Disclaimer:
All characters portrayed engaging in sexual activity are 18 years of age or older. Actual historical figures or living people represented are done strictly for context and humour, I lay no claim to them. As always, critiques and reviews all welcome, illiterate flames will be snickered at. Enjoy!
Chapter 1- Give A Monkey A Gun...
Mark sat in the chair in his bedroom by his computer desk, trying to look chastised, but he was worried that a tiny hint of an evil smirk was crossing his lips. He hung his head in the hopes it would be less noticeable. Standing in the room with him were two stone-faced men in black suits and dark glasses. They stared at him silently for several minutes before glancing at one another. Finally, the shorter one sighed.
"Okay, Mark," he said heavily. "Once more, from the top. I want you to give us as detailed an account of what happened as you possibly can. Leave nothing out."
"Everything?" Mark asked quietly.
"Everything."
"Well, as long as you think you have the time." Mark quipped, sitting up straight and leaning back in his chair somewhat casually.
The tall man frowned. "Was that a joke?"
"Not a very good one, apparently," Mark muttered.
"Stick to the facts," the man said firmly. "We hate jokes."
"No kidding," Mark mused, settling in to relay the events he had already explained to them twice that evening. "Alright, let me start at the beginning."
"Not funny, young man..." growled the shorter agent.
"I found the thing in the park. What did you say it's called?" Mark asked.
"A Holmes Field Device."
"Right," Mark agreed, nodding. "I found the Holmes Field Device in the large lilac bushes over in Grosvenor Park."
"Why were you in the bushes?" interrupted the tall man.
Mark gave him a wry look. "I was making a drug deal. I was supplying uranium to Libyan terrorists. I was hiding the body of a transvestite hooker I killed. What does it matter? It's not your worry or jusrisdiction, if you're telling me the truth, is it?"
"Fair enough," said the shorter agent amicably. "Please proceed, Mark."
Mark nodded. "It was really small and compact at first and I didn't know what it was. But it kinda gave off a hum and it almost had a glow, I dunno. I pulled it out of the bushes and over to a secluded area where there was still some light from nearby lamps. Anyway, I must've tripped a catch or something on it, because the thing folded out on itself into what looked like a platform and grew these weird-ass frames with displays and dials and buttons and shit. It was like something out of Star Trek."
"I can see how it might appear advanced to you," the shorter agent said, nodding. "To my partner and I, it's rather primitive, but that's not your problem. Please proceed."
"Once I was sure that no one was around or likely to come through, I began fiddling around the the dials," Mark continued. "At first I was confused, because it didn't seem to do much, except spit up weird numbers on the analogue screens, but then I thought about it and realized they were dates. They were just... off."
"Not off," the shorter man said. "Just dates set by a different calendar, if you will. The Holmes Field Device was developed by Ashleigh Holmes, the younger brother of the more famous Sherlock and Mycroft, but he was perhaps even more brilliant. He modified the Gregorian calendar to account for leap years and Daylight Savings, changed the accounting of seconds, minutes, hours and so on to eliminate the need for such inconsistencies. The Holmes Calendar will be adopted eighty three years in your future, but it is so accurate that it won't need to be modfied until the year 12,645 AD."
"Huh." Mark said in response, not caring much.
"Oh, and he also invented the temporal displacement device you found," the man added. "Although it'll be another two hundred and eight years before that comes to light."
"Anyways," Mark continued, killing the history lesson. "Once I figured out they were dates and times, I tried setting the time back a few hours. After that, I started pushing some buttons. Things got blurry for just a split second and then the sun was blinding me. I was still alone, but I stepped off and looked around, still in the same spot, but obviously at a different time of day. I looked at the clock on my cellphone and it seemed to have adjusted to say it was six hours earlier, just like I'd set the dials."
"Your phone adjusted accordingly. Electronics will do that."
"I was really excited to look around but realized I didn't want to be caught and I suddenly thought I should be careful."
"What a novel idea," the tall man said dryly. "Go on."
"Well, I went back to the Holmes Field thing and set it to take me back to the time I'd come from. And it did. Then I began thinking about what sort of things I might be able to do if I was careful."
"And this is where it got interesting, yes?" the shorter agent remarked.
Mark nodded. "Maybe I could change things. Not big things, but little things. It suddenly occurred to me the D that Miss Fischer gave me on my Physics exam earlier in the semester had kept me from getting into the university of choice I'd applied to. So I decided to see if I could fix that somehow..."
***
Mark crept through the bushes under the cover of dark, oddly certain than no one was going to see him. He couldn't explain why, but he felt a confidence that he would not be discovered because he hadn't been there before. It didn't make sense, but maybe that was a good thing.