23
Head Office

Ryan allowed his face to soak up the sun as he clears his coffee out of the mug he bought the last year he was in college.

His left hand is in his pocket as he scanned New York City out of his window. It’s been a neat while since he truly looked at it, often with his own ulterior purpose that quickly went over his eyes like a blindfold.

Then he would tell himself that he wanted to rest and be done with this schtick, he should just retire, and give it to the guy running the marketing department.

Some woman in a mauve jacket running across the concrete clutching his kid in her hand? Push it back a day.

The sunlight flooded the felt couch to his right, marked at the center of the wall in front of him. 

It flooded his desk with an assortment of stapled papers of statistics and schematics stacked on the right, a towering all-in-one on the left with a pulsing keyboard that lit up one key at a time while the computer is at rest. The mug would sit next to his stack of pencils dead-center. A small picture of his daughter leaned against the chin of the desktop.

She had a cup of cookies-and-cream in her hand and a uncontrolled smile at the camera. First day of middle school. Ryan offered to drive.

The sun also flooded the wooden table that pulled the length of the wall opposite the couch, holding prototypes and products alike. A mounted hydraulic steel frame closed his collection built over three decades up.

But none of his achievements could surpass the one represented by the photo.

Sean came to the glass door in front of him. Two knocks rang.

“Come in.” The intercom hidden inside his desk wired his voice outside.

He walked in with his white coat on him. The door closed behind him as the ambience noise outside were sucked out of the room.

Ryan tapped the Y key twice on the keyboard and his computer drew on the year in review.

“So how is Miles Hector’s first day?” The CEO casually looked at his screen. The right hand went in his pocket.

“Quick learner. He’s at the cafeteria right now, but he’s happy.” 

The sentence prompted Ryan to look at his wrist.

“Right. Twelve fifteen.” He pulled the top piece off of the stack and scribbled on it with a yellow pencil, while keeping his eye at the desk. “It looks like we are ready for step 4. Have we made sure that Kayla can get an immersion sight for this current day?”

“It’s working, we just turned it on.”

Ryan smirked.

“So we made this, and we turn it on unceremoniously.” Ryan looked at him, eyes shifting. “How long has it been on floating boat? Have them see the whole thing, not just fragments of it.”

“For your information, it has been—“ Sean checks his watch. “Twenty-three minutes and change.”

Ryan drank.

“Mmm.” 

The slot beneath the tabletop in front of Ryan made a whirring noise and produced a piece of paper. He took it in his hands and read it.

“It was a risk, Sean. It was a risk.” He sighed while tracing the terms of the paper dated August 2096. “Sending my girl to a crashed plane. Don’t tell me you don’t know what the issue here is. If there’s a force out there, it’s helping me.”

He looked out the window.

“Allow me to interject. She violated the NDA for the prototype.” Sean fixed his collar. “I understand that this is—“

“You don’t. Whatever NDA, she’s too young to sign it. She won’t get it.”

“Kayla is a legal adult. She signed it.”

“Then it is void. I don’t believe you will sue me over it. Whatever it takes to develop the device—”

“A time-traveling device. You told the entire team that it was your dream to make this happen, but I don’t get it.”

“Humans have limited lifespans. Are we gonna make a pill, and replenish those stem cells or what-have-you down the line and call it a day? We have a mission for humanity.” His face was craning towards Sean. “We make something that everyone can benefit from. Then you go to sleep at night.”

“You don’t need time travel. You are sending your kid—“

Ryan looked at him as his face flooded with color.

“I had a dream that I can move back and forth. Maybe undo mistakes here and there.” He took his glasses off to shine the lens. “It’s a different world once you get there. Not sure if it is worthwhile.”

“Too late for us to turn back now, Sean.” He walked in front of his desk and sat on the section next to the pencils. “What we do is to look ahead. We spent the money. We made this thing happen. And I gave my little girl to someplace, somewhere, sometime—“

He let his voice stop before it collects too much in his throat, and then started back up again.

“I know I owe her. I know I don’t have anything for her. We can’t fail, Sean.” Ryan looked at the hypercube sitting on his desk. “For all good conscience, for Kayla. We can’t fail.”

He checked his roadmap on his phone.

“We finished two weeks from now.” He looked at Sean. “That’s how much longer I’ll have to wait before I can see my little girl again.”

He took the photo from his computer and looked at it.

“Failure is not an option, Mr Hunter.”

“Guess I’ll let you know if we can ship this thing, then. I’ll be excused.” He approached the door as Ryan waved him away. The frost in the glass went away as the ambient sound came back before the door mechanism sealed it off again.