Part 4 — Chapter 9

Summary

• The protagonist has undergone several years of training in the Time Institute, after leaving a hotel five years earlier. Their study involved private instruction and self-study in the Time Institute library and at their apartment with their pet cat, Marvin, who was a gift from Zoey.
• The protagonist is introduced to the travel chamber which contains a desk and an embedded wall bench. Zoey is also present in the room and has a device that appears like a gun.
• Zoey explains that the gun-like device shoots a microcomputer, a tracker, into the protagonist’s arm that interacts with their personal device and the time machine.
• Zoey reveals that the cat, Marvin, is not from the present time. She tells the story of an agent who fed her tracker to a cat and subsequently, the cat was transported through time instead of the agent. Marvin is that cat and he is originally from the year 1985.
• The protagonist expresses surprise and dismay at not being told about Marvin being a time traveler, to which Zoey dismissively responds that a cat is a cat, regardless of its time of origin.
• Zoey injects the protagonist with the tracker, causing unexpected pain. She then proceeds to use a floating screen projection to adjust something before holding the protagonist's device close to the projection.
• Zoey programs the protagonist’s first destination into the device and instructs them to sit in the time machine.