Amber found them a private meeting room two floors up.  Jinsu heard her speaking to Kris through some kind of device on her wrist, telling him where they were in case he needed Jinsu before lunchtime, as she let them in.  Rather than following them, though, she planted herself outside on guard, and the door swung shut.

Tao took one look at the office chairs around a large oval table that had some strange equipment on it and grimaced, heading instead for a sofa and a couple of chairs around a low, glass-topped coffee table towards the back of the room.  There were potted palms on either side of the table and Tao nabbed one of the chairs.  Rather more hesitantly, Jinsu sat on the sofa, although it was hard not to relax when the cushions dipped as Baekhyun sat beside her, surreptitiously slipping his arm around her waist.  Jinsu had to resist the urge to snuggle into his side.  She had to admit that the increase in the amount of physical contact she had with Baekhyun was very welcome indeed.  She also hadn’t expected him to ramp it up so dramatically since the day before, but he was so natural about it that it felt like it was something he’d always done.  It sent Jinsu’s nerves tingling with delight.

“I’ve been carrying out some repairs on the Attayear with a team,” Tao began, looking between Baekhyun and Jinsu and ignoring the arm around Jinsu’s waist.  “We don’t know if it’s ever going to be used again at this stage, but it is the prototype time machine and it’s really exciting to see how things were done on it right back in the beginning.  There’s been a lot of physical repair to do, of course – huge wear and tear to the exterior and the time vacuum wards.  I’ve never seen so much damage before.  I actually thought it wasn’t possible to travel with a machine in that bad a state of repair.”

Jinsu had to really focus on what Tao was saying because Baekhyun’s thumb was rubbing gently between the top of her hip and the base of her ribcage, which was more than a little distracting.

“When you have no choice, you just get on with it and hope for the best,” Baekhyun said.

“Yeah,” Tao agreed shortly.  “I can tell.”  He clasped his hands together, resting his elbows on his knees, and leant forward.  “We don’t have original parts, of course, but we’ve fitted the Attayear with the most compatible parts we could find.  It doesn’t have the same renewable energy capabilities and facilities as it originally would have done because we simply don’t use them in the same way.  Our own machines are much more fuel efficient and can go much further with much smaller engine tanks, and we tend to use enormous lithium-powered self-recharging generators for the majority of the trips we do because it keeps pollution down and the like—”

“You power them with lithium?” Jinsu cut in.  “How does lithium even give you enough energy for that?”

“Scientific advancements,” Tao said, waving a hand.  “The build of the Attayear is very different, particularly when it comes to the engine rooms, so we’ve decided against remodelling it on our later versions and giving the original a revamp.  We’ve repaired all the machinery and made sure the screws and rivets are all the right size—” he nodded at Baekhyun, which Jinsu took to mean that Baekhyun had told them about the engine problems, “—and we’ve completely cleaned out the fuel tanks and removed all the sludge so you can get some proper fuel in there and things will run much more smoothly in the future.”

Tao tapped his fingers together.  Baekhyun shifted a little further back in his seat, fingers curling a little around Jinsu’s side.  She could feel herself blushing.

“And then we have the computers,” said Tao.  He looked at Jinsu.  “I understand from Baekhyun that you have a big problem with a virus that’s been damaging your systems.  I’m one of the chief technological and computer engineers in this base, so I thought I’d take a look at it and I can tell you right now, I have never seen a virus like that in my life.  Ever.”  He looked back at Baekhyun again, but continued talking to Jinsu.  “I nabbed Baekhyun before his medical checks since I needed access to the Attayear’s systems to hook it up to a super-computer and it was safer to do it that way than to hack in and get hit with a countervirus—”

“Is it possible to counter the virus?” Baekhyun asked.

Tao laughed.  “Give me a few years and I’ll get back to you.”  He sobered again.  “I did try, but I know a tough one when I see one, and this is, like, up here compared to most of the encryptions I have to hack as part of military intelligence.”  He held one hand above his head and placed the other one level with the base of his seat.  “It’s honestly the equivalent to setting off an atomic bomb in a cupboard.  Whoever built that virus knew what they were doing, and it’s a complete motherf*cker.  It probably took the best part of a decade to put together.”

Baekhyun glanced at Jinsu.

“Seriously,” said Tao.  “I’ve never seen anything that comprehensive.  And the even more terrifying thing about it – it’s not its adaptability and self-mutation – it’s that it works so thoroughly on such a destructive scale when it was built without the knowledge of precisely what it was targeting.  In fact, from what I can make out, it seems to have been better suited to targetting an older or different form of time-travel-machine programme, if anything.”

Jinsu’s heart sank.  “So the Attayear’s unusable.  Or, well, we can control it with fuel injection.  But that would make getting back home very difficult.”

“I would not advise you to travel like that,” Tao agreed.  “It’s very hard to be completely accurate with it, and it’s very dangerous.”

“Could you put in a new computer system?” Baekhyun suggested.

Tao shook his head.  “That would require rebuilding the Attayear model to suit the computer, which would take a long time.”

Jinsu sighed.  “So we’re stuck here for at least a few years,” she said.  “Unless you think it’s likely that we can nab a time machine to go back to the present, or somebody’s willing to drop us off.”

“That’s unlikely.  The generals aren’t very keen on letting you go back; they don’t know how much havoc it would wreak, even if you’re trustworthy,” Tao explained.  “You’re children, after all.  Even if you have good intentions, history is the way it is and the present is the way it currently is because of people taking advantage of people with good intentions.  Love’s the most selfish of all the passions, you know, because when you love something too much, it becomes greed.  And that’s exactly what people are: greedy.”

“But we could prevent this whole war from happening,” Jinsu argued.

Tao just raised an eyebrow at her.  “To do that, you’d have to destroy knowledge,” he pointed out.  “Specifically, scientific knowledge.  And where somebody has already found a way to work something like this, you can hide it or get rid of it all you like, but somebody else will always experiment on their own and find another way to do it, especially if somebody else has done it before.  Didn’t two people create the lightbulb independenty, after all?  Or was that the telephone?”

“But we don’t belong in this timeline,” Jinsu said.  “That’s the epitome of messing with a grandfather clause.  Time machines or no, we belong in our own timeline, and that’s not this one.”

There was silence for a couple of moments.  Baekhyun continued rubbing his thumb gently against Jinsu’s waist.

“Not my call or jurisdiction,” said Tao, “but I’m actually more interested in this virus.  Obviously with only what you could see or access and laptops, you won’t have got a full overview of it and what it was targeting, but when you can view it from a supercomputer and have time to do that without worrying whether the machine’s going to go out of control or going to crash, there are a couple of things you get to notice.  It took a while to decipher the patterns because I initially had no idea what I was looking at, but eventually I figured out what the virus is targetting, and that’s control over where the Attayear is going.  It’s quite astonishing how it managed it considering it didn’t know what part of the programme it was supposed to be targeting, but all the ri