His Coffee Machine Tried Too Hard.

His Time Machine didnt look like anything I’d ever seen before. Then again, I’d only ever seen time machines on television and they were all made up. This was real enough, I was no longer when I should be. It did look slightly like something I’d seen before. The shiny chrome was oddly familiar.

It also made coffee, quite good coffee really, if you could get the grind right. So, a space/time ship that made a decent cappucino?  Not exactly, he told me

‘It’s a coffee machine with Features’.

The Triviandians had gotten into a product race with the Seigneurs of Lopdor. It had started out innocently enough (as they all do) with an inbuilt conical grinder. That was followed by a ‘good morning!’ timer system followed in turn by a time machine. It knew exactly when you wanted a coffee.

‘Yep’ he said ‘got it real cheap of G-Bay!’.

Cheap apparently because the Trivandians had started experimenting with molecular gastronomy and destroyed their entire galaxy. ‘And the Lopdorians, sorry, Seigneurs of Lopdoor?’ I asked.

‘Oh they went broke, invested all their money in a 5 D cinema chain. Couldnt get it quite right though.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Well, whatever time you turned up, the film had already started. Plus you’d already seen it.’

As time froze across the universe, nobody really needed a time machine anymore. Why bother going forward to Right Now?  It only really worked where there were still mathematical constants other than just today’s date. To work properly, it needed things you could really trust… eg. the irrefutable fact that there’s always a Goth on Newtown station.

I was ahead of him on this one. I knew why the damn thing didnt work properly anymore.

 

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