Cats.

Chapter Four

Jake Nitro lived on Bondi Beach, which was just about as unlikely a place for a lecturer to live as anywhere. It was a tiny cramped apartment opposite the beach, and the rest of the residents seemed to all be feral tourists from England, who were running around topless and drunk at 2pm on a mid-July day.

But there it was, just as he’d written on Topsecrettruth.com–  right there smack bang in the middle of his tiny kitchen it stood: a time machine. It was about 8 feet tall and 6 feet across, and it was a really unnerving shade of grey.

“Where did it come from?” I whispered.

“That’s the biggest mystery of all,” Jake replied at a normal volume. “Though I definitely have my theories…” he trailed off. I thought I detected anger in his voice. 

“Does it…still work?” I asked, careful not to get too close to it, remembering Jake’s story, about how his trip in it had been almost completely accidental. He’d just been standing next to it, and the next thing he knew he was inside it, travelling 200 million years into the future, simply because that was the first thing that had popped into his head.

I tried very hard not to think any thoughts along the line of “I would love to go the far future and die”, but everyone knows that trying not to think about something just makes you think about it, so I made sure I was standing a safe distance behind the bench top. 

As I glanced at the bench I did take a moment to notice that Jake used smooth peanut butter, much to my dismay. Oh well, I thought, we can work on that after we fall in love. He would have to switch to crunchy.

“Not since that one morning,” Jake interrupted my peanut butter thoughts. “I think it’s most likely broken, actually.”

“Oh.” I was surprised. “So why is it still sitting in your apartment?”

He looked at me strangely. “Well where on Earth else would I put it? How would I even move it or get it out of the room?”

He ran his fingers through his hair and looked distraught. “I can’t get rid of it. I can’t move. I can’t...leave. I would have to explain this bloody thing to the next lot of tenants.” He kicked the machine and I jumped back as though it might suddenly sprout teeth and eat me.

“So you’re... stuck here?” I looked around the shabby apartment. 

Jake continued pacing around his kitchen. “I’m stuck in every way possible. I mean, I can’t even talk about this without people thinking I’m completely crazy. I didn’t talk about it for a year. And now that I am talking about it, I’m a laughing stock. The university will probably fire me soon.” Jake stopped talking and pacing for a second and looked at me.“That’s what it is you see: that’s why it was put here in my apartment, to make me appear crazy.”

“By who?”

“The government,” he replied. 

Uh-oh, I thought.‘The government’ was the prime antagonist of people who frequented Topsecrettruth.com. They all thought ‘the government’ was behind everything, including an ancient alien race building the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which just made zero sense. Believe me, they would have all loved to pin the blame of the sudden appearance of a telepathic feminist cat in my house on the government if given half the chance.

Jake’s words kind of rang an alarm bell in my head. I thought, shit, maybe this guy actually is crazy. Maybe this time machine is plastic and he has just concocted the entire time travel story to entice young gullible conspiracy theory nutters like myself back to his apartment.

But then I looked at him and I really wanted to kiss him because he was really adorable stressing out about whether or not the government had planted a time machine in his apartment in order to discredit him and make him lose his job at the university. But was it really the best idea to believe a guy just because he was hot? 

Eh, it was as good an idea as any.

So I took the bait. “Why would the government put a time machine in your kitchen?”

Jake was reluctant to answer. Instead, he just looked at me and said. “Take me back to your house. I want to see your cat.”

***