Dreaming in Static

Chapter 8

Andromeda

Ali tumbled through the cyan mass encircling the portal with Polaris in his arms, and Andromeda was about to scold him that this was no time for romance, until she saw the huge slit in the android's abdomen.

Panic almost overtook Andromeda at the sight of the smoke rising from the wires, almost a repeat of the incident on Infinity, until she remembered that she was purely mechanical and no amount of fear could sway her programming. There was no time to treat Polaris's wounds; they had to utilize whatever escape method Alistair had planned out, right now.

"Alistair," Andromeda breathed, "let's do this."

Ali delivered a brief nod and pulled what looked like handcuffs from out of his pocket. He attached one of the cuffs around his own wrist and the other around Polaris's. "I hope you don't mind, Andromeda. I'll come back for you."

She nodded. "Just go."

Ali bit his lip, swiped along the surface of the handcuffs to configure the settings, and pressed a button.

And then, it was like nothing Andromeda had ever seen before. It was as if the fabric of space-time was literally curving around Ali and Polaris; a dark opening split behind them, sucking them into it and warping their images at the same time, and Andromeda had to hold onto the bed to keep from falling into the hole with them. Just as the sucking feeling became unbearable and her fingers slipped from the edge of Ali's bed, the opening sealed again, and Andromeda stumbled to the floor. Even teleportation didn't have such an effect on the environment, but the only other possible explanations were dimension-jumping and time-traveling, both of which were quite impossible.

She stood up and dusted herself off, and found herself looking straight into Ali's bright eyes again. He clicked one of the cuffs onto her wrist and pressed the same button, and then she was falling, falling with him, holding onto his torso desperately--she couldn't breathe, but it wasn't an unpleasant feeling; she didn't require air anyway.

Andromeda had no idea how much time had passed--it didn't feel like time had stood still, but it certainly didn't feel like time was moving forward. As she shook her head to clear her thoughts and opened her eyes, feeling oddly refreshed, she realized that, indeed, time had not stood still at all.

It'd gone backwards.

Ali

Alistair looked around to confirm that it'd worked, and the sight of Polaris standing in front of him affirmed his lingering question. He'd set his time machine for one hundred years in the past, so that no matter how long they decided to stay, there was practically no way they'd end up conflicting with the 23rd-century timeline. And if they did, well, they'd be far too old to do any real damage, and nearing death anyway.

So it was...2117. Probably. If his invention had functioned perfectly. Every trip to the past was instantaneous in the present, so although Andromeda had experienced no passing time, in reality Ali had already taken around an hour to fix Polaris's system as well as he could.

"Okay," he sighed, throwing his head back to look at the faded blue sky. "We've gone back in time by 100 years. And after the trip I just took with Polaris, I tried to fix her. She should be functioning now. Mostly."

Andromeda nodded at him, understanding. He was glad that he didn't need to explain any further as he'd have had to do with almost any other person he knew.

Polaris

Andromeda was looking around with a bewildered expression on her face. It was the first time Polaris had ever seen her caught off-guard by the sheer reality of it all: they'd gone back in time.