Eventually I arrived at a room I’d long since scoured for any remaining detail not yet recorded in my binders. Yet, the pings were loudest here. So whatever I was meant to be searching for had to be in here someplace. I searched lockers along the wall and the inside of a toolbox with a handle lined, of course, with sharp little spikes.
Finally, the only drawer of a great desk in one corner of the room, next to the only clock I’d ever found in this place. On the wall just under the clock, a faded blotchy stain. On the desk before me, a letter of some sort, though of course I couldn’t read it. The pinging stopped when I opened the drawer. Inside, a small pistol and what looked to be a glass sphere.
“No need for the pistol just yet, but have a look into that orb if you’d be so kind” the professor’s voice instructed me through the speaker. He said it so casually that I might’ve missed it. Frowning and peering again at the strange little button box, I reached for the orb. Surprisingly warm in my hand, as if there were some energy source inside.
When I looked into it, I recoiled. There was the professor’s face looking back at me! “Oh don’t tell me I’m that difficult to look at, m’boy. You know in my time, I was quite the ladies’ man. Of course there’s no going back, they see to it. Now if you just keep looking at me...yes that’s it. Don’t look away.” As I maintained eye contact with him, I witnessed my surroundings both distorting and receding in all directions until, baffled as to how I got there, I found myself someplace else entirely.
It was the entrance hall of a mansion, beautifully intricate in the same style as the building I’d struggled to find earlier. Wherever there was any space for some sort of flourish, there it was, a lovingly hand carved bas relief depicting various scenes from mythology. The floors above us came apart and reformed as I watched, comprised of countless interlocking platforms.
Each platform was itself intricately decorated, as expected. But each also included one wall, with a familiar looking clock on it. As well as an equally familiar stain just under the clock. When one of them descended low enough that I could get a better look, I discovered they all carried identical mahogany desks with a single drawer.
This was my first direct glimpse of them. Ghostly images of men in what looked to be finely pressed grey suits, slumped over their desks. The clock behind them spinning furiously in the wrong direction. As I watched, in perfect synchronization, they all suddenly bolted upright, materials from the wall stain abruptly being sucked into a hole in their head which disappeared a split second later.
On the opposite side of the hole, each held a gun to its temple for a few seconds, then set it in the drawer and closed it. Finally, still moving in lockstep, all of the flickering, grainy images of men stood up from their desks and walked backwards out of frame. The clock then began to operate normally, hands turning in the direction I knew they ought to.
In a perfect reversal of what I’d just seen, all of the men walked into frame, sat down at their desks, withdrew the pistol from the only drawer, then shot themselves. Gun to the temple, sudden splatter on the wall under every clock, then they’d collapse forwards onto their desks as blood pooled under their heads. Then it once again reversed itself.
It was at this point that I noticed the professor next to me. Clothed head to toe in the strangest outfit, despite the fact that he’d been wearing boring, bog standard professorial attire when I’d last seen him. From the bottom, his boots were what I figured for polished black vinyl, reaching nearly up to his knees. His trousers, like his shirt, were made from rich black velvet.
Then came the belt. A solid seven or eight inches wide, plainly serving no other purpose than aesthetics, made from thick black leather with a polished silver restraint poking through one of the notches. His gloves reached nearly up to his elbows and were made from the same shiny black vinyl as his boots. Finally his collar, every little silver button done up, looking nearly tight enough to choke.
“You look surprised. Did you really imagine that nobody’s ever explored these places more methodically than you? Become masters of them?” I hadn’t imagined any of this ahead of time, and said so. It seemed to amuse him. “Clothing is only an expression of your self image. Something you naturally struggle to change, but which is trivial for one of us.”
Us? I scanned the room, for the first time noticing distant figures clad in uniforms identical to his on various floating platforms. The non-stop forward and backward three dimensional movie playing out on each one, if I could call it that, made them difficult to pick out unless you knew to look for ‘em.
Almost unsurprising to see what each of them held in their shiny, gloved hands. Nicer than the one I’d been given though, made out of what from a distance looked like obsidian. One of them commandeered the platform he was on, landed it before us, then greeted the professor with “As it ever was”. Travigan casually replied “As ever”, then informed the other fellow that I was the one he’d been telling him about.
He was clothed head to toe in the same manner as the professor save for a small obsidian pin on his collar. Some sort of rank, no doubt. Black hair slicked back with hair salve, features straight and angular as if carved from a block of granite. He held out his own remote, turned it over, then angled the mirror on the back to peer at me through it. “Quite advanced. Never seen a case this bad, usually He’s got ‘em by now.”
The professor agreed. “An unusual case. Spent years simply mapping everything he came across in excruciating detail. I know he made it down the stairwell, but not much further. Certainly never descended through the clouds, anyway. He really jumped out at me as the ideal candidate for this attempt.” The two continued to talk about me as though I weren’t present.
“Excuse me, but what are those things?” I pointed to the transparent movie-like apparitions on the countless floating platforms. I had to repeat myself several times before they’d stop simply talking over me. “My dear boy. I assure you that you’ll be able to render the service you’ve enlisted for without ever knowing that, and that you’re much safer for it.” But I’d just about had it with obfuscation by then, and insisted upon being filled in.
To my surprise, he obliged. “For the Manifold and the reality outside of it to exist, certain things have to work the same way for everybody, everywhere. A common infrastructure, underlying machinery of the universe that’s normally invisible to us. What you’d call physical laws. The one we’re concerned with here is time.
Time is what ensures that everything doesn’t happen at once. Cause always precedes effect, the reactions on which all of the technologies known to you depend, and so on. But it doesn’t ‘just happen’ that way. That’s work, somebody needs to do it. There is after all no shortage of intelligent life throughout the universe working tirelessly to thwart the tyranny of unidirectional time.
Anybody who’s ever lost someone close to them. Who’s ever longed for a bygone era, or realized that all of the stars will one day burn out. Many of them are sufficiently motivated to try and do something about it. A former fellow of the Institute, Ronald Mallet, was among the first in your continuity. Had his own reasons for wanting to turn back the clock. They all do.
But if you make an exception for one, you have to make an exception for all. As the number trying to reverse time increases, and as the technology available to them grows ever more powerful near the end, more and more work must go into enforcing the forward movement of time. A certain something or other cobbled together from odds and ends, known to many different cultures by even more plentiful, diverse names.
You can’t simply call them what they are, can you? It would be ugly and rude. They perform an essential service after all. So, we’ve taken something from their surroundings and clothed them with it, that their insufferable nature might remain hidden. Of course, even that name chafes them. It’s something you must never say aloud or even read, lest you never stop. It’ll consume your every waking thought, like a splinter in your mind.
Don’t you feel them? They’re behind you even now, hands on your back, ensuring you go through with it all start to finish. That whatever direction you move in, it is never backwards. Not in the true sense of the word. So that once you discover what you’re moving towards, you cannot reverse course or even slow down, however desperately you might wish to.
All of this was bought on debt, you see. Light, color, sound. Existence. It cannot last forever, that initial sum will eventually be depleted, at which time the debt must be paid. They make sure that nobody tries to back out of it. That we all play the only parts we’re able to, always moving irreversibly towards the end of all ends. As per the agreement. ”
Stay Tuned for Part 4!