The soft whirring of the machinery was interrupted by a chirp he hadn’t heard before. The foreign sound startled him, and his heart started racing with possibilities. He went immediately to the master screen and discovered nothing obviously out of the ordinary with the slipstream. At least not on first glance. Then he noticed it. It was small, almost imperceptible, but it was there. Then it was gone. He’d have to check the reports. Admittedly, the numbers their journey was throwing were exceptional, far more than he’d expected. But again, time was a factor that couldn’t be held to exactitudes, so he didn’t have any cause for concern.
Until now.
Because these numbers weren’t just exceptional, they weren’t normal. These numbers were so out of the realm that they couldn’t be explained by the randomness of time. All this because of that miniscule blip? he wondered. Or maybe not so miniscule. There was no way to know. It was a marvel, really, this miracle of science. The instability of it even more so. He walked back to the master screen. A part of him was bitter that he couldn’t be a fly on the wall and observe it all in the first person rather than as a series of numbers, charts, graphs, and phase-shifts. He stared at the slipstream, noted their positions, and let his frustration show in the beadiness of his eyes.
“Which one of you stepped on the butterfly, Mr. Johnson?” he said out loud. “What have you done?”