By Tiara Louise Rea
Frank Rosenthal had one simple ambition – to create a Time Machine. To Frank, there had never been anything more exquisite than immortality, and the idea of moving forward and backward in time at his will had always intrigued him. At twenty-two, he dropped out of a prestigious English University and moved to the countryside, where he devoted the rest of his life and fortune to his eager dream. At 54, he died a quiet, relatively unnoticed death in a lonely estate, leaving behind one known relative – his son, Milo.
While alive, there was very little that Frank Rosenthal had understood about his son and truly less that either of them had in common. With his father’s death, Milo noticed little difference in the silence house on the hill. Milo had, in fact, known this death was coming for several years and since his father had done nothing to attempt treatment, it wasn’t exactly a surprise when Milo came to visit and found his father listless on his waterbed. The last attempt (and subsequent failure) to prove that his Time Machine worked had resulted in an intense bout of clinical depression, which left his father locked away in his house most of the time anyway.
Kneeling on the old wood planks that made up his father’s living room floor, Milo finished boxing the last of the scattered machine parts – junk as the dictionary might call them – that had once littered the kitchen, dining room, and bedrooms. More concerned with clearing the house so he could sell it and leave this all behind him than looking into the sentimental value of the work his father had put into the Time Machine, he tossed part after part into unlabeled boxes and pushed them aside.
A buzzing, whirring sound from the next room over caused Milo to glance to his right, spotting the small, rusted robot known as Ana. His father had built her when he was only seventeen, a miraculous feat at the time, though she was on her last leg as it was and Milo wondered now since he had the power if he shouldn’t simply take her down to the dumpster and recycle her. She was aged, and the robots he could afford after selling this house would pay for something better.
“Bring those here, Ana,” he called, and like an obedient dog, she followed the sound of his voice and rolled to a stop before him, an armful of old papers and computer parts tumbling from her rusted frame and into the box he held out. She was built quite human-like with moving facial features and over 1,000 pre-programmed expressions, though years of overuse and water damage had left her in a sad shape, more boxy than busty. The newer models other scientists had come up with were quite a great deal better technologically and sociologically. They were built to interact with humans – she had been built first as a toy and then as a maid, and she often stuttered in speech and her movements were quite jerky in comparison. “Why were you heading towards the door?”
“There is someone waiting out there for Frank,” she said evenly, her tone almost eerily human. “I was going to tell her he is no longer home.”
“You can say that again,” Milo sighed, leaning forward to look out the small porthole of a window near the front door. Through the video screen window he could indeed see a woman, in her early twenties at the latest, with short black hair, thick mascara, and long limbs.
Standing, Milo watched the girl as she went so far as to knock at the door impatiently. Quirking a brow, he folded his arms and regarded her through the one-way portal. “Do you know her?”
Ana mimicked his movements, extending her neck an inhuman distance to peek around the corner curiously and regarded the girl in the portal along with Milo. “Yes,” she said matter-of-factly, her rusted head squeaking as it bobbed gently. “She worked with Frank on the Time Machine for the last few years. They were inseparable until the last committee meeting.”
“Go turn yourself off for the rest of the day,” Milo said dismissively. “I’ll tell her about Frank.” Though he didn’t feel brave, he knew Ana would just invite the girl in, and he was in no mood for socialization as he packed up his dead father’s things.
“How can I help you?” he asked, pressing the small red switch at the right of the portal. On the outside, his image was reflected through, as if they spoke between panes of glass.
The girl’s green eyes lit up and widened. “You must be Milo. I’m here to—”
“He’s dead,” Milo said, beating her to the punch, though he didn’t expect her eyes to look into his in the way they did. Full, emotional, heartbroken. “I…didn’t mean for it to come out so bluntly,” he lied.
“It’s alright,” she said, shaking her black hair from her eyes and folding her arms. “I knew it was going to happen. I didn’t expect him to last much longer. He was…” She paused for a long moment, regarding Milo as he watched her. “May I come in?”
Glancing over his shoulder, Milo noted Ana had taken to a small corner of the hallway and turned herself off, and thinking about the easy way she had said this girl worked with his father for the last several years slightly put his mind at ease. “Yeah,” he said finally, opening the door for her after unlocking the series of intricate bolts his father kept on every inch of the frame. “I’m sure you want to pick up some things, having worked with dad and all.” He shrugged as she entered and waved towards the basement. “The Time Machine stuff is down there. Have at it.”
Her beautiful face contorted a little at the tone of his voice and she was silent as she entered and cautiously crossed his path towards the basement stairs. “My name’s Alba, by the way,” she said.
“Nice to meet you,” Milo replied as he shook her hand, though he wasn’t and sensed she knew that.
Watching her go, Milo thought he saw the same kind of fire that his father had when obsessed with his current project, and a lump formed in his throat.
Though he and Alba had made a small lunch together in the kitchen and it had been a welcomed break from their separate work, Milo wasn’t interested in making a sudden friend with his father’s strange protégé. He was more interested in where his father had found someone like Alba and why she was picking apart the Time Machine than anything else. Of course, he could only imagine what a 50-something bachelor and a young girl her age could find to do together. The thought irked him, made him slightly ill.
“How does this thing work anyway?” he asked while sipping from an ancient coffee mug. It was nearing midnight, and he had only just realized Alba was not picking up the pieces but fitting them together in a feeble attempt to make the Time Machine work.
“This thing,” she stated matter-of-factly, shaking her dark hair from her eyes, “Is a Temporal Atom Displacer.”
Milo grinned. “A Time Machine?”
With a roll of her eyes, Alba moved in front of the large white machine, her cool eyes scanning its smooth surface. “Your dad always called it a Time Machine. Said it was his boyhood dream, but it’s pretty lame, calling it a Time Machine, when it doesn’t really control time at all – just displaces the atoms around us to distort how we see it.”
“Yeah, well, my dad pretty much lived on dreams and in them, so that doesn’t surprise me.” Milo approached her side and inspected the machine in a perfect mimic of Alba’s motions. “So it…displaces, um, atoms? I…have no clue what the hell that means.”
Laughing outright, Alba nudged his shoulder in a playful manner Milo had never really experienced, having never had many friends as a kid or anybody close enough to have had that sort of physical relationship with him. Rubbing his arm where she nudged it, he watched her cautiously, as if afraid she might hug him next.
“Milo, your father described you so perfectly.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“The Temporal Atom Displacer works just like it sounds. It takes the very particles that make up life and time and space and everything around us, and displaces it or moves it into another dimension. In laymen’s terms? It moves you from the timeline we are currently in onto another entire plane of time beyond this one.”
“That’s laymen’s terms?” Milo asked, sitting on the old green couch his father had often fallen asleep on. “So why doesn’t it work? My dad spent ages trying to make it do what you say it should. I can’t imagine how all that effort didn’t pay off.”
Alba frowned again and took a seat next to him, shrugging. “We tried everything. Your father poured his every last penny into this. It was his life’s ambition to make it work and to…” Pausing, she glanced over at Milo, her brow furrowed just like his father’s had always furrowed. “Milo, your father talked about you. Quite a bit.”
“Right,” he said, looking down into his empty cup before setting it down at his feet. “Did he mention the time he neglected my art shows for his seventeenth committee hearing? Or maybe the time I told him I was gay and he offered to escort me to the nearest hotel room? Or when I came to visit several summers ago and he was too busy to see me? Those must have been fascinating stories.”
The silence between the two of them dragged on for several minutes, and the more it did, the more Milo realized that he had both been wanting to get these feelings off his chest for years and that getting them out in the open in front of this strange girl made him feel guilty and full of remorse and anxiety.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “You didn’t ask for my life story, and I’m sure you’d rather not know it anyway.”
“No,” Alba said, her voice quiet and very serious. “I wanted to ask why you never visited, why he said he hadn’t seen you in years… I’m sorry, Milo, but he did love you, very much in fact.”
Milo laughed, standing quickly to his feet and ready to burst. “Just because you’re his lover, you think you can—”
“I’m his daughter, Milo,” she blurted, standing to face him.
“Excuse me?” The room was spinning and Milo’s pale cheeks burned.
“I know it sounds impossible, but he and my mother had an affair a long time ago and—”
“Does that make you…my sister?” Milo had never imagined in his wildest nightmares that he could possibly have any other relatives. Everyone he knew was dead or had abandoned him.
“Half-sister, I suppose,” Alba said gently. “Trust me, I was shocked that I had a brother, when dad told me.”
Milo cringed at the ease way she said dad like it was just that simple to become a part of Frank Rosenthal’s life, when he had been trying to do so for his entire life. It was as if this simple, stupid girl had weaseled her way into his father’s life under the guise of helping him with his Time Machine, when they were really simply bonding over years of absence and distance. Running both his hands through his hair, he turned to look at the source of all his frustration which seemed to now tower above him, ominous and overwhelming.
“This stupid piece of shit,” Milo snapped suddenly, face contorted in pain. “It was so easy for you, wasn’t it? To bond over this piece of shit with my father, to show him you were smart enough, fast enough, good enough to understand it all. And I bet he went on for hours about me, I really bet he did, and all the ways he’d rather have you for a daughter than me for a son. Anything but me.” Real tears were swelling in Milo’s eyes, and for a moment he forgot himself as a sob wrenched from his small, skinny form. “It’s not your fault,” he added, trying to fight the emotions pouring from him. “I don’t care. It’s not worth it anymore.”
Alba was at his side in an instant, her arms wrapped around his shoulders. “Milo, I don’t know you at all, so I have no right to tell you how to feel or what to feel…but in the time I’ve known your father, he has changed quite a bit. He was so cold until we talked about his Time Machine, and finally, he began to tell me things. He was really sorry for all of it, Milo. I know it. He wanted so badly for you to understand his work.”
A whizzing sound overhead alerted Milo to the presence of Ana, who seemed to be making her rounds again around the large estate. The sound was almost comforting, breaking the silence and easing the blow of the last words out of Alba’s mouth. For a moment, Milo could imagine himself as a young boy, sitting down on the small green couch, watching his father work on his Machine, asking questions as Ana brought them tea and lemonade. He had never tried to show interest, had never bothered to learn the intricacies of his father’s work. Everything had simply seemed too far removed from him, too big or too hard or too large a commitment. In the time it took for Alba to say those last words, realization dawned on Milo – he would never see his father again. He would never be able to watch his strong fingers wandering against the ancient machinery or hear the gears as they worked friction between rusted metals or feel the sting of his father’s empty words.
There was no longer a chance at knowing he was worthwhile in his father’s eyes. But there was the opportunity to try and learn what had made him who he was – the only chance left was to understand the Time Machine itself and to possibly assist in making it work. It would have been the only tangible thing that could have made his father proud.
“How does this thing work again?” he asked quietly, staring up at the towering mass of springs, coils, metal, and glass. He could almost hear it whizzing with life.
