Dr. Henrich had been working on the prototype for decades. His entire career had been devoted to transferring the three dimensional periodic arrangement of a crystal onto a four dimensional construct.

Unfortunately at his age, he was hobbled by his recent hip replacement and the crystal wasn’t large enough to fit his Segway. It would take him hours just to make it back to breakfast this morning.

Ever since Einstein, scientists have understood the relative nature of time. But Dr. Theodore Herzog was the first one to commoditize time. He realized the principle of the conservation of energy was applicable to time as well. If time is sped up in one place, it must be met with a corresponding slow down of time elsewhere.

Dr. Herzog managed to commercialize his findings so that he could sell people time. Unfortunately, his wind clock never made it to market. A future version of himself came back to the present and murdered him, erasing him from the timeline all together.