About noon the sky darkened, a breeze sprang up and a low rumble announced the approaching storm. Gagging for breath, I ran to catch de bus. Luckily, I caught it. The gravel crunched and spattered beneath the wheels of the bus as it went. Outside the window, shadowy figures peered at the bus through the darkness. I could not prevent my imagination from churning out a picture of my unsavoury past. Although the Internet represented a quantum leap in globe’s connectivity, there was an extremely job insecurity and scarcity, so I have shot for the moon buying a Time travel to the future. Flashing these thoughts through my mind, I rose from my seat, going out of the bus.
Anxious about being late for the appointment, I ran down Main Street. It was two o’clock in the dot when I went inside the shop. I saw a metal box shining and I though “unbelievable, a real Time Machine,” I shook my head. Because of the machine’s light I felt my eyelids blinking. The watch on the wall near to the machine seemed to quaver.
It was because I was stuck in the time, always in the present, unable to move forward or backwards that I bought the travel ticket to the future. Indeed, now time wouldn’t be a prison. I thanked my lucky stars to be actually free.
“Do you guarantee I come back alive?”, I answered to the man behind the desk. It was a difficult question, so he hesitated before answering.
“We guarantee nothing, except the time travel,” explained this man. “If you disobey the instructions, there’s a stiff penalty,” added him.
“Trying to scare me!”, I yelled with a loud voice as if I was talking someone hard of heard.
“Frankly, yes. Time travel is the more dangerous game of your live. Good luck!”, wished the man. I though I’ve been mixed up with some queer people on my live, some crackpots and some screwballs, some imbeciles and some lunatics, but for sheer dumbness, this man had beat all them.
I moved silently across the room, toward the machine, toward the roaring machine. Then I sat down inside the machine.
First a day and then a night. Then a week, a month, a year, a decade! A.D. 2055, A.D. 2070! 3000! 4000, 7000! The hands of the wall watch were round and round, never stopping in a continuous flow. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…The machine roared again and stopped. The fog that enveloped the machine blew away. I went out of the machine. My face was pale, my jaw was stiff and I felt the trembling in my arms.
“Have the time travel finished?” I felt my mouth muttering. I smiled palely.
Suddenly, all was silence as if someone had shut a door. I was outside. The place seemed the remoteness Atacama desert, the driest place on Earth with cloudless skies. It was extremely hot.
What I saw was a habitant of this future. A large animal with resilient legs, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each leg was a piston. The head, a ton of sculptured stone. Its mouth opened, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its armoured flesh glittered like thousand green coins.
What was the worst of these time travels is that you couldn’t put a commando team on immediate standby at one moment in the future or past, which you would order to attack in any moment. That would be the right time to commando’s attack. But I was completely alone.
I was trembling. I couldn´t believe my eyes. But I was there because of a better future. Anyone had been able to reach it without shooting the moon, so I bite the bullet. “Who…who are you?,” I stammered to the beast.
It or he or she, screamed a sound but I didn’t understand what. “I’m a visitor from the past,… I live in the year 2023,” my voice quavered for a moment but then I regained control.
Suddenly, the beast leaved in a hurry and disappeared. I felt as relieved as a zebra outrunning a lion.
I realized that I was in a daze. I didn’t know what to do. It was desert that all I saw. Anyone was there. Any building, any infrastructure was there. Obviously, if stargazing had be high on my list of beloved pastimes, this place would have been worth of my serious consideration. But it wasn’t.
In spite of that I stared at the sky, seeing a dark spot on the Sun. I’m not an astronomer, but maybe I was witnessing a Venus transit, maybe Venus was passing following its orbit being its form reflected against the surface of the Sun.
I wasn’t drunk or crazy or dreaming. Something inside my head was saying I was too smart to be taken in. IT was the future. The chaos theory of the butterfly effect was totally right being this desert the consequences of the past human actions. This desert dispels my illusion in the future.
So I decided that this future wasn’t my thing. I went back to the time machine with the purpose to change this pessimistic future.
Lights on! I went to the past. Suddenly, my brain felt as it were made of rubber and somebody was twisting it all. The terror of it blinded me. I was flying through the space. Stars and meteors whizzed by. It seemed billions of years old, the stars were born in nebuli, clouds of hydrogen gas. Then these protostars became hotter in a way that the hydrogen inside of the cores began to fuse creating helium. And a massive star, which stood there in my mind, collapsed into itself creating a bottomless well of gravity called black hole…
I was trembling. “Do you know what this means?”, I heard my voice becoming hysterical and I tried to keep it calm.
Starting again…Again starting. Again.
Author: Y.MURIEL
©image: web site https://news.uchicago.edu/
@Yolanda Muriel 
yolandamuriel.com 