Calling it a time machine would have been too cliché, too limited. Sure, that was one way of referring to that damned thing — as they had (jokingly) come to call their experiment, their anchor — but it didn’t encompass what one experienced when it was activated… no, activated isn’t correct either. An understanding — when one reached an understanding with that damned thing.

It felt like an inside joke, with a dash of psilocybin. You wanted to add “anti-” to every word you at first thought described it perfectly: anti-consciousness; anti-enlightenment; anti-experience. Anti-time-machine.

It wasn’t something spiritual, but you could fool yourself into thinking that, feeling that. But you knew it wasn’t. The oddest thing was how damned normal it felt. So familiar. Anti-familiar. And that may just explain why she, for lack of a better explanation, hated that damned thing.

Can one hate a blueprint?