The Girl with a Toaster

2. Anachronism

A girl with long golden braids has materialized in my room. Her outfit drapes tightly around her torso in gradients of green and blue. A glistening orb hangs from her necklace.

My observations are cut short as she takes me by the wrist. "Jax. Time is short. Let's go!" She takes hold of her necklace with the other hand and spins the orb. I watch, mesmerized, as the orb's crystallized contents twirl like a galaxy.

Time stops... or does it speed up? I can't feel which. The room blurs into a haze as the bounds of space expand without limits. From the corner of my eye I see my bed tumble outwards as if suspended in space. The light that engulfed my room twists and shines across her face. She smiles as if amused by my confusion.

WAZHWONG!

The same sound resonates. She lets go of my wrist and I plop to the floor. My hands land on a foreign feeling. Where's the carpet? The floor is stone black. I'm not quite on the stone, though... I should be touching it, but I am displaced right above it. Glass. There must be a layer of glass over the stone.

She has already made her way to the center of the room. I fail to understand a word of what she just said.

Hold on. She hasn't said anything. But it feels like she just finished explaining everything and nothing. What is going...

"First thing you'll notice is that your brain is utterly confused." She runs around the center console flipping switches and glancing at monitors. "It'll take some time to get used to it. Except for the fact that, well, time doesn't exactly exist here."

Here? My eyes scan around to make sense of the situation. I am in a large, cylindrical stone room with swooping arches of light carved into the walls. The girl tinkers in the middle of the chamber, commanding a pillar of foreign technology. I realized my observations fail to help me divine my current location, so I ask.

"Where am..."

"Paraspace," she responds as if expecting the question. "Kind of like a pocket dimension adjacent to your room." Her explanation stops there as she intently studies a screen.

"Who..."

"I'm the doctor."

I look at her in confusion. "Doctor who?"

"Exactly!" She exclaims in joy. She pulls out a device resembling a large gadget pen from her back pocket and holds it up, looking at me as if I'm supposed to know something.

"What's that?" I inquire.

"Sonic screwdriver." She waits for me to respond. After a moment, she rolls her eyes, sighs, and continues in disappointment. "Have you never seen the show Doctor Who?"

Here I am, zapped out of my room and into this... place, and she's asking me about a TV show. But she proceeds to explain. "I'm friends with a man named Sydney. He says I inspired him to create a show called Doctor Who. It's one of our most popular pass times from Earth!"

I fail to understand a word of what she just said.

"Forget it. My name's Zoe." She sheaths the sonic thing back into her pocket and jumps to one of the screens. "Right now, you've got a time specter on your tail. If you wanna stay alive, stick with me and do as I say." She concludes her nonchalant introduction with a smile and makes her way to the opposite side of the central pillar.

Realizing I've been on the floor this whole time, I hoist myself up and take another scan around the room. To my left, a closed double door. To my right, a path leading to a hallway.

I suddenly find myself behind Zoe. I remember walking behind her, but just a second ago I was on the floor. Then her voice echos in my head... time doesn't exactly exist here. And then another echo, You're an anachronism.

I probe her for more information. "What's an anachronism?"

Zoe turns her attention to me and smiles. It's as if we both know that I'm remembering in the wrong direction. She obliges to my curiosity. "It's something that's in the wrong time period. Like you! You're an anachronism."

"I thought you said there wasn't time here."

"Correctomundo! But the fact is that while you live in 2018, your chronologic origin dates you at 2144." She continues without letting me interrupt. "You're an anachronism, and time specters love to feed on things like you. Since it's following you through time and space, we're going to lure it into a trap. It'd be quantumatically disastrous if it got to you! Besides sucking you dry of chrono-potential energy... quite unpleasant, by the way... it would leave behind a singularity, implode earth, and that would be the end of my favorite human show. I am here to prevent that tragedy! Don't worry. I've done this a dozen times."

I have never been more emotionally confused. My chest is spinning with fear, curiosity, insecurity, and excitement. But something about her smile and optimism makes me feel safe.

That is, until I hear Zoe echo in my head again. I'm so, so sorry, Jax...