[September 16th, 2019]

Park Chanyeol kicked at the desk drawer repeatedly, causing himself to spin around and around in the chair. He gripped the armrests of the chair, and jumped when his companion, Kris Wu, reached over and slapped him in the arm.

“Hey!” Chanyeol yelped, clutching his arm and stopped spinning. “What was that for?”

“For being an annoying little .” Kris said, not looking up from his work. He slaved over a small board, a tiny, pointy tool in hand, and he poked and prodded at wires and other parts of the small board. He wore a ridiculous pair of goggles for safety, small magnifiers attached so he could see what he was doing. Chanyeol had a similar pair perched atop his head. 

“You’re supposed to be helping me.” Kris continued.

Chanyeol sighed, slumping in the chair. “But I’m just the test subject of this whole shabang.”

“This isn’t a ‘shabang’,” Kris pointed out, pushing the goggles up off of his face and leaning back in his own chair, gently pushing the small board back. “This is modern, revolutionary science. We’re bound to get a Nobel with this. We’ll be world renowned! Greater than great!”

“You sound like Sheldon Cooper.” Chanyeol laughed, spinning around in the chair again, but Kris stopped him, sticking out his foot. 

“And you sound like you have one brain cell. Do you at least have your report finished?”

Chanyeol nodded, patting a thick stack of papers held together with a binder clip next to him. “Fifty three pages,” he said. “It’s about as much as I can do off of estimates and hypotheses and with what we have so far - it’ll be up another hundred or so when we find out if this thing actually works.”

“It will. There’s no way it can’t. We’ve got every little detail worked out to perfection. Give the report to Junmyeon to hold onto; he’ll make it easier to edit later.” 

“I still can’t believe you call it a ‘he’.” Chanyeol frowned, picking up his report and unclipping them, straightening them against the table before clipping them again.

“What else am I supposed to call him?”

“An ‘it’. It’s not real, Kris.”

“Shut it before he hears you.”

Chanyeol sighed, leaning forward onto the table and putting his head in his hands, looking over at the powered-off robot in the corner of the room, a wire attached to the wall trailing into his neck. Three short lines dotted his neck, the first two shining blue, reflecting off the pristine metal, the third blinking. The robot’s head lolled onto his shoulder, seemingly limp.

“It’s powered off, Kris. It’s not real.”

“Well, it’s the closest thing I have to the real thing right now.” Kris propped his feet up onto the desk.

Kris had built the robot eleven years ago, and what had started as a high school garage project evolved into Kris’ main source of security; the sole thing he relied on so much.

Five years ago, Kris’ fiancé, Kim Junmyeon, died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, a disease that attacked his lungs. Junmyeon was also born with an alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, or an AAT deficiency. Although Junmyeon had never smoked, he was prone to lung diseases as a child. 

Since they met in high school, Kris saved most of the money he made from work, whether it be part time jobs or selling off projects he had made. He had once come close to affording a lung transplant for Junmyeon, and he was placed on a wait list, but died before he could receive the transplant.

Junmyeon’s death has turned Kris’ world upside down and inside out, as he devoted all of his time and energy to him, and without him he felt lost and confused. And so, he remodelled and renamed the robot, and although WJM-0522 still served its original purpose as Kris’ assistant, doing everything from filing to taxes to ordering random he sees on Amazon for him, but also a stand-in Junmyeon.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear you it.”

“I don’t WJM-0522.” Kris rolled his eyes.

At the sound of his name, the robot stirred, its eyes flitting open and head straightening.

“Good morning!” It singsonged, playing a recording of the real Junmyeon Kris has programmed into it. “It’s eleven degrees Celsius, fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit, a thirty percent chance of rain...” the robot’s voice switched over to its default as it recited the weather, a metallic, tin-like voice.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kris waved it off. “Come over here for a sec, I’ve got papers for you.”

“Permission to detach from charging station number one? Battery is at ninety-six percent.”

“Yeah, just get over here.”

The robot reached up, ripping the cord harshly out of his neck, in such a way that sent shivers up Chanyeol’s spine - the thing looked so real, it freaked him out to see something that looked so human-like to so casually rip a cord out of its own neck, no matter how many times Chanyeol saw it do that.

The robot’s walk was stiff, but smoother than earlier versions and how robots looked in the media. It walked a little slower and stiffer than usual, though, as Kris had accidentally knocked it down the stairs last week and hadn’t gotten around to fixing the left knee joint, no matter how many times the robot told him to.

“I can’t get up the stairs,” the robot had insisted earlier that week when Kris had called him from the upper floor. “My left leg joint doesn’t work.”

“You’re fine,” Kris dismissed. “Just get up here.”

“Fine, here I come.” The robot meant to make its way upstairs, but ended up running into the stairs straight-on, causing it to lay flat on the stairs. “Told you!” It called, it’s speaker muffled. “Fix me!”

For the past week, it would let out a shrill, “Fix me!”, but Kris kept insisting he would do it later - he was so close to his breakthrough with his and Chanyeol’s project that there was no time for Junmyeon’s leg joint.

Kris took the papers from Chanyeol and handed it to the robot, who popped open its chest panel and placed the papers inside, then closing the panel. There was a slight whir, and it’s eyes glowed yellow, and then green, and then returned to its realistic set of brown. 

“Filed.”

“Okay...” Kris sighed, flicking his goggles back down and bringing the board back closer to him. “I’m making a few changes to this, popping it back in - would you mind lowering the back panel for me, please? - and then we’ll be good to go.”

Chanyeol reached forward, banging on the back of a white machine, and a back panel popped out and open, and Kris leaned forward, hooking the board into the back and closing it shut.

“There.”

“What do we do now?” Chanyeol asked, to fill the tense air, full of anticipation. They both knew what came next. It was everything they had worked for, their end goal.

“We try it out.” Kris muttered, standing up. He gestured the robot over. “Myeon, watch this screen here - it’ll track Chanyeol’s vitals. It’s very important you watch his heart rate - it cannot go over 120, you get that? Chanyeol can literally explode if that happens, and we don’t want that.”

Chanyeol’s eyes widened at the mention of him exploding. “You never told me that! You said this was safe!”

“It is,” Kris consoled. “As long as we do it right and your vitals are fine. That’s why we have this,” Kris held up a large syringe, full of an amber coloured liquid, flicking the side of it, causing Chanyeol to inch away from it. “This will keep your vitals in check; regulate them. Too much of something - heart rate, adrenaline, serotonin - can cause you to implode. But Junmyeon will be watching your vitals, and if anything is to happen - which it won’t - he has this,” Kris gestured to a red button near the blank vitals screen. “And this will rip you right back into our time. In one piece. Hopefully.”

“Hopefully?!”

“Hey! You’re the first human test subject. Test subject in general.”

“Make the robot do it. He won’t die. You can just rebuild him.”

“Robot won’t work. Needs to be human.”

Chanyeol sighed. “That sounds ominous, but whatever. Here.” he laid his arm on the table, looking away. “Do it quick while I’m not looking!”

“I already did it,” Kris said, frowning. “I did it while you were talking about the robot. Now, you may feel a little dizzy. This is just regulating your vitals. It won’t hurt you.”

“I hate you, Kris Wu.” Chanyeol complained, and Kris could see Chanyeol make a face as the dizziness and queasiness (Kris should’ve warned him about that as well) set in. 

“It’s fine, I do, too.” Kris muttered, fiddling with more equipment on the table, and then holding up a black, watch-like device. “Remember this?”

“Sort of.”

“I’ll help strap this to you. This part here-" Kris turned the watch over, so Chanyeol could see the back part of it, pointing to the small spoke that jutted out of it. “will poke into your cephalic vein. You won’t feel it much, but make sure it’s not ripped out of you because that won’t end well. Working it is pretty simple.” Kris turned the watch over again, gesturing to the face of it, which had seven ringed dials around it. The main face had a small, square, blank screen on it, and numbers ‘01’ to ‘99’ around it like a clock, and underneath that was one to twenty, zero to twelve, zero to thirty-one, and then zero to twenty-four, and then finally, zero to sixty. “This is how you set it. The first dial matches the first ring of numbers-" Kris wagged his finger up and down, showing Chanyeol the clear correspondence. “relates to the century, the second the decade, the third the month, the fourth the day, and then hour, and then minute and then second. All you have to do once this is on is match the white arrow on the dial to the number on the face.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

“It is. The screen will give you your exact time and date, too, so there’s no mess ups. When it’s set, press this button here,” Kris gestured to a red button on the side of it.

“When do I set it to?” Chanyeol asked as Kris leaned forward, carefully pricking Chanyeol’s wrist and fastening the watch. Chanyeol made a face when Kris pricked him, and shook his wrist out when Kris release him.

“Careful,” Kris warned. “It’ll feel weird for a second, but you’ll get used to it. And let’s try something not too far, first. Let’s do, like, eighteen minutes ago? Noon on the dot.”

“Okay...” Chanyeol fiddled with the watch, setting it, his finger hovering over the button. “Tell me when.”

Kris leaned in towards Junmyeon, glancing at the screen that tracked Chanyeol’s vitals. “Count backwards from ten for me.”

“Ten, nine, eight...” Chanyeol counted off carefully, making sure that each number he listed off was correct.

“When you get there, you’ll be a little dizzy, probably nauseous,” Kris warned as Chanyeol continued to count down. “We’ll be monitoring you the entire time over here, so don’t worry.” Chanyeol nodded as he reached one. “Aight, see you later.” 

Kris gave a curt wave, and Chanyeol jabbed at the red button, twisting away and out of sight. 

Kris should’ve checked that Chanyeol set the watch right, and the realization of doing so didn’t slap Kris in the face until WJM-0522 pointed at the screen in front of them, tugging on Kris’ sleeve for his attention.

“!” Kris yelled, jumping up. “How the does he manage to send himself back to 1800?!”