Chapter Three

October 24^th, 1888, Hartdegan Residence, Whitechapel, London

Alice and Tesla were again convened in the back parlor one evening, though the room had grown somewhat less sparse. The center of the floor now contained a pile of materials that had been growing over the past few days.

The notes and schematics not affixed to the mirror sat largely ignored on the desk. Alice sat back in her chair as Tesla emphatically related to her a tale of his time in New York.

“And Edison said, ‘When you become a full-fledged American, you will appreciate an American joke.’”

Alice shook her head in disbelief. “So you did all that work for nothing.”

“Essentially, yes,” Tesla replied. “And it seems I still have yet to grasp this American humor.”

“You could always just stay in England,” Alice offered with a smile.

“Unfortunately, there is still work to done overseas,” he said, running a hand over his hair.

“Pity,” Alice remarked.

Tesla nodded absently. After a moment, he turned back to her. “What do you intend to do with the time machine, once we have built it?”

Alice shrugged. “I hadn’t really thought that far, honestly. I guess I could explore other times, see how people live in the past or the future.”

“You are likely one of the few people who would not use it to alter the course of history to suit their own ends,” Tesla said with a raised eyebrow.

“I’m not sure you could change history, even if you wanted to,” Alice replied. “Imagine that you travel back in time, to change some event. You would essentially create an alternate timeline in which you wouldn’t have to go back, and therefore you wouldn’t, so the event would never be changed. You could rip apart the very fabric of space and time.”

“And that would be decidedly bad, yes?” Tesla asked rhetorically.

Alice smiled. “Decidedly.”

Chapter Two

Tesla picked up his papers from the podium and gestured Alice towards the double doors. He followed her out into the foyer, and opened the front door for her. They stepped out onto Regent Street as an airship drifted overhead, heading south across the Thames.

As the zeppelin’s shadow passed over them, Tesla turned to Alice. “You will, of course, need a place to construct this device of yours. A laboratory or something of the like.”

Alice nodded. “I have a workshop of sorts.” She smiled. “The back parlor in my house. I never use it, and it has hardly anything in it.” She stepped forward to flag down a coach. “I can show you, if you have the time.”

“Yes, of course,” Tesla replied, stepping up to the curb beside her as a coach rolled to a stop. “For an endeavor such as this, I have all the time in the world.”

The coach took them across central London, and into the East End. They stopped in front of a mid-sized house on Newark Street. It was two stories of pale grey stone, set back from the street behind two elm trees.

“Here we are,” Alice said, stepping out of the coach.

“I do not believe I have ever been to this part of London,” Tesla remarked. “We exactly are we?”

“Whitechapel,” Alice replied. “It’s a decent neighborhood, so long as you don’t stay out after dark.”

Tesla gave her a puzzled look. “What happens after dark?”

Chapter One

October 18^th, 1888, Royal Polytechnic Institute, West End, London

Through the double doors, the half-full lecture hall hummed with oscillating waves of human syntax and grammar. A tall, lanky man in a tailored suit entered from a side door and the hum faded into silence as he approached the podium.

“Good afternoon,” he said with a Slavic accent. He absently brushed a hand across his neatly trimmed mustache. The dark brown of his hair was offset by the intense blue of his eyes, which looked eagerly around the room. “Thank you all for coming. As you all know—I assume, since you are, after all, here—I am here in an effort to introduce wireless energy transfer to the Greater London area.”

He was interrupted by a young woman entering the hall. She wore a loose black skirt, from under which heavy black boots made their presence known. Her auburn hair was twisted back in a bun, save for a few escaped strands which hung in front of her ears, just brushing the collar of her grey blouse. She pulled a silver pocket watch from a pocket in the burgundy corset around her midsection. Glancing at the time, she sheepishly looked up at the podium.

“Sorry,” she said quietly, as she brushed the loose hair behind her ears and took an empty seat on the aisle in the fourth row.

A Matter of Time -- Teaser

A story is about to unfold. The lives of several people, in a past that never existed, will be changed forever. Time can be rewritten. The past and future will collide in a spark of electricity and a cloud of steam. It is only A Matter of Time.

A cast of characters comes out of history and literature, thrown together by repercussions of the science they hold so dear.

• Nikola Tesla, scientist, inventor and master of electricity.
• Alice Hartdegan, Newtonian physicist and connoisseur of time and space.
• Dr. Henry Jekyll, surgeon and biological scientist.
• Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective and observer extraordinaire. 

These four unite under one common goal: to end the murderous rampage of the mysterious man history has come to know as Jack the Ripper.