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DOYLE

The hat wasthe best part. What kid didn’t fancy playing the hero in the ten-gallon hat, pistols at his sides, spurs on his boots, ready to take on the outlaw? Doyle had no pistols, that would’ve required permission forms and red tape he didn’t have time or patience for, but he did have the tan hat.

“What do you think, Lacey?” he asked, tipping the brim to the resort’s costume designer.

He enjoyed making her smile. Maybe it was the blush that always came with it that did it. She was way out of his league, not to mention her relationship with Casey McGovern, the resort’s captain. McGovern was the one who’d get credit for helming the maiden voyage of the Time Capsule Resort, or TCR, but he, Doyle, was the one who designed the actual mechanism that travelled through time, not to mention the cloaking device. Either invention would be enough to make history if it weren’t for the fact the patents were owned by his employer, Bennet Systems, since they’d doled out the cash for his research.

Why did engineers never get the credit?

“Adorkable,” Lacey said, tapping her chin as she studied Doyle’s appearance. “The jeans fit perfectly. But are you sure you want to go for the rancher look and not more of a tinkerer? I have a bowler hat and three-piece suit that comes with a nifty stopwatch.”

Doyle placed his hands on his hips, trying not to be offended. “This resort is about enacting our fantasies, right? Not becoming our 1880’s personas. Besides, I’ve been working out.” He pumped a bicep for her and smiled when she bit her bottom lip.

“There’s my girl,” McGovern’s deep voice came from directly behind, crushing Doyle’s fantasy into dust. “All hands in position for departure, Doyle. We want this trip running smoothly, especially with the Watcher on board.”

Lacey crinkled her nose. “Is it just me or is the Watcher creepy? I get that they’re here to make sure nothing happens to the timeline, but do they have to wear that weird black suit? It makes them look like they don’t belong in any known decade.”

Not too pleased with having another person on board keeping an eye on them, Doyle grunted his agreement. Having Nicole Bennet of Bennet Systems around was enough pressure, never mind a representative of multiple governments, policing them all on what was billed as a luxury vacation.

“So?” McGovern pressed, hands on the slim hips of his own cowboy getup. “Get to work!”

Annoyed, Doyle thought better of snapping back and bit the inside of his cheek. Instead, he ignored McGovern, thanked Lacey for the duds, and went off in search of engineering, where he would sit and monitor the ride and equipment until they docked. They’d done practice runs, but this was the first time he’d seen so many people in the machine. It was the way he liked to think of the Time Capsule Resort, which some called a hybrid ship that didn’t sail and some saw as a time machine that looked like a hotel on steroids. The whole thing was part and parcel of the mechanism in Doyle’s brain. The amenities and window dressings existed to make it more comfortable to humans, as far as he was concerned.

Built in a giant corkscrew shape, the only floors separated from the rest by elevator and stairs were the top and bottom, the “bridge” where McGovern worked in the former, and the day-to-day tech monitoring system on the latter near the exit/entrance. Lacey’s costume shop lived on a higher portion of the corkscrew, above the equivalent of three floors worth of immersive magic courtesy of the designers.

Doyle strolled through the winding halls covered in dirt with various storefronts accurate to the late 1800’s old west and tipped his hat when he spied a couple of women dressed to the hilt just like him. The older woman and the younger mirror image beside her, who could only be her daughter, both tittered at the attention, which added some swagger to Doyle’s step. Lacey already had it in her head he was a nerd. It was an image he wanted to shatter, at least long enough to get laid. He’d thrown himself so hard into his work that he hadn’t had time for much else, including his girlfriend, when he’d started the job. He pulled out of the relationship a mere three months later, citing his single-focus attention span. But as the work eased up and the interior design and marketing crews took over, he was able to lift his head out of the sand and rejoin the human race a bit. Which in his case, meant playing video games, particularly wild west themed ones, out of excitement for the voyage, and going to the gym.

Lost in his thoughts, Doyle slipped through the throngs of excited passengers, eyeing the door to engineering. Situated near the bottom of the spiral, it had been disguised as an old gold mine entrance with an OFF LIMITS sign. The passengers were only supposed to see the mirage created by Bennet Systems, which took the form of an old west town, complete with plenty of saloons and dance hall girls. Everyone on board dressed the part, cosplay to the extreme. The idea was to be immersed in the setting. The real setting. It would change, along with the costumes and scenery, depending on the theme and time locales of each voyage. They were starting with the initial trip to the wild west—Arizona circa 1888. They’d subsequently move on to 1920’s Chicago, 1640’s England, and so on.

Doyle didn’t plan on joining them on all the excursions, but he wouldn’t miss the first time people got to see his baby in action, even if they didn’t realize it was his.

He reached for the hidden button that would allow him entrance as it opened and a woman slipped out, almost smacking into him. She had on one of the fancy dresses from Lacey’s costume shop, but Doyle doubted her bright purple hair would blend in with the real wild west.

“Sorry,” she said, averting her eyes and scurrying out of the way and off into the throngs of excited people.

Looked like Jones was already taking advantage of the scenery as far as the guests were concerned, and they weren’t even there yet. Still, he’d have to have a talk with the guy about letting patrons behind the scenes, even to impress the women.

Catching the door, Doyle entered the quiet space of the control room.

“You gonna be able to sit in those jeans, Wally?”

Doyle grimaced at Jones, his ass of an ass-istant. He hated his first name, Walter, but the second Jones had found out what it was, he’d grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go.

“How are the readings?” If he ignored the comment, maybe it and Jones would go away.

“Ship shape. Get it?” Jones’s eyes sparkled. His red kerchief and straw hat were more reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn than a cowboy, especially on his small frame.

Doyle shot him the side eye as he spun his chair toward the consul. Eight holo-screens displayed 3-D views of the perimeter of the machine from the inside out. The whole thing was basically a cylinder encased in super thin, nearly indestructible AC glass, so that when they parked themselves near the action, they’d feel like they were in the center while staying safely cloaked from view of the people in 1888. It was an assurance that the timeline would remain uncontaminated and satisfy the government Watcher sent along to keep an eye on things, not to mention Doyle’s own conscience. That way when they took small groups on excursion into the Tucson of the old west, they’d remain inconspicuous among the bustling population.

As nervous as taking civilians back in time made him, if his design proved to be the marketing win for Bennet Systems’s Fantasy Resorts, he’d get credit for the tech, and that meant unlimited opportunities for future funding.

Since this was the first real time machine ever invented, no one knew what would happen if things were altered during a previous time. Sure, there were plenty of theories—not to mention plenty of science-fiction supposing various scenarios. But the reality was likely very different and not something Doyle cared to experiment with. During all the test runs, he had been absolutely careful, but he was one man, and the environment had been easy to control. Throwing so many people into the mix had not been his idea, but in order for Bennet Systems to pony up the money it took to develop the tech, he had to agree to their choice of use. It was better than the alternative—selling the design to the government, who would likely bury its existence and his accomplishment along with it all for covert use. Bennet Systems may not be perfect, but it was public and powerful, which helped calm his nerves about the Watcher on board.

McGovern’s baritone blasted all around them. “Welcome aboard the Time Capsule Resort. I am your captain, Casey McGovern. As you are all aware, this is a one-of-a-kind voyage, not through space, but through time. Now, I know you all signed your waivers and passed your physicals, but when we hit the Go button, I need you to be in a seated position.”

Doyle cringed at the words “Go button.” He hated when people didn’t call things their proper names. “It’s a time destabilizer, asshat,” he muttered, adjusting one of the gauges to his left. He’d been double checking the cloak all morning. While the time destabilizer was an interconnected array of neural nets throughout the machine, the cloak was an external piece, roughly the size and shape of a baseball bat and encased in metal. It was attached dead center to the bottom of the resort, where the whole thing was designed to hover eight feet in the air above the ground, just in case landing on a specific spot had unforeseen timeline consequences. It also avoided the possibility of anyone walking into it by mistake.

The cloak always felt a little unprotected to Doyle, considering the absolute importance of it, but he’d been too busy fine tuning the neural network and had to delegate the job to Jones. When his triple check left him satisfied, Doyle tucked his hands behind his head and tilted his hat forward to cover his eyes. With his feet resting on the console, he leaned back in his chair to take a hard-earned break.