Sigmund Deaves: Timepiece

Chapter 4: Brain Remapping

Back at the hospital, his mother had just arrived. Sigmund had already been barred from playing chess in the lobby after he made a seventy year old with lung cancer hyperventilate, so he was forced to take part in the touching family moment of loss. "How did it happen?" someone asked through tears.

Sigmund wanted to ask a question about his family's sentimentality but thought better of it. Instead, he reminisced with his mother and sister for a minute before fleeing to a spot next to Henry. They sat like that with Sigmund twiddling his thumbs and Henry staring blankly at the floor for a few awkward moments before Sigmund said, "Hey, Henry, wanna play a game?"

"No," Henry knew of the winning streak Sigmund had when it came to chess, "scratch that, make it a hell no."

Sigmund shared a brief moment of grim laughter with Henry before the brutal atmosphere forced them into silence. Out of boredom, Sigmund searched for the clock on the wall so he could stare at it for another five minutes. However, he couldn't see it at his angle. He decided to use the obsidian pocket watch to check the time. It reported a continuous clicking noise and the time 4:57. Sigmund had just clicked the pocket watch closed when he caught Henry staring intently at it. Without a further sound, Henry roughly grabbed Sigmund's arm and dragged him to a hallway at the other end of the lobby. Over Sigmund's exclamations of surprise Henry said, "We need to talk in private."

Henry threw Sigmund around a corner that broke line of sight with the lobby before whispering intensely, "How did you get this!?" Sigmund attempted to straighten his tie in a gesture of indignation before realizing that doing so would be impossible.

"Sorry, yeah, I know that it's grandpa's watch. But the paramedics dropped it when they were hauling his body out the door and I picked it up. Honestly, I was gonna give it to Mary earlier but all the sobbing got in the way," Sigmund responded.

Henry's expression just got more frantic, "That's not just a pocket watch, that's a Timepiece."

Now Sigmund was even more confused, what was a Timepiece? He said, "Er, is that like a really expensive kind of watch? In that case, all the better reason for you to take it back to Mary," he extended the pocket watch toward Henry.

"No!" Henry shoved the 'Timepiece', as he called it, back at Sigmund. "If you can open it, then it belongs to you." the CCP wondered for a moment whether or not the medical student had forgotten seeing him do it just a few minutes prior before flipping the Timepiece open again. Henry face was contorted in shock when he murmured, "No, that can't be possible, it doesn't choose its users randomly. Great, first John kicks the bucket and now this."

"What are you talking about?"

Henry's face betrayed a sense of extreme gravity as he lowered his voice to a whisper, "What you hold in your hands right now is probably the most dangerous item ever invented by humans. It has the capability to destroy not just our planet, but the universe as a whole. Be very careful with it." Sigmund was struck by whiplash at how quickly everything had jumped from grieving to intense in just a few moments.

The CCP didn't know how to react to this, but he generally assumed snarky disbelief would suffice. "Not that I want to repeat myself but what are you talking about?"

"That," he pointed at the obsidian pocket watch, "is one of the three time machines currently on earth."

Nothing on Sigmund's face signified that he was even slightly surprised or amused, "Ha ha, very funny," he didn't appear to find anything funny at that moment, "fine, I probably deserved that for always talking about time travel. But even I know that there's no way this is a time machine."