The Safe

Ever wake up in the middle of the night, or randomly check your watch in the daytime, to see the same thing following you around? For me it’s 11:17. I would say one out of every 3 times I check my watch it’s 11:17. You may have another one, like 3:33, or 12:50. If you don’t have one, count your blessings and stop reading. If you do have a time that you can’t seem to shake, follow these instructions.

Find the place where you were born. The more specific the better. The exact room if you can, but sometimes what you’re looking for can wander around a bit.

Search the room and the surrounding area thoroughly. You should eventually find a safe with a 4-digit keypad combination. You know which 4 digits to enter. (Use a 0 first if your hour is below 10.) Inside you should find a manilla envelope. Take it out, and be careful to note its surprisingly heavy weight, because you don’t want to accidentally drop it. With the envelope in hand, get out of there, and make sure nobody saw you.

Once you’re in a safe place, open the package up. You should find an external hard drive, and two envelopes. One is labeled “Photos.” Open that up, you will find a series of polaroids documenting your life story. Each one will have a date and a brief description printed in the white space. You will have never seen these pictures before, or have any recollection of someone taking them. The pictures will often appear to have been taken from secluded areas, as though a stalker took them. Be very careful when looking through these photos that you don’t look at any photos beyond today’s date, because they are there, and the future is not meant to be known.

The other envelope is labeled “Certificates,” and is nowhere near as thick as the photos envelope. I would advice against looking through this altogether, as it will contain all legal documents from your entire life, from your birth certificate, to your marriage license, to every driver’s license, business license, traffic ticket, and birth certificate that has your name listed under “mother” or “father”. Of utmost warning, it also contains your death certificate.

Obtain a cheap computer that you won’t feel too badly about parting with, and a high-quality printer that is full on toner and paper, with extras as needed to replace. Make sure the printer drivers are installed properly. Do not plug the hard drive in until you are complete ready to print out all the information you’ll find on it, and utmost importance: DO NOT CONNECT THE COMPUTER TO THE INTERNET. If the computer has wireless capabilities, remove them. It needs to be physically impossible for the machine to connect to the internet on its own.

Once you’ve plugged the hard drive in, don’t do anything on the computer. The hard drive has software that will take control from here on out. If you followed the instructions precisely, the printer should be spewing out pages like mad. They will be blueprints, schematics, and mathematical formulae that most people won’t have the capacity to understand. If the printer runs out of paper before it’s finished, be sure to load more in. You’ll know when it’s finished because the computer will shut down and never turn on again, and the final printed page will say “END OF INSTRUCTION SET.” It will then provide an IP address. Go to that IP address in your web browser. It will prompt you for your four-digit password. From there, further instructions will be given.

About a dozen of us have followed these instructions so far, and comparing our printouts shows that each hard drive only contained a piece of the whole. We don’t know how many more pieces there are out there, whether anyone has duplicates, but we’re pretty sure we have partial schematics for a working time machine, one that we are destined to construct.

I’ve never been brave enough to look at the photos and documents of my future, but others have taken the plunge. They claim that every time they look at one of their future pictures, the photo has changed, and sometimes, the number of photos changes altogether.

As a final warning: destroy the hard drive when you are finished. It is unlike anything any of us have ever seen before, and it seems to be able to turn itself on without a power source. I didn’t wait around to see if mine made any noises, but reports from the others say that at night, it seems to whisper to them.