Excerpt: The TimeMergers

Time. Time to eat. Time to sleep. Time to wake up; to go to class; to go to work; to take out the garbage; to change the sheets; to get a haircut; to make dinner. Time to feed the cat. Time to do all those little things that made the day roll along and kept it from getting stagnant. Some people said time was infinite; and sometimes it stopped. Time is something that has been around since the beginning of the universe. And everything else has been around since the beginning of time. Time cannot be measured but the attempt is made anyway.
Professor Evaline Lacey thought a lot about time. She had no thoughts about measuring it or controlling it. Instead she wondered if she could find a way to ride along with it. Time was a wave. Or maybe it was the tide. It rolled into the shore and back out again only to roll back in, this time with a different story to tell. Time was cyclical. That much Professor Lacey was sure of. She wanted to catch one of those waves, ride it out and see where it brought her.

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"Just what is it that you've been making up there, Professor?" Olivia asked. She could not deny that she was intrigued by the secretive way these two always spoke when discussing their projects. It was high time she found out what was going on up there.
"Shall we show her, Joel?" Lacey asked with a smirk. When dinner was done they all trooped up to the lab. Lacey picked up the bracelet and held it out to Olivia.
"A bracelet," the maid asked incredulously. "That's the big secret?"
"Actually," Joel said, "It's a time machine."
"A WHAT?"
"A time machine," said Lacey with a calm smile.
Olivia held out her hand for the bracelet. Lacey gave it to her knowing that she would be careful with it. The CyberMaid looked critically at the piece of metal. It was about two inches wide and a quarter of an inch thick. The decorative jewels it sported Olivia now saw were actually buttons. There was a screen along the top of one side which ran a series of dates and times and other imformation like that. Olivia was impressed, though she could not see the point of a time machine. Why not be content with the present?
"Many people look at time as a straight line," Lacey was explaining. "We start at one end and progress toward the other. Here is a standard timeline- we start at 1672 here and end at 2172 here." She drew a line along one of the notescreens laying on the table and labelled each end with the date. "But what if time is not a line, but a continuous circle? It will never end and conversely it will never begin." A circle was drawn next to the line. "In that case then we will be constantly overlapping other time lines as we continue going around." Lacey labelled one spot on the circle with both the 1672 date and the 2172 date. "Everything happens at the same time and so in theory if we can figure out how to shift ourselves from one layer to another it will be possible to travel into another time."
Olivia was really impressed. Maids never came up with anything like that. She nodded her understanding and looked back at the bracelet.
"Wow. So why a bracelet? I mean, what's it supposed to do?"
"The bracelet is the link between layers," Lacey said taking it back and gazing fondly at it. "It is used to direct the wearer into the shift and then sustain them in that time."
"Yeah, but only one of you can go then."
"For now. If it proves successful we can make more."
"So who's going to test it tonight?"
"I am," said Lacey with a sly grin.