Cats.

Chapter Two

I handed Ruby some tissues and retreated to my bedroom, which was also conveniently located safely away from the prying eyes of Mr Kittens. She had wanted to continue our discussion of Sharia Law, but I pretended I was really tired and needed to sleep. What I was really doing, however, was logging onto my favourite conspiracy website Topsecrettruth.com.

Late night conspiracy web surfing was something I’d always loved doing, but I was in a particular mood for it that night, given the strange turn of events that day:  a feminist cat popping up out of literally nowhere to disrupt our lives. 

There was a section on the website that dealt with ‘supernatural freak animals’, which was where I’d intended to start my search. However, before I had the chance to click the forum link, something else caught my eye.

It was a new thread in the “time travel” section of the message board. The author was a member called Dr Nitro – also known by full name of Jake Nitro according to his signature – who had had written a 5000 word message board entry about his experience of allegedly travelling 200 million years into the future. As far as Topsecrettruth.com went, it wasn’t a terribly unusual claim. But it was intriguing enough for me to click on it and begin reading.

Now – here’s a little fact about me: I believe literally everything I read. That makes me both the best - and the worst - kind of person to be trawling conspiracy forums on the internet. 

As an example: Say I read a story about the Sydney Harbour Bridge having been built by ancient aliens. That is how I will from that point onwards recall history.

So I totally believed every last work of Jake Nitro’s story.

***

It was enthralling: he claimed to have one day woken up in his apartment building to discover a large, grey, nondescript machine in the middle of his kitchen. When he’d approached it, he’d felt a buzzing in his head, and knew intuitively that he could control that machine with his mind. He’d opened the door, stepped inside, and realised that it was a time machine. 

He wrote that the interior of it was unlike any technology that could even be imagined on Earth, and that he’d freaked out and accidentally sent himself 200 million years into the future. The machine responded telepathically to his thoughts and he’d been unable to stop it before it was too late.

Well I didn’t blame him: I would have freaked out as well and probably sent myself back to the time of dinosaurs and gotten myself eaten by one. 

But Jake swore that he went so far into the future that the place he landed on was not even recognisable as Earth. He wrote that now he was back home, in the present day, that he was unable to function properly, that he was unable to forget what he had seen in the future. The worst thing of all, he wrote, was that absolutely no one believed his story.

It was a lengthy read, but I raced through to the end, where the most interesting piece of information presented itself: Jake Nitro was a lecturer in physics at the very same university I attended: the University of Sydney.

Well this is very interesting, I thought.

***