Dr. Linda Rose didn't look like a common 30-year old physicist. Long dreadlocks, reaching her butt easily. The thick, orange-brown strands were filled with countless small metal plates and clips. She wore the ornaments just for appearance. Apart from that, Dr. Rose usually wore a T shirt from some heavy-metal band, torn jeans, and heavy, black leather boots. Judging from her appearance, no one would guess she was a PhD in temporal physics from Harvard, working at a private lab owned by a large multinational also in Boston.

But now, Linda Rose sat in her apartment and cried, hating all of society. Today, she had received news her project was being cancelled. The company as well as its stockholders didn't see the use of it, didn't believe it would work, and during their last meeting, decided to pull the plug. No more money in this sink.

Despite Linda's severe protests, arguing that it was almost ready for testing, her dedicated work, the huge rewards it would yield, the decision was final. She could keep her job, but no more of the project.

The project in question involved a device to travel through time to visit the past. It had turned out that the future couldn't be visited, but the past, yes. The complex mechanics were all worked out by Dr. Rose, as well as the huge mathematical calculations required. It turned out making the time travelling device itself wasn't really tricky, but the exact pinpointing of the place were the time traveller reappeared in the past, that was the sting.

The Earth moves around the sun, but the sun also moves through the galaxy. At a speed of 43,000 miles per hour it goes, which means that the place in space were the Earth had been at the time of, for example, Linda Rose's birth 30 years ago is not the same place the Earth occupies in space one year later, which is not the same place two years later, etc....

So, if one travelled in time without taking heed of this, let's say 10 years in the past, he or she would end up in the vacuüm of space, in the spot the Earth would occupy 10 years later. And that meant death.

Linda was still calculating the position of Earth, calibrating the rate at which the universe itself expanded as well, when she heard the project was cancelled. One argument was that time travel to the past would be impossible. Where, one manager wondered, were the time travellers of the future? Did not Stephen Hawking himself throw a party for future time travellers and no one had showed up? Would not the crucifixion of Christ be so popular an event that the entire country would have been overrun with people back then? The absence in historical records of this was, so was the thought, proof time travel to the past would not be possible and therefore, Dr. Rose's project a waste of cash.

And then there was the "grandfather paradox". What if the time traveller killed his own grandfather in the past before the man had children? Then the time traveller could not exist himself. But then, how could he ever travel back in time to kill his grandfather?

Linda argued that maybe the time traveller became some kind of "ghost", non-corporeal, being able to witness the events but unable to interfere. An idea being met with laughter.

Then she suggested the existence of parallel universes, a hypothesis debated by a lot of scientists. There had to be more than one universe, and a time traveller altering the past travelled not only back in time but also to another universe. So he could kill his grandfather and live, for the time traveller did come from "elsewhere". This idea Linda brought up got turned down as well. No more money.

So she sat at home, hating everyone. Six years of dedicated work, all for naught! Six years! Ever since she got her PhD she had worked for this firm, who had opened a few months before her promotion. And now they dropped her like a stone! And she should be glad, Linda was told, she could keep her job. Yeah right. She was sooo glad!

"Fuck you," she thought. She was going to end it! With out without permission, she was going to end her project! The device itself, creating a so-called wurmhole (a "tunnel" in space and time), was almost ready for testing, it only needed the exact coördinates to be fed. Dr. Rose would use the company's supercomputer to calculate the precise point in time and space and show them she was right. No, she would sell the device to a competitor! Yes, that is what she was going to do! Perfect revenge. But first she needed to test it, travel back in time herself.

So she did the coming weeks. Calculating, programming, finishing the device, all in secret and using money meant for other things. Her goal was to travel back in time three times in a row, first one year, then five years, and finally ten years before going back to the present. So in total she would travel sixteen years to the past.

When she finally had everything calculated, she fed the data to the device which she had attached to a leather girdle she wore. Luckily, the device itself was small and thin, about 5 by 3 inches. As departure point Linda had picked a spot outside the city of Boston on a big meadow bordering a small forest. It was better to appear on a spot that hardly anyone visited, should she not be the "ghost" she hypothesized she would become, but travel to a parallel universe. She would soon find out which hypothesis was correct, Linda pondered.

"Position of Earth one year ago, correct... coördinates are correct, system status green," she muttered. Then she activated the device.

The wurmhole opened around her. And she was gone.

A flash of light.

And Linda was one year in the past, same spot were she was standing.

But she realized something was wrong.