The Time Traveler’s
Guide to Grammar
A note of caution to the reader,
Anyone of age thirteen and up may read this book. This book is not meant, however, to be read in all ages. This book is a product of the 24th century AD and is meant to stay there. A fine of 25,000 dollars, 400 Emperos, or 23 ITU will be given (adjusted for inflation according to when the book was printed and when it was bought) for anyone who brings future items into the past. If you find this product in an earlier century, please bring it to your local TMI Agent. If you are a citizen of an earlier century, please dispose of this fictitious rubbish. If you insist on reading this work, please regard all names, dates, and notions as nonsensical and kindly forget everything herein shortly after reading. This would aid the Time Travel Authority greatly in seeing that no paradoxes or other problems are incurred as a result of mismanagement of future products.
Monday, 7am, Sept. 15, 2361
Twenty students stood, sat, reclined, and wandered around twenty desks that were set up around the large contraption in the middle of the room. Rain pelted against the windows, creating crystal lines like cobwebs across the sky. The mist mixed oddly with the daylight, making it seem as if a blacklight had been turned on behind the clouds.
Mr. Orders, their physics teacher, looked up from the paper on his clipboard. He tried to give the students a piercing stare over his reading glasses, but did not quite accomplish this because it took a second for his eyes to refocus past the lenses.
“Barry, you’re up.”
Barry, a chunky boy sitting in the front row, rose up from his seat. As he slunk along to the middle of the room, the twenty students sized him up. The only sound in the room was that of Barry’s untied shoelaces, ticking against the tile floor.
Barry came to stand in front of the contraption. A door, sensing his presence, slid silently open.
Barry gave a long sigh and walked into the shadows spilling out from the contraption’s insides. The door closed smoothly after him. The rest of the class looked on for a minute, and then went back to their silent meditations.
The contraption was, in fact, a time machine, of the B-5 class. Physically, it looked like a large upside down ice-cream cone (the kind with the flat top). The exterior was constructed on the outside of all metal, which reflected the flickering fluorescent lights on the ceiling back around the room. The effect made the machine’s surface seem as if it moved and pulsated and was not wholly placed in the realm of the real.
She shivered and looked away from the machine. The rest of the world in 2361 still told stories of the time travelers. They were criminals, con artists, ghosts even. Quinn looked around at the motley, half-asleep group of students around her. Half dead they were at this time of morning, but criminal, they certainly were not. Most merely had the curse of being too intelligent for their peers, and so loneliness had piled up on them so thick that the constant sense of being lost stuck to their eyelids.
The time machine began thrumming, the voice of giant, rusty clock gears shrieking through the room. The twenty onlookers whipped their heads to stare. The first student of the day and already he had gotten the time machine to work! Everyone’s eyes widened as the time machine began to glow, at first a dark gray that blended into the metal, then lightening to silver in another moment.
Then the light went out, making the once mysterious metal siding suddenly look very normal. Soot infused vapors began curling out of the door. A moment later the door opened up, and a curtain of smoke wafted out of the doorway. Barry followed after, slumping over and choking. One student ran over with a cup of water. Barry grabbed it and finished it in one gulp. As soon as everyone saw that Barry was not about to die from asphyxiation, they crowded around him, excitedly asking him how his experience was.
“Back! Back! Give the boy some breathing room,” Mr. Orders barked, and pushed a few kids to the side before the rest got the hint and backed away of their own accord.
Mr. Orders gave Barry a brief glance then wrote him a note to the health room. When Barry had left the room, Mr. Orders looked around the ring of students.
“Barry had to have messed up, and badly, right off the bat in the third equation. Note his example. Remember,” here he paused after each word as if he was talking to young children. “Take. Your. Time. We’re here until at least twelve tonight, and we can be here longer than that until each of you completes your exam. And look there,” he pointed at the clock, “it is currently 7:15 AM. Please do not try inputting the first equation you pull out of your head and then jam it into the computer. For one, you will not get a good grade that way. Secondly, we only have one time machine at this school. You do not want to be the kid that everyone hates because they have no machine to practice on until finals.”
He softened a little, “I know you have been cramming more math equations and science theories into your heads in the past three weeks of school than most math or science professors learn in their lives. I know you guys got the thick envelopes with the bright, flashy pamphlets in them telling you how smart you are, and how completion of this program will guarantee you a spot in any Ivy League school that you have your heart set on. But let me fill you in on a secret.” The class leaned closer in towards him. “There is only one thing, one thing that got you in here. That is a recommendation, not from your teachers, or your parents, but yourselves.” Everyone jumped upon hearing this. It was one thing to hear about how paradoxes worked in theory. It was another thing to realize that these theories applied to you. “You have already gone through the training, and you have already decided that this is the life you want. This is one school where cheating is encouraged. It tends to mean that you could travel in time to the point where I am reading off the answers to the test. All of you look sufficiently surprised at the fact that a ‘you’ in the future decided this grueling fate for you instead of intervening and telling you the answers. Why is this? But first answer this: why are you only allowed one paradox under what article in the Time Traveler’s code?”
“Article 3.5!” The class called in unison. Looking satisfied, Mr. Orders began again.
“All of you have already used that chance up. Now, can any of you tell me why you can’t have more than one paradox?”
“Because the other time travelers don’t want to waste all of their time righting all of the things that you have done wrong?”
Mr. Orders snorted, the breath shaking the thick bush of his mustache.
“True. There is also another reason though, and it is the fact that it is hard for people to really live if they are kept constantly worrying about what they have left undone. Should you leave a paradox open, you will disappear from existence. Do not think because this place looks like a normal school that it is. Some of the stories that the people conjure up about the Time Travelers are true. Luckily for you, along with allowing cheating, we are the only school in New York City with a one hundred percent graduation rate. The fact that you are standing here means that you finished. Unless, of course, you somehow manage to create an alternate universe. But string theory, and those worries, can be saved until next year.”
Mr. Orders flicked his eyes down at his clipboard.
“Now, Quinn, you’re up.”
She jumped upon hearing her name. Mr. Orders was looking at her with a faintly bored expression. The rest of the class migrated back to their seats where they awaited the second act of the show to begin.
She looked towards the time machine where faint curls of smoke still wafted from the entryway. Gulping loudly, she strode through the doorway and was embraced by the shadows. The door clicked softly shut.
br /> One light on the ceiling flickered on, followed quickly by a chorus of buttons and panels that lit one half of the space. The rest of the interior was a plain white, in the shape of a full circle. In the middle of the room sat a table and chair. On top of it lay a stack of papers. Pencils were scattered haphazardly across the floor, likely pushed off of the desk when Barry was struggling to breathe.
She took off her sweatshirt and laid it to the side of the door. Still not feeling ready, she pulled back her hair in a ponytail. She had to write out the physics equations that laid out her current position in the universe, the position where she wanted to go in the future, and then the bridge equation telling the time machine how to get there. Then she had to feed the sheet into the computer’s reader, flip a switch, and away she would go. At least, this was the plan.
Mr. Orders and several others of her professors had told her that the first time they actually applied the equations, most students landed in space, or on a different continent. Some got close to the room, but landed in a wall. The students in the older grades warned that landing in a wall would give you bruises throughout your entire body before the time machine’s automatic controls brought you to a safer location.
All she needed to do was to write three equations. She had memorized the format, and now just had to plug in the correct numbers. She picked up one of the pencils, laid a sheet of paper on the table, and began computing the first string of integers. She had only gotten the first string of numbers when she realized that she had forgotten a part of the equation.
Looking down at her paper, she saw the numbers swim in front of her eyes. She had not slept at all because she had attempted to cram Stephen Hawking’s entire Universe: A Cosmos Explained into her head in one night. Setting down her pencil, she stood up and paced around the room.
Coming back to the table, she sat down again, determined to at least get as far as Barry did. But as she looked down at the page, she saw that the equations were now completely unreadable. She was attempting to look at them through a window of tears. Utterly frustrated that she could not even get the machine to go anywhere, she tore up the paper and threw both it and the pencil across the room.
An hour later she opened the door. With twenty people staring at her, she hung her head and hurried to sit back at her desk. Mr. Orders looked as if he was about to reproach her for failing even more poorly than Barry had. But she looked at him, and something in her eyes must have communicated how distraught she was.
Instead he spoke to the entire class with a surprisingly soft voice. “All you guys have to do is to move one week in the future, get whatever is sitting on my desk, and then come back. If you feel yourself beginning to freak out, take a deep breath. If that doesn’t help, then just make sure that you come to mine or Mr. Avery’s office hours and we will work through the equations. You have all semester to accomplish your first time travel.”
She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and then rested her head on her desk. Wisps of dark hair had escaped from her ponytail and created a screen between her and the world. She just wanted to shut everyone out and not think of how many more times she was going to have to face defeat.
She heard faintly through the thick fabric, “Caden Reddinger. Looks like it’s your turn.”
Although all she wanted to do was hide under the hood of her sweatshirt until they were released from this hell, she found herself peeking through the slit between her hood and her sleeve. For one thing, everyone wanted to see their peers be as scared as they were. In this respect, Caden was not giving anyone a good show. His shoulders were relaxed, his face expressionless. The second reason why she could not help looking up was the simple fact that Caden was quite nice to look at. Tall and lanky, he seemed to float even as she saw his feet on the floor. He had been blessed with wavy chestnut hair and a pair of ethereal gray eyes. These natural blessings were augmented by the fact that he, like many New Yorkers, restricted the colors of his clothing to black, dark blue, brown, and other neutral tones. This made the beauty of his face stand out even more in contrast.
This also brought her to the third reason why she loved looking at Caden. She really wanted to find something horribly wrong with him other than the fact that he did not like her. She still remembered when they had been paired together on the second day of class to work on a problem. She had begun to ask him how he wanted to divide the work. After he did not answer that question, she asked him what law he wanted to use.
He had merely slid across a sheet of paper. There, in surprisingly neat handwriting, were printed all of the equations. Circled at the bottom of the page was an answer.
He had grinned and asked, “so, which part of New York do you come from?”
She had scowled, and for the rest of the class period neither spoke to the other. She had seen his actions first as showing off. She had been taught early on, as a child who had usually been years ahead of her teachers, that showing off only made you look arrogant. She had perceived Caden’s actions secondly as a personal insult to her. His self-satisfied smile hinted that he had done something that she could never hope to accomplish.
She sat straight up then. No, Caden could not have started the time machine yet. She had not even noticed that he had entered the machine! She snatched her mind back from its reflections. The entire class grew silent, eyes growing wider with each second. The time machine was growing steadily brighter. Then, in a flash, it was gone. The students were left to stare at each other, the looks of astonishment different colored reflections of their own faces. This was the first time most of them had seen the time machine in action.
Before any of the students had time to assess one another’s expressions, the time machine was already back. The door slid open, and out stepped Caden Reddinger.
He walked straight towards Mr. Orders and held out a thin sheet of paper.
“The answers to the midterm, I believe, will be lying on your desk around this time next week.”
Mr. Orders took the paper, reading it over with a look that showed that he was as bewildered as the rest of the class. Few people even managed to get the time machine to go anywhere the first time they used it. No one in the history of the school had managed to go to the right place as well as the right time.
“Class is dismissed,” Mr. Orders said. Everyone ran over to Caden. It seemed as if he had just become the new class hero.
She picked up her bag and scurried out of the room. She did not want to be there when Mr. Orders realized that he still had seventeen students to test that day. As she left the nice heating of the school for the meager safety of its overhang, she saw that the rain was coming down as hard as ever. Shrugging her bag further onto her shoulder, she braced herself and stepped out into the downpour.
Feeling the water immediately begin trickling down her neck and into her shirt, she hurled a few curses to the wind. Today evidently was not her day.