Chapter 3: Kick Start My Heart

Suggested Listening:

Kick Start My Heart by Motley Crue; November 20, 1989

Professor Wells set into his Time Machine. He thought to himself if he should actually have installed straps to hold him into the seat as Jack Kilroy has suggested. Professor Wells believed that Jack called them seatbelts. But surely since gravity would be unaffected by the time travel those things were not necessary Professor Wells concluded.

Professor Wells drew in a deep breath and prayed that it wouldn't be his last if he grin his teeth gripped the lever that was going forward in time and pushed. The result was the machine violently kicking off forward in time like a Doberman pinscher with the zoomies.

The world around started to collapse and then rebuild itself. The sensation is one that Wells could not describe properly. The closest thing would be like riding a bolt of lightning in a hurricane with a lead brick around your neck. At first Wells felt like he was being pulled apart; and then like he was being smashed together like he was inside the hydraulic part of a hydraulic press. He was suddenly short of breath. But when he tried to breathe he realized that he could not. His hands and feet did not move. Wells tried to scream but couldn't. It was like everything about him was frozen in time except his consciousness. This went on for what seemed like hours. During this ordeal Wells began to wish that he was dead. Then something caught his eye. A Rolex wristwatch. That had been fastened to one of the bars on the chassis. He could see the hands moving at what seemed to be a normal speed; at least what he would consider to be normal speed. After a few moments of focusing on this professor Wells realize that his nausea was passing and he began to relax.

The landscape was misty and vague. Wells was still on the hillside upon which his house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me gray and dim. He saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapor, now brown, now green; they grew, spread, fluctuated, and passed away.

He saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changing—melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Wells noticed that Jack had placed the Rolex where it could just be seen while looking at the dials. Looking at it seemed to keep Wells balanced and emotionally calm. Although he still hadn't figured out how to actually move his body yet.

Presently Wells noted that the sun belt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that, consequently, my pace was over a year a minute ; and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring.

The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now. They merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. Wells noticed now a clumsy swaying of the machine, for which he was unable to account. But his mind was too confused to attend to it, so with a kind of madness growing upon him, he flung myself into futurity. At first he scarcely thought of stopping, scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. This hyper charged time rocket was like a drug. But presently a fresh series of impressions grew up in his mind,—a certain curiosity, and there - with a certain dread,—until they at last took complete possession of him. What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, he thought, might not appear when he came to look nearly into the dim, elusive world that raced and fluctuated before his eyes! He saw great and splendid architectures rising about him, more massive than any buildings of his own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist. Wells saw a richer green flow up the hillside, and remain there with-out any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of his confusion the Earth seemed very fair. And so his mind came round to the business of stopping.

The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of Wells finding some substance in the space which he, or the machine, occupied. So long as he traveled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered. He was, so to speak, attenuated—was slipping like a vapor through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in his way, meant bringing his atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction—possibly a far-reaching explosion—would result, and blow himself and his apparatus out of the Rigid Universe—out of all possible dimensions—into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to Wells while he was making the machine ; but then he had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk—one of the risks a man has got to take ! Now the risk was inevitable. He no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all the feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset his nerve. He told himself that he could never stop, and with a gust of petulance he resolved to stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, he lugged over the lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling over, and he was flung headlong through the air. There was the sound of a thunderclap in his ears. He may have been stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round him, and he was sitting on soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still seemed gray, but presently he realized that the confusion in his ears was gone. Wells looked round. He was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and he noticed that their mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating of the hailstones. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a little cloud over the machine, and drove along the ground like smoke. In a moment he was wet to the skin. "Fine hospitality," said he, "to a man who has traveled innumerable years to see you!"

Presently he thought what a fool I was to get wet. He stood up and looked around. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour. But all else of the world was invisible; almost it was like he couldn't see it because he wasn't fully synchronized with the flow of time; wherever here and now was.

Wells looked at the dials on his Time Machine. The date was February 29th in the year 2384. A full 489 years had passed since this morning. Wells retrieved the Rolex that Jack had placed on the rollbar. It was set before he left to the time back in 1895. Wells decided to keep it set that way.

Wells then went about righting the Time Machine back to an upright position. He never noticed the knapsack under the seat; or the handwritten note that Jack had left him.

However, Wells' arrival had not gone unnoticed. He was being watched remotely. A man who was simply called the Angel watched him. "You're early," These Angel said to themselves. These Angel checked all the calculations again. These Angel had calculated that Wells would arrive on the 13th of April of this year.

Sitting on These Angel's desk was the prototype time machine that Wells had sent into the future. It had arrived on the 13th of January of that year. These Angel decided to be patient; There wasn't any time to change his plans at this point. These Angel turned attention back to what Wells was actually doing. That's when These Angel noticed that Wells was armed. "S! #." That was going to complicate things.

However, Wells was completely unaware of the existence of These Angel, or the fact that his prototype had been captured and thoroughly examined by the most sophisticated networked intelligence imaginable.

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