I walked slowly through the corridors of what we call Time Central Station, on the latter end of the singularity arc, as if I were walking to my execution. In a way, I was. Walking into the Infernal is to experience one's own death and to spend an eternity in isolation; spat out whole on the other side, whenever the machine is switched off. However, if one knows the secret, one can endure eternity.

The hallways were cut out of the living rock, more like tunnels, really. Every few paces, a glow globe was thrust into the ceiling to spread a little illumination on the spartan stone. I wondered if the debilitating nausea that always results from Time Shooting is a result of the machine or simply a case of nerves. My jittery body told me the smart money was on my nerves. My stomach felt queasy at the mere prospect.

I knew what Purley meant by her personal totem reference, but not why I was requested by name—usually just “an agent” goes to give testimony. I pondered if this shoot would render me insane. Perhaps I was already insane. What is a few hours or years or even decades in this world, when countless eternities are spent in the void of the Matrix?

I could hear lectures from open doors up ahead as my path took me through the classroom area; probably new recruits being told that from the very beginning that physics had it wrong, and that there is more in heaven and earth than they had dreamed of. I wondered how many might make it.

My evaluation with Miss Purley took the better part of two hours but passed quickly as she is delightful company. I'd always mused over what the exact criteria for clearing an Orphan to shoot through time might be. I'll be the first to admit that it can be quite taxing on the brain pan. The realization that all events and all places happen instantaneously at the same point in space-time-matrix is usually enough to shatter the logic system in the first place. When one adds that our perception of the universe is an illusion and that time doesn't truly exist, except as a coping construct for our ill-equipped minds to order existence, things go haywire pretty quickly.

Once one learns that not only do paradoxes exist, but that the Gail-ignoring universe doesn't care one iota about whether it makes sense to humans, things go from haywire to fugazi quicker than our illustrious leader, Doc Epstein, can crank up the volume on his beloved Disco music. All of this knowledge pretty much turns everything that we think we know inside out. Then, if one is accursed enough to walk through that damn time machine we call the Infernal, you get the added bonus of being stuck in a disembodied void of nothingness, except for your thoughts and what you'd been feeling, for all eternity.

If that wasn't enough to shatter your psyche, then one has to cope with reliving snippets of time, over and over, as events loop around each other, as well the disjointed reality of adapting to different realities as things change—that is if you even notice. I wondered if our counterparts at Wayback still tried to reconcile time and time travel with that era's conceited and primitive notions of cause and effect. 

That's why they slip us the White Rabbits, or so they say. The hallucinogens not only turn one's mind inside out and make you see all sorts of things, they also distort one's sense of time while turning up the speed of the mind and tearing down the protective walls we've built in our brains to protect ourselves from reality. My White Rabbit trip was only about four hours, but it seemed like eons. I knew from experience that even those endless infinities pale in comparison to being cast into the void during a shoot. I tried to console myself with the fact that I was going to give an exposition to the Monks.

Just ahead of the immutable past where time travel cannot occur, at the tail end of the singularity arc, there is the Wayback. That base sits in the late twentieth century, right before everything initially went fugazi, and the scholarly records-keepers, whom we call the Monks, constantly interview us Orphans from the future and check our deposition, as well as any records we might carry, against both the immutable past and the original records from the future.

One cannot check results in their future, my present, because things are manipulated. History morphs around the changes. I, again, consoled myself that giving testimony to the monks was a sort of promotion. I attempted to make myself feel enthusiastic about walking into the Infernal once more. I failed. As I walked towards doom, I could hear bits of the conversations from the classrooms.

"Time is not linear. It is more like a fluid that we can swim about at will. You need to unlearn everything that you think you know. "

And, "Paradoxes? If a building collapses in one city, how much of an effect does it have on a city on the opposite side of the world? Just because we cannot understand how something can both be and not be at once does not mean that the universe cares or even notices. If you go back in time and kill your grandfather, the cosmos has no issues with that. You've simply created a loop in linear time where your grandfather lived, spawned your murdering ass, and went back and killed him. Rather than a straight line in time, you've made a loop..."

I could hear the moans and standard "But, what," questions. That one took me a long while to grasp as well. Something can both be and not be at the same time, regardless of whether we think it makes sense or rips apart the fabric of existence. Schrödinger's Grandfather. The universe simply doesn't care if things make sense to us or if our meticulously detailed mathematical theories say it can happen or not.

If those poor sods have a problem with the universe not caring about what we think would be a paradox, just wait until they're orphaned from the time stream. A sadistic chuckle escaped my lips at the thought of that. They don't call us shooters Time Orphans for no reason. Once you jump outside the linear flow of time, you're never back in sync with it. You literally become orphaned from the flow of time.

From another room, I could hear a far too eager-sounding student asking, "But how can we change major events if they are almost impossible to change?" 

The response came from one of my favorite teachers, a disgraced physicist recruited from the twenty-second named Marta. "We call that Temporal Mass, T-Mass for short. Both the gravity of any particular event and how much it has been meddled with, make it more difficult to change because there are far too many factors involved. The key is finding the Butterfly, a catalyst event, so to speak, that is rather insignificant, in and of itself, but that will have a major impact on how things unfold from that moment forward. The course of history is not altered by fighting major battles but through the butterfly effect..."

My footsteps took me out of earshot. I mentally shrugged. Perhaps I had absorbed more of their constant teachings than I suspected.

As much as I had loitered outside the lecture halls, I eventually reached the stairs that would take me to the lowest level. Once more into the breach of death I strode. I could hear some ancient electronic-instrument-driven music playing from the lone room at the far end of the dimly lit hall. The two armed guards paused their conversation just long enough to note me and nod and then continued with their debate over the superiority of the Green Tonic over the Blue. I noted that they were carrying primitive powder-propelled projectile weapons rather than the particle pulse weapons of the modern era. That made sense, the electromagnetic interference of weapon fire would probably throw the time machine out of whack and the poor shooter—myself in this case—might wind up in Anywhen rather than their destination. I steeled myself and pushed open the double-hinged, swinging doors that exactly matched those of the commissary. 

While I never really had a solid idea of what a secret, hidden underground laboratory should look like, I knew that this one most definitely fell short of my expectations. While the place was brightly lit with rows of Vid-screens on the far wall, displaying rows of arcane-seeming calculations, and almost every available surface was packed with papers, notebooks, and various bits of computer and testing equipment, I never imagined that a secret lab that is the heart of the bureau's efforts to improve our present would contain a billiards table and be littered with cups and food containers spanning the culinary delights of four-hundred years.

Even if one could readily accept this sort of clutter as a by-product of genius scientists, the cacophony of the worst of music, spanning the preferences of the rebellious youth across dozens of generations, was an assault on both one's senses and sense of taste. Some ancient noise was playing with some guy yelling about Soho doorways and not knowing who he was talking to. I didn't know if the recording quality was terrible, the speakers were bad, or if it was meant to sound that distorted. As always, the disconcerting sign on the far wall was brightly lit: “Negative 13 days without an accident.” 

The time machine itself, the Infernal, dominated the center of the very large room. It stood on a square dais and was made of a matte-black metal so dark that even light failed to illuminate it. Every time I gazed upon that rectangle of cold metal, I was reminded of the description of a black hole, so dense that even light cannot escape it. It stood plain and unadorned except for the multitude of wires that snaked out of the top and sides and connected it to the controls and powering blocks. Looking mostly like a giant-sized doorway, one could just barely detect the interference in the air inside its opening. The air wavered a bit, looking more like steam and hazing one's vision as they looked through the opening. Dark, stark, and imposing, it was difficult to look at without feeling a sense of dread.

A half dozen others occupied the room, all of which I knew. There was Rolf, whom I liked. Rolf is from my time, so we have some things in common, despite him being much more intelligent than myself. He was seated in front of a Vid-screen, pouring over some formulae. Doc Epstein was seated atop the billiard table, his long mass of tangled, salt-and-pepper hair as wild as ever. He was sipping some pinkish drink and holding some charred hunk of meat on a stick. Two others that I'd seen around were checking the digital gauges hooked up to the Infernal. Another pair were playing cards at the far end of the room and nodded my way when I entered. No white coats and radiation suits here, just a motley group with a seemingly cavalier attitude toward changing the course of history. 

Doc Epstein looked up at me and smiled his friendly and disarming smile. It suited his rebellious father's personality perfectly. "I see you've finally made it, we've been waiting. Have you brushed up on your twentieth-century dialect?" He patted a spot beside him on the table, beckoning me to sit. "Satay beef?"

I jumped atop the table beside him but refused his food with a shake of my head and a wave of my hand. I prefer to shoot without anything spicy in my stomach; when one comes through on the other side, the forceful emptying of one's stomach immediately follows. "My dialect is passable," I stated. "I have a difficult time with some of the slang and accenting, but my pronunciation is decent enough that I could casually pass for a local."

He smiled his disarming smile, and I felt almost immediately at ease. I always found him to be fascinating and endearing, not at all how one would imagine the inventor of time travel and the self-appointed savior of his distant future. He spoke confidently but softly. "So, Miss Cavalier, this is your first real assignment, yes? No more food courier runs and grunt work." He laughed good-naturedly, his chuckle echoing slightly off the high ceiling of machine-cut stone. "When the request came up from the nineteens, I knew that you'd be the perfect choice for this job..."

I cut him off. "What exactly am I to give exposition on?" 

He chuckled again and patted me on my shoulder in a protective, fatherly manner. "No, no, my dear lady. We can't have that." He paused and looked over the control computers on the opposite wall, frowning and nodding at the same time. They had recently come alive with activity as the others finalized the calculations for my time shoot. I could see the cables attached to the infernal begin to pulse with a sickly greenish-blue glow. "If we told you what you were to talk about, it might contaminate your testimony while you're floating through the Matrix."

"I've been instructed on how to give testimony, but never done it before."

"Relax, noble chevalier," he said gently, with a touch of mirth in his voice. "Just speak plainly and honestly. There's a first time for everything. We were all virgins once." He leaned in and whispered into my ear, "Except for Samuel, there. I think he still is one." He tittered and resumed speaking in a regular voice. "I'm sure you'll do quite well on your first field mission."

I looked at him in shock. A field mission is entirely different. "Field mission? I thought you said I was just going to give exposition."

He paused and looked at me. His eyes were piercing; they always were. He shrugged. "Oh yes, that's it," he winked. "Testimony about your present. I regret my Freudian slip was showing." His usually confident and assuring visage slipped for a moment.

I was going to press him on the matter, but it was announced that the machine was ready to hurl me about four hundred years into the past. The 1990s were a time of legend, right before those that benefited from their forefathers' efforts eschewed their way of life and embraced their own destruction. Feeling my heart begin to pound and my resolve wavering, I nodded to everyone and held my posture and face in what I hoped was a bored sort of resolve. Inside, I felt an almost insurmountable terror.

I stepped slowly toward the machine, with each step feeling as if I were trying to push through a steel wall. It took genuine effort to not turn around and run as far away as possible from that damnable machine. The interior of the Infernal began to glow with that sickly glow of energy. The fog of doom wavered in a misty cloud. I could feel the hairs on my body begin to rise, and I sensed the incredible energy pulsating through the doorway.

While the events inside the Infernal are monitored by video and audio, to the outside observer, the transition is almost instantaneous. Once the machine is turned on, the video records typically only show two to four frames of the shooter in the Infernal before they’re gone. At a little over two-thousand frames per second, that’s not even a heartbeat’s duration. Dar, who’s been a Time Orphan for longer than anyone else, once told me, “When you achieve Zen, you become a god in the void.” I knew what he meant, and it has kept me reasonably sane through my few time shoots.

Although being shot out of the time stream into the Matrix seemingly takes zero time to the objective observer, those in the machine are trapped there for hours before they transition. The first thing one experiences is hearing a low hum, followed by one’s skin tingling all over. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the hum becomes a gentle throb and the tingling becomes the weight of force on your body. As it increases in tempo, reality flickers back and forth between the timeless void and the world. Eventually, the flicker becomes a blink, and the blinking becomes a strobe, the tempo ever-increasing. One’s corporeal body becomes immaterial, and feeling it drain away is extremely unnerving.

However, I discovered that whatever one is thinking or feeling when their body melts away will have quite a bit to do with one’s mindset through the countless infinities of the Matrix. As soon as my skin felt the crawl of electricity, and when that hum begins, I immediately open my mind, letting it go lucid, and begin masturbating. That’s my “totem,” as Miss Purley put it. 

Breathing to the thrumming drone of the hum as it pulsed, my fingers sought my clit, flicking my clit in time with the rhythm of the machinery. My other hand plunged into my wetness, pushing in deep as the humming rose in volume and the pressure on my tingling body increased, then letting off, drawing back as it subsided. 

While patience is required, I can time it so that when the material world disintegrates, I am in the throes of orgasm. That feeling of rapture, all my body’s nerves alight with pleasure, my mind reeling in sexual thoughts, is how I like to spend my infinity. I edged myself for several hours, always at the cusp of orgasm, a thousand sexual fantasies cavorting in my mind’s eye. When the final lurch of the machine wailed out, shattering my eardrums and rending my body into shattered atoms, and all the universe disappeared into nothingness, not even darkness, I willed my essence into an explosive orgasm.

Despite being disembodied, the sensations one feels are merely how the brain translates external stimuli. For eons, my soul exploded through the void of nothingness, creating decadent, sexual realities along with it. My self-created universes were all happiness and sex, the horrors of life, and the vampires forbidden from intrusion.

Maddening, endless, and mind-breaking, countless infinities were spent in the void. My lucid mind was free to roam, to ponder, and to plan, but the pulsing of pleasure, wave after orgasmic wave of my rapture, dominated all. If one is to spend forever in a singular state, I couldn’t think of a better feeling. Eternity can be bliss, but it can also drive you insane. Additionally, when one spends multiple infinities in the timeless void between realities, an hour, a year, or even a lifetime spent in reality seems to be more the dream than that endless state.

Eventually, the process reversed itself. The first thing to materialize was the scar on my forearm. With glacial slowness, the rest of the universe brightened into existence. The strobing followed, blinking so quickly that all seemed bright, then slowing, the humming noise returning. My body, listless and tortured, popped back into existence. Nausea, horror, and confusion followed.

After an endless amount of eternities, I suddenly felt! I felt a ravaging pain coursing through all of my essence. I felt weight, pressure, intense heat, and freezing cold, simultaneously, and felt my agony-racked body plummeting through space. I welcomed it with a euphoria beyond words. The elation of physical feeling was the greatest bliss one can ever experience; overtaking the anguish of all the pain and torture it contained. Yes, it was pain, but I was whole again!

Our physical perceptions may very well be an illusion as far as the universe is concerned; as far as I'm concerned, being able to feel something, anything, even pain once more, is superior to being cast asunder in the void. I saw lights, bright lights through my restored, but still blurry, vision. I couldn't stand and fell on my hands and knees, gravity grinding me under its heel; my guts spewing bile and whatever else my stomach contained onto the floor. Through my vomiting spasms, I laughed the cackle of a madman. I couldn't decide if it was worse to be the one hurled through the endless void of the Matrix or to be the guy that has to mop up afterward.

Mere seconds later, my body was beginning to feel normal, albeit weak, and unseen hands helped me to my feet. A smiling youthful face offered me a wet towel to wipe the vomit from my face. My mind got used to having eyes once more, and I could see the twentieth-century version of the Infernal, here at the beginning of the singularity that spans several centuries. This place we call Wayback on our end. I never bothered to ask them what they call it. The infernal looked almost exactly like the one at Time Central, except this one has slightly more rounded corners and the power supply is much larger and closer to the machine than on the one in my present. This place was, however, much cleaner, being constructed of man-made brick and painted a glossy white, devoid of a pool table, and no dreaded terrible music playing too loudly. 

"Do you know who you are?" One of the 20th Docs asked me. I never saw him before, but then again I'd only been this way three times before. 

"Gail Cavalier, from the 24th. Sent to give testimony to some random Monk herewhen."

He looked puzzled. "Monk?"

I paused and momentarily thought I was still in the void of the matrix; my mind concocting being spat out in some demented dream. Then I remembered. "You call them 'Checkers' here, I think. We call them Monks upstream because they sit cloistered away all the time writing and reading." 

"Clever," he smiled. "Follow me, and I'll take you to a room where you can freshen up. Hungry at all?"

I was. I also had it on good authority that my stomach was totally empty and prepared to accept the offerings of twentieth-century food. I also needed some alone time to feel what it was like to have a body once more.