Story #148 - Time's Up

Time's Up

There was no time. Literally.

For once, the phrase was actually relevant; instead of merely being a way to indicate rush. Waste. Anger.

No one had expected it – although from our best guesses there had been a man in Northern Yrakistan who had predicted that such a thing would come to pass, but of course everyone was sure he was a madman. Aside from living in Northern Yrakistan, which at its best was inhabited by three sheep farmers, two sheep and a lonely goat, every scientific conference the man had attended ended with him being thrown out and told firmly never to return by the beefy nerd bully-boys that guarded the entrances.

The fact that the man – Boris Tolson – was not a scientist might have had something to do with the fact that he was continually bounced from events. He was also rude, underfed, and had the distinct smell of sheep on him, which made him a poor attendee. Rumor had it that there had been a conference in Miami that Boris had made it through without being forcibly removed, but he had also been showered and stone cold sober at that point. Yrakistanians were well known for their alcohol tolerance, and Boris was well known for his ability to over-imbibe.

But despite his (many) flaws, Boris was in fact a brilliant mind. Had been. Had been a brilliant mind. It’s still difficult to imagine that someone would actually kill him, let alone in such a barbaric way.

Alright, you’ve got me. I’d imagined killing him a time or two after he interrupted one of my best presentations at the bi-annual SciSciCon in Hanover. In fact, I’d dreamt up a whole suite of ways to deprive Boris of at the very least his voice, if not his arms and legs and possibly the ability to carry around a beating heart, but it was all in fun. Angry, angry fun.

Then the end of the world came along.

Our top minds started moaning about it, which made everyone who wasn’t a top mind immediately criticize everything that was being said. We were a jealous and petty group, and as soon as the leaders in our field said something was unequivocally true, we naturally argued it. They were right, unsurprisingly, but that didn’t mean we weren’t going to fight tooth and nail to prove that they weren’t.

But Boris, sweet Boris – he knew before us all.

Time was linear, something we all liked to say, but hadn’t know for sure. Dr. Tremmon Pal proved it a few years ago, confirmed that the arrow we’d been shot on was flying true, and flying straight. Polly Dyer had shown it was also flying toward a wall. Just a grad student, Polly’s work had been largely ignored until the pundits and gurus started talking, and then an astute young scientist (ahem!) pointed them in the direction of her proof.

We had less than ten years, and then time as we knew it was going to grind to a halt.

“Grind” might not be the best word either – “come screeching” might be a better way to put it. What that was going to do to us was anyone’s guess, but the best one currently going around was that the earth was going to tear itself apart, somehow outside of and around the time that once existed.

My specialty lay with temporal mechanics, not those real ones that guys who couldn’t make honors in high school got to take when they eked their way into University. They figured it had something to do with a number of super massive black holes that were all converging at a central location, attempting to devour one another as they swirled in and around themselves. Somehow – look, I don’t really have time for a full-on math explanation – these holes and their interactions are going to culminate in the final movements for the temporal dance we know as time.

Everything is going to come to a sudden and unpleasant stop, and even if it does get going again, we’ll likely find the earth shredded underneath us.

That brings us to the plan.

You’re receiving this rambling letter as a selection candidate for the only answer or government can think of – getting you off planet long enough to find a solution. The nature of light and time make it possible to move away from the wall that is being created, away from the creeping death that we’ve got to look forward to. Our fastest ships will buy you (and I) ten years to do our good works, to build off of what poor Boris started and find a solution to this conundrum.

Saying “no” isn’t really an option, since you can expect a platoon of national guardsmen outside your door in the next day and half, and if you decide to run, they have orders to capture you and subdue you by any means necessary. Buck up! You’ve been chosen as one of the few to escape the potential cataclysm, one of the few that might have the brains necessary to stop this thing.

I can’t claim I have any idea what that solution will look like. I’m a theorist, dammit, and all this real-world nonsense makes my head spin, but we are literally running out of time. Have I made that point clear? Do you understand the concept?

We had the chance to have time to work on this, a chance we ignored when we sent Boris and his goaty clothes tumbling from the doors of our hallowed conference centers. Such is the price we pay for hubris; such is the price we pay for ignoring those whose smell and mind do not agree with our own.

Know what we’ve wrought, and then make your choice. You will be ridiculed, mocked for your ideas, possibly compared to the great Yrakistanian himself, but you owe it to us, and to your planet, to at least try.

Boris is dead, but his ideas don’t have to die with him. Join us – before you don’t you have the time.


- D