Alias re-vitalises his passion for time travel. He kick-starts his dusty time machine and lands in the ‘Book of Genesis’. God says: “Let there be light”; and there was light. A month later, the Devil sends him a ‘trillion dollar’ power bill. Well, it ain’t cheap to light up the earth and all the planets and stars for a whole month. Considering the price of coal was at an all-time high, add carbon tax and GST, the hellfire power station wasn’t making much profit.
Alias moves the forward lever on the dashboard, rattles through the ages when suddenly, his time machine stops abruptly. He calls the inter-era helpline and is placed number 3050700000000 in the queue, which is quite reasonable considering the enormous time-span between Genesis and the Apocalypse.
Fortunately, the breakdown happened in a time-warp, so the wait for service allows just for a comfortable ‘power nap’. Repairs done, Alias hits the accelerator and soon lands in 2084. The whole earth is now governed by the Sino-Russian ‘Rouge States Union’, under the brutal rule of ‘Ivan Ping Pong’, ‘the terrible’. Alias learns that the free world had been trying in vain to prevent this from happening, using strong words of condemnation to fend off missiles and chemical weapons. He wanders the spy-camera lined streets and falls into one of the many potholes. Bleeding and in pain, he lies there for many hours before help arrives. The sun descents below the horizon, as the conscripted paramedics in their shabby uniforms, carry Alias several kilometers to a run-down, rat ridden medical tent. Surgery is postponed indefinitely, because ‘Ivan Ping Pong’ has offended his ally the Devil, whose fiddle he had previously danced to. In response the devil turned off the power supply. Alias regrets having left his time machine, while he visualizes his escape to a better world. His day-dream is interrupted, when a government official orders Alias to prey to the two highest Gods of the empire, Vladimir and Xi. When he refuses, he is brutally beaten to death by three secret service agents.
At heaven’s gate, he fails a ‘Covid Test’, and is placed into isolation on a dark cloud at the end of a queue of millions. He can but dream of his time machine.