29 Minutes

Two

Aisle was sure she was dead.

What made her think this way?

Well, that God-awful stench was one thing. Seriously, she was just about to gag from the smell.

But what made her mind up that she wasn't dead was when she opened her eyes and noticed she was lying on top of a very dirty boy.

Aisle didn't have very many friends. In fact, she didn't have any friends at all if she didn't count Rosy and Rochelle from work. She had only seen people behaving romantically to each other on the television. She had also never known what physical contact with a male felt like even if she was to be married in a few months time. The only man aside from her father to ever hold her was the contractor his father worked with, and that was a handshake. Now, she was sprawled all over this boy in a very small room. She was almost screaming when she scrambled up from his body.

The vigorous movement roused the boy and he was coughing violently as if he had just been chocked. Aisle remembered that she had been hanging onto something that felt like a neck before she passed out. So he was the one in her house. But she glanced at the room she was in and there was no way she was in her house. Where the hell was she? Was this what death looked like? If do then death had pathetic taste in decor.

The boy finally managed to get a hold of himself and stood up. He seemed just as disoriented as she was as he was looking around the room. After a while, he sighed and murmured to himself that he had only been dreaming and something about the machine being a bust. Aisle was still too scared to speak as he went about collecting various items that had been on the floor. His room, if it was his, was so small. Aisle was just wondering how a human being could live in such a condition when the boy turned and looked at her.

They were both silent for a long while before they started screaming at each other. Aisle was throwing each and every thing that she could land her hands on at him.

"Will... you ...stop," he said, ducking the junk being hurled at him. Aisle was not going to be taken without a fight however. She was just about to seize something long and wooden when he was upon her and snatched it from her hand.

"Who are you? Where am I? What do you want with me?" Aisle's questions came fast and thick as she tried to break free of his hold. He was about to speak when snapped his mouth shut. He was glancing at her for a long while before his mind finally made the connection. She was the hazel eyed girl form that house. But if it was not a dream, then what the hell just happened to him.

"Look... I'm going to let you go now. If you throw anything else at me, I'm throwing you off that balcony over there."

Aisle was calculating her options of winning any physical battle with him. She had to accept that that was impossible. I mean the size of him was enough to make her cower. He was also about a foot taller than her. The math of an escape was only equitable if he willingly let go of her. So she nodded and watched as he slowly let go of her hands.

The boy was not sure if the hazel eyed girl had been a project of his imagination. But Papa would have mentioned that he had lost his mind if ever it happened.

Of course.

Exactly. So it only meant that the machine had done more than he had intended it to. What exactly had it done again? After he was sure that the girl was not going to chuck anything heavy at him, he turned to look at his machine. The watch on his wall told him twenty nine minutes had passed since the test run. So he had not died... that was a relief. But the machine hadn't exactly worked either. Or had it? What exactly had those blueprints from his father been about? Where they real for cell degeneration inhabitation?