Dr. Gottlieb’s Incomplete Guide

to Making Time, Timeslips

and Wormholes

Chapter 1

Making Time

                It's hard to understand what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work. Where did it go? Dr. Gottlieb couldn’t figure it out. It was as if time wasn’t constant. He never had enough time. Dr. Gottlieb was a famous scientist and inventor that rivaled Einstein and Edison. He set out to create an invention that would make more time thus giving the person that owned it more time to spend. He used a wristwatch as the device to make more time. He had tweaked the watch, and no one could really understand, but he had created something like a miniature super-collider inside the wristwatch. It was able to create anti-matter which somehow twisted or perplexed time said some crazy philosopher. Gottlieb himself had said and I’m not going to do the German accent, it was really a very simple device, but the truth was no one else would understand the mechanics of it for over a century. It certainly was simple to use. There was simply an hour arm, a minute arm and a make time arm. Making time was as simple as winding your make time arm on your watch back a few hours.

                He first tested it in his laboratory. The watch was made of platinum, he started by winding the make time band from 12 back to eleven. He thought he felt a stillness immediately as if the world had collectively fainted suddenly. The result was he had made an hour of time for himself. He couldn’t quite believe it. At first, he didn’t, until he wandered out of his laboratory. His invention had worked. It appeared he had made extra time. He was even more astonished to learn in his extra time, the outside world had vanished, well that wasn’t exactly accurate, the outside world was there, but the people had vanished. He wasn’t sure where they went, they just were no longer there. He wandered around his neighbor aghast at the emptiness of it all. The animals were gone, it was as if this time existed just for him.

                “Vas is goin on?” he muttered to himself, but he knew it had to do with his invention.

                “Vere did ze peeple go?” Dr. Gottlieb stood scratching his head.

                After what Dr’ Gottlieb estimated was an hour, time returned to normal, and all the people and animals were back, still he had many questions about the device he had invented. Where did everyone go when he made extra time? What would happen if he turned the make time hand back 360 degrees a bunch of times? Was it possible to travel through time? He knew he needed to do many more experiments before letting the public know about what he had discovered.

Dr. Gottlieb was in Nirvana, he didn’t really believe in Heaven. He puttered around his laboratory stealing an hour or two. He had yet to wind the watch around twelve hours or even worse 24, he was, in truth, fearful of what might happen. He had only just begun to experiment with the watch when it became apparent that his assistant was aware of its power.

Herbert was a stumpy little man and Dr. Gottlieb didn’t really trust him. Dr. Gottlieb noticed him examining the watch, and knew he was suspicious. What the doctor was oblivious to was that Herbert had already stopped time a few times and he was completely unaware of it.

Herbert liked to make extra time for himself, so he could go around and steal things. For although there were no people or animals when you made extra time, all possessions were still there. Herbert was carefully never to steal anything like art or precious jewelry, something that could be traced back to him. The one time he just waltzed into the bank and rolled out a pallet of money. It was a little hard for him to steer the pallet down the sidewalk and he had only made an hour for himself. He needed more time. Herbert quickly ran back to the laboratory to make an extra hour of time. Once he had made enough time for himself, he pulled the pallet back to his house and stored the money in his garage. The Bank of London proverbially lost its mind as there seemed to be a total of about 5.1 million dollars missing.

Dr, Gottlieb had heard about the missing money, didn’t hear about any robbery, but didn’t put the two together, besides he’d know if Herbert were using the watch, wouldn’t he? He did not know, and Herbert went right on using the watch and probably would have never got caught, but he got greedy. One day Herbert wanted to pull a hug heist, so he decided to wind the watch back over 12 hours. Herbert body seem to age rapidly in the mere seconds it took him to wind that watch. Herbert watched as his body quickly began to deteriorate before his eyes. His last thoughts were, Oh shit, what is happening, I probably should have breached the subject with Doctor Gottlieb. The good doctor only found the desiccated skeleton of his assistant next to the watch that could make time.

Chapter 2

Time Slips

Of course, an unintended consequence of Herbert winding the watch back more than 12 hours was it caused time slips around the greater London area. The weird thing was the time slips weren’t for the entire world and they appeared to occur in very small spaces and short periods of time. Still, the time slips were becoming extremely problematic. For example, six-year-old Joey Bosa was walking home from the bus stop and happened to hit an extremely volatile and is now a fifty-four-year-old man. Joey like Doctor Gottlieb wondered where the time went.

There were even more horrific examples like Kathy Craig. Christy Craig had been a toddler in a stroller being pushed by her young vibrant 23-year young mom, Kathy. They hit a timeslip and Christy was instantly 88 years old, and her mother was a mere pile of bones on the sidewalk. Christy was confused as she had no recollection of her mother, other than the pile of bones. She is suing Doctor Gottlieb and the case is tied up in court. In one tragic instance an entire minor league baseball stadium aged about nine years. It was fortunate they didn’t get hit with 99 years; it would have literally been the stadium of the dead.

The anomalies continued to get weirder. There was the missing case of Chris Worrell whose mom claimed he was holding her hand walking in the park when he was instantly sucked down a wormhole, never to be seen again. There were missing posters of Chris Worrell, but everyone knew not to look. He had been sucked into a wormhole and would never be heard form again.

Mr. Cranston had said that for all we know Chris Worrell could be on Jupiter.

“But he would die,” I explained to Mr. Cranston.

“Yup,” Mr. Cranston replied.

Ashlee Bartley was the only person I heard of that the time slips worked in her favor. Ashlee was an out of work waitress who was well past her prime. She was forty-four years old, until after a night of heavy drinking, she woke to find she had somehow hit a reverse timeslip and was twenty-three years old. Ashlee had been handed a legitimate science fiction fantasy; she had been given a second chance at being young.

Chapter 3

Wormholes

The wormholes were even more problematic, some of them appeared to drop people off on Jupiter’s moon Titan or deep in outer space where the person would be subject to a horrible death where their eyes popped out of their head.