Department of Temporal Adjustment

Vanessa and Tony have very full lives. Tony is in the Air Force Reserves, a father, and a full-time student. Vanessa is a full-time mom and also a full-time student. Because of their full schedules, Vanessa does most of her schoolwork late at night after the children are asleep. When not at home with her family Vanessa spends a good bit of time in the basement lab of her archaeology department. While there late one night she hears a strange noise in the hallway. She takes a peek and sees a strange group of people exiting the janitor’s closet. She decides to hide in the lab for a while to avoid them. Several nights later she again finds herself alone in the basement lab. This time when she sees a strange group of people she calls security. But the security guards make her feel that she’s overreacting. So she takes it upon herself to check out the janitor’s closet and steps through a time portal into the future. Vanessa has a hard time believing she is really in the future, until she’s given a tour of the city. She becomes concerned when she’s told that once a person walks through the portal they rarely get to return to their own time. Fortunately for Vanessa, the future scientists find that she plays a role in history and must be sent back to her own time. To safeguard the timeline they shield her memories. But the brain is a complicated organ and shielding is an imprecise science. So although Vanessa does forget about her time in the future, she forgets many other things as well. Which results in her stepping through the portal into the future many more times. The fifth time Vanessa goes through the portal the scientists decide that to try to shield her again would be too dangerous, so Vanessa is sent back to her own time with her memory intact. Things work much better this time, and Vanessa looks forward to a happy future with her family.