“This doesn’t make sense,” Josh said to his cell phone. A text had just come in from Lily.
Whr R U?
Why was she asking this? The message didn’t look like the others he’d been getting from Lily ever since yesterday afternoon. That was when she’d figured out how to send text messages from two thousand years in the future—through the ailing time machine.
“What!” Josh shouted as he examined the timestamp on the text. It was yesterday, September 7, 10:35 am. That wasn’t possible. That was before Lily had disappeared. Wasn’t it? This must be a mistake, he thought. But something about the text really bothered him.
What if this text from Lily had been delayed for some reason? For two days now he’d been working on how to get the time machine fixed. “What am I missing?” Josh shouted now at his laptop. Josh paused and shook his head as he noted his increasing use of one-way conversations with inanimate objects.
He looked at the text again. The message itself was odd. Lily obviously knew where he was. He was in the present—frantically trying to get Lily back home from two thousand years in the future—where she was sent by a broken time machine. Why was she sending this text now? He asked his laptop, “Am I supposed to look at this in a different way?”