The Accidental Time Traveller

1 - Encryption

Watch the screen.

Samantha Perry froze as the words floated on the black monitor in front of her. They were simple words, a very basic font designed to grab the attention, but they were words that sent goosebumps running across both arms and caused her to stare unblinking at the screen as if the act of blinking would make them go away. After a moment she realized that she was holding her breath, and forced herself to exhale slowly and carefully. Even then, she still didn't blink, examining the words on the screen, the first sign that her work of the past three months had been successful.

Watch the screen.

There were signs of degradation and heavy pixelation across the screen, caused by the decryption protocols she had thrown at the damaged footage that Kari Cheng had left behind. Wait, that was a lie: Kari had destroyed everything, including all of her hard drives. Most of it had been automatic due to Kari's own personal brand of genius and paranoia. When Kari hadn't entered a password by a certain time, a series of computer viruses and programs had been released and had set to work deleting all of her data. By the time Samantha and her team had gotten to Kari's apartment, all of the data had been destroyed. One program has unleashed a particularly nasty trick that had involved a drill press boring its way through the stack of drives in the server cabinet. There was quite nothing like physical destruction to kill data. It would take some kind of genius to recover anything at all from that mess.

To her credit, Samantha was exactly the right kind of genius.

"I've got you now," Samantha whispered and allowed herself a smile.

For a moment, anyone used to seeing the focused intensity that was Samantha's resting bitch-face would have called her beautiful. Even her mother would have called her beautiful, she who hated the heavy dark mascara and black lipstick that Samantha habitually wore despite the most stringent dress code at the office; that was a battle that even Ted in HR had decided wasn't worth dying over. Samantha was scary, intentionally scary, but even then in her moment of triumph, she forgot all of that and just allowed herself to feel, really feel the pleasure of finally beating Kari Cheng.

Watch the screen.

Samantha pushed the space bar.

Kari Cheng stares out of the degraded footage, frozen for a moment, framed by static and the running decryption software that Samantha still has running. She is in her living room, standing at her desk to record the video.

Just seeing her face caused Samantha to purse her lips in irritation, Kari's almost flawless Filipino face, petite and attractive to the point of distraction with those full lips, so kissable... and for a moment, she regretted that she had never gotten to know Kari the way she had always wanted to.

"Goddammit Kari," Samantha whispered to the image and shook herself out of her reverie, surprised at the effect Kari still had on her, even now. She looked at the frozen image wondering if her decoding had failed, but then—

Kari starts to move, static and glitches marring the video.

"Okay Chris! These are the limitations—"

bzzt!

"—rules to time travel—"

bzzt! crack!

"You can only travel to your own lifetime and to twenty-four places that you've actually been to, so no running off and killing Hitler."

bzzt! Static and the video jumps forward.