The Edge of Time

At the speed of light, as everyone knows, time slows down.  Most people think that gives you more of it.  But they are wrong about this.  No matter how fast you travel, in whatever direction, you only have the time you have. 

            No more, no less. 

            What most people also do not realize is that as you near the speed of light, fate slows down as well.  Destiny, which always races one step ahead, now eases up ever so slightly, and seems to hesitate and pause.  In the blur of this kind of motion, you could almost get the impression of catching up with it, grabbing it by the tail, even wrestling it to the ground.

            But you would be wrong there too.  Fate stays one step ahead, no matter what.  

            No more time, no less fate.

            Such are the mysteries of life as you approach the limit of speed in the cosmos.

            Jon Drammond thought about all this as he stood in that white room, dressed in white, before the vast expanse of the window.  Outside the transparent chromium pane all was black, with only the faintest hint of light.  Out there where a billion dim wiggles looked like the tails of countless microbes spawning.  That was the way stars appeared at this speed, alive and darting.  Seeing this illusion of life, you could almost come to believe that the universe itself, down to the very atom, was alive.

            You could almost believe that it was not all, in fact, coming to an end.

            This was a nice fairy tale but Jon did not get the chance to dwell on it.  He thought he was alone in the room, staring out into space, having his thoughts.  But his wife Dayn had been standing behind him the whole while, watching, silent.

            “How much time?” she asked softly.

            “I didn’t see you there,” he said without turning around.

            “How much?” she repeated.

            “We don’t know really.  It’s all just a theory.”

            “Yes you do,” she said.   “What are they saying?  How much time left?”

            “It’s a pointless calculation,” he said, turning his back to the sky.  “We have as much time as we have.”

            He was lying to her and she knew it.  She knew all about the clock they had down in one of the labs.  Most everyone did.  The EndTime clock they called it.  It had been set according to the mathematics of their theory and told them, very specifically, how much time they had left, how much time the universe had left.  When she last heard the rumors, the clock was indicating 312 years.  But that had been months ago and the magnitude was changing with each and every second.  What could it be now?  Two centuries?  100 years?  A single generation?

            She did not press the issue.  Her husband was a Chief Cosmologist and that meant that he was a very stubborn man.  If he refused to tell her, that would be that.  At least until something changed his mind.

            “Is Tara home yet?” he asked by way of changing the subject.

            “I just picked her up.  She’ll be here in a second.  Do you have to go back to work tonight?”
            “No.  I’m done for the day,” he said and pulled her close and held her a bit too tight before the prancing starlights.

            “There’s bad news, Jon, I can feel it in you.  You don’t have to protect me from it.  We’re in this together.”

            He thought for a moment and knew that she was right.

            “We were off in our guess about the acceleration.  By quite a lot.”

            “I thought so.”

            “We may only have as few as 90 years.  Maybe we’re wrong about that too.”

            Tears welled up in Dayn’s eyes but she fought them back.  One thing she had learned during the Running was that being strong was more important than being sensitive.  It was the only way to go on.

            “90 years,” she said.  “Tara’s generation.  Then the end of all life for all eternity.  It is still so hard to grasp.”

            Jon Drammond did not answer her.  There was nothing really to say.  It had all been said before.  Many many times.  Everyone had made peace with it in his or her own way.  To Jon, who was not of any faith, it was simply the rule of the cosmos.  A rule that trumped all others and that overwhelmed  the fears of any frail little personality.  Still, it was one thing for a person to know that death was inevitable and to come to terms with it.  Quite another to know that the universe itself was coming to an end. 

            It all, of course, began with the Big Bang.  Everything did.  The universe had exploded from a pinpoint blast and been expanding outwards for the last 15 billion years.  It was what everyone knew and it was romantic and dramatic and wholly unfathomable to anyone without superstring hypermath.  Even so, it was undeniable since its first discovery in the mid 20^th century. 

            But it was only half the story. 

            It would take another five hundred years for the rest of the tale to be told…that there had been a second Big Bang, erupting from the exact same point in spacetime.  This was known as the Second Wave.  It was an explosion too, just like the first, but of antimatter.  A widening black hole expanding with increasing velocity that would eventually engulf all matter and energy.  It meant that while the universe was created in an instant and was expanding outward at almost the speed of light, the seeds of its destruction were there right from the start.  And it meant that this very universe would be destroyed by a second, obverse explosion slowly overtaking the first. 

            The scientists called this Alternating Pulsing Cosmogeny or simply APC.  Two adjacent branes in n-dimensional space colliding over and over.  Universes created and destroyed and created again, just like the ancient religions said.  Yet despite the fancy names and equations, it meant a plain thing.  That the world was coming to an end.  Very very soon.

            When the full impact of the theory became clear, another understanding emerged.  They could calculate the stretch from the blast center to earthpoint and knew that life on earth was doomed.  So one hundred starships carrying peoples of the earth were launched in an effort called the Running.  These were hopeless flights, they all knew.  There was no way to outrun the end.  But heading at lightspeed away from the center of everything would at least add some time.  And they had gotten much better at predicting the end in the 20 years since the Running began; now the EndTime clock was thought to be quite accurate.  

            But then again, this was the precise thing no one really wanted to know at all.

            “Daddy!” shouted a small, prim girl standing at the doorway.  She came racing in and slammed into him, making everyone laugh.

            “My little genius!” Jon said. 

            “Look what I found!” she said, slapping a small rectangular object into her mother’s stomach.

            “A school project?”

            “No silly, I discovered it.  On a spedition.”

            “Expedition,” Dayn said.  “They were doing archeo research on Level Five.”

            “No, it was on Level Seven,” the girl corrected.  “What is it Mommy?”

            Dayn took the object in her hands like a treasure and stared at it.  At first, it seemed remote and strange, like a creature from a lost world.  Relic of the dim past.  Then that past slowly seeped in through a crack in her memory.

            “I think this thing was called…a…bok.”

            “Like a box?”

            “No, a bok,” Dayn said and opened it up.  Sure enough between the thick covers were thin white leaves filled with strange symbols.”

            “Book,” Jon corrected.  “I saw them when I was a boy.  My grandfather had a collection of them.”

            “What’s it for?” Tara asked.  “It doesn’t react at all.”

            “No.  It’s not for reacting.  A book was a kind of…”

            “Archive,” Dayn suggested.  “A place to store…”

            “Language,” Jon added.  He had taken the book from his wife’s hands and was flipping slowly through the pages.  The texture was smooth like fine waferskin, and the color slightly yellow like Auricine.  It even had a familiar smell but he could not quite place it.

            “You see, darling, that is an ancient language,” Dayn said, pointing to the symbols on the pages.

            “I can’t hear it,” the girl said sadly.

            “No sweetie, it doesn’t talk.  These are written words.  Written?”

            “That’s right,” Jon said.  “Written.  It means that they were…put on the surface…with a machine…um…”

            “It was a way of…putting language down so that…people could…”

            “What good is that if you can’t hear it?” Tara interrupted.

            “You have to…what’s the word, Dayn?”

            “Read!” Dayn shouted, as though she had just stumbled onto a gem inside her own cortex. 

            “That’s right, you have to read them.  You have to look at them and say what they mean.”

            “Read,” the girl muttered, with great mystery, almost like an incantation.  “Well, can you read it Mommy?”

            “No I can’t.  I haven’t even seen one of these since I was a little girl.”

            “Like me?”

            “Yes, just like you.  But not as smart.  Can you read it, Jon?”

            He studied the words on the cover, then turned some of the pages and moved his lips silently.

            “Is it in the Talk?” Dayn asked.
            “Yes, it is,” he said.  “But it’s an ancient form that was known as English.  A lot of similarities though.  You know, I bet I probably can read this.”

            “Can you read it to me, Daddy?  Can you please?  Please?”

            “I’d need to go down and uplink a lingualog.  Then I guess I could.  But it’s just an old book.  Why would you want me to read it to you?”

            “Because,” the girl concluded.

            “You might as well,” Dayn said.  “It might be fun.  We can sit together and you could read it to us.”

            “What’s the point?” he said with a tired sigh.  “Some old book.”

            “It will help us pass the time,” Dayn said.

            “Pass the time,” he echoed. 

            An ironic phrase, he thought, considering that there was nothing else left for humanity to do.  Nothing left to achieve, nothing left to hope for.  All that remained of our great passage was to pass the time waiting for it to come to a stone cold dead deletion.

            Dayn, studying his face that she knew so well, could see the mood that would soon immerse him if she did not step in and insist.  She pretended to kiss him on the neck but instead whispered into his ear:  “She wants to spend time with you, Jon.  With us, as a family.  It doesn’t matter why.”

            Jon was a scientist, like almost everyone on the ship.  They were the smart ones, the ones with fancy logic, people of the grid and grit, analytical, with math but not myth, questions but no mysteries.  They were beyond lies and fables and were living in the slipstream of reason in its final surge.

            But the one thing he had learned in the years since they left earth was that although he was a brilliant physicist, he could easily be wrong about simple things.  People things.  But about these, his wife Dayn was always always right.

            “All right,” he said.  “I’ll be back in a few minutes.  I’ll need to access the Core.”

            While he was gone, Dayn and Tara slid the couch over to the window.   It was a big fat soft couch, perfect for telecommuning or just gazing into space.  Dayn held the book in her hands and looked through it with a great sorrow.  Whatever was inside this mystery box, and everything else and all there was, and all of life, all made things, would vanish in almost no time at all.  Like a dream in the head of a waking child.  Everything.  Only to start all over again with a clean slate.  The physics said so.  It was the way of the cosmos.  But that did not make it any easier to swallow right here and now.

            “Let’s see,” Jon said, returning after an hour and squeezing between them.  “I haven’t practiced this in a while, so I may get some of the words wrong.”

            He took the book from his wife and held it like a sacred object.

            “Is it really really old?” Tara asked.

            “Let’s see,” he said and turned to the first page.  “There it is.  You see, it says 1961.”

            Tara followed his finger down to some symbols on the page.  She studied them for a few moments and came to a conclusion.

            “Is it about axial symmetry?” she asked.

            The question caught both of her parents off guard.

            “What do you mean?”

            “It’s like a neutrino counter-collision.  It flips over,” she explained.  “See?”

            She took the book from her father’s hands and turned it upside down.  Then pointed to the numbers to prove that they read the same.  Upside down it was still 1961.

            “Wow,” Jon said.  “Smart girl.   I didn’t notice that.”

            “If this is about Plasma Physics,” Dayn said, “I may fall asleep.”

            “No,” her husband said, turning to the first page.   “It just means that this was when the book was made.  In the year 1961.”

            “500 years ago,” Dayn mused.

            “Yes.  And it has a title too.”

            “Title?” Tara asked, confused.

            “Like a name.  Every book had a name.  What you would call it.  And the name of this one is – let’s see – it’s called One Ocean.”

            Tara still had a puzzled look on her face and her mother jumped to the rescue.  Her daughter had been born during the Running and her whole world was the starship.  She had never known the earth with its magnificent oceans…their vastness, wetness, deepness.  The way they cradled life.  She had never been swimming, surfed a wave, or watched the sun set across an edgeless sea.

            “Oceans,” Dayn said, trying to find grand enough words.  “Oceans were…”

            “I know,” Tara said.  “they have them in the simmies.  They were water that covered our home world.”

            “Huge amounts of water.  You can’t imagine, sweetheart.  As far as you could see.  Your father and I used to swim in them.”

            “Yes, but that’s not what it means here,” Jon interrupted.  He had been reading some words on the back cover that explained the contents of the book.  “This book is not about oceans at all.  The title refers to a place where people lived.  A building on a street.”

            “Why was the street called an ocean?” Tara asked.  She was of that age at which words meant what they meant.  Or they meant nothing at all.

            “It was a street called Ocean Avenue in a place called Brooklyn,” her father said.  “This is a book of stories about people who lived there.  They lived in a building that was called One Ocean Avenue.   One Ocean…that was the number of the building.”

            Places and streets with names, and buildings with numbers.  Were these all too hard to understand as you flew away from history so fast that the stars wiggled?  Jon wondered if the book was such a good idea, but his daughter broke in with a question that cut through to something much deeper.

            “Stories?” Tara asked, miming her father’s drawl.

            “Yes, you know.  Stories about people and things that happened to them.  Way back in 1961.  In a building.  On a street called Ocean Avenue.  In a place called Brooklyn.”

            “500 years ago,” Tara repeated.  That was a hard concept for a 9-year old to grasp.  Not logically but emotionally.  “Are they all dead now?”

            “Well…stories doesn’t mean it actually happened.  These are probably made-up stories. The author – I mean the person who created them – made up stories and wrote them down.”

            “Wrote?”

            “I mean he recorded them in this writing system so that other people would read them and find them interesting.”

            “Was he a Runner, daddy?”

            She was trying to piece something together in her mind but it was not clear just what.

            “No sweetie, there were no Runners then.  This was long before we discovered the Second Wave and started the Running.”

            “Okay,” Tara said.  She knew now what she needed to…what a story was and that people once lived in buildings and that there were streets named like oceans.  But none of that was especially important to her because she also knew that the end was coming and that her father and mother were there with her now, and that there was nothing else to be done but be together.  And that felt right.  She pressed in closer to both of them and said, with great authority:  “You can start now.”

            And so Jon began to read.  He stumbled at first.  The words came to him through a great mire of disuse.  There had not been much call for books or reading in the world of the liquid image, and so over the years he had lost the skill.  But as he went on, it became easier.  He had read when he was a boy.  Read a great deal in fact.  That was rare even in his generation which itself was a century beyond the death of paper.  But his grandfather had insisted on it and Jon had found it to be tiring but also exhilarating.  So many ideas, so many sentences, so many stories.  Still, the lingualog helped and so did some residual memory and he pressed on.  He did this for his wife, for his daughter.  To keep their minds off the terrible calamity to come.  He did it for himself too.  For each moment that he read seemed like another moment stolen from the exploding center of negative history.  And so he read the stories in the book to them.  He read all through the unending night and on into the following day, even though day and night were both just concepts now.

            “Something has changed,” Dayn said when she saw him the next evening.  He had spent the entire day in the lab, not even coming back for lunch.  This was unusual and would have been a bad sign but for the slight, almost undetectable, curl of his lips.  No one but Dayn would have noticed this, but she did and could not overlook it.

            “Something’s happening,” she said bluntly.  “Tell me.”

            “I’m not sure,” he said.

            “I am.  I can see it in your face.  Tell me what it is.”

            “I’m not sure.”

            “Have you noticed something?  Has something changed?”

            Sensing that she would not give up, he finally softened and answered: “Yes, I think the clock is slowing down.”

            “What does it mean?  Does it mean that the Second Wave is slowing?”

            “No, the Second Wave is not slowing down.  Nor is the end of the universe.  But somehow, we have enlarged the slip of duration between them.”

            “I’m sorry, Jon, I’m not a chronologist.”

            Jon took a deep breath.  The evidence of the two cosmic expansions – the miraculous one and the horror – only existed as patterns in highly complex fractality.  They were equations, significances, nesting iterations of self-generating emulata.  There weren’t even any normal words to translate them.  But the expression on his wife’s face made it clear to him that, one way or another, he had to come up with some.

            “Put it this way,” he finally said.  “It seems, and this only a vague conjecture at this point, that the wedge of time within which we live is enlarging slightly.  In other words, it may be the case that the EndTime clock has slowed its acceleration.   It’s not definite, just a hint.  I don’t know how or why.  None of us do.”

            “Does it mean that we live?” Dayn asked, jumping on the conclusion like a raft.

            He looked puzzled.

            “I mean we humans, Jon.  Us.  Does it mean that Tara has a chance to live?”

            “I don’t know.”

            Again that night and for many nights thereafter, they continued to read their stories.  They sat again on the couch as the dance of the stars passed before them across the vast window of the ship, like a paper panorama being unfurled at one end, furled at the other.  When One Ocean was done and all the tales in it told, they found another book in the vast library that had been neglected for so long.  And another and another.  And they read the stories from all of them.  They read out loud about all these people who once lived or never lived or might have lived, and understood something of their loves and their hopes and their despairs.  These were tiny stories, little nothings at all, long ones, short ones, funny ones, sad ones.  Great big stories about life itself or little diversions about the merest of matters.

            About the woman who lost her earring but found her lost love.   The great hero of the great war who was inwardly a coward.  The captain of the ship whose misplaced map changed the shape of the world.  About the first men and women, who knew more about the universe than those who evolved solely to survive in it.  Lovers who reached across the eons to know each other through all the ages of their lives.  A man who died of radio.  A woman who lied to her lover and regretted her truths.

            To the outsider these told tales no doubt were nothing more than a way to pass the time, the only time that was left in an existence careening towards its end.

            And yet…something was changing. 

            They all sensed it in themselves but Jon could see it in the calculations as well.  Unseen, odorless, untouchable.  But with a presence as palpable as gravity itself.  They all knew this, sensed the rubbery fabric of the cosmos stretching just a bit, the difference between a split second and a whole one. 

            At first they did not speak of it.  Too fragile, as it was, to tinker with.  They simply continued to read together each night and wait for the daily report that indeed the EndTime clock was slowing.  Finally Dayn said aloud what they had all been thinking.

            “Maybe it’s the stories,” she said.

            Jon laughed at that, but deeply and with a profound tenderness.

            “I mean it,” she insisted.  “You said the change has now been proven.   You said the universe was still expanding and the Second Wave was too.  But that our slice of time was widening and that the end was no longer as near as once predicted.  You said all that.”

            “We can’t explain it.”

            “But it began when we started reading those stories.”

            “Please, Dayn.  Let’s not get all cryptic here.  We don’t even know if this is permanent.  It may just be an anomaly.”

            “But it did begin with the stories.”

            “That can’t matter.”

                “But it did.”

            “Yes it did.  But there can’t be any connection.”

            “Maybe the stories are expanding time.  Driving a wedge between the two waves or something.”

            “That doesn’t make any sense at all and you know it.”

            “It could be.”

            “Could not be.”

            “You don’t know.”

            “Well if you can explain to me how reading some stories from a few old forgotten books to our 9-year old daughter can change the velocity differential between the expanding universe and the expanding anti-universe, I will be happy to bring it to the Council.”

            Dayn, who knew nothing of all the hypermath, knew something much better than equations.  She knew people.  In fact, she knew most of the other families on the ship who were in some ways mere statistics to the theorists and their computers.  And so, quietly and informally, she convinced her friends and neighbors to join the experiment. 

            The library, which had been all but abandoned for years, was now buzzing with activity as people all over the ship took out books and began to read the stories in them.  They read them aloud at night and silently in the morning.  They traded the books and told each other the tales and acted them out and now, so many years after the written word had evaporated, they even began to create their own stories.

            And sure enough, their slice of time continued to expand.

            “Maybe you’re wrong about all this,” Dayn said, but kindly.

            “Yes, that’s always possible,” Jon admitted.

            “Perhaps the universe is not made of tiny atoms or vibrating strings or shiny cubicules.  Maybe it’s made of stories.”

            He could no longer deny it.  Perhaps it was true, he thought.  And to create them was to build matter, to read them was to expand the present, to tell them was to enrich the world, to remember them was to reach inside the very fabric of spacetime and weave new moments.     

            Perhaps.

            It made no sense, he thought, but neither did Big Bangs and black holes and anti-universes.  They were stories too.  It was all a matter of what one chose to believe. 

            And so, after a while, Jon joined the throng as they all went down to the lower libraries and found what was there and reveled in it.  And they read the stories until the cosmos stopped stopping and the world was still again.  

            And all the while the stars outside sparked and wiggled like living creatures playing at the edge of time.