Dreams in the Distant Sky

Prologue

"Okay! Voltage: check! Circuits: check! Instant food: check! Destination?"

"Check!"

Two women and three men stood around a huge machine in which sat another man dressed in heavy clothes. Around them were huge circuit boards, multiple controls, bundles of wires and monitors displaying complex information. Above was an open ceiling giving all of them a view of the brilliant star studded sky.

The atmosphere in the huge room was exciting yet tense. Everything had to be perfect for this experiment. Everything had to be checked twice, thrice, to ensure the safety of the man who was to travel in the machine. And of course, there was excitement to be the first to achieve the feat of travelling through time.

Trials to send inanimate objects had been successful. They were sent to the past and brought back to the future with pictures of the surroundings as proof that the machine was truly capable of taking people through time. It was also to make sure that the object that had undergone the stress of travelling through the time space didn't suffer any side effects.

This time, a person would go to the past for real to understand how life was back then. Pictures, samples of anything that the people from several millennia back could be used to study the evolution of both the human race and nature. Perhaps, these things could bring about a positive change and solve many problems that people faced in the world today.

"Okay, are you ready to commence the experiment?" A girl with bright red hair and big round glasses hiding her sparkling green eyes asked out loud.

The man in the machine gave a nod and a thumbs up showing that he was prepared, mentally and physically, to be the one to make history. Literally.

The red head gave a nod to the man and a signal to the others to rev up the machine through the control panels. Taking a deep breath, she engaged several switches and pulled the lever that would process the information and supply the current they needed to get the time machine on its way to the past.

The engine of the time machine roared to life, shattering the silence in the room. Every single person in the room held their breaths while they watched the machine tremble. A few seconds passed and they heard a pop and fizzle before the machine fell silent.

Nothing had happened. The machine and the man inside were still in the room. The glass hatch of the machine opened and the man coughed as he tried to dissipate the smoky smell that had emanated from the circuit board of the machine.

"What happened??" The red head relaxed the lever into its neutral position before walking to the machine along with her friends.

"Sarah, I think something in the circuit board fused." The man said and jumped out of the machine so the red head, Sarah, could take a look.

"This can't be happening...." Sarah groaned. "I checked everything twice! How could this happen in the last minute?"

"Keep it together, Sarah." The head of the team, Michael spoke. He was a serious man and even under times of pressure, he always maintained his composure.

The whole atmosphere of the room had gone dark. The team was so close to achieving the impossible but now they had to start from scratch. With something wrong in the main circuit of the machine, they couldn't risk sending a person through time. Trials with inanimate objects and cameras would have to be done again before the day to try time travel for real came again.

"Hey Kaya! Check the circuit board inside the machine and give me a report of what happened and what has to be fixed. Sarah, you check the voltage levels and make sure there's no leakage or oversupply of power to the machine. I'll make sure the programming is correct. The rest of you, make yourselves useful and check the other circuit boards." Michael gave out instructions and each of the scientists in the room went ahead with their jobs.