Free It Started as a Joke (All the Presidents' Beds, #1) by Kit Helix Page A

“rudest cunt he’d ever met” and “what she needs is a good hard fuck.”
    Sandra was not in need of a good hard anything.
    “I was just fucking with you, Pepe.  You did a good job, and you’ll get a good tip.  But you’re going to need to drag your sorry ass back to the register and comp those two wines.  You get me?”
    “Yes ma’a...,” and he ran off in terror. 
    Sandra sat across from me, pleased as a caterpillar on a leaf.  She brushed a lock of her perfectly thick, perfectly black hair away from her eyes and smiled.  She tugged her purse from under her seat and pulled out a credit card.
    “Eleanor practically ran the country after FDR got sick.  Would you give her a go, just for being adjacent to that much power?”
    “I’d give her a go because she was a stone cold fucking fox,” I said, then muttered, “ That was a lot of adjectives.”
    “Yes, too many,” she said.
    ****
    A fter we left, that conversation, as all hypothetical conversations do, vanished back in to the ether from whence it came.  It was a mere nothing floating in the universe of nothing with nothing to suggest its importance in the least.  Six months went by, a year.  I didn’t even remember Pepe’s name until moments ago.  And yet. 
    You see, I work in a lab unlike anything else on the face of planet earth.  It is government funded, but it is not owned by the government: it is much too big, too important to be owned by anything as limited and ephemeral as a government.  No, I work outside of governmental boundaries, attempting to answer questions and create solutions to problems that haven’t even been imagined.
    So, when I first saw the prototype for the WOGENTIM, I thought, “That’s just another one of our magical gadgets.”  And then.
    Sometimes people with allergies will get itches in places that can’t be scratched.  The back of the eyeball, inside the ear, on the liver.  And it’s agony, those irritations, because no matter how you position yourself or rub your body, there’s just no way to calm that itch.  Short of taking a needle and stabbing it into your eye, you aren’t going to be able to scratch that itch.  The WOGENTIM made me itch like crazy. I had an itch in my brain, somewhere deep, somewhere that couldn’t be scratched.  And so.
    The WOGENTIM was a time travel device.  WO rmhole GEN erating TI me M achine. The itch that I felt was coming from the ether, from that conversation. 
    Our lab had tested the WOGENTIM, using robots and drones as test subjects.  We’d send them back in time, have them find a spot that wouldn’t be disturbed, and then just record data for years until we’d come and dig them up. 
    At first, we’d send the bots back 24 hours.  We’d send them back then find them right where they were supposed to be.  Then we tried a week.  A month.  A year.  A decade.  A century.  A millennium.  Every time, they were fine.  Though fine, of course, is in relative terms when you’re asking something to sit in one place for a few thousand years.  They were rusty, yes.  Their batteries were dead, sure.  But perfectly intact.  And the logs indicated that the stress on the robot bodies was negligible.  In fact, time travel seemed to have no ill effects whatsoever.  And now.
    My first experience with time travel, I went back 30 minutes.  At the stroke of noon, I hit the button and thought that it didn’t work.  When you go, you feel nothing.  It’s not like in the movies or TV.  No flames on the ground behind a kickass DeLorean.  No police box shrieking loudly and spinning through a pink tunnel of time (that’s a little suggestive, no?); no naked Arnold Schwarzenegger bathed in white light and electricity.  Nope, it was just button-pressed = new time. 
    When I arrived at 30 minutes previous, I checked my watch.  It, of course, told me that I hadn’t traveled in time, because watches are not very clever.  Humans, on the other hand...well, I wasn’t