The Girl & the Machine

T
HE GIRL AND THE MACHINE
. Copyright © 2015 by Beth Revis

Cover photography by romrf/Shutterstock.

A
ll rights reserved
.

Published in the United States by Scripturient Books.

N
o part
of this publication may be reproduced without the express written permission of the publisher prior to, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Electronic versions of the book are licensed for the individual’s personal use only and may not be redistributed in any form without compensation to the author.

Y
our support
of the author’s rights is appreciated.

T
his short story
is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously.

“
T
he Girl
& the Machine” is also published as part of
The Future Collection
© 2015 by Beth Revis/Scripturient Books

“
O
h
, my gosh, it’s you!” A pretty girl dropped to her knees in front of Franklin. She had honey-colored eyes that seemed to glow next to her dark skin and bright smile. He stared at her, his mouth opening slightly in shock.

“I’m sorry—” he started.

“No, no, don’t be, I’m just so excited!” The girl slid off her knees, sitting down fully in the grass beside him. “I’m Heather.” She stuck her hand out. He looked at it. “Heather Gardner-Wells,” she added, as if that made a difference.

Franklin hesitantly shook her hand, barely touching her fingers, then dropped it. Heather scooted closer.

Below them, a car blared its horn on Elm Street. Dealey Plaza wasn’t an ideal place for a study session, but Franklin loved it. He loved the history of the place. It felt momentous, just being there.

“I thought I might see you here,” the girl said eagerly. “I mean, you told me not to track you down, and of course I
tried,
but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I figured that, of all the places in Texas you’d be, it’d be here.”

“I’m sorry,” Franklin repeated. “But I really don’t know you. I’m afraid you’ve got me mixed up with someone—”

Heather straightened her back and met Franklin’s gaze with twinkling eyes. “You’re Franklin Poteat,” she said triumphantly, “and you were born in North Carolina, but you moved in with your gram here in Fort Worth soon after you hit puberty because she had Alzheimer’s and you had, well…” She paused. “You know.”

Franklin grew very, very still.

“Your…condition…means that you need to have someone not too concerned when you disappear for a bit, and besides, you thought you could help your gram out. And it worked for a bit, but then she died.” Heather gasped and covered her mouth with her hands. “I’m sorry!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to say it so bluntly. But anyway, you were old enough to, er, travel as you please after that, you had better control, and…” She looked down. “I…uh. I’m going to stop talking now. Sorry.”

Franklin stared at her, his mouth slightly open in shock.

“We should go somewhere more private,” he said.

Heather looked up, her eyes bright and eager.

“Where someone else can’t hear us,” Franklin continued.

Heather leapt to her feet. Franklin was slower as he gathered his books and carefully put them away in his leather knapsack. His hands were shaking.
How did she know?
His brain tried to figure out how she could possibly know his secret…and how he could possibly have known her. She stood there, bubbly and excited, as if all of this was perfectly normal.

She led him to the library—not to the books, but to the little greenhouse off to the left of it. It was just a decorative thing, really more like a glass-enclosed gazebo with far too many ferns. It had been intended as a quiet place to study, but a greenhouse in Texas was never a good place to study. It was always empty.

The air was stiflingly hot and stuffy, but Franklin shut the door anyway.

For a moment, he stared out the dirty glass, trying to find the right words to say, hoping that when he turned around Heather wouldn’t be there.

“You’re probably wondering how I know you,” Heather stated.

Franklin turned to face her. Gone was the effervescent excitement. Heather looked as somber as he felt, and there was worry—or fear?—in her eyes now.

“It’s not every day that someone comes up to me and says, ‘hey, I know your deepest, darkest secret.’”

Heather laughed, but there was no amusement in the sound. “I suppose it’s not every day someone meets a time traveler.”

To have it stated like that, so simply and in such a matter-of-fact voice, threw Franklin off. The only people he’d ever tried to tell about his condition were his parents (who didn’t believe him) and his gram (who had, but couldn’t do anything about it).

“How do you know that?” Franklin asked, glaring at her. “Have we met in the past?”

Heather smiled slowly, but again there was no mirth in her look, not like before. She shook her head. “We didn’t meet in the past,” she said. She stepped closer to him, and her hands shook as she reached for his cheek, her fingers barely brushing along the edge of his jaw.

“Then how did we meet?” Franklin asked. “How do you know so much about me?”

Heather’s eyes did not leave Franklin’s. “We met in your future.”

Franklin jerked back. That was…impossible. He didn’t pretend to be an expert in his own ability to travel through time, but he was the only person he knew who could actually do what he did. He had started travelling through time by accident. When he got older, he was able to gain a certain level of control over his ability, but even so he had limits. He’d never traveled forward into the future, and he had never traveled past his own timeline. The most back he could go was the day he was born, and no matter how much he tried, he could never go into tomorrow—he always landed in today. And he
had
tried—many times. He had tried for greed, in an effort to learn the winning lottery ticket numbers. He had tried for curiosity, to find out his own future, and the world’s. But nothing he ever did worked. His future was as cloudy as everyone else’s; only his own past was clearer.

And yet… Here was this girl who knew his secret. Who knew him. And as much as he did not want to believe her, he couldn’t see any other way she could know about his ability.

As the realization that Heather was speaking the truth dawned on him, Heather started to smile. It was a ferocious smile, the same kind of smile a predator has when it first sees its prey.

“I have known you for a very long time,” Heather said. “More than six years. And throughout that time, I have been waiting for this day.”

“And what happens today?” Franklin asked, apprehension seizing him.

“Today’s the day when everything changes,” Heather said. “Today’s the day we change the world.”

“
T
his is so weird
,” Franklin said. He pushed his small suitcase back and forth on its wheels, focusing on the whisper of the sound of the plastic wheels sliding along the cold tile floor. He ignored the rush of people around him. Heather had arrived at the airport before him. She seemed to have no trouble believing that he would absolutely follow her here. When she had left him at the greenhouse, after telling him everything, she had just handed him a plane ticket and walked away. He’d considered tossing it. But in the end, his curiosity had won out. He had no idea why he trusted this girl. He couldn’t explain it. But she seemed familiar to him. She felt like an old friend.

She felt like someone he could trust.

Still: “It’s just
so
strange,” he repeated.

“Weirder than the ability to time travel?” Heather asked with a smirk.

For Franklin, yes. Having a girl approach him while studying on a random Tuesday afternoon and telling him his entire life story and informing him casually that he was going to change the world today was definitely a new experience. Time travel was tame in comparison. Time travel to him was nothing more than an afternoon adventure. He used travel to steal extra naps during study sessions or to get away from the pressures of college. Very, very occasionally he actually used it to help him be a better history major. He was restricted to his own timeline, but he was able to enhance his report on terrorism by actually watching 9/11 happen in real time. He had won an award for his portrayal of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina from the history department, and no one had ever known that his sources were all firsthand.

For everyone else on earth, time travel was surely an anomaly. He could see why so many people would find it fascinating, including Heather. He’d asked her dozens of times, and she confirmed every single time: She was not a traveler, not like him. She had met him in high school, but when she had met him, he was 38 years old. He wasn’t a history professor, as he always supposed he would be, which was why he was spending so much money getting that degree. Instead, he was the world’s only time traveler. Not many people knew, but some did. Important people. He was wealthy. He was powerful.

And he needed Heather’s help. In the future.

“So, I came to your past, but I was in my future,” Franklin said slowly.

“Yes,” Heather said. “I was in high school, it was just after my prom, and I was sincerely freaked out.” She laughed. “I’m not even sure how you knew it was me. I looked very different then.” She touched her dark hair pulled into a neat bun. “Anyway, you found me. You were really concerned about it all. We were both desperately worried that you were going to create a paradox, and it would ruin everything. I think that’s why you went so far back into my past. I was just old enough to understand what you were saying, but not old enough to make a difference.”

“And now you are?”

Heather checked the flight boards. Their flight was running ten minutes late, and the flight attendant at the desk was loudly confirming to a group of businessmen that the delay was really only ten minutes, and they would probably be able to make the time up in the air.

“I am young,” Heather conceded. “Let’s just say that meeting you changed my life. I was always studious, but you gave me a purpose.”

Franklin looked down at his ticket again. Massachusetts. Heather was about his age, but she was in a far more advanced program of study than just a general history degree like him. She was one of the top students at MIT. Heather was working directly with a famous theoretical engineer professor, and she had her own laboratory space.

“So what did future-me tell you to do?” Franklin said.

Heather averted her gaze. “I’m not supposed to tell you everything,” she said. “I know it’s difficult, but you’re going to have to trust me.”

Franklin’s grip on his suitcase’s handle tightened. He didn’t like the unknown. He always wanted to know exactly what was occurring around him. There were times in the past when he spied on himself just to get a different perspective on what had happened at certain moments in his life. He looked around the crowd at the airport now, trying to see some future version of himself spying on this moment. One of the businessmen caught his eyes. A tall white man with short brown hair and dark hazel eyes. The exact same shade of eye color as he himself had. Franklin’s gaze intensified as he tried to figure out if this businessman was actually him, from the future, watching.

The businessman looked away.

Franklin pressed Heather for more details, but she refused to answer. “I’ll tell you more when I can show you what I have in the lab,” Heather said.

Franklin tried to assess what this meant. After Heather had met the future version of himself after her prom, she had dedicated all of her time and energy in doing…something…for him. Or, rather, for his future self. Something that his future self needed. Something that, as Heather had said, changed the world.

The flight attendants opened the gate and started the boarding process. The businessmen were among the first to push their way to the front of the first-class lane. The man with hazel eyes who Franklin thought might be himself glared at the woman with a small baby who neatly maneuvered her stroller around the clusters of businessman to the front of the line.

Franklin barely paid any attention as he handed his pass over to the flight attendant and she scanned him in. He followed Heather like an automaton, blithely accepting the aisle seat she offered him as she slipped into the window seat.

The thing was, this all felt…momentous. The fact that he had somehow figured out how to travel into the future, he had chosen Heather as one of the first points of contact to make…that all meant that she was important. That they were important together. That what they were going to do would be something that would really make a difference.

Change the world, like Heather said.

The first time Franklin had ever used his ability, he was eight years old. It had been a complete accident. He had broken a toy he had just received at his birthday party the previous day. He clutched the rubber wheel of the brand-new remote controlled car in his hands, and he had wished with all his might that he could go back and stop himself from attempting to drive the car over a makeshift ramp into a pile of rocks. Somewhere in that passionate desire, his ability to travel through time had been triggered. He blinked backwards to ten minutes prior. He hadn’t been able to change anything; he had been too shocked. He had just watched the destruction of the remote controlled car all over again, then blinked and was back in his own timeline.

He’d experimented since then and gotten better at his abilities, but he’d never done anything…remarkable. He’d never done something that would make a difference.

The flight attendants walked up and down the aisle of the plane, checking overhead compartments and that everybody was wearing a seatbelt. They started their spiel about safety as the plane taxied out onto the runway.

Franklin leaned over to Heather. “So the stuff that we’re doing… It’s really important, isn’t it?”

“Why does that seem so shocking to you?” Heather asked sincerely. “You have the ability to literally travel in time. You could do… You
will
do so much good for the world. Is that really such a surprise to you?”

Franklin could not meet the fire and Heather’s eyes. The truth of the matter was, it was a surprise to him. His abilities to travel through the time were limited, true, but he had never really thought about how he could use them for anyone but himself.

“I don’t think I’m quite the person that you met when you were in high school yet,” Franklin said.

Heather touched the back of Franklin’s hand and didn’t speak until he met her eyes again. “You are exactly the person that I met when I was in high school,” she said. “I have no doubt of that.”

M
assachusetts was considerably colder
than Texas had been, made more so by the biting wind. Franklin was rather glad that Heather was taking him directly to MIT and her lab there.

He had expected the lab to be a part of MIT, but instead Heather drove them straight by the main campus, down several back alleys, and into the country. The lab itself was at the end of a narrow dirt road in the middle of the field. Franklin wondered if creepy horror movie music would start playing in the background.