When Class 8B is sent into a forgotten lab, Marek finds a suspicious old machine labelled ‘Time Hoover’ and presses the wrong button at the worst possible moment.
At Nicolaus Copernicus School in Swidrówka Dolna, every break was a sprint for the best spot in the corridor. But that June morning managed to outdo even the usual chaos. Before the first lesson was halfway done, Mrs Wozniak had already decided that physics would be more interesting somewhere nobody had been in years.
That somewhere turned out to be the old laboratory at the end of the corridor, the one with the peeling door and the lock that sounded like it was coughing up dust. Only a few students even knew the room existed. The legends about it were better than any lesson: a computer with a screen like a fish tank, a mysterious spill of green liquid, and one very fast decision by the school staff to pretend the whole place had never happened.
Mrs Wozniak, who could turn a glass of water and a rubber band into a full experiment, looked delighted. She swung the door open and marched Class 8B inside as if she were leading an expedition instead of a lesson. “Today,” she announced, “we are testing pressure.”
Marek spotted the machine first.
It stood in the corner like something rescued from a scrapyard and then given a bad temper: huge, round, packed with buttons, switches, blinking lights, and a warning sign that said, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH - EXPERIMENTAL TIME HOOVER. Marek leaned closer, his homemade watch already five minutes fast and, as usual, completely certain it knew better than everyone else.
“Don’t touch that,” Ada whispered. She had the same tone she used when predicting rain five seconds before it started. “That is exactly the sort of thing that ruins a day.”
Marek grinned. “Or improves it.”
Luke, who usually treated everything as nonsense, lowered his phone and actually looked interested. That was how bad the machine looked. The whole class drifted nearer, as if the floor had turned magnetic. Marek lifted one hand, found the biggest red button, and pressed it before anyone could stop him.
Nothing happened.
For one tiny, unbearable second, everyone stared. Then the machine gave a noise like a hippopotamus sneezing underwater. The lights went wild. A lever snapped up, another slammed down, and something inside it began to smell suspiciously like burnt pancakes.
The machine shuddered. Air rushed through the lab in a sharp, spiralling gust. Papers lifted off the desks. Someone yelped. Marek’s watch jerked on his wrist, and the second hand started spinning backwards like it had lost its mind.
Then the ceiling changed.
Dark lines spread above them, sketching themselves into a pattern of stars and curved paths no one recognised. The loudspeaker crackled, coughed, and came alive with a metallic voice:
“Sequence active. Please prepare for...”
It cut out.
The machine brightened again, and in the centre of the lab a spiral of light began to open, slow at first, then wider, brighter, and far too impossible to be ignored.