“THE YEAR 2041”

After mother gave up her responsibilities and made me the head of MSAT, I was very grateful to her. She was always a brilliant scientist but she knew nothing in terms of business. She could build and design, but she needed someone to show her the needs of the society so she could act on them. My task was to earn designated profits to make MSAT even bigger. I had a brilliant marketing and research team and they earned me a lot of money and reputation.

We had a stake in city council and I made friends in high places to work on bigger and complex projects. Out of everything we built, the project that defines us and our city is the Hover rail. It’s what our city is famous for, a train of the future that runs throughout the city. It crushed the concept of personal vehicles, as everyone quickly started using it to go to different places and why wouldn’t they? It was faster, more cheaper than a car and it somewhat reduced the traffic in this city.

Then we started working on robots, the first generation robots were going to be simple and slow but we had to start with the basic idea and work on it to make better robots. Slowly but surely I knew we could do it as well. In the first two years as the head of MSAT I brought in a lot of money and exposure. Hawkesbay, a city which was not known suddenly started getting tourists from around the world.

It is safe to say that I was made to lead MSAT. One day while looking into the company’s expenses of the last 10 years, I stumbled upon a folder with no name. The folder was fragmented and was heavily damaged, instead of deleting it, someone had tampered with it and made it unenviable to read or understand.

The only thing which made me interested in it was the amount of money we had invested in the project. It was in billions and it was more expensive than any other project. I was very curious to find out what the project was for, and why those numbers were mentioned nowhere in the annual profit/loss report of that year. I made a team that would recover the fragmented data so that I could understand what this project was. I waited patiently as the team worked to recover bits and pieces of that folder.

When they had recovered enough data, they allowed me to look inside the folder. Looking at my screen my eyes grew wider and my heart skipped a beat. ‘Time travel’ was the focus of this research! I read notes and theories written by mom, she had kept this a top secret and never told anyone about this project. As more and more data got recovered I became more and more interested in it.

I needed someone to take this project to the next level, which meant taking the help of some old and new minds. Looking at the old scientists, I found out that most of them left Hawkesbay or were dead.

Obviously I couldn’t ask mom to help me out. If she wanted to continue this project she wouldn’t have kept it from me in the first place. I hovered my cursor on a name ‘Dr. Mark Silas’ after looking into his profile and searching for him I finally found an address and I went there personally to visit him.

People are easy for a business man, if you keep your emotions and beliefs aside it is very easy to lure them to do something for you. I had read Mark’s personal history; he was an ambitious scientist, one of the few who wanted the project to continue. His professional life was full of achievements but his personal life was an utter mess.

Mark married Carol and they both had a daughter Clara, they were a happy family. Clara had imaginary friends when she was 7 years old, at that age of course everyone has and Mark paid no attention to it. As she grew older her imaginary friends did not vanish. At 17 years old she almost got hit by a car as she chased ‘John’ through an alley. Carol and Mark feared the worst as they went to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist diagnosed Clara with acute schizophrenia and told them that she had maximum 13 years of life ahead of her.

This broke Carol and Mark. They spend years seeking a cure but it was all in vain. They were very supportive and loved their daughter but time had decided to take her away from them. After his daughter’s death Mark dedicated himself to his work.

He was the first to volunteer on the ‘Time Travel’ project. Mark never went back home as the place haunted him and reminded him of his daughter. In all his commitment to his work he had forgotten about the pain of his wife. He ignored her and the day came when she took her own life, the sorrow of her daughter and the distance of her husband was too much for her to bear.

This didn’t stop Mark from devoting himself to mom’s project. Perhaps he wanted to go back and change his fate, warn himself of the tragedies which were to occur so he could avoid them. This endeavor of his was also going to end in vain too. After mother time traveled and saw different universes, she saw what could be done and was afraid of the unseen possibilities.

She scrapped the project and Mark never got to achieve what he wanted. This was an opportunity for me, if I pushed Mark with old memories and his goal, he would fall into the pit of sadness once again and I would be able to control him. I had a conversation with him at his house and I was able to convince him. I took his help to learn more about time travel.

He helped us to remake the device which was used to travel in time, the ‘chronoton enhancer’. Soon we made even more devices. A certain device that can freeze the chronotons of a person. A device which can destabilize the chronotons and make a person die instantly with Time Dementia.

A chronoton reader which allows us to calculate the probability of an event to happen to someone, basically a device which can show a person’s future to an extent. In return for all this I had promised him a life where he and his family are complete, a life where Clara won’t suffer and Carol won’t kill herself. I promised him all this, once my project “Annex” would be completed.

Seeing so many universes I saw the endless possibilities, I am not afraid to say that I was consumed by the power to time travel. This universe had nothing to offer to me, I had everything here, but in other universes I wasn’t who I am here and that was unacceptable to me.

I wanted to be a constant in all the universes, the only man with power to travel in time and different worlds, the only man with the power to make or break people’s lives. ‘Project Annex’ was my vision of being in all the universes, as the Reed Maximus who can control time. So I decided to change the fate of those worlds with this project, hiring individuals with a shattered past and manipulating them to work for me, as I promised them a chance to undo what time had done to them.

Mark had warned me that changing the fate of other universes can have severe consequences, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I was a God now and a God isn’t scared of anything. Of course no one in my family or the world could know what I was doing.

I had big plans for the coming years and was shaking in my boots thinking of them. It would take some time to wield this power in other universes, but time was in my hands now and I felt immortal!