Urza - Time Machine Operation 2

A high-pitched whine rose to echo through the lab, and a thin red beam stabbed from the base of the machine. It lanced through the charged air, just past the silver man’s shoulder, and neatly struck the circle scribed on the floor. The ray fluttered a moment before sweeping in an arc. It looped the golem once and sped in its course. In moments, the single spinning beam had widened into a crimson cone that enveloped him.

The silver man stood there, bathed in lurid light, watching his creators. The men were busy at their consoles, drawing up one energy source and leveling off another, directing the beam in its spiraling crescendo, configuring the coordinates of space and time….Light intensified. The artificers’ endeavors slowed. The whining hum reached a peak. Master Malzra and Barrin soon moved not at all, frozen in space…or time.

The probe understood. The roaring machine and its whirring cone of light had teased the cord of time down to a frayed nub, and then to nothing. With rising fury, the device plucked at the packed skein of past moments. They too began to unravel. No longer motionless, Master Malzra and Barrin moved backward, undoing all they had done. Their arms darted with strange jabs like scorpion tails. More than that, the silver man also moved, or his past self moved. It trudged backward out of the circle just as he had trudged forward into it, only minutes before.

Within the cone of regression, the present-time silver man watched in amazement. His doppelganger conferred with Malzra and Barrin. Their words were lost to the hum of the machine, but the sense of them was clear—reversed syllables that did not inform or enlighten but rather disinformed and obscured. All the while they spoke, the ghost golem knew less and less, and the ghost time machine retracted into the dome above. When the brief conference was done, the past-time golem staggered backward toward the door, ignorant of the hidden machine and all that had been said.

The regression accelerated. Barrin and Malzra scuttled backward about the room, dismantling things, forgetting conversations, reducing conclusions to hypotheses, surrendering step by step the whole march of time. Soon they moved too quickly to seem anything but man-shaped blurs, then were gone entirely. The lab was dark and empty for some time, except the occasional jag of a mouse backing fitfully across the floor.

***

Malzra, with a suddenness that seemed almost savage, reached toward the probe’s neck, performed some quick manipulation, and shoved the creature’s head back on its shoulders. In a moment more, he lifted the metal skull-piece cleanly away.

Within the time machine, the silver man stared, stunned to see his own being so quickly and easily dismantled. The body yet stood, though the casing of the head lay now, as if discarded, on a side table. The inner workings of the golem’s head were laid bare. Cogs and cables gleamed beneath a low set of struts. Light leaked through the whole mass. Malzra was busy tugging at a central silver case, the movements of his fingers awakening twitches in the creature’s vivisected frame. Another two jiggles and Malzra drew forth the case. He opened it. Inside lay a dark stone the size of a child’s fist. He removed the crystal. All final signs of life fled the creature.

The silver man watched in amazed dread as Malzra held high the stone. Gulping backward laughter came from the gallery. Malzra shouted something that ended the jollity and retreated to a table where he positioned the stone in a metal case.

The students in the gallery began to move. Malzra and Barrin busied themselves setting tools into cases and rubbing smears of oil from rags onto their hands. As the room slowly emptied, the dissected golem merely stood, lifeless and headless in the midst of it all.

The regression slowed. The time-traveling silver man’s hulk smoldered—heat from temporal stress. He stepped from the coruscating beam. Around him time resumed its forward march. The students headed back into the gallery. The scholars unpacked their tools and wiped their hands clean.

***

The regression was done. He was suddenly yanked from the time stream and back again, bathed in that rapacious red glow. Master Malzra summoned him to the present.

The silver man arrived. The beam skittered and danced away, withdrawing into the machine overhead. It too withdrew, trailing gray tendrils of smoke from the temporal stress it had endured.

***

Time Streams, Chapter 2