I meet Adam soon afterwards in the basement of her tower.

At first, I struggle to find words to describe the thing that lay before me, parts of it dismantled, all sparking wires and beeping lights. It’s a steel giant made from parts of other steel giants, their dead limbs and organs cobbled into a grotesque monstrosity that is somehow holding itself together. This is the device that allows her to travel through space and time. Its old name was Traverser 003, before it decided it had enough and broke down here in the middle of nowhere. She has almost finished patching it up.

The top half is transparent, and can be opened up like a car door. The inside is like that of a car, a great many screens and buttons arrayed before the driver’s seat. Despite its ragged appearance, the inside is spacious and rather comfortable, fairy lights strung around the back.

Blain turns them on and makes them flicker. “Lovely little things, eh? Picked 'em up in a store from your time. 1980s, I think.”

“I’m from the 2000’s,” I correct. “Though we still have those.”

She shrugs out of her jacket, pulls on a pair of gloves and picks up a can of spray paint. She reapplies it on the letters scrawled on the side of the time machine, huge, rounded letters that spell out its new name in bright, blood red.

‘ADAM 1.0.’

“Give me two days, and Adam should be shipshape and ready to sail.”

Blain keeps her word.

For the next two days, she spends most of her time down at the basement, and I idling on the couch, watching storms come and pass, listening to the winds howl. I don't know if it's the silence, or the solitude, or my alien surroundings that drive my thoughts in a way I had not anticipated.

When Blain drops me off in my own time, in my own place, how do I simply walk back home, with these visions of the future still in my head? Whom do I tell about this without sounding insane?

These two days have changed me in ways I can never reverse.

If only there was some way to erase this incident from my memory…