Far in the future on a planet called Arbez, the people of the planet have made a very interesting discovery. First, I should probably tell you about Arbez. Arbez is a planet that is exactly like Earth. Everything is exactly the same except that the future of Arbez is quite different than that of Earth’s future. This is simply because the author of this story didn’t want to create false facts about Earth’s future and instead makes false facts about an imaginary planet. If you’re truly curious about this, you ought to ask him. I can’t guarantee he’ll tell you, but…

I’m getting off-topic. As I said, the planet Arbez is exactly like the planet Earth therefore you can probably imagine what it’s like, but I’ll tell you anyway. There are 7 continents on this planet, each with several countries on it excluding two of the continents. Australia has one country and Antarctica has none: no one lives there. However, as we speak, there are researchers on that continent which is where our story will take place. Eventually.

Now, as you can probably tell from the previous paragraphs, the author of this story is quite a procrastinator and somewhat lazy. The main character of this story will be just like this too, but he doesn’t show up until later either. For now, we’ll just be talking about the amazing discovery made by the Arbezians far in the future.

The discovery the Arbezians made, while being far into the future, isn’t especially useful, but it’s cool. The Arbezians found that time travel is actually possible. They’ve only been able to go to the past, and they haven’t actually been able to send anyone back, but they’ve certainly discovered that it’s possible. Another thing is, though, that while they could only go back in time, if you open a portal to the past, you can travel back into the future through that portal. The most interesting thing about this discovery is that they found that dryers offer the most ideal conditions for time travel meaning that you can only travel back in time from a running dryer or to a running dryer. As I said, they haven’t been able to send people back since it would be hard to fit a human being into a dryer, but it did solve the age-old problem of losing one of your socks when you put them in the dryer. Or did it cause it…?

Anyway, our main character is a renowned scientist. In fact, he’s so important that his name is Arbez—he wasn’t named after the planet, the planet was named after him. His research team in Antarctica is currently studying something completely unrelated to time-travel. He just wanted to get away from people.

Lately, the research team in Antarctica had been having some strange troubles with their dryer. It was constantly turning itself off in the middle of drying leaving your clothes wet. This is a very bad thing in Antarctica because you end up taking your clothes out and they’re frozen solid. Your clothes are then unable to be worn and could end up breaking. So instead of just fixing the dryer, they thought it would be more fun to create a machine that reverses the way things work so that when the dryer would normally break down, it would work better than ever.

This was a difficult concept and took them months. By the time they finished it, all of their clothes had broken and they had none left so the device was pretty pointless, but they ended up finishing it anyway. Arbez (the person, not the planet), being the lazy procrastinator he is, didn’t want to start doing what they were actually supposed to be doing so he volunteered to be the one to test the device. Everyone else thought he should be the one to do it. They didn’t want to sit in the cold laundry room with no clothes.

He turned on the dryer and sat down to watch. He was too lazy to shiver, but soon enough, the dryer shut itself down. He watched the machine. It was supposed to turn on immediately. Then, in a couple seconds, the dryer turned on. Everything in the room switched around too, but that didn’t matter because he was seeing everything backwards anyway. The machine was obviously working because the room started to warm up too. They’d just have to fix the delay.

Arbez was planning on waiting until the dryer was done before he left when he realized that this was a dumb idea in the first place. The dryer was making everything wet! He had to stop the dryer and tell everyone what happened and that they should probably just fix the dryer after all and buy clothes for that matter. He tried pressing the “Stop” button on the dryer, but of course it wouldn’t stop because it had been switched to the “Start” button. When he realized this, he tried pressing the “Start” button, but it wouldn’t stop it either because stopping the machine actually starts it.

Arbez was trying to figure out how that makes sense but then decided that it would be more productive to think of a way out of this mess. However, he found it extremely difficult to think in the first place because, thanks to the machine, he was actually incredibly stupid instead of incredibly smart, not to mention all his thoughts were backwards. But he finally decided that the only way out was to create a time portal and send the machine back in time.

If Arbez had still been smart or if he had been thinking forward, he probably would’ve realized the idiocy of this plan, but he ended up opening the portal anyway. Suddenly, when the portal opened, the machine, which would’ve been working normally had it not been on, began to malfunction and the time portal started to grow. This was a moment of utter chaos. Nothing was making sense. Of course, it would’ve been making sense had the machine not been on, but Arbez couldn’t handle it. He ended up jumping into the portal instead of throwing the machine into the portal.

When Arbez arrived in normalcy, he realized that he must’ve arrived in the future since everything was backwards at the time he entered the portal. He was very glad for finally thinking straight and not having to deal with that stupid machine, but he found himself having some new problems. The time portal was still growing, he didn’t know how to stop it, he was in a place completely the opposite of Antarctica—it was warm and had lots of people—and he had no clothes on. Therefore, as soon as he arrived in the future, he was arrested for being naked in public.

At first he didn’t think it was a problem because the portal would grow and everything would switch places setting everything back to normal and getting him out of jail. But after having some thought in jail, he realized that it didn’t make any sense and he ought to do something about it. The first problem was, of course, getting out of jail. He started to think about it, but before he could come up with any ideas, the portal came into his cell and he simply went through it to get out of the jail.

He found himself out in the open in the middle of Antarctica. It was a good thing they gave him clothes at the jail. He started to go towards the building with the machine, but found it growing further away. He suddenly forgot which made him remember that the machine makes everything reverse and therefore started moving away from the building. After a little while, he ran into the building, which normally would’ve hurt but in this case it felt pretty good.

He tried to enter the building, but by doing so he exited the building. So he went around to the back. The back door would normally have been locked—which doesn’t really make sense considering they’re in Antarctica—but he was glad because it most definitely wasn’t. He went in through the back, which meant he went in through the front and was glad to find himself inside.

He was at first surprised to see that no one was there, but he realized they must’ve been sent to the future as well which meant they should’ve been arriving back at the building soon if they were in the same jail as he was. He went upstairs which took him downstairs to the laundry room and he found the machine. He tried breaking the machine, but that meant he fixed it, which didn’t get him anywhere.

Arbez became very upset that he couldn’t figure out how to stop the machine, which made him very happy that he could figure out how to stop it, which was fortunate because now he knew how to do it, which meant that he didn’t know how to do it, which was a bad thing. He started to feel like there was no way out of this situation, but that wasn’t possible because then there’d be a way out of the situation which brought him to the conclusion of how to stop the machine. He reached around the front of the dryer and plugged in the machine.

Upon solving the problem of the machine, everything turned back to normal, and the whole situation left the scientists with one question: What the hell?