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User24
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the intricate patterns of wiring and arcane mechanics spiralling upwards and all around them as they stepped into the machine, it was itself a paradox, built in the future based on itself from the past, our present.
They turned switches, typed co-ordinates on foreign keyboards; so much had changed that the technology was hard to identify with - no friendly mouse, no CRT, it was all custom built for it's purpose; the exploration of a timeline that would never exist.
Officially, it had been built in 1987, officially, it was the fruit of a billion dollar reseach project stretching back to the 20's, and of course, officially, it didn't exist.
In actual fact, (fact being a rare commodity in these times) it was never built, it just appeared, some decision in the far future had affected the distant past, skewed the time lines, and produced the machine, it didn't ever need to be built, because it never actually existed.
Of course, it was useless, you couldn't go forwards or backwards in our time, you could only explore alternate realities, things that never happened, things that won't happen in the future.. sometimes it was hard enough just to keep going forwards at a rate on 1 second per second; it was hard to stabilise it at our current timespeed.
When they first used it, they were cautious, skipped back one minute in time, and quickly returned.
that was a mistake,
really - they never should have used it at all, it should have been ignored.
when they got back, they were shocked, everything had changed, the past was different, and the future they returned to was different, too - it's presence in the past had affected the future so wildly that it was unrecogniseable.
Now, it was rarely used, sitting in an abandoned lab, under surviellance, never talked about; the enthusiastic scientific papers and news reports had stopped, in fact, most people were waited for it to dissappear, as rapidly as it appeared, hoping in vain that if it went away, it would return reality to normal; take away it's wild changes.
has been reading Dr Who.
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031009
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