THE MACHINE

Jonas was a goddamn genius, that’s why I decided to study under him in the first place. While others were out there toting their research on super-batteries or solar panels with 99.9% efficiency or hyper-aware AIs and Virtual Intelligences, Jonas was, for lack of a better word, consumed by the concept of time travel. Before you ask – no, he wasn’t trying to forge a functioning flux capacitor to slap into a DeLorean, nor was he trying to make a Police Box that was uncannily large within. No. Jonas had a very simple goal: to create a machine that could receive messages in binary from the future and convert those messages into text.

 I was there the day he succeeded.

I’ll admit, I was a skeptic – I still am – but after what I’ve witnessed since the conception of this idea, and after what happened to Jonas, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all real. Sure, it seems like Science Fiction, but so did television and space travel and radio before we went ahead and made them a reality. That was always the beautiful thing to me about Science – the fact that, in so many ways, it was a playground to make fantasies come true. Of course, there’s a little more to it than saying “I’m going to make a Time Machine” and then it poofing into existence, but it’s like art in that respect – sometimes, the journey is part of the whole, not just a mindless step toward an end. Jonas knew that, and I knew he knew that.

He called me on a Friday evening – something that had never happened before. When I saw his name flashing on my phone’s screen, I knew that something had happened: maybe not something good, maybe not something bad, but something worthy of note. When I answered, I heard his breathing before anything else. I could practically feel his breath through the speaker.

“It… works…” he huffed.

It took me a moment to register the meaning. I’d had other things on my mind at the time – a date at a nice little Italian restaurant in town. Luckily, the girl had gotten up to go to the bathroom and we were well into the part where we were trying to drink up enough courage to ask the other to come home with us for some stupid reason or another. I cupped my hand over the phone and looked around before whispering back:

“Are you sure?”

I could hear scratching on the other end of the line, and I knew Jonas was shaking his head, as he always did. There was a wet click as his tongue snapped free of his mouth and he exhaled, trying to steady his breathing. “I’m positive,” he said, “we’ve got a message.”

I nearly dropped my phone onto my plate. A passing waitress who had witnessed the fumble smiled cautiously and stepped wide around me, my feet already entering the aisle.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“LeConte Hall… third floor…”

“I’ll be there right away!”

I ended the call, took one last swig of whiskey, and ran out the door, my suitcoat over my shoulder. I didn’t even stop to think about the girl.

Not even twenty minutes had passed and I was on campus - a small miracle in for just about anywhere in California. I knew full well that only the maintenance men were going to be around and that, most likely, the front doors to the LeConte would be locked, so I saved myself a trip by parking in the back and sneaking in through a rear door. I took an elevator to the third floor. The moment the doors slid open, I broke into a sprint. I could already hear the sounds coming from the conference room.

Jonas had fixed an old printer up to the machine – one that could hold an entire spool of paper and print in long, uncut sheets – and easily half the room was already buried in the folds of print. Jonas, his eyes narrow and dark behind his glasses, his brown-grey hair frizzed and coiled and unkempt, was darting between the paper tongue as it snaked across the floor and the little, pulsating black cube at the edge of the oval table.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

Jonas’s beady eyes snapped to mine and his mouth cracked into a toothy grin. “Look at it! Look at it all!” His hands swept in a grand gesture around the room. “It’s working!”

I threw my suitcoat onto the nearest chair and moved into the room, stepping over the roll of paper. The printer itself was chirping endlessly, printing and spitting and resetting in a steady cadence. I looked down.

“Have you read any of it yet?”

Jonas turned, his hands shaking, and violently shook his head no. “No time. When I called, I had just plugged it in. Good God, this is amazing! Absolutely amazing!” The way he talked about it was more like a kid on their first visit to Disneyland than those of a bona fide Doctor of Physics. He moved across the room and picked up the edge of the sheet of paper. Then he looked up at me with a twinkle in his eyes. “Grab your phone and record this,” he said, “I don’t want a second of it to be missed.”

I pulled my phone out of my pocket, started the recording, and fixed it on Jonas. From my vantage point, I could see the black cube – the Machine – sidled up against the edge of the printer. Jonas was centered between the whiteboard and window in the back of the room. I gave him a solemn nod and Jonas cleared his throat.

“I am Doctor Jonas Saigh, Professor Emeritus of the Physics Department at UC Berkley,” he began, “and what you are witnessing is the receiving of direct messages from the future. These messages are obtained via a receiver of circulating laser light. They function one way only – from future to past – and may hold clues to future phenomena and events that could prove invaluable to us all. I am assisted by my graduate student, Charles DeClaire.”

For a moment, Jonas looked up at me, the paper glinting white against the lenses of his glasses, his teeth a wide brim of a smile between his lips. I nodded again and he began:

Message Received 20:50:11 – Hello World.

Message Received 20:50:39 – Hello?

Message Received 20:50:58 – Are you there? Can you read this?

Jonas’s eyes scanned the page and his hands began to move. “Pages. Pages of these. ‘Are you there?’ ‘Can you speak to us?’ ‘Hello.’ There must be hundreds of people, maybe thousands using this very technology to contact us from the future. It- It could be tomorrow, or it could be a hundred years from now, or a thousand! Jesus, Charlie! This is amazing!”

I nodded and panned the camera from Jonas to the printer. Its pace had slowed and I could see an error light flashing orange on its face. The spool of paper must have almost been completely gone, there were so many folds on the floor. If the paper didn’t go first, then the ink would take it. It didn’t matter though. The point had been proven. The Machine worked.

Jonas waved his hand and I panned back to him.

Message Received 20:58:12 – We miss you.

Message Received 20:58:16 – Please read this, please respond.

Message Received 20:58:22 – We need your help!

Jonas’s hands shuffled down the page more, his eyes intently scanning its face. His toothy grin had broken into a full beam, like a kid staring at a nest of Christmas presents. The printer finally groaned the last of the paper out and the room fell silent, the orange error light blinking in its shadowy interior.

Jonas’s face changed. The smile receded behind his thin lips, and his eyes flicked up toward mine. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, I spoke:

“What’s wrong?”

He read back in response:

Message Received 21:00:09 – Turn it off!

Message Received 21:00:10 – Turn it off!

Message Received 21:00:11 – Turn it off!

I glanced at the cube on the end of the table – stark, gleaming black, a swell of white fading in and out beneath. It caught the orange cast of the room each time the error light blinked. The single row of fluorescents above flickered.

Message Received 21:00:11 – TURN IT OFF!

Message Received 21:00:12 – TURN IT OFF!

Message Received 21:00:13 – TURN IT OFF!

Jonas was tearing the paper upward now, his eyes scanning, his mouth reciting the plea over and over and over again. He cleared what must have been a hundred pages, each only a second apart, each crying for the Machine to be turned off.

The paper was practically flying through his hands now, tearing here and there but Jonas kept reading and reciting the pleas as they went on. Minutes passed on the page, and the pleas were growing more frantic, some registering at the same exact time, others strings of the same words repeated over and over again.

Jonas reached the edge of the paper and stopped. His hands were quivering, clamped around the page’s base, and his breath caught in his throat. He swallowed hard and exhaled.

“Jonas?”

He didn’t respond. I moved closer, my hands dropping to my side.

“Jonas? What’s wrong?”

Jonas didn’t read the last message on the sheet. He simply pushed it away from himself and my free hand caught the paper’s edge and pulled it up for me to see.

MÊssÆg R×ÇÍeVd øø: øø: øø – We Hear You.

I looked up from the sheet. Jonas’s hands were smoothing across his stubble and slicking through his hair. He rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses, pushing them to the bridge of his nose.

“There’s something wrong with the Machine.”

I let the paper fall from my hands. “It’s a piece of technology. There’s always room for improvement.”

Jonas’s face contorted into a glower. “No. There’s something very wrong.”

He reached for the Machine at the edge of the table and, in my mind, I saw exactly what he meant to do. I moved between him and the Machine.

“Don’t be hasty. The last message was a hacker – someone who’s learned to exploit it. That’s all. If people can do it with computers and BluRay players and radios today, then people can do it with things like this in the future.”

Jonas gently pushed me to the side and set his hand on the Machine. For a moment, it looked like he was going to just pick it up and unplug it, but in the last second, his eyes squeezed shut and he palmed it and hurled it at the wall. The cube cracked and shattered, its components spilling onto the floor below the powdery dent it had made in the drywall.

“Jonas! Jesus! Calm down!”

Jonas turned to me, seething. “Charlie, I need you to get the fuck out, now. Delete the video. Don’t speak to anyone about this. Ever.”

I made to raise protest, but the look in Jonas’s eyes were murderous. I bowed my head low and left.

The rest of the weekend was a nightmare. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Machine, about Jonas and about the messages. I tried to call him a hundred times. I tried to get into the building, even talked to a maintenance man, but I was refused access each time. I finally emailed Jonas and explained that I was sorry, and that I had deleted the video, and that I needed to hear from him. I didn’t get any response.

I went in to see him the first chance I got. I made my way up to the third floor of the LeConte, I walked the hall to the end, but, instead of Jonas, I found the maintenance men toting boxes from the room. Jonas’s name had already been scraped free from the door’s face.

I asked them what had happened, and it was only then that I found out why I couldn’t get ahold of Jonas for the rest of the weekend.

After I had met him on Friday night, after the events of the Machine, Jonas had returned to his office. There, he had lit a small fire in his waste paper bin and burned any and all documents related to our studies. When he had finished destroying the evidence, he left for home.

Jonas took his life with a single bullet early in the morning. His only remaining family, his niece, requested that an obituary be put off until she could plan the funeral.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

This morning, I awoke to a package on my doorstep. It was a simple cardboard box with no return address and, within, I found the parts to the Machine. I knew Jonas had to have been the one who sent it, but I wondered why… until now.

Jonas was a goddamn genius, that’s why I decided to study under him in the first place. He had a very simple goal: to create a machine that could receive messages in binary from the future and translate them into text – and I was there when he failed.

But in his failure, he found something far more potent – something so much more than he ever could have imagined.

Jonas created a machine that could receive messages from the dead – and now he wants me to rebuild it and find him.