also made a mental note to never work from home again, at least not if he was going to be alone all day.

Just as he was getting out of bed, his phone started ringing. It was his boss-of-sorts, Rohan Khanna. Frowning at the screen and wondering about what the hell he had to talk about with his boss when it was well past midnight in India,he picked up the phone.

"Hey Boss,how's it--",began Ethan but he was cut off immediately by Rohan who sounded out of breath and quite desperate, adjectives which one would find hard to associate with Rohan Khanna, a person known to keep his head in the most trying of circumstances.
"Listen to me carefully Ethan. Where is Jennifer right now?"
"Um, she's at work, probably has a lunch break or something. Why?"
"Are you absolutely sure about this? When did you last talk to her?", asked Rohan shrewdly but more calmly.
"I was just about to call her now," said Ethan, scratching his head. This was weird behaviour, much more so for someone like Rohan.
"Okay, look it's probably nothing but just find out that she's safe," said Rohan assertively. "Although she would certainly be safe now for the ring to come through today," Rohan added slowly as an afterthought, more to himself than to Ethan.
Ethan tentatively proceeded forward saying,"Ok boss, I've no idea what you're talking about. Care to elaborate?"
"Just get yourself and Jennifer on the next flight to New Delhi. We have a breakthrough."

Ethan was shell-shocked. He had been trained by Rohan before on the proper meaning of what those last few words meant. Those words had never been used before in their decade of research on time travelling and it could only mean one thing. They had hit the jackpot.
How it involved Jennifer did not matter and he'd vaguely heard about some ring which was of no concern to him at the moment. It'd probably end up costing his wife a potential performance bonus to leave tomorrow and also give both of them severe jetlag but that was irrelevant now.

He ran back to his bedroom,began packing his bags, throwing clothes one on top of the other, adrenaline surging all the time. The dullest of days had suddenly become one of the most important. In his head, he kept thinking the same thing over and over again.

WE HAVE A BREAKTHROUGH.