The not too distant future...
"Boo!"
"Shit!" Charise yelped and jumped in her office chair, nearly toppling backwards. After barely steadying herself, she glanced back and snapped, "Dunlop! Can you stop doing that, for fuck's sake!"
"Only if you stop falling for it," the elderly man chortled, leaning his chin over her shoulder. Ignoring the bristling vexation of his young lab assistant, he smiled, further wrinkling his weathered face like crepe paper, amused with himself.
"What the hell do you want, old man?" Charise clucked, her emerald eyes burning a hole in his forehead. She and the geriatric inventor had been working together for a while so they were both accustomed to her being short with him. She refused to call him 'Professor Dunlop' since he behaved more like an immature frat boy, despite looking every bit the octogenarian he was.
"Busy?" he asked.
Her autumn-orange brows pinched above her dark-rimmed glasses, barely signaling the tip of her annoyance. Gesturing impatiently towards her computer she grumbled, "I'm entering the data you told me to enter."
It was perturbing just to have to tell him. It was obvious that ninety percent of her time at the 'lab' was spent inputting the gibberish he had scrawled in a mountain of notebooks, aka 'data'. One percent of the time was spent helping him with actual work, which was basically carrying junk around the broken-down warehouse he called a lab. She was kept busy fending off his geriatric flirtations for the remaining nine percent.
"Good. So not busy, then," he said, standing upright. He beckoned, curling his knobby-twig finger at her. "I NEED you."
She could tell he was attempting to sound provocative. "I'm not letting you cop a feel of my boobs," she warned.
He tilted his head like a puppy and blinked. "I wasn't going to--"
"You will. I just wanted to get that out of the way for today."
"True. Smart thinking," he chuckled, then beckoned her, "Follow me."
With an exasperated groan, Charise dropped her head back, her red hair cascading over the rear of the chair, before she reluctantly peeled herself from her seat.
"Come on!" Dunlop declared and scurried off practically dancing upon his arthritic knees, a result of his 'wilder' days of sexual conquests, according to him. Right.
"This is what you get for answering a want ad for a 'part-time lab assistant'," she sighed to herself. Then she thought, 'No, this is what you get when you answer the ad, accept the job, and hang around for almost six months just to get paid by some lunatic who fancies himself a 'mad genius'.'
She doubted Dunlop was an actual professor or a scientist. Mad, possibly, but not a legitimate scientist. Fortunately, and to her own chagrin, it was exceptionally good pay, especially for a college student like her who was basically being asked to do nothing except type gibberish into a computer. The crackpot was somehow loaded.
She ambled towards the sound of Dunlop's rambling chatter emanating from somewhere amongst the clutter in the abandoned, dilapidated warehouse. She walked through a maze of tables and shelves full of dusty electronic devices and wires that were apparently scavenged over many years. Down another aisle was an assortment of 'inventions' he had started and dropped.
She steered clear of the makeshift office where she knew the dirty codger spent a couple of hours each day locked inside watching porn. It probably took him that long to get it up and squirt out a thimble's worth of love juice, but kudos to him for still trying without breaking anything.
"Where are you?" she bemoaned as she shuffled along endlessly.
"By the time machine!"
Charise paused, then raised her exasperated eyes towards the cavernous ceiling. "Fu-uuck."
She rounded a corner and emerged in a space occupied by Dunlop's 'baby', his 'masterpiece', the invention he dubbed, "The Chrono-Jump Chamber."
It was an old refrigerator with crap superglued to it.
Charise crossed her arms. "Please don't tell me we're trying this shit again?"
Dunlop busied himself adjusting knobs and flicking levers affixed to the sides of the refrigerator. On the top was an array of electrical circuits and tubes with coils of wires that led all the way up to the ceiling, connecting to a generator on the roof. Dunlop grinned at her. He was trying very hard to look maniacal but appeared more as if he had just passed gas.
"Today, we make history!" he declared with an upward stab of his finger.
"I'm spending the next ten minutes stuck inside the fridge again, aren't I?" she remarked dryly.
"Ten minutes and thirty-three seconds," he corrected. "You saw my calculations."
"You mean your hieroglyphics on the box of cereal?"
"Every minute in the machine takes you back in time five years."
"Can't we use a plant or something to test this out?" she asked. "A gerbil?"
Dunlop blinked at her. "That would be cruel. I abhor the idea of lab testing with cute furry animals."
She spiked a brow at her. "But you're okay testing your shit out with cute, red-headed lab assistants?"
"We've gone over this. You won't be harmed because you are the exact weight and shape required for the test subject," he explained while scanning her body with a lecherous eye.
"Uh-huh. I know that you've been ogling my 'shape' for months. That's why you check my measurements weekly and do 'imaging' tests with me in my underwear," she droned, calling his calculation bullshit for what it was. She was sure he jacked off to the images from those tests, too.
"Exactly!" He nodded, shaking his thinning, scraggly, silver hair. "You were specifically chosen for this!"
"I was the only one who answered the ad!"
Ignoring her skepticism, he waved her over to the machine. "Put on the Chrono-synchronizer Band," he said. She scoffed as she watched him slip a modded fitness band onto her wrist. As he often did, he had stolen the idea from a movie, this 'time bracelet' having been inspired from the classic action movie, Avengers: Endgame.
"Here," he continued and handed her a small pouch. "Inside are some tokens from that time for the buses and the address I want you to go to after you arrive."
Charise didn't bother asking for further instructions since they were always the same as when they attempted the time-trip three times previously: Go to the address then ask for some dude named 'Barry'. Everything else will sort itself out. The synchronizer was time-stamped to her individual 'Chrono-DNA' and would return her automatically to the present in three hours 'jump-time'. For Dunlop, seconds would've passed.
All of this timey-wimey garbage didn't matter to Charise because she knew she wasn't going anywhere. In a little over ten minutes after entering the contraption, she was going to step right back out having not gone anywhere either in distance or time.
Dunlop opened the fridge door. He paused, regarding Charise while tapping his lips with his finger. "Almost forgot. Remove your clothes."
"What?" she replied, her tone flat-lining. "Why? I didn't have to strip the last time we tried."
"I've surmised that only organic materials can go through the jump," he explained. "It's likely the root of our previous failures was due to the fact that you didn't go through the process while... ahem... naked."
Charise could tell he was trying to sound clinical, but the subtle lick of the tip of his wormy tongue across his withered lips and the build up of drool at the edges told a different story.
"You got that from The Terminator," she noted.
"Possibly," he said with a sheepish glint in his blue eyes.
Squinting back at him skeptically through her glasses, she dangled the pouch. "Then tell me, genius, how am I supposed to bring this and the Chrono-synchronizer? Stick them in my ass?"
