Ben

On the 3rd of October 2351 a machine flared to life. Huge energies coursed into it via cables, only to leave moments later as heat dumped unwanted into its radiators. With an enormous puff the machine unleashed sixty years of human metabolic entropy into superheated steam. In the heart of the machine was Jane, a person of the early 21st century. From her perspective there was no transition. One moment she had been in the year 2021, sat beneath a tree in a park. Reading a detective novel. Then the book was gone, and the tree. Also the park. Even the year. She found herself laid in a bathtub, immersed in sickly fatty fluids. She was naked and cold. The first question Jane had for the operators and technicians who greeted her with a warm towel was "where am I?''. They brought back the dead a hundred times a day, and knew that it was best to answer when, not where. Jane's second question was "how did I come to be in the year 2351?''. The answer begins in the year 2021. Jane sat beneath a tree. She read her book. She walked home. She attended university. She played her guitar. Went to pubs and festivals with her friends. She studied philosophy as her course, but there wasn't much work going in analysing Plato so she got a job in marketing. She married, had children. Lived a normal enough life. She followed the scientific news no more than most. She did watch the much-hyped documentary about the possibility of restoring objects to a previous state. She found it a disappointment. So they could get a single molecule to unreact? Maybe some chemist somewhere cared. But technology's march was unceasing. The egg was unboiled only two decades later. The redaction machines, as they came to be known, restored an object to a previous state. Set the machine for 10 minutes and insert your alarm clock. Ping! The machine takes no time at all to operate. Within find alarm clock, time as it read 10 minutes ago. Smash said alarm clock with hammer. Insert the pieces into the ma