The Larcenists

It was a watch. To any onlooker, it would resemble an old pocket watch whose battery needs to be repaired. But, only the four knew what it really was. It was gold in colour, not the gold that we see today, it was not lustrous, just a plain and unpolished gold, which perspicuously has seen better days. The watch looked like it had three parts if you unveiled it; the outer part had an intricate design on it which only added to its antiquity. The anti-penultimate part had the markings of a dial, all in Roman numerals. The crux had the hands, which showed the present time they were in. On the top of the watch, there was a knob with a golden Albert's chain. The chain also had the similar markings as the watch. All in all, the watch was a piece of eye-candy to an antiquarian.

But, it was not any regular watch; it was a time machine that was in Jay's family for centuries. The most surprising thing was that Jay was the first one to realise that it was a time machine. So he probably was the second person in history to time travel, apart from who created it.

The watch worked in a bizarre way. Multiple people could time travel at once, but obviously, conditions apply. They all could go to the same place, hand in hand and they had a specific time limit depending on which era they travelled to.

Neil and Tara, after getting to know about the time machine, were extremely curious to know how it worked. Since 300 B.C, the space-time of our universe was deemed to be emanated from the Euclidean space, which had specifically three dimensions. Later when space travel was reckoned possible, a fourth dimension was discovered, this could be traversed through space-time lapse. To achieve this lapse, many scientists and physicists had tried inventing the time machine; but they failed to do so. The machines they made needed a colossal amount of energy for time travel. When they had successfully created a portal to the past or future, by the theory of conservation of energy, a wormhole was created in another space lattice.

For time travel to be possible in reality, the body that is time travelling has to be projected at a speed equal to the speed of light. When that happens, the specific body has infinite mass quantity with respect to the mass of the earth. The probability of achieving this was extremely low. In order to make it possible, the watch accelerated their velocities, due to which a sphere of heat was formed around them. Once the sphere reached its maximum threshold, the growth of mass around it was not possible. The acceleration of the sphere would stop when it would be equivalent to the speed of light. The mass inside the sphere would be a very infinitesimally small value compared to the mass of the earth, but inside it, the mass would be infinite. Then it as a whole would be projected into a wormhole. But every few millenniums or so, Earth would get sucked into a wormhole. Eras changed, with them the centuries changed, people changed, their styles changed, continents changed. To go back into the previous eras, the wormholes traversed would create a suction power so great that holding on to anything would be very difficult. Each era had its own gravitational pull. They get pulled by a copious number of gravities. The different eras were clearly visible. They passed the time when women wore corsets and long dresses, the time when India was under the British rule, the French revolution along with the German and Russian, back to the time where India was not discovered by outsiders, even further to the days when Aryabhatta lived. Jay pressed the button when he saw the period of Gods and Goddesses in Athens.

The last attempt at making a time machine was done by Jay's ancestor, Jacob Ray Hawkins. He made this time machine in such a way that they could travel in time through all the wormholes that had been induced during the past time travel experiments. So when they selected a specific time era, they would be projected into the wormhole nearest to it. To materialise into the era they chose, the knob should be pulled to its original position.