Rolf’s forehead was face down on the desk in his lab with his arms falling straight down toward the floor. His slight frame made him look like a caterpillar as his spine curved to allow him to reach such a contorted position. Then like the clichéd cartoon one might expect if they were to happen upon such a sight, he started banging his head in a slow rhythm, as if that might knock the answer into it. Or out of it. Or free from it. Or something.
Rolf knew it was going to be a challenge, and he knew that time was variable; he had no idea, however, just how much of a bitch that girl called time was. Me? It said to him with a scowl upon its faceless set of representative numbers, you’re going to harness ME?! Dance with me, maybe. Harness me, no. Yes, if time could talk, that’s what she’d be saying to the brilliant scientific mind currently hunched over in misery banging his head upon his desk.
This was a mess. This was a serious mess.
Not only were they now jumping to unshared time …
And not only was that unshared time years into the past …
But the jumps were now vastly out of sync …
And he couldn’t control it.
He was so sure that the latest formulas and change to the program would fix the unshared time, but all it did was make it worse and widen the gulf between their arrival times. Why? He could make a guess, but Rolf hated guessing, even if it was an educated one. Seriously, look where the last one landed them.
The problem he knew, the cause was a mystery.
But then that bitch named time. It was really that simple, he just hated to admit it. I’m too variable to be harnessed, she scolded the scientist. NO! he protested. There’s a key to everything, and he’d found enough of them to make more of the tumblers line up than anyone could have done in hundreds more years, that’s how much a genius the German quantum scientist was. But the ones that hadn’t fallen into place yet? Well … they were a significant problem.
It was very simple really, and he wondered if the wayward pair had realized it yet, that time was fluid. Each jump took exactly the same amount of time no matter who jumped first and where they were landing. The jump would take them and in a matter a second, to their perception, they’d be in their new spot in time. Their jumps were no longer beginning exactly simultaneously, but that wasn’t that great a shock considering the variable he prepared for; there was only 12.46 seconds between them, which was nothing. It was their arrivals that were subject to wide distances now. So to the one that arrived earlier in time, the other would appear to be lost in the proverbial vortex. To the one arriving at the later point in time, there was no difference other than their partner already having arrived. It was all about perspective. What frustrated Rolf and, frankly, boggled him, was why the gap between arrival end points was so wide now. He knew it was something he did with his latest adjustment, which was made to fix the fact that they were jumping to unshared time, which he was nearly positive was due to something they did that he couldn’t hazard a guess at that caused them to go out of sync in the first place.
The icing on the cake of this very bad day was that the durations of their stays had also fallen into disarray. Jump durations were always variable, but now they had something of a mind of their own. Again, it was a mess. Because he’d been wrong in his last fix. He hated when he was wrong. But he hated it more when he couldn’t figure out why.
So, now he sat there deflated and deriding himself, in the unexpected position of having to now go back to the drawing board, so he could figure out how to get them back on track.