BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BE-Smack

I look over at my clock. 11 am. It's a Saturday and since I didn't have class today I had set my alarm for late in the morning to let myself sleep in. I remember that I have no plans today, and let myself fall back asleep in the warm embrace of the bed the university furnishes all dorm rooms with. I need my beaty sleep after all.

Eventually I realize that I've woken back up, and lie in bed, staring rather blankly at the dimly lit ceiling that I've lived under for nearly 3 years now.

After some time goes by, I finally sit up and look back at the clock. 2 pm.

Once I've gotten out of bed and dressed myself in the same pajamas I've worn since I started college, I put on some coffee and begin making myself a bowl of cereal.

Damnit, who left the box open? This is how you get ants.

Oh right, it was me.

I almost never have plans on the weekend so I usually spend my time watching anime or playing video games.

After I've finished making cereal, which is about the most cooking I've done in two months, I grab my phone and sit on the couch, ready to spend the rest of the day doing absolutely nothing productive.

A new episode of this show I've been watching is supposed to air later today so I'm looking forward to watching it.

About 2 minutes after it starts however, I get a phone call.

God Damnit, do you have to call right now?

I curse the caller as I look at the caller id. Its from Michael, my best friend of about fifteen years who I've known since elementary school. He's a bigger nerd than me and he's incredibly smart and always helps me study and because we have a lot of similar interests, like anime and manga and video games, we've always been really good friends. I sigh, as I would have liked to keep watching but I mute the tv and answer my phone.

"This better be good. They're showing the new episode of that show I've been telling you about."

"Forget the show. William, I finally got it working, you HAVE to come over and check it out, it's awesome!"

"Got what working? oh right, th-"

"THE TIME MACHINE DUDE! I finally got it to work! Hurry up and come over, you have to see it, its freaking amazing."

"Right now? I kind of wanna finish the episode."

"Dude, oh my god, bro, you have to come over and see it. Trust me, the show can wait, you're gonna want to see this right now."

"Really? it cant wait like twenty minutes?."

"Alright fine, but as soon as its over you better get over here."

Now I know what you're probably thinking. 'Your friend built an actual time machine? That's incredible! Why aren't you in a hurry to go see it, instead of trying to finish an episode of some dumb show?' and while a time machine does sound really cool, he's always been talking about one for like the last year and a half, he's told me he finally' finished' it like four times already, just in the last month. And every time I would go over there to check it out, it's always the same thing. He would take off his watch and put it in this little metal box attached to this big scary machine, and press a button. But nothing ever happens. So I always leave, more disappointed each time it happens. 

I don't know why he can't just test it first before making me haul my ass over there every time.

So, I'm understandably a little hesitant to just drop what I'm doing and rush over there, because there probably isn't an actual working time machine.

But he's always really passionate about this thing and he is my best friend, and this time he did sound pretty excited, so who knows.

I finish watching the episode, but I wasn't really focusing that much, as I've been thinking about the phone call, and wondering if Michael actually got it working, and the possible consequences of it, if he did. I mean, if he actually did get it working, that would be pretty awesome to say the least. I mean we could like learn the winning lottery numbers, go back in time, buy the tickets with the winning numbers, and win the lottery. We could become super rich overnight. I could drop out of college, I would never have to work again in my life.

I get my shoes on and start heading over to his place. He lives in the dorms like I do, so it only takes about a minute of walking. I walk up to his door, and knock.

I hear something drop on the floor inside, and some hurried footsteps that get louder with each step as he walks up to his door. It quickly opens up, revealing the familiar face of my close friend.

The man before me has dark brown hair that's pretty long, but doesn't quite reach his shoulders. Normally its a little messy, but today especially so. His green eyes have dark bags under them, and I can tell that he'd been up all night, probably working on his machine. He's wearing a light blue shirt, with quite a few stains on it, and a pair of jeans.

With the door open, I can see a little bit into his dorm room, its pretty small, and about as messy as his hair. It's filled with empty pizza boxes, empty soda cans, empty energy drink cans, and empty cardboard boxes with packaging material laying everywhere. It looks like he'd been ordering lots of parts for his time machine and getting it delivered. I don't think he ever has company over, which is why he never cleans the place. He doesn't have very many friends, and I think I'm probably his closest one, which makes me feel a little bad for him.

Now, I'm not exactly a popular guy or anything, but I do have a fair number of people I can call friends, a lot more than he does. I became friends with him back in elementary school, when I saw him eating alone at lunch, I'd also seen some other kids pick on him before and since I felt bad for him I sat across from him and tried to make conversation. He seemed pretty happy to talk to me and we ended up having a lot of similar interests, so we grew quite close over the years.

Here he was, standing in his doorway, looking exhausted, but also about as energetic as I'd ever seen him. I'm guessing some of those energy drink cans I saw must have been drank pretty recently. Upon seeing and recognizing me, he quickly grows a small smile. He peeks his head outside the door way, looks in either direction suspiciously, and sees that we are the only ones in the hallway. So he pulls me inside, and quickly closes and locks the door behind me.

"Dude, it's awesome! You're gonna want to see this, I finally got it working this time." He says, leading me through the living room into the spare room. He lives in a two bedroom dorm, but his roommate moved to a different dorm a couple months ago, complaining that it was too loud and he could never get any sleep while living with Michael. Probably due to all the tinkering that Michael does, even during the night. He reminds me of like a mad scientist in a lot of ways.

No one has moved into this dorm since then, so Michael has been using the extra bedroom to house all his 'projects', including the time machine, despite the university's rules of keeping extra bedrooms clean and ready for new students.

"Are you sure it's gonna work this time? This isn't the first time you've called me over saying that it's finished. I have things to do today you know." I don't have any plans actually, but I don't want to waste a precious Saturday watching my friend mess with some big machine that never works.

"Yea, William, it works. It definitely works. I'm one hundred and eleven percent certain it works. I've been up like all night making sure there's nothing that I've missed, and I've spent all morning testing it."

"Ok, fine, let's see it in action then."

He walks over to the side of the room, opposite of the doorway. There's a large table against the wall, with a big machine sitting on top of it. It sort of looks like if you took an engine out of a car, and set it on a table, but more, science fiction-ish, I guess. Kind of hard to describe really, and I don't know anything about machines or engineering. There's about a thousand different wires connecting different parts of it, and there's large upside down 2L soda bottles filled with some kind of light blue liquid attached to the top, there's some thicker wires connecting to what looks to be a series of car batteries lined up on the floor, and some wires are connected to a laptop sitting on the same table. Attached to the machine is what looks to be a microwave, but if you took off the outside panels of it and stuck a whole bunch of wires and other modifications to it.

"I'm surprised you haven't gotten in trouble for this yet. I'm sure this is violating some kind of safety rule the college has."

"Hmm? Oh, yea, well, nobody ever sees it so no one ever reports it."

It looks messy and unorganized  and half of it's covered in duct tape. If you looked at this and didn't know what it was, I don't think you could ever figure out what it was or how it worked. Hell, even if you did know what it was, you probably couldn't figure out how it worked. It's like his hair, or his dorm, but even more messy.

He grabs his watch that's been sitting on a table, and walks over to me, while showing me the watch and pointing to a digital clock up on the wall.

"See how the watch and that clock are perfectly synced up?"

I look at the watch, it reads 4:56:32 pm, I look at the clock, it reads 4:56:32 pm. Perfectly synced.

"Ya, I see that."

"Okay, now watch this."

He grows a smile, then puts the watch inside of the repurposed microwave-thing, closes its door, then walks over to the laptop. He enters some numbers, and as he does, I can see some text appear into what loots to be a terminal on the screen. He pauses for a moment, then hits enter. He steps back and looks at the machine, constantly glancing back at the laptop as he does so. I can see lines of what is probably some kind of feedback the laptop is receiving, and only he knows what it means.

"I set it for 10 seconds into the future." He says, still looking at the machine.

Immediately after he says that, various lights on the machine light up, and the light inside the microwave also lights up, and pretty bright as well. I hear a small humming noise coming from the machine, and then, as quickly as the lights came on and the noise started, it all stopped. The whole process took probably a second, maybe even less than that.

"Is it done?" I ask, looking back at my friend.

"Yep, so now we wait 10 seconds."

He says, then looks at the clock on the wall. I look as well. 4:56:43 pm

4:56:44 pm

4:56:45 pm

4:56:46 pm

4:56:47 pm

4:56:48 pm

4:56:49 pm

4:56:50 pm

4:56:51 pm

4:56:52 pm

He walks over the the repurposed microwave, opens it up, and pulls out the watch, exactly where he left it by the looks of it. No smoke or anything comes out this time. So I actually get a little excited, as this is starting to look a little promising. He looks at the watch, walks over to me, shows and shows me the watch.

clock: 4:56:54 pm

watch: 4:57:04 pm

I stand there for a few moments, constantly looking between the watch and the clock, trying to see if I misread the digits. After a moment, I realize that it actually worked this time. I look at Michael, who has a smug grin on his face.

"Holy shit."

"I know, right?"

"Di- ... wh- ... how di- ..."

"I know, right? Pretty awesome."

"Di- did you actually just send that watch forward in time?"

"Yep." He nods his head.

Wow. He actually did it. He. Actually. Freaking. Did it.

"Dude. You built a time machine! Like. An actual, fucking, time machine."

"Yep." His smile's gotten even bigger this time, and he has his hands on his hips, proud of himself. He built a god damn time machine after all.

"Is it safe? Does it work on living things? Can you send things back in time?"

"Yes ... and maybe. I haven't testing going backwards yet, but it should work. And as for sending living things through time, well, watch this."

He leaves the room, and a few moments later he comes back, holding something in his hands. It's a mouse. White fur, with little red beady eyes.

"Wait, are you gonna put that in the machine? Will it hurt the mouse?"

"Don't worry, it's safe. One hundred and eleven percent safe."

"Well... if you say so." He built it, so if anyone would know, it'd be him.

He puts the mouse into the repurposed microwave, goes back over to his laptop, enters some more stuff with the keyboard, and the machine lights up and makes a low humming noise for a second like it did with the watch, then it all stops.

"This time I set it for 1 minute" As he says so, he goes over to the microwave, opens it up, and I look inside at the empty interior. No mouse.

"Where'd it go?"

"The future."

"Oh, yea. That makes sense." Right, duh. If he sent the mouse into the future, that means it's no longer in the present. Seeing a working time machine in front of me for the first time is probably affecting my ability to think straight.

He closes the microwave door and stands back, glancing between the laptop and the clock. And I just look at the clock, anxiously waiting for a minute to pass.

After what feels like an eternity has gone by, I hear some tiny squeaking and tiny footsteps coming from the repurposed microwave. Seems like the mouse is back. Michael opens the door, and pulls out the mouse, holding it in his hands. The mouse sniffs around a bit, exploring Michael's fingers, but looks completely fine otherwise.

"See? completely safe?"

"Ya. I guess so. But what about any long term affects? Like what if the machine causes cancer or something."

"Well we'll just have to wait and find out I guess. Good thing we're using mice to test it out first and not people. "

"I guess so."

He sets the mouse down on the table, and lets it wander around a bit. Michael turns back to me, and encourages me to check out the time machine, to look at his wonderful creation. I walk over to it, and get a closer look. Of course, I have no idea how this thing works. Maybe I should ask him.

"So how does this thing work anyways?" I ask as I'm bringing my face close to the machine, carefully touching parts of it to see if I can make any sense of how this thing operates.

He takes a deep breath, then talks: "So, in Einstein's special theory of relativity, it says that time is relative. That is, different frames of reference will experience time at different speeds. Now, one of the ways your experience of time could be affected is by a strong gravitational force nearby, another way is how fast you are moving. What this machine doe-" He starts explaining things in a really technical matter, that I understand none of, so I sort of tune it out. He seems really deep in thought as he's explaining it, so I don't interrupt him. As he's explaining it, I start investigating different parts of the machine, eventually working my way down to the microwave that is attached.

I open the door, and peek inside, to see what the inside looks like. But as I open the door I realize that it's a lot heavier that I thought it would be. Michael looks at my confusion, as I'm closing and opening the door, trying to figure out why its so much heavier.

"Oh yea, so I changed the insides of that door as well, normally, a microwave door just stops microwaves, as in, electromagnetic radiation, from leaving the appliance. Since the machine does a lot more than just produce microwaves, I needed a way to-"

I hear some clicking on the keyboard from the laptop, Michael and I both turn our heads and see the mouse on top of the laptop, his little feet randomly pressing some buttons.

"Oh right, I forgot about that guy."

As we walks over to grab the mouse, the mouse ends up stepping on the enter key. The machine immediately starts to light up and produce a hum, Michael looks over at me, and I realize the microwave door is still open, with my face right in front of it. Michael's face, as well as mine, immediately turn to ones of horror.

I quickly try to close the door, but realize that all my opening and closing of the door ended up getting it stuck open, so I could no longer close it. Michael sees this, looks over at the screen, and I see his face turn to an expression of pure terror. He looks back at me-

"SHIT SHIT SHIT, it's set to the maxi-!"

Immediately my vision turns to darkness.

No earth, no sun, not even any stars are visible. Just, darkness. At the same time, the breath is sucked out of my lungs quite forcibly, and it's very painful. I feel weightless, and my skin hurts a lot as well, like it's trying to rip itself off of me.

And it's so quiet. I can hear my heartbeat, which is really loud now.

It's so painful.

It hurts everywhere, and I can't breathe.

I think I'm going to die.

I don't want to die, I really like being alive I think.

There's so much I never got to do, never got to experience. So many people I'll never see again.

Mom, Dad, my little sister, my friends, Michael. I'll never see them again.

It hurts so much, it feels like my body is trying to tear itself apart, my eyes hurt, my ears hurt, my lungs hurt. Hell, even my balls hurt.

After a few moments, the pain starts to fade away, as start to feel my consciousness fade.

Fuck. I'm dying.

There's nothing I can really do about my situation though, and as my thoughts start to fade, I almost feel calm.

After another moment, I die.