SciFriday Challenges (Anthology)

Challenge 13 - Anyone Superstitious

"Open your eyes Felina." Oliver said as he removed his hands from covering his wife's face.

The slight creases by his eyes deepened and the corners of his mouth lifted upward. Felina's eyes bounced as they examined the pile of scraps before her.

"What is this?" She asked.

Oliver smiled wider and placed his hands on his wife's shoulders. "I'm getting the grant to finally build it!"

"Oliver," Felina bit her lip and glanced away. "I know how much you want this, and I truly believe you can build it, but I don't want you to become disappointed when it doesn't work."

Oliver cupped his wife's chin in his hand and gently turned her face back to him. "I will find you again and this time we can change the outcome. I won't let this be the end for us."

A few weeks later, Felina passed away in her sleep.

***

Friends and Family of Oliver Wesley would all very much agree that he was a man with bad luck. Like the time he managed to slip on some ice after having his braces removed, only to smash out his front teeth. Surprisingly though, his bad luck was what lead him to meeting his wife. He was set up on a blind date and arrived at the wrong restaurant but he met Felina instead.

As their romance grew, his bad luck seemed to dissipate and he even earned a scholarship to the California Institute of Technology, where he studied physics and explored the theories of his hero, Stephen Hawking. One of the theories that fascinated Oliver the most was that of black holes in the universe. This sparked him to design his own theory about time travel. At first it was just an essay he presented in front of a panel as part of a final exam but then Oliver's bad luck returned when Felina was diagnosed with terminal cancer. If it had been detected sooner, then the cancer could have been removed before spreading to her other organs. This made Oliver even more determined to make time travel real so that he could go back and change Felina's fate. He worked on it every chance he had, things like Napkins and receipts were always covered with some sort of mathematical formula written on them.

After Felina's death, he let himself sit in sorrow or drag his feet about with his robe trailing behind him and a bottle of bourbon in his grip. Then after a week he wiped the sleep from his eyes, rinsed his mouth with wash, tucked his unwashed hair behind his ears and went off to build his machine. He welded scraps of metal together, tightened nuts, bolts and screws and with every piece that came together, he saw Felina in them. Like in the shiny metal that glistened with his welding torch, he saw her bright smile that wasn't perfect, yet a beauty that made his heart dance. It made him miss hearing her laugh, especially at night when they used to lay in bed going over things that happened during their day. Except now he lay alone at night.

As Oliver caulked seams to make the time travel contraption air-tight, he could picture Felina's hands guiding his. Like when he used to get absorbed in a mathematical equation and she would wrap her arms around his torso and then place her hands over his as he slid his chalk over the blackboard. Her soft delicate hands with pink painted nails would undoubtedly wrap around his fingers if she saw how bloody and blistered they were now.

Moving onto building the computer which would generate the algorithm and send Oliver back in time, was easier. He built the computer inside the contraption so he could control it from there and preprogramed the algorithm in it so it would be easier to access and run. He then wired the computer to a generator that included a hand-crank, in case of emergencies, which was also built inside the time travel machine. He wanted nothing that was controlling his fate, to be left out of his reach. However, he did have a control panel outside on the machine, just in case he needed to destroy it.