All The Time
by joshua kaplan
05-29-2019
***
10:44:21AM GST
everyone watched.
In Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas... in every corner of every continent which held people and electronic communication, people sat transfixed at the riveting and horrific images on every display that could carry them.
To some it seemed as unreal as any television show... same screen, same images of impending destruction, but something was missing.
Where were the heroes? the ones that swoop in and deescalate the violence? the answer was so simple that it escaped many of the rank and file. after all, it had been the complacency of these many that had expedited the current scene. too much simple comfort, too little experience outside of their segregated communities, and too many unabashedly corrupt oligarchs engineering the poisoning of these minds and systems which governed them. it had been the heroes; the world's militaries and the officials that commanded them, that had been the pigment, and the world's wealthiest and greediest had been the artist's hand that shaped them.
Now they were all as one, together; the wealthy and the homeless, the immigrant and the long settled, the golden and brown and pink, the devout and the heathen, watching in detached awe at the soul-stilling scene before them.
The journalists from around the globe all seemed coordinated in their commentary, though they were oceans apart...
"120 seconds until first impact... Fairbanks Alaska, Fort Wainwright, our prayers are with you..."
***
"Fucking assholes actually did it." The irritated man said to himself, watching the same news as everyone in his tiny and cold efficiency apartment. "Shit! how many are airborne?"
The array of cheap monitors in front of him showed several versions of the same scene from alternate perspectives, some satellite, some ground images, some from various types of aircraft, all showing thousands of radiant plumes streaking across the stratosphere, like god-thrown spears of nuclear death.
The man smiled to himself.
"We chose wisely." He murmured.
The man spoke to himself a lot, but felt no shame or self-consciousness. The truth was that he didn't speak to living people unless he had to, and he was now clinically insane from social seclusion. He knew this, but still didn't care. He could speak to any of those he had loved in his life in his mind, all long dead, and did frequently.
"2 minutes. How close should i cut it, you think?" He asked one of his memory's faces. "The closer it gets the easier it will be to deal with."
"yeah, you're right. shouldn't wait until the last second," He answers the internal voice. "Just one of those fuckers goes off and there's no going back on it."
"Was a good guess that Russia would launch first. Gotta hand it to ya, old friend. You called it. Fort Wainwright, first target."
Alaska was a cold place, but the cold didn't bother the man. He wore a parka only to fit in with the norms of the environment, and not be publicly classified a freak. which he was.
The man had a secret.
He had not shared it with anyone but his wife, now dead some 300 years.
On her death bed she had made him promise her to not let go, to please carry on and use his gift to help people.
Then she had died. He had lost everything that mattered to him in a moment, and all he could he do was endure and fulfill that sacred promise... to never let go.
He was 386 years old, as time measured normal passage, but had stopped physically aging around 45. this was when he had mastered his gift.
Time.
The man, whose real name lost relevance with the death of his wife, was a human time-sink. He could slow and even stop the flow of time in and around his body, manipulating his own cellular degeneration while allowing blood to flow, oxygen to convert, and electrical activity to fire. He could completely isolate himself from the currents of temporal change.
When he had illustrated this to his wife with small showings of material displacement; moving a cup from one side of the table to the other, or appearing in different places around the room, she had to leave him, so overwhelmed by this ability. To her it seemed witchcraft, a cup appearing and disappearing, a husband doing the same, and she couldn't handle it.
She had stayed away for 6 months when she finally accepted that it didn't matter. She loved him, and he she, and that was all that ever really made sense to her. without it, there was little reason to wake.
When she returned to him, apology in her eye's and heart, he had dropped to her feet, weeping in joy at her return, and sorrow for his ability. She was all that mattered.
From that point on, the pair were together in soul and purpose. They had formulated experiments and tests to learn of time and his mastery of it. They learned that though he could slow and stop time altogether, he could not greatly affect forward motion. The flow of existence was at the spearhead of time, with a small forward buffer. One might affect forward motion through time, but only fractionally. Crops might ripen a day or two early, or a difficult livestock birth might be shortened, but this aspect of the man's control was limited by the constraints of the temporal flow itself.
They also learned that his growing control of how time might affect his body was limited to himself and what he touched, only. If he touched her, he could exert the same influence over her physiology which held his; undetectable cellular degeneration while maintaining electro-chemical conversion, so they touched a lot. still she aged, though slower, but he stayed as he was.
This was when they had discussed his future... alone.
To him, there was no future without her. They had bourne no children, and he had no passion or joy other than she. He would die with her, at her side, by his own hand.
"No." She had replied with a look that could itself have stopped time. "You will not."
"I cannot even pretend to have a glimmer of understanding as to why you can do these things," She had said, "But there must be a reason. something greater than crops or magic tricks or jokes on our friends."
"Like what?" He stuttered through tears. "There's only you. I can't live without you. The months you were away..."
During those difficult days the only things that had kept him going were their farm's needs and the hope that she would come back someday. The daily feedings and tending to the vegetables, these were things he loved and that mattered to him, but without her it all seemed pointless, somehow.
"I know, my love," She had said softly, stroking his dark hair, "and I'm sorry. i was scared... so scared..."
They hugged for a long time, both crying, and merged into each other as the candles melted slowly into memories of light and love.
Then the rains came. Hard. and with them, the flooding.
And they learned just exactly what he could do.
The small farming community woke after the storms expecting the worst; entire crops washed out, river-based structures leveled, dead animals collecting at the river basin, and even human lives lost. The elderly and infirmed, the slow and drunk, they might not realize in time, or have no one to retrieve them.
And there was damage. Some fields were awash and crops were lost, and some structures had fallen, but there were no casualties. Not a single farm animal, or human was lost.
But the single thing that created the most amazement, if amazement might even qualify, were the troughs, ditches, moats and channels that had appeared over-night throughout the landscape. channels that had diverted the flood-waters away from crops and protected houses.
"It's a miracle!" They all cried aloud. "God has saved us!"
When the rains came the man and his wife had stared at each other for a long time, looking for that spark of inspiration, that moment of clarity in the others eyes and heart.
"You can save people. Since you have all the time in the world, you can grab them from their homes and move them before the flood waters hit. maybe you can stack sandbags or dig channels..."
"Dig channels..." He had said, his eyes distant. Then he looked at his wife, smiled and kissed her on the forehead. "See you soon."
Then he disappeared into the timeless place.
It had taken him several years, or it would have if time moved.
He had first marveled for a long non-time at the static sculpture of rain cascading through the sky, interrupted only by his touch. How he might be wet but not cold, as the water moved slowly over his body through time but the energy movement of heat transfer didn't last long enough to affect him. Then he realized he had a job to do, and it wasn't going to be easy.
He first retrieved a standard sized spade and walked toward the river to survey the job, also remembering the last flood and the damage it had done. He picked a section and began to dig. water only pooled at his feet from the slow runoff of his body but became as glass the moment his foot moved. He dug ferociously, as he discovered that his body did not fatigue in the timeless place.
So he dug, and dug and dug. He learned that the amount of concentration necessary to keep his hands from blistering was too much to maintain, so he retrieved a pair of gloves from a nearby neighbor's shed and continued to dig.
He didn't need to eat or sleep or drink water... so he dug, and thought about his wife... her long golden hair, which flowed in waves like swaying rows of grain. Her large intelligent gray-green eyes which reflected her love of him. Her kindness to all living things and acceptance of his own frailties... and he dug.
He made few visits to see his wife, appearing suddenly only a moment after he had left. The first visit startled her. He was soaking wet, covered from head to foot in dirt and mud that had stuck to his time-radiant periphery, and his hands were soaked in blood.
He had almost assaulted her in his passion. To he, it had been a week of constant digging and yearning to see her. to she, it had been a nano-second.
He embraced her tightly, and she couldn't help but recoil at the wet embrace.
"I can't linger. this will take me a while, my time. See you soon, my love."
On his next trip into the time-sink, he decided that he would need some extraneous items to focus and tend to his hands. he would need shovels. he couldn't protect them from the constant contact with the soil. with no time-flow, the dirt couldn't be extracted. some entropy had to be tolerated. This meant not only shovels, but boots, blue jeans, and lots of gloves and bandages. also books. his mind needed some material distraction to maintain it's grip on the real world.
he found that life in the timeless place was a bleary silent existence, and apathy might easily set in and extend his non-time away from his wife. But as much as he wanted to see her, he knew that every second out of the stillness was a second lost to time, and he wasn't a time traveler. he couldn't go back and correct his mistakes. He had to get it right the first time. He had to focus and do what was necessary.
There were times when boredom got the best of him, or when his hands hurt too much, so he stopped digging and read, healing his hands in the forward time-buffer. the buffer worked perfectly. he could generate a field of hastening on just his hands and take whatever non-time they needed to fully heal. When he got tired of reading, he strolled the community, peeking into windows, staring at biological paintings of families and petting living statues of domestic animals.
One non-day, maybe 2 years into his excavation he had wandered into the small center of town looking to gear up and he stopped, and looked suddenly to his left.
"What the heck..."
For a moment he thought he had seen movement in his peripheral vision. Nothing moved in the timeless place, he thought. Nothing but him. So what was that...
Then he saw it. it was a medium-sized quadruped, approximately a foot high at the fore shoulder, with a stout body and wide head draped with fleshy folds. it had very short white fur with brown blotches in random placement.
"A bulldog? Here?" The man exclaimed to the staring canine and the universe. He had never seen one in real life before, but had seen pictures. "What are you doing here, pooch?"
The time-sink dog had no reply.
The man knelt down and put his hand out, palm upturned.
"Hey buddy, come say hi."
Though the man was considered intelligent, he was still a man of the 19th century, a farmer, and had no knowledge of particle physics or wave mechanics. Had he been an educated man of a more advanced age, born of wealth and opportunity, perhaps he might have wondered how he might see the dog. Since light did not move in the Sink, the new occupant's mass could not reflect the light back to the man's retina. He might also wonder how the dog would see or hear him, as well.
The short stocky canine happily trotted over to the man, accepted him with a short sniff, received a healthy amount of jowl scratching, and rolled onto his back, tongue lolling out of it's mouth.
"What a sweet boy you are." The man smiled, and had to stifle a tear. What a special gift, he thought. Company in this strange place.
"I guess you an me are the same, boy. Cuckoo."
The man softly stroked the at the dog's forehead, and his eye's suddenly brightened.
"That's what I'll call you... Cuckoo." He said happily. "Get it? We're time freaks, you an' me, like living clocks. So, you're Cuckoo clock."
"An' you can call me Woof." The man laughed out loud. It was the first time he had laughed in a long non-time.
Cuckoo uprighted himself and seemingly in direct response gave a hearty "Woof," elevating all four paws in a little hop/bounce.
"Okay. That's not odd at all." The man laughed again. "C'mon Cu, we got diggin' to do."
And the two new friends set about their timeless task.
***
When the job was finished to their mutual satisfaction, as Cuckoo had dug just as voraciously as his man-friend Woof, the two strolled unhurriedly to survey the work. The man felt detached, looking at the enormous, as yet unfilled, channels they had dug and the landscape of mounds of repurposed soil, unable to fully absorb that he and a bulldog had done all this themselves. They had excavated and moved tens of thousands of tons of earth in the vacuum of the time-sink, in no time at all.
The man looked at Cuckoo and wondered what would happen to him when the time-flow began again. Maybe if he touched him when the flow re-started, he thought, he might bring his wife a gift. She would love him even more than Woof did, as such was her heart. And Cuckoo would probably abandon him the moment his wife started loving on the dog. The man smiled to himself at the thought, something that happened far more often since Cuckoo came into his life.
The man knelt beside his furry companion and wrapped his arms around it's thick neck.
"I'm going to start the flow, Cu. Please hang on to me."
"Woof!"
***
When he didn't appear as he had done before; suddenly, grimy and wet, she worried. She walked to the window of their small cottage and watched the rain pelt the pane in chaotic bursts. She saw branches flying and leaves swirling and she chewed at her lower lip.
"Where are you, my love?" she spoke softly to the violent scene.
She started when she heard the knock on the door, and moved quickly to open it. It had only been minutes since she had seen her husband last, and she was still wet from his last embrace, but it seemed a far longer void. That single moment you think you've lost someone can last lifetimes.
"Hello?" She said, unsure. They never locked their door, and if it had been her husband he wouldn't knock. would he?
She opened the door and her heart leapt. There stood her husband, almost exactly as he had appeared before; worn, pale, dirty, smiling, and eye's tearing freely. At his right ankle sat a big white and brown bulldog, panting and slavering.
She stared, her own eye's pooling with moisture, as she knew what his smile meant.
"Hello, my love. This is Cuckoo. Say hi, Cu."
Cuckoo raised his hind quarters with some awkwardness, standing proudly, and said hi.
"Woof!"
"Ohhh..." The beautiful woman said, as she immediately wrapped her entirety around the happy canine. "You brought my love back to me, beautiful handsome boy..." then, to her husband, "Where did you find him?"
"He was in the timeless place. he helped me dig."
"How did he get there?"
"Dunno. He was just snooping around. I think he's time wacky, like me."
"Woof!"
"He calls me 'Woof," the man said, chuckling, watching his wife pour love all over the joyous canine.
"Did you do it?" She asks her husband, still focused on her new friend.
"Yeah. Should work, except we have to go back when the flood hits." The man answers, looking out the window at the raging storm. "There are sure to be things that i couldn't foresee. people and animals will need to be displaced. Maybe more digging. Let's give it a few minutes."
The man stared now at his wife, whose eye's met his.
"How long this time?" She asks, her eye's now showing concern.
"Years, I think." and he swayed for a moment, and broke down, dropping to his bloodied hands and knees, weeping. All the months of loneliness and seclusion in the most lifeless environment any mind might conjure came boiling to the surface. Even with the company of his four-legged partner, it was a gauntlet of stasis, worse than death, for even in death there is motion and energy. There was nothing in the Sink but digging and Cuckoo and a world frozen in vacuum.
***
The man recovered quickly, but only because his wife made it so. She said nothing, but enfolded herself like silk in wind around his soil-blackened neck and torso, breathing her life and light into his soul. He hadn't felt her touch in what seemed an eternity, and it was the only reason he did anything at all. It was also all that he needed to continue.
The man got to his feet and lifted his wife with his arms tightly around her, squeezing her to remember long the heat of her body, the swell of her breasts, the salty taste of her neck, and the smell of her hair. He lowered her gently to the ground, kissing her long on her full lips. They held each other for a long time, until they heard the pitched tumult of the storm reach deafening proportion.
Cuckoo stood at their feet, looking up at his new family and whined.
"The waters are coming. We have to go now, my love. The chickens won't save themselves, they're kinda dumb, y'know."
"Don't I ever." She said, smiling. "Go save the chickens. and the goats too, while you're at it."
The man smiled back sadly, not knowing how long he and Cuckoo might have to endure the stillness.
"We won't be long." He joked.
The man placed his hand on Cuckoo's wide brow, scratched his ear, and the strange pair disappeared to finish what they had started.
***
10:44:43AM GST
The man rose from his simple wooden chair and walked to retrieve his tool kit from the closet.
"Time to get back to work, Cu." The man said to the image of his now long buried four-legged Sink-walking partner, forever etched in his insanity. He knew the dog wasn't really there, but to him Cuckoo was as real as the impending disaster that they must now address, together. Just like the flood. Just like the countless other tragedies and incidents he had intervened in over his lonely existence. The fires and fights and accidents, all now a blur in a consciousness that had absorbed far too much information to effectively sort through.
With some difficulty the man pulled a canvas chest harness out of the closet, weighted with heavy iron and steel tools clipped with various Caribbean to it's facade. He made the outfit years ago for this one specific purpose.
He knew this dire event would happen eventually, and with the help of the people he held inside his delusions had formulated a plan to deal with it. He had studied for years the construction of the materials of nuclear conflict and knew what was needed to disassemble them. He didn't worry about the nuclear material itself, as nothing radiated in the Sink without his permission. Once he removed the core he needed only to find a safe place for it to be stored, and the task was done.
He wondered if his body's radiant time-flow would allow the shed protons to poison him, but not in fear. it excited him, the thought that he might actually die. A part of him that he had to keep buried was this desire. To finally rest. To be dead.
10:45:21AM GST
"One minute until first impact. May God help us all..." The television reporter said, eyes down, unable to focus on the protocols of his profession.
The man strapped on the far too heavy harness, wincing a bit, but he knew encumbering weight was not a concern. Gravity had no say in the Sink.
He then walked to his desk and retrieved the printouts he would need to locate and dismantle the missiles that would be first to deliver their payload, also the thumb drive with the software necessary to retrieve information and calculate additional targets. He didn't want to have to walk back to Alaska between waves so he took whatever he would need with him.
The last this he grabbed before exiting was his Patek Philippe 5930G World Time Chronograph, which he considered to be the best watch in the world, and no one knew time quite like him.
He opened his front door to a blast of icy air from Alaska's unforgiving lungs, which he allowed himself to feel. The bracing of the cold helped wake his mind to the surreal task at hand. He pictured briefly the long walks across oceans and continents and the horrified and weeping faces he would see, but it didn't faze him. If you can spend a year in the Sink, he thought, you can spend an eternity. He pictured how he would walk up to the hurtling ballistic, now frozen in space/time, on planes of atmosphere the exact dimensions of the bottoms of his boots, generated by his mind. All compounds, even gases, where as tungsten and diamond might never hope to be, when in the grip of the Sink. He pictured the disassembly and bringing the material components to the ground and the thousands of times he would need do it.
10:45:51AM GST
"30 seconds..." The man hears as he closes the door behind him, out of habit only, and checks his watch to confirm the last words he will hear for perhaps hundreds of years.
In the waning moments before he entered the Time-Sink, he thought about his wife's dying words...
"Never let go, my love. Not for me, but for every other person who has someone they love."
This was why he would do it. Not because he cared about the industry of humanity, or it's history, or art, or nations, or religions... he didn't care. What he had learned in all his tortured years was that the only thing that mattered was the love between living beings. Families, friends, lovers, and even strangers and animals. The contact and caring, the sacrifice and deference... this was why he would do it. To give the world another chance to be in love.
...and then he was gone.
~end
***
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