The Will

Dr. Edgewood died last month. She had been a friend and mentor through my high-school years, and a valuable study partner once I entered college. To look at her, you would think she was your everyday, average grandmother, but talk to her for five minutes and her brilliance sparkled as bright as her brown eyes.

She only had one living nephew. They were never close and he couldn’t be bothered to come to the funeral. He showed up for the reading of the will, though. I know because I was there.

I wasn’t surprised that Dr. Edgewood included me in her will. With our shared love of science, I figured she would leave me one of those fat, copious notebooks that she scribbled in whenever a revelation struck her. I would have loved a keepsake of that familiar, fluid handwriting. Of course, I could always go back and look at the corrections she made on my term paper. Those pages were liberally peppered with ‘What were you thinking?’, ‘What’s your point?’, and even a swear word or two, all written in old-school, red ink.

When I arrived at the lawyer’s office, his expansive desk was bare except for a small stack of papers and a single cardboard box closed with a duct tape. The Doctor’s nephew sent me a questioning glance as I sat in the chair beside him. He never bothered to introduce himself, there was no need, I recognized him from a picture that hung in Dr. Edgewood’s study.

We sat in silence as the lawyer read the will aloud in a monotone, disinterested voice. The majority of her worldly goods were bequeathed to the nephew; what she left for me was taped shut in that cardboard box. Per her instructions, I wasn’t to open it until I returned to my dorm room.

It felt disappointingly light when I lifted it. Obviously, she hadn’t entrusted me with her journals. I’m only in my junior year of college and nowhere near the scientist that Dr. Edgewood had been; I reasoned she had probably left her important discoveries to a more seasoned colleague.

Something small and hard shifted inside the box as I carried it into my dorm room. I used my key to slice through the duct tape. At the bottom of the sizable box, was an outdated clock radio. It was brown with faux, plastic wood sides and a metal face plate. I lifted it from the box and found a note beneath it. I eagerly unfolded it only to find instructions on how to set the clock forward for Daylight Savings Time, which began next week. At least the gift was practical.

I sat down on the bed. Was this a gag? The doctor had a great sense of humor, but it seemed she should have left me something more meaningful, or at least familiar, upon her death. This bequest came from the woman who was always encouraging me to push boundaries, think differently, and expand my horizons. It didn’t make sense.

I plugged it in near the nightstand and the numbers on the clock face illuminated.

Throughout the next week, I would read and re-read the instructions for the clock. I thought about the hours that Dr. Edgewood and I spent discussing relative velocity, space time continuum, and time compression. I wondered if, somehow, the clock was an homage to that shared passion; that maybe there was hidden message behind the brief note, but nothing pointed to the clock having any other function, or meaning, beyond telling time.

Resigned to disappointment, I followed her instructions on Saturday night and set the clock ahead one hour. The clock seemed to have a year function, but it was stuck on 2055 and wouldn’t let me change it. After struggling with it for a while, I gave up and went to bed.

When the alarm went off the next morning, I awoke to see a giant crack stretching across the discolored ceiling of my dorm. Groggy, I stared at it for a minute before realizing that an unnatural amount of light was streaming into the room. I rolled toward the window to see an opaque, plastic tarp covering the glass. As I climbed out of bed to investigate the disappearance of my curtains, I tripped over chunks of plaster that had fallen off the crumbling walls.

Earthquakes were rare in this part of the country, and even if I had slept through one, how did this tarp get on the window? I tugged at the corner of the plastic and it easily fell away. The college grounds, once landscaped with bushes and trees, had suddenly become a parking lot filled with vehicles. I strained my eyes, but no other buildings were visible in the distance; there was only a barren stretch of concrete where the campus once stood.

I frantically searched my room, noticing the cobwebs and dust lying thick across the empty desk. Everything seemed to be decaying around me; even the brass doorknob had corroded and was caked with rust. As I reached for it, it sprang open and there stood Dr. Edgewood with a clipboard under her arm and a smile on her lips.

“I see you got my present.”

I stumbled backward, grabbing the rickety desk chair for support.

Her hair looked more gray than white, and her wrinkles seemed less pronounced than the last time I saw her, but it was definitely her.

“This must be very confusing. In your mind, I died last month; but last month was a long time ago. No, don’t be afraid.” She held out her arm and I hesitantly touched the sleeve of her white lab coat.

“How is this happening?”

“My time travel theory, was never a theory. While you slept for one night, the world whirled around you in years- decades. You awoke in the future.”

“If you are alive, wouldn’t this be the past?”

She shook her head, smiling at my confusion. “On my first trip to the future, I arrived in the year 2027 and saw the aftermath of a war that wiped out the world’s greatest minds. Our enemies had created a new type of bomb specifically built to target our scientists and innovators. By removing our best and brightest, they crippled us in the war and enslaved entire nations.

I was able to trace the fallout particulates from the 2027 explosion and discovered that the bomb had unintentionally acted like a teleportation device. Instead of destroying these people, it sent them into an unknown point in the future. It took four years of searching, but I found them- in the year 2040.”

“You’re telling me, this is the year 2040?”

“No,” the lines in her face deepened in sorrow, “this is 2055, fifteen years after ‘the skip.’

The war of 2027 took its toll and left us devoid of any technological innovations- imagine the world pre-electricity and you’ll understand 2040. When I arrived, the skipped scientists were only beginning to unravel the problem, having to start from virtually nothing. I’ve been traveling back and forth for years to help them find a solution.”

“Back and forth? You mean, between 2020 and 2055?”

“Longer. I’ve been time traveling since the year 2001. It wasn’t until 2005 that I discovered the time path of the skip.”

I sank down in the chair.

“And it took us fifteen years to rebuild the world’s scientific infrastructure. We were limited by both the technology of our time and their time. But in those years, we’ve made leaps forward in innovation. That’s why I brought you here. We discovered a solution, but we need someone who can take it to the world… to the past.”

“And you chose me?”

“I’ve known about my death for many years; the curse of jumping forward in time. Through the experiments in which were able to re-create and reverse the effect of the bomb, my team and I were exposed to the radiation that will end our lives. None of us will survive the journey back to 2020. We need you.”

“I’m just a college student; why me?”

 “Because, you’re the only one who would believe it could be possible, because I’ve taught you to strive for the impossible,” she said with a motherly smile. “But, the impossible is never easy. You’ll be dismissed, mocked, and ignored. But, if you do this, you could prevent the skip; you could save our world.”

“What do I have to do?”

She smiled, her brown eyes twinkling. “Bring the time machine and follow me.”

“What time machine?” I asked, looking around the small room.

She walked to the bedside table and picked up the alarm clock. “Did you really think I left you an old alarm clock in my will?”

“Well, I didn’t think you left me a frickin’ time machine.”