Prime Mover

Chapter 2 - READ THE MANUAL

OK, this is really weird. When I got home from school today, someone had written

READ THE MANUAL

inside my diary. When I put it down last night, I was certain the next page was blank, but there it was in big block letters. It looked like my handwriting, though, so maybe I wrote it late last night and forgot about it. Had I really been that tired?

So I got out the manual that came with the watch, and thats when things got crazy.

What I thought was a watch wasn't just a watch. According to the introduction, "TTD" stood for Time Travel Device.  My first thought was that this was some kind of expensive toy from Doctor Who or another sci-fi show. Maybe dad thought I was a fan; I know a lot of other kids my age were. So I Googled it on my phone, and came up with nothing. A couple different companies called Agilent were out there, but none of them made watches or sci-fi props, and nothing like a time travel watch had appeared on the show. What kind of watch company doesn't even have a web page? 

The manual was pretty thick, so I started in with the easy stuff first. The day, month, and year on the face corresponded to show what time it was for the wearer. It said I could change it to a whole bunch of different calendars or time zones if I wanted, like Greenwich time, or the Chinese lunar calendar, or Galactic Standard, whatever that was. The additional numbers I couldn't figure out yesterday corresponded to longitude and latitude, down to 6 decimals. It supposedly had an accuracy to within about 2 feet. I tested it by walking around the house a bit, and watching the numbers change. Then I looked up the actual longitude and latitude on Google maps. This thing had the most kick-ass GPS I'd ever seen, much better than my iPhone. 

But time travel? Seriously? I skipped over the chapters on warranty information and battery replacement, and dug into the good stuff. It was a little complicated, but apparently all I had to do was set a target date and time, hit a button, and it would take me there. Then. You know what I mean. You could put a number of different times into the memory too, then hop to them when you wanted. That could be really handy - it recommended you set them for important events so you could find them easily.

After using it, what the manual called a "jump", it would automatically take the time you'd just jumped from and store it in the memory, so that after you jump to another time you can jump back and not miss a thing. It also recommended setting a time and place you know as safe to the "panic button". Tap that three times and you go there instantly. I'd worry about that later, I didn't plan on getting into too much trouble.

I knew I had to test this out, to prove whether it was real or some elaborate toy. I had heard mom talking to someone in the kitchen for a while, so she would be busy and not likely to interrupt. I'd set the watch to take me back five minutes, then step outside my room, activate it, and go see who she was talking to. That couldn't be too difficult, right? And if it turned out this thing was just a toy, no one would know and I wouldn't look like an idiot.

I set the "to" setting back five minutes, stepped outside my room, and shut the door. The hall was empty, and mom was still talking to someone in the kitchen. I took a deep breath. Ready... set... go...

Everything went black, then white, then black again, like the entire world was blinking. My stomach flipped like I was on a roller coaster, and my ears popped, followed by a high pitched ringing. If time travel was this disorienting, I wasn't sure I wanted to do it that much.

I took a few deep breaths until the nausea faded, then looked around. Everything seemed exactly the same, but the lighting had changed. The hall table light wasn't on, and I didn't hear mom in the kitchen. Did I do something wrong? I walked into the kitchen and she wasn't there. There were no lights on, the house was completely quiet. Where had mom gone? I was sure I had heard her just a few minutes ago.

Then i glanced at the clock on the microwave - 12:25. Oh crap. I checked the watch to be sure, and there it was. I had screwed up, but not majorly. I must have set the time to go back five hours instead of five minutes. It was mid afternoon.

But it worked! Holy crap. This changed everything. I had jumped back five hours, to an empty house. So that meant I was in school right now, Ken would be at work, and mom was probably off somewhere shopping or volunteering. I sat down at the kitchen table as the implications of all of it flooded my brain.

My dad had given me a time travel device for my birthday. Just imagine all the things I could do with that. Win the lottery. Bet on sporting events. Heck, why think small? Why not go back and invest some money in Apple before they got big? I could go back and warn people of terrorist attacks before they happened. Stop important people from being assassinated. I had to read the manual some more, surely there were safeguards in place against that kind of thing.

Where had dad gotten something like this? Why would he give it to me? And why now, when I tuned 18? Was there some minimum age for jumping through time?

I ran back to my room to think. I saw my new diary sitting on the nightstand, and I realized I was still in the past. I mean, I hadn't jumped back to the time I had come from later today. Geez, this time stuff was giving me a headache, and I had only jumped once. Something crazy occurred to me, something I should do before I jumped back.

I picked up my diary and opened it to the first blank page, then took the pen and wrote READ THE MANUAL in big block letters. I set it back carefully, then stepped to the center of my room, checked the watch, and pushed the button to jump back.