Time Bums: Our Story So Far

Jackie is on her way to class at Mass. College of Art when she is accosted on Huntington Ave. in Boston by a strange bearded man with a French accent. He demands that she take him to see Steve at MIT, but she doesn’t know any Steve. Reluctantly she agrees to help him and they go to MIT where, by a stroke of luck, they locate “Crazy Steve” and a robot, AMNOZ, he built from discarded office supplies.

The bearded man brandishes a device that looks like a TV remote control, and complains that it doesn’t work. Steve is puzzled, but Jackie suggests that perhaps it just needs new batteries. Steve replaces the batteries in the remote, and the bearded man presses a button and disappears without a trace.

Steve tells Jackie that the device looked like a duplicate of his time machine which, after some rummaging, he finds on his workbench. Steve offers to take Jackie back to the time when she was stopped by the bearded man to pick up the portfolio she dropped in the street. However, due to a sticky Rewind button on the device, Steve, Jackie and AMNOZ wind up in the in the late Cretaceous period.

After narrowly escaping a tyrannosaurus rex, the trio find themselves in the forum of ancient Rome with another click of a time machine button. However, they are recognized as Steve, Jackie and the “talking box,” by a Roman citizen, who has them arrested by orders of Our Lady.

In captivity, they meet Our Lady, who turns out to be the same bearded man who first accosted Jackie in Boston. He plans to detain them to prevent any interference with his plans to unmake everything, but, again, they escape by jumping through time.

They briefly visit the GeoSphere, a structure which encloses the entire planet, and contains the wherewithal to provide food, water, air and other necessities artificially. (The Forward button also sticks.) The GeoSphere is too depressing, so they again leap, this time landing in mid-16^th century France.

Here, to their amazement, Jackie, Steve and AMNOZ again run into the bearded man, Our Lady. This time, however, he introduces himself as Michel de Nostredame.