Writing prompts - 1. No Coffee - Prompt 445

"This would be easier if you actually told me what we're doing," Peter grumbled.

Professor Haworth sighed. "I already told you. Altering a single space-time variable to see what the consequences are."

"You never said it would be this boring."

"You're getting your paycheck either way, aren't you?" the Professor snapped. Her glasses slid too far down the bridge of her nose and she pushed him back with an automatic motion.

Peter raised both his hands, palms out. "Sorry, ma'am. I'm just here to document."

"Indeed, you are," Professor Haworth told the much younger man. "And I would appreciate it if you let me continue my experimentation without unnecessary interruptions."

Peter resigned himself to more boring hours of making sure his camera was filming everything. When he'd seen the ad in the college noticeboard he had thought it was too good to be true. Three grand for a single afternoon of work? He had the practically jumped at the chance, snatching the little notice away so nobody else would know about the opportunity. Professor Haworth had hired him right away and told him to come at 4 PM sharp with his recording equipment. She hadn't said what for, and all Peter knew about her was that she was some kind of a big shot in the Experimental Physics Department. Still, three grand was three grand, and here he was.

He recorded. Hours went by while he watched her punch little buttons and stare into three different monitors through which obscure pieces of alphanumeric information were displayed in ever-changing patterns. Professor Haworth had told him that she had secured the entirety of a wing's power output at the University for her great experiment. That sounded impressive, but so far there hadn't been any fireworks, arcing bolts of electricity, or any other Frankensteinesque displays of technological power. Peter had tried to ask what the big experiment was for, but he had received incomprehensible answers. The Professor wasn't very good at explaining things, and Peter felt more stupid than he had ever felt in his life next to her.

He glanced at his watch. It was already 9 PM. Unfortunately, the ad had specified the starting time but not the ending time. Peter began to sincerely hope that this wouldn't be an all-nighter. Although, with the amount of dough he was going to receive, it kind of made up for it, he supposed. He'd be able to take Taylor out for a fancy dinner to celebrate their three month anniversary, for example. And the amount of weed the campus dealer would give him was already making his mouth water.

He tried to keep himself busy by watching the Professor work, but it was hopeless. She had pulled a pad out of somewhere was making cryptic annotations on it. Her symbols didn't look like anything Peter had ever seen, although for him physics had stopped at high school. More minutes ticked by. Peter's coffee got cold on the table. Then he got hungry and decided to go for a snack.

"I need you here," the Professor said as soon as he pushed his chair back.

"Just a second, going over to the vending machine."

She gave him a sharp look, the monitors glinting in blue and white reflections off her glasses. " I need you here."

She could be intimidating when she wanted to, Peter discovered, and so he remained seated. He opened his mouth twice to ask what she was doing, but then decided against it. He made sure his recording equipment was doing its thing and tried to ignore the rumbling in his stomach as seconds turned into minutes.

"The calibrations are complete now," professor Haworth announced. She turned to look at the camera, and Peter realized she wasn't talking to him. She was merely voicing her process. "The entanglement stream has been rendered stable, and the chronitons are synchronized. It is now possible to alter a single variable. The control individual is present and he will be outfitted with the chroniton bracelet shortly, as will I. After that, I will initiate the delete sequence. I have selected something meaningful enough to show immediate changes in the timeline yet trivial enough that people will not be adversely affected by its lack, should the delete sequence be successful. Only the two of us will be unaffected by the change, which should propagate instantaneously across the entirety of space time if my calculations are correct.

"After proper measuring has been conducted, the change will be undone, and the only unaltered record of the timeline prior to the experiment will be kept inside these computers. An identical system copy has already been downloaded to a facility outside this laboratory, which will be unshielded from the timeline change. Conclusive proof of the success of this experiment will be reached when both system files are compared. If everything goes according to plan, we will have successfully completed a change in the infancy of our planet, and reverted this change to its original state at the end of the experiment. If successful, the applications for a technological tool such as this one are unimaginable. Although the chroniton reservoir found by our deep-tunnel probe is limited, it will soon become the most valuable object in the world.

"Safety protocols have been tested and retested. Catastrophic failure is extremely unlikely, but the unavoidable nature of predestination paradoxes will ensure that the timeline coalesces into a homogeneous state even in the event of serious bifurcation.

"I will now begin. Entering this code sequence will erase an organism with matching DNA strands across all moments of the timeline prior to this one. Entering delete sequence for the coffee plant."

Although Peter had only understood about half of what the Professor had said, he watched with bated breath as she keyed in a sequence of strange characters into her main computer terminal. Her finger hovered over the enter key for a full two seconds before she pressed it.

"Sequence initiated," she said to the camera again. "The change will take effect as soon as the code is parsed. Thirty seconds, counting down." She turned over to him. "Put this on."

She was holding out a silvery bracelet through which a single glowing line of red appeared to have been threaded into the metal. Peter took the object and held it up to his eyes. The glow inside was more beautiful than anything he had ever seen. It was mesmerizing, and if he squinted and looked just right, the patterns inside it appeared to fragment and reform, shifting, echoing each other…

"Stop that," Professor Haworth snapped." She took the bracelet from Peter and snapped it on his wrist. As soon as it clasped shut, the glow inside it died.

"What are these for?" Peter asked. "Not anything dangerous, right? There's not going to be, like, radiation or anything here, right?"

The Professor smiled, and for an instant she looked years younger. Peter realized she might have even been hot at some point.

"If anything, they are the only thing that will keep us safe," she told him. "Hold that cup for me, will you?"

Peter gestured to his coffee cup. "That one?"

"Yes."

"Okay, I got it. Now what?"

She glanced briefly at one of the displays. "Four, three, two, one…"

The countdown on all the computers reached zero at the same time.

Nothing happened.

Peter had expected some kind of fireworks display at the very least, but there was nothing.

"It is done," Professor Haworth announced, her eyes flying over the computer readouts. "Oh, dear. I did it. It's a success!"

"What happened?" Peter demanded. He felt like he was missing something important.

"The experiment has been successful," the Professor said to the camera, ignoring Peter. "All instrument readouts are nominal. The timeline is stable."

"What the hell just happened?" Peter asked again.

"Look in your cup," the Professor told him.

"What?"

"Look in your cup. Tell me what you see."

Suspecting a trick, Peter glanced at the contents of his cup.

"What?" he asked, angry this time. He felt like he was being the victim of a scientific prank. "It's just water."

"Exactly," the Professor said smugly. "Do you recall what was in it before the experiment began?"

"Uh, water?" Peter told her. "I may be stupid, but I'm not that stupid. I remember that."

The professor blinked. "Peter, that is not correct. Your cup contained coffee before the delete sequence."

"Okay, now you're just making words up,” Peter said. "Sorry, Doc, but I'm not biting."

"Coffee, Peter. The beverage. Do you remember it?"

Peter shook his head. "Is this some kind of a trick question? I do still get paid, though. Right?"

"Peter, coffee! Black, hot. Grows only in tropical climates with a specific combination of rainfall and humidity."

"Say what?"

Peter was very confused to see the Professor get agitated immediately, tossing papers around until she found a page with lots of strange scribbles on it.

"There is no mistake," she murmured urgently to herself. "The calculations are solid. The laboratory should have been shielded. Unless… Peter, can I see your bracelet?"

"Uh, sure," Peter answered, holding the dull gray object.

He distinctly saw how Professor Haworth's face turned pale. "It wasn't secured properly."

"What do you mean?" Peter asked. He was not following anything that was going on and his confusion was giving way to more anger.

"It must have malfunctioned," the Professor said." But then… That means…"

She raised a shaking hand to her unkempt hair and stared out into the distance.

"Um, Professor?" Peter asked. "Am I my free to go?"

"What?" she answered, as if she were only just remembering that he was still there. "Certainly, certainly."

"But I do get paid, right?" Peter asked her.

"Of course. You'll see the… The payment in your student account before the end of the… Week."

"Okay," Peter began. "I'm going now."

The Professor said nothing. She merely stared at her computer monitors with an expression that Peter could only classify as total confusion.

Happy that he was going to get his money, Peter went to his dorm with a spring in his step. He went to the bedroom he shared with his best friend, Tim, stripped down and walked to the bathroom to take a quick shower. There, he discovered that he hadn't given back the bracelet the Professor had given him, and he couldn't take it off no matter how hard he tried. Resigned, he took a shower anyway, trying not to get the thing wet in case it was something very expensive and delicate. Then, feeling refreshed and ready for bed, he slipped between the covers and closed his eyes.

Thunder and lightning woke him up the next day.

It had been loud. Much louder than anything he had ever heard before.

He woke up to total darkness, turned over on the mattress, and tried to go back to sleep.

The second flash of lightning burned searing afterimages even behind his closed eyelids, and the thunderclap that followed it was earsplitting. It jolted Peter awake like a bucket of ice water.

"What the hell? Tim? You there?"

Peter looked over. Everything was black, so he fumbled with his hand until he found his phone. He tapped it and the sharp white rectangle of light made him wince. He angled the screen away from him, towards Tim's bed.

It was empty.

Peter looked at the time on his phone as he was about to click it off. It was 8 AM already, and the sun came up at seven.

Thinking his phone was maybe wrong, he looked at his watch, but it showed the same time.

"Fuck! Gonna be late for class!" Peter shouted, to himself mostly, and hurried through a quick shower and grabbed the first set of clean clothes he found. He gobbled down some cereal and ran down the steps of the dorm until he reached ground level. He had an important exam, and then he had promised to meet Taylor for lunch.

When he stepped out of his building, though, he was forced to stop.

A solid wall of impenetrable darkness appeared to extend in all directions, drinking in the electric light that came from the lobby. It didn't look normal, not even with the sky this overcast, and the first steps Peter took out into the darkness were very cautious.

He met no one on his way across the main quad. Normally, at this time the grounds were already full of students coming and going, but now a preternatural calm appeared to have settled over everything, hushing all sounds.

Peter got more and more creeped out as he made his way to the mathematics building, where his exam was taking place. He was not too surprised when he got to his classroom and he saw there was nobody there.

"Hello?" Peter asked. His own voice sounded faint to him, muffled. "Anybody?"

He made his way back, across the empty halls, and looked into every classroom window. He found no one.

Telling himself not to panic, he half walked, half ran to the chemistry building, but it was also empty. The library was empty, and even the Starbucks in the corner was dark.

Above, the sky still churned with red-white bursts of fractured lightning.

"Professor Haworth," Peter whispered as he passed the physics building. "I'm not going insane. She did something to me. I have to find her. I have to find her."

He saw no one as he dashed through empty corridors, down two flights of stairs and into the subterranean basement where he had last worked with the Professor. He crashed against the double doors, trying to hold in a panic that was already bursting out from its bonds, and stumbled into a glaringly bright space.

Professor Haworth was there, sitting at her terminals, looking as if she hadn't slept all night.

"What's going on?" Peter demanded. "You did something to me. Tell me what's happening!"

At first she didn't even turn around, and Peter was irrationally terrified that she would turn out to be a statue or something. He made his way across the lab, skirting tables of equipment, and nearly whimpered with relief when he saw the Professor turn around to face him.

"You still exist," she said to him.

"What the fuck is happening?" Peter shouted, not even caring that he was being rude. He was way past rude. He was trembling with fear. "You did something to me."

The Professor smiled sadly. "Rather, I did something to everyone else."

"Explain," Peter said dangerously, snatching a metal ruler from one of the tables. He held it as a weapon, menacing. "Explain. Now."

"Of course. As you recall, the purpose of this experiment was a delete sequence that would eliminate a specific DNA strand from the past history of the world. The coffee plant."

That word again. Invented. Except…

For an instant Peter felt as if he were seeing double, but in his mind. He had fleeting glimpses of something hot, drinking, but superimposed on those was water. Tea. Not that… That other thing.

"I see you still have the chroniton bracelet," the Professor said. "Maybe that's why you remain here, despite the fact that it has malfunctioned. Mine, sadly, works all too well. I remember everything."

The brief confusion passed and Peter's mind cleared. "What do you mean? What's going on?"

"To put it simply, a catastrophic failure," Professor Haworth told him, and now she looked old beyond her years. "The delete sequence became iterative on its own, feeding off impossible causality loops, and began deleting everything. I'm sorry, Peter. We are the only two living things remaining in this world."

An impossibly loud thunderclap punctuated her words, forcing Peter to cover his ears. The echoes did not die away entirely, and a strange percussive din remained in the air.

"That's insane!" he shouted. "We're not the only ones! There's –"

The sadness in Professor Haworth's face was terrible to see. "Can you remember anyone, Peter? Anyone at all?"

Peter tried. Faces blurred by his mind's eye but he wasn't able to pinpoint a single one. Knowledge fled from him, leaking out of his brain like water from a sieve. In the end, they left only nothing.

"There's just us?" Peter asked in a small voice.

The Professor nodded. At the same time, the ground cracked, jagged rents spidering across the floor. One of the walls of the building simply… Faded. Peter could now see outside, at the horrible blackness of the storm that was coming, and he had the distinct impression it was going to swallow him whole.

"I should not have tried meddling with the timeline," the Professor confessed, her voice full of regret. "Diverging futures cannot exist simultaneously, after all. One of them has to be eliminated for the other one to exist. It's impossible to tell which one until the event happens. Quantum uncertainty works like that.

"I think I know now why we found those chronitons sealed away in the depths of the earth, Peter. The culture that discovered them realized how dangerous those particles could be, and tried to prevent others from destroying themselves by using them, as I have done.

"I'm so sorry. I just wanted to see what happened if there was no coffee in the world."

Lightning struck the building, obliterating it in an instant. Then the echoes died down. Light faded, and reality imploded.

Thanks for reading I decided to just write a silly story that led me wherever it wanted. Let me know what you think in the reviews!