How to Stop Your Local Apocalypse

(I am really hoping the title isn't too long...)

Prologue

The world ends on Friday the 13th. Despite the fact that last Friday was the 5th, which would make this Friday the 12th, all date-recording pieces of equipment manage to malfunction all across the world to read the date as: Friday the 13th. Well, all of them except for Anita's equipment, almost as smart as her. Anita's all-purpose calendar says that today is "The End of the World." Nice day to play soccer, isn't it? Yeah, I've never been much of a soccer fan myself anyways.

And, you know, we've had all the signs this past week. Raining fire, all that blood and, um, horror stuff. Of course, you can't forget the dead ringer: the Four Horsemen. I mean, they're all nuts, I'll give them that, but they seem to wreck chaos all the same. They got all the basics: the Third World War, a deadly outbreak of this contagious virus, starvation all over, the floods from global warming, and some weird light things all over the sky. According to Anita, it's all the basic stuff that scientists knew was going to happen. What makes it important is that it all comes to an end on this day. Today. Friday the 13th. Really ominous, don't you think?

Anyway, Anita's been working on predicting the apocalypse since she got her first computer at age ten. She's been working on this predictive calendar thing almost as long. I mean, by age eleven, she knew her mom was going to die in four years. And when she was sixteen, she figured out that her mom would die on a warm August night, which would have been otherwise peaceful. By the time we graduated high school, she'd known that the world would come to an end in two years' time, on Friday the 13th.

I don't know, but I think that Anita's a lot more than just some genius.

Okay, so apart from all that end of the world stuff, hi. I'm Samantha, Anita's best (and only) friend since we were born. Not that we have the same birthdays or anything, because that'd be freaky (okay, freakier), but we are about the same age.

Anita says that you can't 'exceed' the speed of light. And that if you do, you'd end up spontaneously combusting or something. I don't know, I didn't even go to college! Okay, so both of us didn't bother, since we knew (or at least, Anita knew, and I was just following along) that the world would end pretty soon. Anita wanted to be ready for it, and I just wanted to get out of school. Oh yeah, you might be wondering about our parents, but Anita wanted to make it easy on them. She just made it seem like we'd both gotten into the highest universities on our lists and were doing fine. We met with our parents whenever it was time for a parental visit, but that was about it.

So, what was Anita preparing? Like I said, you can't go faster than the speed of light. Heck, you can't even go at a speed equal to light speed. Anita says that somehow, if it does happen, then all the rules of physics will come undone, and Bad Stuff will happen. Of course, so she reasoned, at the end of the world, all hell will break loose, so why shouldn't physics fall out too? Basically, Anita wanted to build a time machine. I guess she wanted to go back into the past to correct what we humans have done wrong, so maybe the world wouldn't actually end. I don't know.

Still, we aren't exactly there yet. Actually, we were pretty much running out of time. And at the end of the world, time is the only thing you'd really need. So that's why Anita decided to postpone the time machine a bit and skip to plan B. It would buy us some time, and give us lots of room to find the parts we still needed for the time machine.

Plan B is how we ended up in a whole other universe, with all of Anita's machines close behind us.