How To Hot-Wire a Time Machine With Your Least Favorite Granduncle*

Introduction

The short answer is, jam him unceremoniously into the sub-diode panel under the dimensional processing unit, flip the switch, and count to three.

However, we are not here for the short answer. The research I have conducted in the pursuit of this article's evidence is my own. I have had no grants or funding. The granduncle was my own; don't worry, I have backups.

*Hot-wiring someone else's time machine in order to steal it is legal on Earth if it has already traveled back to a time when laws regarding time-traveling vehicles do not yet exist at the time of theft. Similarly, it is legal to hot-wire in order to steal a time machine which will be yours in the time in which it has traveled back to the time in which you are hot-wiring it in order to steal it. It is, however, illegal to steal your own time machine from someone in the future who has stolen or will steal it from you in the past. The following account encourages the reader to strictly adhere to all active laws regarding stealing a time machine.

***

On a severely average day in history, a baby was born. This baby, as babies are often wont to do, took it upon itself to become a man, slowly but gradually; and though it was a man, the baby was aware of its own shortcomings and ineptitude where all things manly were concerned. Namely that the baby had been born multiple times, and wished bitterly that it could stop going back and hearing itself scream uncontrollably while a stranger (always a stranger even after a plethora of first-meetings) carefully yanked him out of another stranger and stretched his head out rather disconcertingly—you see, he was always self-conscious about how often he cried. And the weirdly oblong shape of his head.

Generic childhood; moderate lifetime achievements; inner struggle with self and desire to become more; eventual insecurities and marriage problems {we are on a tight word-count here, you and I}.

And so it was that he found a time machine. Here it is necessary to define the term "time machine" in a way which will befit whatever era it so happens you, gentle reader, are reliving. For instance, the universe itself can be considered a "time machine", in the sense that repeatedly inflating and contracting from periods of increasing to decreasing entropy forces the entire contents of itself (matter, energy, the worst day of your life, et al.) to rewind and replay, for all eternity. Or, you could have had too much to drink last night, and you've just woken up to find that you have, in fact, traveled into next Tuesday, and you have no idea where you are right now but for some reason there is a pile of live salmon beneath you, in which case stop reading this, find out where you are, and get off the salmon for God's sake.

But lo, the "time machine" I discuss is of a rather peculiar nature; in fact, a nasty one. It is structured entirely of artificial elements; heavier than Satonium if you are living after 4300 A.D., lighter than aether if you are living in a prehistoric jungle-desert or wherever it was you philosophers built your teepees, and very shiny. The student-model time machine, for those who are learning to drive, will typically explode on impact with extra-dimensional space, safely allowing an inexperienced teen driver to be horrifically unassembled and reassembled through a protective series of micro black holes, while a more upscale, luxury vehicle will conveniently destroy a teen thirty seconds before he can destroy it. Some time machines are smart-asses; others are hordes of pygmy goats with laser eyes and fine leather saddles.

This man's time machine is/was/will be neither.

This man of whom I speak is, indeed, my great^ 7 granduncle, King Henry VIII.

***

"Thou art too fat," he declared, and stepped to the next maiden.

"Thou art too skinny." Again he yanked the tasseled cord, and the latter woman quickly fell through a trapdoor into a pool of ravenous piranhas, following the former. "And thou," he said, eyeing the forty-eighth maiden in line, who trembled in respectful fear. "Thou art too perfect." She, too, fell through a trapdoor, this one opening into unnecessarily-raging flames.

{I'd really rather not see any of this, either, but unfortunately head-jumping is not possible in real life. As your time-traveling narrator I reserve the right to tell you in story-form precisely what I assume happened behind closed doors, and also infer and/or insert whatever I want regardless of plot relevance. For example, here is a delightful picture of a toad riding a squirrel:}

King Henry VIII sighed. He felt that it really shouldn't be this difficult to find a good comely woman nowadays, what with his political prowess and girth; someone with good birthing hips and literally zero expectations. But alas, dating was simply not what it used to be now that word had got out about Fifth Wife. What had been her name? He tapped his lip; it did not forthwith come to mind. No matter. It had been three days. He must needs move on.

"Percival!" He banged his golden scepter. "Refresh!"

Therewith a caravan of fifty new and similarly terrified maidens entered the hall.

"Hmm," the king said. He stroked his beard. "No."

The entire floor opened into a bottomless pit. A split-second cacophony of yelps ensued, and then silence.

Henry yawned and stretched. "Methinks I shall retire to mine own private study for awhile, Percival; all this speed-dating hath drained the life of me yet. 'Tis getting to the point where thou hast to think, perchance I should consider adopting?" He squinted at Percival.

Percival shrugged. "I have oft heard of such agreements wanting for background checks, your majesty. 'Twould not be of royal blood, anyhow, your majesty."

The king waved a hand. "Whatever. If thou needeth me, I shall be playing with my time machine."

***

It has come to my attention that the unauthorized distribution of these lost yet completely historically accurate documents may pose a problem to your high school history teacher, who existed all throughout the map of time and paid very close attention, and so knows precisely everything that has ever happened in the world with firsthand experience. Ignore everything your teacher says.

Your teacher lied to you.

Teachers are liars.

***

II.

One midnight in early fifteenth-century Edo I was working on a client's time machine. As a mechanic it is often necessary to climb up into some very dangerous parts. Long story short, I fell into a manhole. Now, don't be alarmed, reader; this manhole, at the time, and at this time, which is in fact also that time, although I don't have the time to get into it with you now (or then), was and is also a time machine. Being that, it made time.

It so happened to create precisely enough time to weld the lapse between my coordinates in the sewers of Edo and those of Henry VIII's private study during his reign, about three-and-one-third minutes after he had ordered his piranha pools skimmed. Which, by some slapstick grace of physics, launched us both headfirst sometime into the African jungle.

And it was only after having patiently gazed into the thoroughly unimpressed eyes of a silverback gorilla for two full minutes that it dawned on me. Something was decidedly wrong.

"Hey," I said, proactively.

An enormous man in a questionable choice of fluffy red-and-gold robes was lying facedown in the mud beside me. A gaudy scepter and crown combo were strewn around him like expensive hardware.

The gorilla grunted. Gently, it picked up the scepter and turned it over in apparent admiration of its glintiness, and then calmly retreated back into the trees with its pretty new beating stick.

I poked the man in the back of his head. "Pssst."

A distinctly inhuman noise burbled into the peat beneath his face while I gazed in fascination, efficiently doing nothing. Perhaps he was mortally wounded. I grabbed his shoulders and turned him over.

At this the man exploded up like a Broadway musical intro. "Egads, Percival, the cape! Watcheth the cape, thou slovenly inbreed, or dost thy other hand want severing . . .? Ah." His voice fell weak on the sticky air and his eyes rounded in sudden toddler-like helplessness. "AGH! PERCIVAL? WHAT IS THIS, PERCIVAL, IT IS EXTREMELY HOT AND MOIST. ATTEND ANON, PERCIVAL. ATTEND! ATTEND ANON!"

He went on like this for six more minutes, scuttling between clumps of exotic shrubs with what can only be described as religious determination as I placed his crown onto my head.

"I am not Percival," I said, once satisfied. "Percival is kind of a stupid name. You should be nicer to Percival, he's got it pretty rough as it is."

He froze, crouched behind a leaf of alien vegetation. Slowly, very uncomfortably, his head turned on its neck. He then caught sight of me as though I were Death incarnate. It must be my brownness, I realized. This guy looked like he'd tripped and fallen out of an experimental rough draft of King Lear. A woman of Indian descent with bare shoulders in a remote natural area was probably his worst nightmare.

"No," I answered before he asked. "I am not, and you are not, and we are not, and this is not. You were just in precisely the right place at the right time." For a moment there was nothing but the wild drone of strange Tanzanian hornets and what I imagined was the silent judgment of unseen jaguars. "Sorry," I added.

The man ran off screaming.

"Great, so we're on the same page." Reluctantly, I got up and brushed off my trousers, which I had purchased in a twenty-fourth-century Banana Republic, and if you're familiar I don't think I need to explain to you why those were not exactly ideal in this setting.

Sighing, I unsheathed my machete and trudged on through the thicket. "Wait, stop, come back, where are you," I called, blandly.

The crown was heavy. I hurled it over my shoulder.

That was when my navigator vibrated in my pocket, followed by the artificially can-do voice of its warp receiver. "You've got mail!"

Here you will want to pause for a short recess. Meantime, have another toad:

The African jungle has wi-fi?

I frowned at the plain Helvetica text on the screen. Thank you for the large sacrifice but unfortunately we cannot accept donations at this time. Our god is full. Please take him back. Sincerely, The Gorillas.

"Unhand me at once, thou foul, hairy beast!"

Found him.

The royal dunce was struggling against the bulging arms of two upright gorillas, which was not actually the part that caught my attention so much as the time machine positioned directly behind them as if suggesting one to buy raffle tickets. And not just any time machine—the very first time machine I had ever built. It had been stolen years ago. Before I'd even built it, in fact.

"Ah, good, you have received our message!" The silverback, bearing his shiny beating stick, appeared from a large hut with four red Ferraris parked out front. Two female gorillas hovered a few steps behind, fanning him with banana leaves. The three approached serenely and stood in front of a fountain of Greek demigods posed in a ring urinating onto a pegasus.

"Uh?"

"I say!" the king bellowed. "Gypsy woman! Come hither and slay thine hideous pets ere they feed on my flesh!"

My eyes narrowed to slits.

The silverback chuckled. "Delightful. However, I do fear that our god will not be so inclined to feel likewise; as such, your gift, while appreciated, is unable to be processed."

Up until this moment I had never hallucinated and it was very disturbing. I gaped. "But that? My—my machine?"

The gorilla paused for a moment, brow furrowed in confusion, and then seemed to grasp something internally. "NOOO," he enunciated, over-pronouncing each syllable in a slow monotone. "MMYYY. TIIIIME. MACHIIIIINE." He pointed at me. "YOOOU. HUMAAAAN. GOOOO. HOOOOOME." He pointed at the sky.

Before I could come up with an intelligent response to this, the two gorillas holding back the king broke into a loud philosophical argument.

"Yes, but I wonder," pondered the first, "are all infinities equal? Is one infinity greater than another—deeper, rounder, can it have shape? Do the infinitely small and the infinitely large meet as one?"

"That's preposterous," refuted the second. "Math itself is a puzzle, it cannot provide more than temporary entertainment. It may make one feel a bit more capable, a bit more accomplished, to the effect that the puzzler forgets that a puzzle is nothing more than a setup." He let go of the king's arm and waved his hand in exasperation. "Of course he's going to get the answer if he created the problem."

The first gorilla crossed his arms in defense. "Then I ask you, good sir: is a number within a number a number?"

"Yes, Carl! What is a number? The sum of all numbers is one!"

I locked eyes with the king and jerked my head. This he understood. Slowly, he began backing away from the philosophical gorillas.

"Sirs, I implore you!" the silverback intervened. "Nature is meant to be understood from a limited perspective. Do not fret over what divinity knows, for divinity itself is knowledge."

"The definition of the universe must intrinsically include space and time if it is to correlate with the Einsteinium paradigm!" a random member of the gorilla population yelled, angrily.

"If all of time is to exist at once, and all of space is to exist at once, and our four-dimensional perception of Reality organizes time into apparently sectioned, linearly-directional moments, then it is only plausible (by that relativistic description) to apply a linearly-directional perception of SPACE as well! i.e., we experience space (thus, movement—which is crucial to the structure of time) from a similarly limited perspective!"

A brawl erupted.

I ran for the king and pulled him toward the time machine. We both ducked behind it as cartoonish muscles grappled and theoretical physics flew over our heads like gunfire. Someone brought up someone's mom.

"Okay," I said to the king (at least, I assumed at the time that that was what he was). "I'm not entirely sure that we survived our fall through time. In fact I am almost certain we are dead. But if that's not the case then my next best guess is that this jungle is at a point in spacetime where and when misplaced objects from different times and places gather—probably some attractive effect of gravitational force. We're going to have to hot-wire this thing. I remember some lesson or something from technical school . . ."

The king's brain was sparking visibly.

"Who are you, anyway?" I asked. Perhaps I should have broken the ice first.

An uprooted tree soared by.

"Right, not the time," I said. The king whimpered as I hurled him up with no small amount of effort.

Then I jammed him unceremoniously into the sub-diode panel under the dimensional processing unit, flipped the switch, and counted to three.

***

III.

The thing to remember about time traveling is that you're already doing it.

What I hadn't realized was that the entire previous encounter had been at the fault of my bumbling time partner, King Henry VIII, who also happened to be distantly related to me. Apparently he had found my first time machine during one of my visits to ancient England, where I had been called upon to repair a 30th-century art connoisseur's warp drive. No wonder he had ended up giving me a ride back.

It turns out King Henry VIII did not, contrary to what one might believe, know how to use a time machine.

Instead he had accidentally set it to repeat.

Lying prone on his chaise he recounted his painful existence of repeated births and boyhoods until the moment he went to play with his time machine and pulled a pretty lever.

"First of all, one does not play with a time machine. Second, you're welcome for falling into that manhole, otherwise I would have never interfered and set it to normal. And third, thank you; it's rose gold."

"Normal?"

I pointed to the second button in: NORMAL.

"Oh." Then: "What, pray-tell, dost thou propose the apes were on about?"

I shrugged and stepped back into the time machine. "Well," I said. "This has been a horrifying experience. Take care of Percival for me."

King Henry smiled and waved. I smiled back, and stole my time machine.

FIN