Adventures In Space And Time

Chapter Two

I awoke to the sound of my watch alarm going off. I groggily picked my head up from my crossed arms and blearily looked around. I was still in my workshop, sitting on the bench before my armor. I shook my head to clear it and rubbed the sleep in my eyes. Suddenly, I realized that I still hadn't turned off my alarm. I shook my head again, trying to clear it faster and turned off the watch, but not before I got a glance at it. The watch read 5:45 pm. I was thirty minutes late to a meeting I had set up with the president of MI6 to negotiate the release of some of my agents who had been taken prisoner. Apparently "snooping around" is an offense worthy of arrest in England.

Anyway, I dashed to my room which was five floors down, through a long hallway, down a secret passage disguised as a laundry chute, around three right corners, forward to an imposing, paneled oak door that I had erected myself and tricked out with all manner of security gadgets and surveillance devices. I knocked on the rightmost panel on the fourth row. The panel retracted and exposed a palm scanner. I scanned my hand and another panel retracted and revealed an eye scanner. Then a voice analyzer. Then a fingerprint scanner.

Five scanners later, the door finally opened and I walked through into my inner sanctum. My room was sparsely furnished, yet cozy and was heaped with dirty clothes. I hung my head and sighed, putting my finger and thumb on the bridge of my nose. I really had to think about putting those away, but now was not the time.

I tapped my earpiece, sense of urgency returning, and called my agent in MI6, telling him to reschedule my meeting with the president as I threw on a more presentable shirt than my oil stained work shirt. Maybe I should have worn a suit, but that doesn't really matter, seeing as I never made it to the meeting.

Halfway to my door, my earpiece, which is synched to my helmet processor, dinged. I tapped it, and my sunglass display lit up. In the lower left corner, there was notification that read: Protocol IX39 Initiated. For a split second, I ignored it, and that split second almost cost me everything. A second later, I sucked in a breath when I remembered what I had given that designation. It was the program I had just installed, the one in the Space-Time Flux Capacitor! I had just put it in, why was it malfunctioning already?!

I was pretty steamed at this, but I knew I had to keep a cool head if I wanted to stop the program. I double tapped my scabbard, and my armor built itself around me (If you're wondering what this looks like, just remember it looks like Iron Man, but better). This would better allow me to cancel the program. Using eye movement controls, I opened the settings and initialized motion controls. Easily flexing my fingers in my well articulated armored gauntlets, I typed line after of code, trying to stop the code. I came across a line of code in a computer language used exclusively by the Mordeux, ELH1. I went cold. The piece had been sabotaged. Typing even more furiously than before, and using my knowledge of the Mordeux coding language, I hacked through fire wall after fire wall, getting closer and closer to the program.

Suddenly, I found a side path in the code that led to the program description, and I took it, knowing that I could never get all the way to the program in the few moments left to me. I hacked my way to the description and saw that the destination was unlisted, but I knew the Mordeux's tricks. This was a red herring. The real description would be further down the line. In a moment I had it, the path that would lead me to the real description. Unfortunately, I hadn't been paying attention to the start up count down clock that I had opened the the upper right hand corner of the visor display. I had less than a second left. I typed even faster than I had typed before, breaking through one last fire wall, but I only caught a glimpse of the place I was going, but even that was enough to make me give a whoop of joy.

The destination had been listed as Harry Potter. As the program completed its startup, I couldn't help but grin. I double tapped my scabbard again, and my armor retracted back into it. As the hand in front of me began to fizzle, like I was becoming electricity, I grinned even wider.

I was going to the world of a book!