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Author : Brad Crawford

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There it went again. This time he noted the time and severity of the event. For the last two days or so, Dr. Samuel Coughlin, world-renowned physicist had experienced a strange phase in/phase out effect. It started with a gradual feeling as though he was insubstantial, ethereal if you will, and the sensation progressed to where he momentarily lost his vision, but then suddenly he was fine again. Afterwards, it was though nothing had happened, and he was still actively participating in what he had been doing before. An odd “blink”, that was the only way he was able to describe it to friends and associates. To try and make sense of the madness, his wife kept watch over him during one such event. She said that he briefly flickered, then his eyes went completely dark, as though blind for a couple of seconds. But she could discern no other ill effects from the blink. The miracle in all of this was that so far he had not experienced the blink during a time when cognitive processes were critical to his survival, such as during his daily commute.

Nine seconds; this last time was the most noticeable, and the longest incident of something not being quite right since the infernal blinking began. It was impossible to predict when it might happen again, or even if it would at all. Sam just knew that everything had an origin, and a trigger. Something that caused its beginning, and something to initiate all subsequent occurrences. All he remembered was that he had been researching time travel in his laboratory the day before it started. It started as a plain, ordinary day and remained so up until his final machine check. He had thoroughly checked and debugged each line of code, routinely investigated the wiring, verified the stability of his fusion generator, realigned the time refractors, and then there was a tremendous boom followed by a power surge. Wait a minute…..{BLINK}

As they pried open the bunker door melted shut during the intergalactic wars, Affar-JalTin mused, “makes you wonder how long the computer has been rebooting this rudimentary time machine. It would have been constructed shortly before the hostilities started, and it’s a shame that whoever built it never got to see if it actually worked.” Underneath a thin layer of dust, the dim readout still showed the last setting was to travel 56 hours in the past. Menka Jehn shook his head, “So glad they sent us to find items like this. There’s no telling what kind of havoc this thing might play in the wrong hands. You know, It’s sad, and little creepy; almost as if you can still see a faint, shadowy image making final adjustments. Come on, let’s deactivate this thing and go home…”
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