The Confection That Travelled Through Time

"What on God's grey earth is a liquorice string? I thought pills were ample for all of us ?" said Liza , with her eyes bulging brutally , anger or incredulity was indistinguishable . She then took a peek inside the pig sized cylindrical capsule full of red and green and magenta and cyan strings and pill-like brown stuff labelled 'Edible Toffees'. She glared at old Edward standing at an impassé beside the capsule but it appeared as if he was lost in deep thought. 

"Edward ! Edward ! What are these objects and why do you know about them ?" asked the little snob to the man who had been her caretaker since ages . Edward hesitantly asked her , "What date is it today sweets ? " to which she snapped saying it was the 56th of Bellendter , the 19th month of the year 2093 . Edward adjusted his highly computerized yet uncomfortable glasses on his nose and began speaking. He had never seen Liza as interested in any of their conversations since they generally ranged from, "Where is my travelling costume Edward!" to, "Dad will shout at you for telling me off for using my gizmos excessively". 

Today however the feeling of not having the upper hand in every situation, not understanding the complexity of the situation and not having absolute control over the situation had made Liza ask Edward endearingly about the liquorice sweets. He told her how years and years ago when the birds hadn't fallen off their branches due to radiation sickness and when the water that people drunk wasn't artificially created, there existed a utopic world. He mentioned how food was not limited to an 'Elon's all conclusive daily food pill'. He told her about how people could actually sow and grow and harvest and sell and clean and cook and eat and savour food on a daily basis. For hours he talked about the delicacies and cuisines world-wide and how it gave rise to multiple occupations and opinions but most importantly the pleasure of gorging on a sweet chocolate mousse instead of a dull yellow pill with a glass full of water. 

Liza could hardly control herself after listening to Edward's tales and she grabbed a liquorice string and a bunch of toffees and gobbled onto them like a ravenous hippo. The levels of serotonin and oxytocin were unparalleled and she had never before experienced such joy in her life. Her mind broke apart in tiny pieces which squealed with a loving passion and it gave her the best of highs she had ever received. She then asked Edward, the ever-faithful man, " Who could have sent this to us Ed?". Edward pushed a button over the circular rim of the capsule and projected a holographic film of the entries captured by the time capsule. It seemed like he knew his way around the capsule. The projections began with the footage of its last users and that footage dated back to the magical era of the late 20th century.

10th November 1975: Back when the 21-month system of calendars didn't exist and neither did a scintilla of knowledge amongst people about the life of the people, a century onwards. Zach, the kid with crutches and a hearing impairment belonged to this era. An insightful little kid, he always had the habit of ending up in the wrong places on the wrong time. That's what happened on the woeful day in 1975 when the world was in state of panic over the Vietnam war and somehow an innocuous Zach had got caught up in the whirlwind of atrocities and mysteries. Zach's dad Mitchell Watling, a military commander in the US army was a divorced man of 33. The fact that he had no partner meant that it was imperative for him to take his only son along with him, whenever and wherever he went. Watling could not trust the safety of his loving son in the hands of his divorced alcoholic ex-wife, especially since poor Zach was born with disabilities. So off Zach went to the army camp where his father was training for the war and Zach himself was chilling in the communication systems room on the base. 

The father son duo had lived in the base camp for about four months and were waiting in a tense mood over the proclamation of attack. Zach however barely cared or was affected by the enormity of the War. All he cared was that his dad had asked him to not leave the communication room until he himself returned from the training drills. As Zach jumped around the room with wobbly crutches, he came across a rather peculiar looking device. Certainly, at a young age like his, every device in the room was draconian but this one was particularly abnormal in his eyes. The oddly shaped device had metallic rims and buttons and a cavity within and it looked as apart and misplaced from the array of gadgets in the room as would a young Zach on a soccer team, with his crutches. At that instant, a loud alarm rung, accompanied by flashing red lights and an announcement, stating that the battalion had to move quickly for the treacherous battle. But obviously, the quiet, secluded room where Zach sat had no other occupants apart from Zach to inform him about the warning issued. As Zach ventured further into peering through the glass cavity of the shiny metallic capsule, Watling burst in the room with a massive box in his arms and a palsied face drenched in tears. He whispered into Zach's ears as stably and coherently as possible, "Papa loves you and will return soon. Here's a big box of your favourite sweets and here's a big kiss from Papa. I will miss you Zach." Saying this, he left the box beside Zach and inadvertently ran, for he prioritised the nation's call over any other emotion of his. As Zach sat in the plethora of technological marvels, he opened the box of sweets. His heart fondled up and his eyes rolled, while his tongue lolled and his cheeks tinged pink. He could devour all of these but the very fact that his Dad was no longer there beside him to stop him from over consumption of the sweets made Zach stutter and stumble onto the ground. After some long minutes, he picked out the capsule from its shelf and started fidgeting with it for lack of a better task to do. He figured out how to open the capsule in a snap of a second and now he was wondering what he might put in it. Completely oblivious to the utility of the capsule or the mysticism behind the existence of a highly modern and clandestine gadget, he decided to throw in some of his sweets here. He thought that the metallic case would act as a better protection for his sweets than a paltry cardboard box. After he was done transferring his goodies, Zach shut the lid of the capsule and unintentionally pressed the button on its circular rim. To his horror, the box vanished in mid-air. The shock on his face soon turned into doom. Within the span of a few minutes, he had lost the two things that gave him the greatest joy in the world; his dad and his sweets. He sat weeping on the hard, cold and weathered military floor, destroyed over the sudden turn of events from a state of jubilation to jeopardy and finally distraught. 

Liza was stunned. She was taken aback by this intangible event and how her heart was reacting to a boy of her age who belonged to a long-forgotten era. A boy whose source of happiness in life was stolen by the evils of war and an esoteric instrument. It was like her reality fused with the boy's and the urge to exit her own reality, if only to return the boy's sweets to him was astronomical. This was the maximum amount of compassion that Liza had ever felt or portrayed. She felt her world, however glorified and lucid it was for her, it could never match the manually dominated and yet chronologically lost beautiful world of 1975 where resided young Zach. This tumultuous outbreak of emotions made her shed a tear or two. She then regained mental consciousness of her surroundings and after gaining track of her orientation in the post-apocalyptic world, she turned towards Edward. "Ed, how come you found this capsule and deduced how to operate it? Isn't it supposed to be somewhat secretive and outlandish?”. To this, Edward cleared his throat and with a voice as firm as a rock he said, "I know because the guy you saw cry was my dad. My name is Edward Zach Watling."