Tree

I thought it was just an ordinary tree.

It wasn’t very tall. Just a fair-sized tree, great for sitting under to get out of the sun, or for hiding behind, which is what I thought the instant I saw it. They wouldn’t find me there, at least not right away, or maybe not at all. If anything, I could get out of sight for a bit, get my bearings, maybe even figure out my next step. I didn’t know what to expect, but I had the feeling that no one ever bothered to look at it, even though it was the only one along that sidewalk practically in the middle of nowhere, so it had to be the perfect place to hide until something better came along.

I wasn’t too far from right. I just didn’t know it yet.

I ducked behind the trunk just as they clattered around the corner like a gang of Keystone Kops in a barely controlled skid. I almost laughed at how they bumped into each other, knocking one of them to the street while the others clung to each other for balance. Then it was all shoving and homophobic slurs until the leader bullied them into a loose resemblance to order and barked, “Well, what are you waiting for? Find him!”

“Nobody runs away when I’m mugging them,” he shouted to the heavens as the gang broke apart and scrambled in all directions, and suddenly the tree wasn’t the best hiding place, after all.

I flattened my back against the rough bark and tried not to hyperventilate. Some of them were headed in my direction, and the trunk wasn’t going to keep them from spotting me. I had no choice but to run, except they were too close for me to get a good start. They would catch me in an instant. Panicking, I pressed against the tree, wishing that I could just melt inside it, and suddenly, I was falling backwards.

My backside hit a very hard, smooth floor and I sat stunned for a moment, not from any injury sustained but from sheer flabbergast. Before I even looked around, I knew that I was in a vastly spacious and very likely extravagant room, judging by the shiny marble under my keister. In front of me, set like the portal of an ancient temple, was the biggest and thickest set of double doors that I have ever seen, slowly swinging shut on the area I had just accidentally vacated. Some primal instinct screamed not to let the doors close, and panicking again, I scrambled to get on my feet to prevent it and watched as they thudded together before I could take one step. Then I knew why those instincts had kicked in. There were no door handles on that side. I was trapped.

Although grateful for the momentary relief from pursuing gangsters, I had no idea how I was going to get out of there, or where there even was. It was impossible, but somehow, I had stumbled into… somewhere… without any memory of it. Surely, I hadn’t fallen into the tree. I could almost wrap my arms around its trunk, and the room was much bigger than that. I had to have hit my head or gotten beaten so badly by those punks that I wandered in a daze until waking up in that place. Except that, when I felt my face, it didn’t hurt, and I found no cuts or bumps that weren’t there before, and I didn’t ache anywhere except my tailbone. I had no idea what to make of it, but since I was still staring in amazement at the doors, I decided to look around at where I ended up. Maybe seeing it would present some clue, or jog a memory, or something.

I nearly fell back to the floor in amazement. The place was bigger than I had imagined. That single room was as wide and tall as a house, with a high vaulted ceiling and a catwalk that split the height around the entire perimeter, sometimes once, sometimes twice. Three different stairs accessed the levels from three different points, and passages exited each level in several places, while in the center of the floor, sitting wide and squat and obviously the piece that tied the entire room together, was something that looked like a seven-sided, high-tech mushroom with buttons, switches, dials, levers, and various other gadgets plastered willy-nilly all over it, in the center of which was a wide cylinder with brilliantly glowing flat crystals inside it, half of them jutting up from the mushroom, the other half hanging down from above, and looking like mismatched teeth. The entire place was darkly decorated in a style I can only describe as a science fiction faux pas, with the round passages looking like something from Star Trek. And somehow, whoever decorated made it work.

It was so weird that I ran to the doors and even examined them for hidden handles, but finding none, I turned back to the amazing sight. Somehow, I had found myself in some eccentric’s house, some very strange eccentric’s house, and I was trapped there. There was only one thing that I could do.

“Hello?” I called out, trying to be polite. There was no use in alarming them, so I added, “I’m sorry for intruding! If you don’t mind opening the doors, I’ll be on my way!”

The room was not conducive to acoustics. My voice barely carried, even though there were enough hard surfaces to make it an echoing nightmare. I waited for a reply, but no one answered, and I blamed the room. So, I tried again.

“Hello?” I called louder. “Hello! Look, I know this is going to sound weird, but I got trapped in your house somehow and I just want to get out. Can you help me with that?”

Again, I received no reply. Not even an echo of my own voice. They were either the rudest people I have ever encountered, or they weren’t home. But that didn’t make sense. Why would they leave their doors open for just anyone to stumble through? Didn’t they care that they were practically asking to get burglarized? Unless they didn’t, or they didn’t answer because they were scared. In that case, I expected the police to arrive at any minute. There was no way a place like that didn’t get top priority on the police to-do list. The problem was, I couldn’t explain my presence or how I got there. As far as anyone else knew, I was a burglar, and I had much better things to do with my time than sit in a jail cell waiting for my day in court. And as I had no explanation for being there that any judge would believe, I was looking at some serious involuntary vacation. I had to get out of there before the coppers showed up. That meant convincing the people that lived there to let me go.

“Look, I’m sorry for intruding,” I called, louder still just in case the acoustics were really to blame. “I didn’t do it on purpose! I don’t even know how it happened! I might have hit my head or something, because I don’t remember walking in! I just want to go home.”

I was met once again by silence. I couldn’t believe it. No one was that rude, or that callous. My pleas should at least have brought someone out to challenge my claims, and yet I remained alone, so I was leaning towards the possibility that no one was home. But just in case I was wrong, I kept talking. Maybe something I said would bring them out.

Meanwhile, I had decided to find my own way out, but instead of poking my nose into those passages right away, I decided to check out the centerpiece first. The place was so fantastic that only a rich person could afford it, and rich people tended to automate their houses in the most pretentious ways. And since the high-tech mushroom was the only thing there that had any hardware, I decided to search its clutter for anything like a door control.

I felt like a monkey in the cockpit of a jetliner. There were so many different controls, too many to figure out, but still, I knew I had to try. As I stared in awe at all the toggles, buttons, switches, doodads and gizmos, I called out, “I’m not trying to steal anything! I’m just looking for a way to open the doors, that’s all! But if you want me out of here faster, just come on down and help me out! I won’t hurt you! I promise!

“Oh, good job, idiot,” I chastised myself the instant it hit me. “That’s what serial killers always say just before the slaughter begins.

“Look,” I felt obligated to add, “I’m not here to kill anyone, okay? I’m just -!”

I stopped myself before I dug my hole any deeper. Certain now that the owner thought I was a serial killer, I concentrated instead on finding the door control. But nothing was labeled “Door Control”. There were lots of labels, most that didn’t make any sense unless they were jokes, but nothing that said it opened or closed the doors.

“What did you expect?” I asked myself. “It’s probably just a piece of art.”

But it was a weird piece of art, and it had the air of being a working piece of art. Lights blinked in patterns. Monitors showed readouts. Gauge needles twitched. The mushroom was controlling something or at least looked like it was. And if it was hooked up to the house in some way, it had to be connected to the doors, too, or so I reasoned. It only made sense. And without anyone stepping forward to either help or hinder me, I started flipping switches, beginning with a line of them at the top of a panel.

“I’m flipping switches,” I called out to anyone listening. “If your lights are turning on and off, then come stop me!”

I gave them the courtesy of waiting for their arrival, and when no one came, I began turning and twisting things and even found a plunger of some sort to pump in and out. I worked my way slowly around the mushroom moving things at random until I came to a large lever that seemed familiar. I’d seen something like it before, maybe in a documentary, I couldn’t remember, but I had the distinct impression that something like it had been used to open a door. It wasn’t labeled, but that didn’t matter. I pulled it back, and alarms immediately went off.

The whole room flashed as once-hidden lights played across the ceiling and ran along the catwalks. The cylinder in the center of the mushroom became brighter as the crystals inside undulated up and down in a chewing motion. It was the weirdest burglar alarm I’d ever heard of, and it wasn’t helping my trespassing case any. Thinking that it had to be the lever that started it, I threw the one I had just pulled the opposite way, hoping that would turn everything off, and suddenly everything went back to the way it was. The running lights vanished. The crystals stopped gnawing. And I owed the owners an explanation.

“Sorry,” I called. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to do that!”

I would have said more, but I immediately forgot what I was going to say when the doors opened. I couldn’t believe it, but I’d accidentally done it. Or the owners had, just to get rid of me. Either way, I was free, so I bolted out before I could get into even worse trouble.

And stopped short in an arid desert.

“What the -?” That wasn’t there before. I was sure of it. I was visiting a small English village, not the Sahara. I looked around, but all the way to the horizon stretched endless sand dunes broken occasionally by a tiny tuft of some plant. The sky looked weird, too. The clouds were strangely wispy and the blue between just a bit too green. I definitely didn’t remember any of that before waking in the strange house. In fact, I could have sworn that I had glimpsed the same street where the punks were looking for me just before the doors closed earlier. At least I didn’t have to worry about them anymore, or the police coming to get me. It would take hours for either of them to arrive. But I had to find out where I was. My plane ticket was only good for England. So, I turned to go back inside and nearly fell over again.

There was the tree. The exact same one that I had hid behind. Now, I am not a tree expert. Wasn’t then and still am not. But this one was distinct for its bark and leaves, and I could have picked it out of a line-up. And there it was, planted in the middle of a desert where no tree had any business being. And in the trunk facing me was a vertical rectangle with impossible dimensions, too thin to squeeze through and yet wide enough for two people abreast, beyond which was the room that I had just left.

I staggered back in amazement. I glanced all around me to confirm that I was indeed in a desert. I even felt the scorching heat as the wind blew past me. And I looked on either side of the tree for signs of the enormous mansion before walking completely around it. It was just a tree. The same tree from that tight little block back in that quaint little English village, right across from the alley that the punks had chased me through. And it had an impossibly huge room inside it.

And I was completely lost. More so than I was earlier. I wracked my brain trying to make sense of things, but nothing clicked. I would have remembered if I was in a desert at any time. I should have remembered how I got into that weird house. I might have been able to justify either of those things, but not the tree or the impossible opening. That completely baffled me.

I would have gone insane trying to figure it out if something hadn’t distracted me. A large black shape began to crest one of the dunes from the far side. It looked like a vehicle, maybe a dune buggy, but there were weird claw-like things jutting from the sides and what looked like a gun mount pointing forward over the roof, and suddenly, wondering how I got there became much less important. If that was a military vehicle, I had the sneaking suspicion that I didn’t want to be seen by it, but the only place to hide was behind, or in, the tree, which stuck out like a sore thumb. The decision wasn’t hard. I would rather be inside where it was cool. At least I would be comfortable when they came for me.

I peeked around the tree to check on the vehicle before ducking into shelter and couldn’t believe my eyes. It wasn’t a vehicle. The thing that topped the dune was a gigantic scorpion, and it had spotted me.

I wasted no time. I expected to barely squeeze through the gap but instead raced through with unanticipated ease, so much ease that I careened uncontrollably through the room and into the mushroom. That was a blessing, though. After a frantic search, I located what I hoped was the alarm control and threw it. It had opened the doors earlier, so naturally I assumed it would close them, too. As expected, the doors closed and the lights flashed alarmingly. The crystals gnashed together in the cylinder, but this time a ponderous groan filled the air. It sounded like a bunch of arthritic old men trying to put on socks. Thinking that I had broken something, I threw switches randomly, trying to get the groaning to stop, and the room stomped.

That’s what it felt like. The room lifted itself like an elevator then slammed itself down again, throwing me off balance. I stumbled away from the controls but quickly corrected myself, and just as I was about to wonder if I had broken something very expensive, the doors whirred open.

They whirred. And of course, they did. They were on motors, after all. But I hadn’t heard them earlier, so I knew that I had done something wrong. I went over to check them, even though I wasn’t a door expert, either. If it was something simple that took just a little oiling, I might be able to affect temporary repairs. If I could find any oil, that is. But if it was anything worse, I would never be able to pay it off. I had to know what it was, either way. But I had to be wary of that huge scorpion, so I approached cautiously, and saw rainforest outside.

“This is too weird…” I whispered to myself, peering incredulously through the opening. Humid air and the smell of dense vegetation wafted in, and I felt giddy breathing it in. Thick ferns stood right in the doorway and over them more ferns with wider leaves blocked the view of everything behind them. They were lit by the lights in the room, the ones that didn’t come on just to alarm everyone, and I had the impression that it was night, although there was nothing visible to prove it. Anything could have been hidden behind the wall of vegetation, and I was in no mood for more surprises, so I flipped the lever again to close the doors and put up with the flashing lights and groaning once more.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the lever. Something very strange was happening. It felt like I was trapped inside some sort of magic mansion and that lever was the key. Then I saw it. A button marked, “Intercom.” So, I pressed it, expecting that I would finally speak to the owner of that insane place.

“Hello.”

That one polite little word scared me out of my wits, and I whipped around towards the source. I hadn’t heard her sneak up on me. She was short and blond, with a long lavender coat over a rainbow t-shirt and matching pants, and on her head was a cute little straw hat with tiny flowers and a little bit of veil. She smiled at me in a peculiar way, like she could afford to be friendly because she was the smartest and most capable person in the room, while simultaneously making the place feel very comfortable, and I knew right away that I could trust her. I took a moment to steady myself from the abrupt scare before saying, “Are you the owner?”

She looked up and to the left as if politely telling me that that was the stupidest question she had ever heard, then told me, “I am the interface.”

I thought I’d misheard her. “The… what?”

She smiled, cocked her head cutely, and pointed daintily at the button I had just pressed. I had read it wrong. It hadn’t said, “Intercom.” It said, “Interface.”

And then I looked at her. Really looked at her. She was bright and shimmered slightly, like the rebroadcast of an old CRT television over digital media, and although completely three-dimensional, I could finally see that she wasn’t a person. At least, a person that was in the room with me. She was decidedly translucent.

“You’re a hologram?” I asked. She must have been loaded to afford an intercom like that.

“I am the capsule’s interface,” she loftily replied. “And you are not supposed to be here.”

“No kidding!” I couldn’t help the sarcasm. After all, I’d been trapped in there for a while. “I’ve been trying to tell you that! Now, can you just please let me out of here so I can get back to my hotel room?”

She smiled in a polite form of irritation and pointed daintily to the doors.

I shook my head. “Oh, no! No, nonononono! I already tried that and I ended up in a desert and a jungle, neither of which, I suspect, are anywhere near England! So, if you don’t mind showing me the real way out of your little funhouse, I’ll be on my way!”

“Oh!” The lady perked up, suddenly sprouting the brightest smile. “You’re from England?”

Way to stay on topic, I grumbled to myself but didn’t dare say it. And before I could think of anything wittier to say, she suddenly frowned and remarked, “But you sound American.”

Ah, I noted. One of them. She probably expected me to be packing heat, too. Out loud, I said, “Sorry to disappoint you.”

She shrugged in a pert little way. “No one’s perfect.”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t try. “Can you please show me the real way out of here?”

“The capsule’s main portal is the only egress,” she chirped, sounding like a chipper version of Alexa. “Accessible, of course, from any corridor via dimensional intertransition.”

That made me peer at her curiously. She was weird enough already, and now, she sounded like she was reading from a technical manual. But I quickly decided that it didn’t matter, since I wasn’t ever going to see her again once I made my escape from that place, so I smiled and nodded a lot and then put on my confused face when the realization hit me.

“Are you sure that’s the only way out?” I asked, keeping desperation from my voice. “Because that out there sure doesn’t look like a quaint little road in Cottingham!”

“Well,” she said in lofty annoyance, even raising her nose at me, “If you hadn’t been spinning knobs and flipping switches willy-nilly, it would still be a quaint little road in Cottingham, wouldn’t it?”

I had no answer for that, although I should have suspected that monkeying around with the instruments might have had something to do with my current dilemma. But how was I supposed to know that? I thought that stupid mushroom was just an art piece!

“Okay, so this thing changes the scenery out there,” I carefully replied to show my understanding as I gestured at the high-tech mushroom. “Can you make it let me out?”

She frowned at me as if I was a very slow child. “You do realize where you are, don’t you?”

“I honestly don’t care,” I replied, although that was a lie. I’d never even heard of such a place before, much less been in one, and I was curious how they pulled their tricks. But at the same time, I couldn’t wait to get out of there, even if it meant running into that gang again. At least, they were something that I understood. “Just let me out.”

She pointed at the lever. “That’s the door control.”

“Not out there,” I argued. “The quaint little road in Cottingham!”

She sighed prettily in exasperation, even deflating in a cute manner. Her entire demeanor was starting to annoy me.

“Well, you should have thought about that before you played around with the console,” she scolded, her thin blond brows knit angrily.

“How was I supposed to -?” I stopped. It was useless arguing about it. Instead, I took a deep breath and as politely as I could asked, “Could you come out here and help me, please?”

She scowled, pondering my request as if it was also the stupidest thing she had ever heard, then finally said, “I’m right here. However, I cannot interact with capsule controls unless authorized.”

I couldn’t believe it. “What? After all that jabbering, you’re not going to help me?”

Her scowl grew impatient. “I cannot interact with capsule controls without the proper authorization!”

“I thought you owned the place,” I hastily pointed out. It must have been too hasty because her scowl intensified.

“I am the interface,” she haughtily explained. “I activate only to supply ready information or to take temporary control in the event of crew incapacitation.”

She peered at me irritably. “Or if someone pushes the button.”

I felt like I should apologize to her, but I was in no mood for prolonging our acquaintance with the time that would take. And I did need her help, even if she refused to do anything about it, so I made her an offer.

“Okay, so you can’t touch the controls,” I said, trying not to sound too anxious. She could, after all, refuse the offer. I had to put all my hope into her wanting to get rid of me as much as I wanted to leave. “Could you tell me what to do so I can work them for you?”

She rolled her eyes up and to the right in deep thought, pouting prettily. After an interminable amount of time, she finally looked at me, her brows raised, and addressed me like I was in preschool.

“Do you know your primary temporal coordinates?” she asked through a sweet smile.

I knew those words, or so I thought, but strung together like that, they didn’t make any sense. “My primary -?”

She sighed heavily, throwing her head back, and I saw just how much I was annoying her. She didn’t even try to be pretty. Instead, she just let the complaint fly, and it was rather refreshing to see. “How do you less advanced species even make it through the day?”

Certain that was some insult against men, I still let it pass. It just wasn’t worth it. Instead, I kept my cool and asked, “You want to tell me what primary temporal coordinates are?”

“Everyone exists within a chronal period called…” she began to lecture but stopped and eyed me critically, like I was a bug under a microscope. Discarding the topic with an annoyed flick of her fingers, she said, “You know what? Never mind. What is today’s date?”

I felt insulted but I didn’t know why. Hastily telling myself that it didn’t matter, I asked, “Why?”

She raised an eyebrow, as if to say that I should just do it without asking stupid questions, or something to that effect, so I told her and she nodded sagely.

“Please enter the following coordinates,” she said. “Two seven six nine zed gamma eight …”

I got lost after that. There were too many numbers, and she spoke way too fast, and I could swear that she just threw in letters to confuse me, and some of the letters weren’t even letters. Well, pi isn’t, as far as I know. I glanced at the mushroom and back at her while she rattled off somewhere around twenty or thirty things, then she stopped to scowl at me.

“Aren’t you going to input the data?” she demanded.

I glanced between the mushroom and her a couple more times before I asked, “Where?”

She deflated in a huge, exasperated sigh and plodded moodily to a section of the console that had a few dozen switches on it, as well as a digital readout at the top and a few knobs and toggles at the bottom. She haughtily indicated the entire panel and began saying “numbers” again. “Two seven six nine zed gamma eight delta…”

I rushed to the controls to put them in as fast as possible, but hesitated when I saw the switches. They only went up or down and clearly were not marked in any way whatsoever. Neither were the knobs and toggles, and the digital display, which already glowed with numbers and squiggles, had only nine places to populate, far short of the dozens she had rattled off. I stared at it like a caveman for a bit, and the flashing lights didn’t help my thought processes any, before turning to her with a scowl of my own.

“What?” she irritably sighed, eyeing me critically.

I gestured at the panel with both hands in a clearly questioning way, but she only wrinkled her nose in cute annoyance, and it made me so angry that I snapped, “How?”

“How… what?” Then, it dawned on her what I meant, and she sighed again, shook her head, and tsked. “Millions of years of evolution and you still don’t know how to input temporal coordinates?”

“I missed that class in high school,” I dryly replied. “Now, will you please -?”

Thankfully, I didn’t need to ask twice. She passed her hand from one toggle to another and to each knob and switch, explaining how they worked and how they affected each other and I’m happy to say that after what felt like an eternity, when she was all done with the lecture, I finally understood everything even less than when I first laid eyes on the panel. And she wasn’t happy about it.

“Just do everything I say,” she grumbled, then pointing a finger at each individual instrument as she spoke, she walked me very slowly and condescendingly through the process. Somewhere along the way she stopped to remind me, “You do realize that if you hadn’t run roughshod all over the controls, you wouldn’t be in this predicament right now, don’t you?”

I swallowed the very colorful response I had intended to give and waited for her to continue the instruction, and after a short wait for my reply, she tilted her head in a cute display of triumph and moved on to the next instrument. It was excruciating, and after a while I think she got as bored as I was, but she kept going and my mind started drifting even as my hands kept working. I blamed the flashing lights. They were getting quite hypnotic.

“Now,” she suddenly said louder than usual, waking me from my trance. “Move to this panel and throw this switch.”

I did as she requested and there was no change in anything. After a few seconds, though, the room jumped again, the flashing lights ceased flashing, and normal lighting resumed. The lady sighed, gave me a satisfactory smile, and said, “There. Now, get out.”

I glanced at the doors apprehensively. “Are you sure?”

She heaved a huge sigh. “I am the interface. I don’t make mistakes.”

“I’ll bet,” I grumbled, but as much as I doubted her word, I still moved over to the door control. As soon as I grabbed it, though, I hesitated. “But are you sure? The last time I stepped out, there was a giant scorpion.”

“”Ah,” she replied. “That would be the Ordovician period, approximately four hundred sixty-seven million years prior to your temporal coordinates. No, I have not returned you to that era, and yes, I am certain that if you have input the coordinates correctly, you are back where you belong.”

That insult I couldn’t let slide. “What do you mean? You told me what to do. You watched me put them in.”

She nodded, but there was a shadow of doubt in her eyes.

“What?” I had to know if that shadow meant that I was going to walk into something worse than giant scorpions.

“As with any… well, unenlightened species, such as yours,” she said slowly, picking a hell of a time to choose her words carefully. It was making me nervous. “There is always the possibility that an element of chaos might factor into the equation and cause the results to become skewed and…”

I couldn’t stand the prevaricating any longer. “You think I screwed up, don’t you?”

“You had dozed off,” she pointed out.

“You saw that, did you?” My ears burned, but I chose to ignore it. “But you watched everything I did. You would know if I made a mistake.”

“I am the interface,” she indignantly replied. “It is not my place to correct those that I inform.”

That made no sense. “Then, how do I know I did it right?”

She lifted her nose indignantly. “I do not know. I am programmed to work with experienced pilots, not untrained intruders.”

I tried not to let that bother me, since it wouldn’t matter for long anyway, and very nicely asked, “Did I do it right?”

“How should I know?” she indignantly replied. “It isn’t my role to watch every little thing that you do.”

I sighed heavily. There was only one way to find out, and anything was better than hanging out with her any longer. I threw the door control and the doors hummed open. Beyond them was a cobblestone street with a fancy horse-drawn carriage clattering down it. The people striding casually on the far side wore Victorian era dresses and suits, the women holding parasols in the light drizzle. It smelled like manure and smoke, much of which lay in the street or was smudged on the brick walls of the tightly packed buildings.

“That is not Cottingham,” I remarked.

“It isn’t even your temporal coordinates,” the lady agreed. I turned to scowl at her, but she beat me to it by scowling at me first. “Are you sure you listened to my every instruction?”

I lifted a brow high but could think of nothing to say. So, she helpfully added, “You were dozing off, after all.”

“I heard everything you said,” I snapped, irritated at the accusation. Then it hit me and I turned towards the doors, gasping incredulously. “People.”

I took an unconscious step towards the doors, gaping at the scene. The carriage had already rattled past, but the people were still in view. Some of the drizzle was even blowing inside.

“Wet,” was all my brain could process at the moment. “Stinks.”

“Are you all right?”

Her innocent question snapped me back to normal. Well, almost normal. I whipped around to confront her. “That’s not a funhouse!”

She scowled in confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

I glanced through the doors in alarm and back to her. “That’s not some weird turntable, is it?”

She paused to absorb that, then her brows lifted curiously. “Is that what you thought?”

I looked at the doors again. The giant scorpion could have been an animatronic in an over-sized sand box, and the ferns might just have been a wall of ferns, and she could even have faked the heat or humidity, but there was no way she paid actors to just walk around a Victorian set all day on the off chance that she would want to see that kind of scenery, much less keep a horse and carriage to complete it, and I didn’t care how much money she had to waste. Something much weirder was going on, something that I just couldn’t wrap my head around.

“What’s happening here?” I demanded, getting more nervous by the second. “Where am I, and who are you?”

“I am the interface,” she replied as calmly as ever. “And you are in a Type Eighty Temporal Reconnaissance Capsule.”

I didn’t take the time to process that. Instead, I pointed out the door and demanded, “And that?”

“That is London, circa 1666,” she replied, still calm as ever. “And I’m afraid that is as close as you will come to your correct temporal coordinates. Good-bye!”