Here's the second installment in my story. As for the image, it was rendered in Daz Studio.The room and table were modeled in Shade. 1 An Incredible Revelation I guess the best place to start is at the beginning. My name is (or maybe I should say was) Timothy Cocoris. I’m an American of Greek descent. At the time my story began I was sixteen years old and in my junior year at Triple Falls High School, in Triple Falls, Pennsylvania. I was an average student. I could speak Greek, which I learned from my grandmother, an immigrant from Thessaloniki. I had taken classes in French and Latin, but didn’t do too well in either of them, but I did pick up a bit of Koine Greek in a class I took at the Greek Orthodox church where I went with my parents. I wasn’t very proficient in science, or math but did well enough. My one sole accomplishment was that the year before I had built a camera obscura from scratch, even grinding the lens myself. I succeeded in taking some simple photographs with it and it had garnered me second prize in the school’s science fair. It all began on May 7, 2012. I had gone to the science lab at school that night to meet my friend Jack Taylor who said he wanted to show me something that would “revolutionise the world and especially the study of history”. But Jack’s first love was quantum physics and he hardly cared about history, so his statement left me somewhat puzzled. That was all about to change. Jack was waiting as I entered the lab. Sitting on the table was what looked like a calculator and beside that was a legal notepad and a laptop. “So what’s the big deal?” I asked, throwing my backpack on the table. “This” he said, picking up the calculator. “A calculator is going to revolutionise the world? I asked. Jack began punching the keys of the calculator then set it on the table. “Note the time on the clock here”, he said, pointing at a corner of the calculator’s large viewscreen. It said 8:16 PM. “Suppose I told you that the entire science of geometry is based on a misconception?” he said. “The misconception being that space is three-dimensional.” “It’s not?” I said. “That’s news to me.” “Nope,” he said, “there are actually four dimensions. Well, I only know of four of them, there may be more.” “OK, I said, there’s ‘height’, ‘width’ and ‘depth’. So what’s the fourth one?” “Duration” Jack said. “To simplify things a bit, each of the three Euclidean dimensions represents an object’s ability to exist in space in a different direction. Height enables it to exist vertically, width horizontally right-to-left, and depth enables it to exist horizontally front-to-back. Duration represents the object’s ability to exist for any period of time.” “Now watch,” he said and he pushed one of the keys. The calculator hummed and I could feel the table vibrate slightly. The calculator seemed to look a little fuzzy for a second or so, then it vanished in a flash of light, startling me slightly. “What happened?” I asked, feeling the spot where the calculator had been a moment before. It felt warm for some reason. “It’s warm”, I said, not knowing what else to say. “Friction” Jack said, “from the machine’s vibration.” “So what happened,” I asked again, “did it explode?” “Not exactly”, Jack said. “It’s a time machine and I just sent it three minutes into the future.” “A time machine”, I said. “I thought time travel was supposed to be impossible”. “So did I,” Jack said, “until I made the Discovery”. He picked up the notebook and leafed through its pages. The pages were filled with diagrams, formulae and notes. I glanced at it but it was nothing I’d ever be able to understand. “So what exactly is this ‘Discovery’?”, I asked skeptically. “Difficult to explain,” he answered. “The hard part was figuring out how to make it move…” “But it didn’t move,” I interrupted. “It just sat in one place and vibrated.” “At super-light speed”, Jack said. “But isn’t it impossible to move at super-light speed?” I protested, “Isn’t the speed of light the fastest possible speed?” “It was thought to be, until very recently when researchers at CERN observed neutrinos travelling a distance of five hundred miles, arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have done. “To simplify things a bit, when an object moves, or vibrates, at greater than the speed of light, it creates a sort of singularity in space-time and is able to use the singularity to travel forward or backward through time.” Jack droned on explaining about what a singularity was and how to create one, and a few other things “I’m not even going to pretend to understand any of that”, I said. “Well,” Jack continued, “the trick is learning to control it. Otherwise a time traveler would hurtle randomly into the future or the past, and no telling where he’d end up. If this thing is ever to be useful, it has to be controllable.” Suddenly there was a flash of light and the calculator reappeared on the table. “Look,” Jack said, pointing at the clock on the viewscreen. It still said 8:16, but my watch now said 8:19. “It’s off by 3 minutes now” I said. “No, it’s accurate”, Jack said. “It just bypassed the last 3 minutes. If a person had been holding it, he would have only noticed the passage of a second or so. The trip would have been instantaneous.” “So you can travel instantaneously to any time in history?” “It’s only instantaneous for short distances. Travel along the fourth dimension is just like traveling along any of the other three dimensions: The further you go, the longer it takes to get there.” “so how far can you travel along the fourth dimension?” I asked. “In theory, infinitely, but you’d need a time-reference for a controlled trip. That’s where this comes in.” He picked up the calculator and punched the keys then showed me the screen. It said : P: 5-7-2012 D: 6-9-0068 Followed by some coordinates. “So what’s it mean?” I asked. “These are the time and space coordinates you’d need if you wanted to go back and watch Nero’s suicide. The top line is the current date. The next line is the destination date, June 9, AD 68. The coordinates are for Rome. I don’t know how accurate it would be, location-wise,” he said. “I’ve made short trips with it, and it has always been anywhere from a few feet to a couple of miles from my intended location. I have no idea how far off target it would drop me if I made that long a trip.” “You’ve actually used it?” I asked. He nodded. “Where’d you go” I continued. He pointed at a folder on the laptop’s screen. “Look in there” he said. I opened the folder and clicked on a file called 0001.jpg. It was a photograph of a town with people dressed in what looked like period costume. “That’s Triple Falls in 1786,” he said. “That’s the furthest back I’ve gone so far. I haven’t tried the future yet, though.” He set the “calculator” on the table. “But what if you’re like in the second floor of a house, and you time-travel to before the house was built? You’d materialise 10 feet above ground-level.” “That’s another thing,” he said, I’ve already taken that possibility into account. It has a safety fearture where it seeks the nearest solid surface, meaning that it can’t drop you off up in the air or in water. I picked up the time machine and turned it over in my hands, still unable to believe it. “But whatever you do”, he continued, “please don’t tell anyone. Last thing I’d want is for it to fall into the wrong hands Imagine the disaster that would result if, for example, someone were to go back and give modern weapons to the British soldiers during the Revolution. The U.S. would lose the war and there’s be no Unites States.” “Well,” I said, “You could always go back and assassinate Hitler or something.” “And return to the present only to find out that something just as bad, or even worse, had happened. I’d rather not chance it. But promise me you’ll keep it to yourself,” he said. “Don’t worry, my lips are sealed”, I assured him.”Besides, it would be pointless to tell anyone. Who would believe me?. My thumb must have absently brushed against whichever button activated the machine, because it started vibrating. “O my god, Jack said in a panicked voice, “ drop it before it’s too late!” I tried to drop it as the vibration increased, but for some reason it wouldn’t leave my hand. Then as the vibration reached a nearly intolerable level, I became surrounded by a swirl of light interspersed with blue sparkles. Jaqck’s voice faded, and the room disappeared from view. Then I lost consciousness.