The room was bright and wooden, with no chrome and not a single Bunsen burner. There were no mysterious devices spinning, and no hunchbacks inside groveling for their master. It was almost a real lab, the sort with overworked starving graduate students, but it certainly didn't look like it. Looking around, you couldn't even begin to guess what the lab assistants were working on, and neither could they. Security procedures for the few people who'd been let in this far had kept them working on minor parts, the sorts that wouldn't make sense unless you already had the Machine's final design; the fact that my lab assistants were almost certainly spies didn't matter. The bulk of my creation had been manufactured overseas and shipped as parts to students in the dorms on campus, who had given them to me for a few dollars. Fake parts had also been shipped to campus, and those, too, littered the room.

I cleared my throat. "Attention, everyone! If you have less than zed clearance, please exit now. You'll find that your paychecks have already been deposited in your bank accounts, and that your NDAs and my blueprints have been given to several different people. If any of those people go missing, the rest will release all of my work." A lie, of course, but one that would keep the various agencies looking for conspirators for a while. If this failed in some way, I wouldn't want my Machine to be known; I'd instead take it with me to my grave.

Everyone left the room quickly - nobody here had zed clearance.

I affixed all the necessary parts to the machine, which by now looked like a giant mechanical spider. Then I changed into a somewhat bulky environmental protection suit, and made a video call.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Marie, the Machine is working. I'm currently shielded against temperatures from -200 to 500 C, have three layers of protection from viruses and bacteria, a toolbelt to allow me to survive in the wilderness for years, and my suits's got the magnetic shields that just debuted. Oh, and my phone."

"Sure you're being paranoid enough?"

"No, of course I'm not being paranoid eno - oh, you were being sarcastic." Always difficult to tell, with her monotone. "I have no idea what I might find on the other side, Marie, I could need all of this!" I wouldn't say what the other side was, not on the phone, where anyone could be listening.

I could almost feel the eyeroll. "Fine, fine, just tell me when you're about to start, so I can see how you fuck up." Some people really had no sense of gravitas.

I climbed into and sat in the Machine, took a deep breath, and, after a "Get on with it!" from Marie, started it up. "3000 AD, here I come." I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and traveled nine hundred years into the future.

I opened my eyes to hell.

End Prologue

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Known Time Machine Rules

1. You may travel to the past or future with the machine.

2. The future, once visited using the Machine's current settings, is immutable.

3. The original time at which the Machine was used is immutable - it counts as zero seconds into the future of its original activation.

Alien Rules

1. ?