Timewalkers: A Time-Travel Adventure Gone Wrong

The lift was cramped and old, the kind of lift that creaked when it moves and pings when it stops. Was this the one from the old film? I can't remember.

It opens to the lab, dark and empty. Lights were dimmed, but we all knew the way back to our stations. We passed by the giant time machine in the cold room, past the laboratory bays filled with petri dishes and beakers, over by Dr. Green's workstation where he was studying a sample in his microscope.

"You're late," Dr. Green said without looking up, "we've been working on your machine for like an hour." He didn't wait for me to respond before he turned back to his microscope.

Dr. Gold wasn't around yet. He had a habit of being late - sometimes he'd even show up at 3 or 4 in the morning after partying all night. Still, you can't help but wonder how he continued to get funding when he was so unreliable as a scientist.

We'd started working on this project about three years ago, with a grant from the government for energy research and development. At first, we were just doing promising theoretical work into zero point energy - you know, alternate forms of energy stored inside atoms and whatnot? Some of us were working with vacuum energy - like not even *inside* atoms - but *around* them! I know it's hard to imagine these things but that's what quantum mechanics is all about! That strange space outside of normal physics that isn't quite reality but not quite nothing either! Well, we were stuck in that world for a while until some new discoveries changed everything!

Remember those experiments that caused ripples across time? Well they weren't just ripples! Those experiments opened doorways into alternate realities where time moved differently than ours! Some other scientists have hypothesized that maybe there are billions or trillions of parallel universes out there where time moves normally and maybe their version of this lab exists right now -right now- and they are doing all the same things we are doing right now right here in our lab except it's been going on for three years already! It's mind-boggling isn't it?

So anyway, Dr. Gold had been running these experiments on some quarks from another dimension and then...well let him explain because I don't know exactly what happened: The quarks disappeared and something came through in their place - something small enough to fit inside a tiny electron microscope chamber and long enough for us to think it might be some kind of weird virus! But then it grew! It swelled up like a living thing or like those amoebean creatures from outer space! I remember when we first saw it pulsating in there - alive inside our refrigerator sized machine - our giant time machine that was supposed to take us back in time science fiction style but instead brought a tiny creature through space/time/reality and into our lab!

At first it looked like some kind of leech or tick or something but then its body split open and I swear I thought I was seeing things: It split apart into two distinct creatures - one male one female - both naked and pink like babies even though they couldn't have been more than a few months old by human standards who knows how they define age in their dimension? So anyways they looked at us with big black eyes and spoke English (on account of my research!) so we figured they were friendly beings from afar who could help us advance our research into new dimensions through which we could explore multiple realities at once, including ones where time flowed backwards or forwards as well as ones where time travel already existed as technology that could take us anywhere if only we knew how to use it correctly.

That's how Drs Gold & Green got involved anyway. They had done some work on DMT before so they suggested we create machines based off their designs to send these creatures home so that we could learn about their world...or dimensions...whatever. We made them little chambers like coffins filled with different light spectrums based off their descriptions of their dimensions and sent them back home...but they never reached their destination because they kept disappearing halfway back through our machines along with any objects around them so we improvised: If they could go anywhere then maybe anything could go anywhere too if only there was some way to access distant places through time itself using quantum mechanics!? And that's how we created our first time machine! We put one of those creatures inside it along with several other items taken from other dimensions just to see if this thing worked...and when we activated it...well let me tell you it did work alright: It took our little creature home alright alright alright!!!