Margaret Smith has become unstuck
in time. Finding out about her ancestors seemed fun at first, a hobby to while
away the time now that the kids had moved out and started families of her own.
A chance to unearth some long lost family scandal, perhaps to discover an
illustrious ancestor, and to finally work out how exactly she was related to
all the half remembered aunts of her childhood.
An advert on ITV 7 had pointed
her in the direction of Ancestor-Discoverer dot com, a site which promised to
make easy all the hard work of searching through archives and records and take
her directly to the business of nosing around the private business of her forebears.
She made a cup of tea and got her laptop ready, entering all the information
the site needed: her name, her date of birth, the details of any known
relatives. She then pressed enter and set the machine whirring away.
There was a click and then a
disorienting flash as she found herself sat in the parlour room of a Victorian
house. She screamed. She wasn't a technical person but she was pretty sure this wasn't how computers were supposed to work. The inhabitants of the room, clad
in petticoats and crinoline, seemed just as surprised, one of them dropping a
petite china tea cup. Margaret looked back down at the screen of her laptop to
see a black and white photograph of the woman who sat shocked and cupless in
front of her.
“You’re my great-grandmother”
Margaret said in a somewhat uneasy tone “you died aged 47”
The laptop clicked and the room
around Margaret flashed again as she appeared in a Turkish bath, a naked,
rotund, moustachioed man stood in front of her.
“Ruddy Hell!” He exclaimed
“A great-grandfather!” Margaret
again recited the words of her screen “arrested for... sodomy?”
The fleshy pink man blustered for
a moment before the laptop clicked again and flung her through her family tree.
After the initial shock wore off
she found some fun in it, telling newly-weds that they would grow old together, announcing the name of a child before it was christened, finding the source of
old family in-jokes. But after every jump she became more concerned with how
and when this would end, desperately clicking through links on the website for
some option to take her back home as dead relatives watched her in confusion.
As the jumps continued the happy
times became scarcer and she found herself in a debtor’s prison, a medieval
torture chamber, the after effects of a shell-explosion on the Somme where she learnt in horrifying detail how her
grandfather had lost his legs. It seemed to her the jumps were becoming darker
and more sadistic as time went on and she grew ever more panicked. Hitting the
Esc key, trying Ctrl-Alt-Del like her son had explained when he first got her
the laptop two Christmases ago, but nothing happened.
A ship in the midst of Trafalgar,
a boarded up house during the Black Death, a Viking raid, the jumps continued.
Who were her relatives here? The laptop had no pictures this far back. She took
to shouting names in the hope that discovering her relatives would jump her
somewhere safe. The firing line of a Civil War battle next, then a starving peasant
family in the midst of the Anarchy, a Roman legion laying siege to a burning
hill fort. The men stood around her had faces filled with hatred and she was disgusted by the thought that she was related to any of them. She glanced up and noticed a huge stone flung from a
catapult racing towards her. She screamed a name in Latin at the top of her lungs.
The laptop clicked. She opened
her eyes. A group of people dressed in furs sat round a campfire and like the
nearly all the others before looked up at her sudden intrusion into their lives
with surprise.
The battery on the laptop died.
The screen went black.
No comments:
Post a Comment