The Decameron 2.0

Day 7.1 Humor - LOLA'S PANADERIA rmcneary

"Carter, I'm leaving you."

"Yeah love, just make sure you leave dinner on the table," Carter said. She focused on the motherboard in front of her, the silver and gold circuits holding her attention better than jewelry ever could.

Evan made that threat every so often, to get her out of the lab, but she couldn't today. She was so close to completing the necessary tech for her control panel. While her earlier attempts had ended in failure, she knew this wouldn't.

Having already figured out the quantum formula for time travel, this should have been a breeze. But as they liked to say, the devil was in the details.

Speaking of which, what's that smell?

She sniffed under her arm and gagged, bile reaching the back of her throat. She couldn't remember the last time she showered, but it couldn't have been that long. Besides, science waited for no one.

The time machine's shell gleamed in shades of silver-blue in her periphery. It consisted of a titanium-andarium alloy, two of the strongest metals known to humankind. It could withstand extreme heat and cold and treated boulders like pesky mosquitos. If she happened to land in a volcano or in a surprise ice age, she'd be fine unless she opened the door and broke the seal.

She had no intention of opening the door.

All the grant money for her project had dried up and her savings dwindled every second. Yet all of it, money and time, would be meaningless once she finished. She could apologize to Evan with a Danish from the bakery where they'd met ten years ago.

Theoreticians had all these 'rules' to time travel. If you occupied the same place and time as yourself, you could cause a spatial implosion. If you killed a butterfly, you could set off a chain of events that caused Hitler to win the World War II. Yet all these 'rules' were contradictory and based on theory. Not a single person had successfully traveled back in time.

Yet.

Carter didn't specialize in theory. She was the engineer, the muscle behind the machine. She'd been deconstructing and reconstructing tech with her father since she was a child. Give her a broken device and she'd figure out how to make it work again. Then build a better version with the spare parts.

Besides, all of it was bull. No one or thing on this planet was irreplaceable to history. All those world-changing discoveries and inventions? Someone else would have done it. Just like people on four different continents invented the crossbow at roughly the same time. So what if one of them had died? The world would still have it. People died needlessly every day and time kept flowing.

That was the first thing she'd do after getting Evan that Danish. That worthless drunk driver that killed her father would never learn to drive.

The final solder complete, she connected the board to the diagnostic program she'd created to test its efficacy. She set a quick alarm on her smart watch. It would take a few hours, so she left her workshop for a bath and a meal, not necessarily in that order.

She opened the door and was assaulted by the darkness. The moon peeked through the clouds like a child playing hide and seek.

Dinner was likely cold, but that's why they invented the microwave, right?

When she opened the door to the kitchen, instead of a covered plate, there was a folded note on the table. Evan usually left one there as not distract Carter from her work. She tended to ignore text messages, v-notes, and the world in general while she worked.

She made a mental note to read it after eating and went to the fridge. There wasn't a nice container of food waiting like she'd expected. To make matters worse, Evan hadn't shopped in a while, because they were out of deli turkey and pickles. There was some half-thawed ground beef and tomatoes staring her in the face, but instead of trying to remember how to make a lasagna in the middle of the night, Carter decided to pull a six-pack out of the fridge and drink until she forgot she was hungry.