Welcome to my submission for the Dreem Word of the Week S1 R2 contest. The word in question is TIME. I decided to take this opportunity to write a sequel to a story that I published previously: The Blossoms of Yesterday's Regrets. So make sure to check it out, if you haven't already. Throughout this sequel, you will see some tweets. These are randomly inspired tweets that I published after writing the first part and then decided to incorporate into the present narrative. So in a way, they're time traveling tweets. 😉 Enjoy!
"Where am I? Why do I look like this? And what in the world am I wearing?" Ms. Connor said looking at herself on the glass wall. Spires rose onto a dark red sky, where three moons bathed them in a violet glow. Feeling faint, she stumbled and fell into sweet darkness.
— litguru () July 31, 2022
“Wake up, Doctor. I need your help.” The voice was so clear, it woke him up. Dr. Pascal lit a lamp and read for a little awhile. An unsettling feeling came over him. As if he was late for a meeting. When he fell asleep again, he dreamed of Ms. Connor.https://t.co/i3pQUQUY6u
— litguru (
“Wake up!”
The voice again. He turned and tried to ignore it.
“Wake up, dammit! The fate of the universe is at stake!”
A flash of lightning illuminated a figure standing by the window.
Dr. Pascal sprang up in bed. “Who’s there!?”
Turning on the neon lamp on the bedside table, he saw its glow illuminate a man wearing a glittering pneumatic suit and head contraption with attached lenses. A long beard fell down his chest.
“Listen carefully, boy. Nine hours from now, you’re going to calibrate a woman named Gala Connor. There will be a glitch in the machine, and she will end up in a star system forty light years in space and ten million years back in time. This event unleashes a catastrophic collapse of our universe fifty years from now, and you must stop it from happening.”
“Whatever you’re talking about?” Dr. Pascal said getting out of bed and reaching for his robe. “We’ve been time traveling for nearly a century and never encountered such a curious glitch.”
“Nevertheless, it has happened in the stream of our time. The malfunction will occur for reasons we’re still trying to work out. Regardless, the end result is the same: a new dimension of time.”
Dr. Pascal laughed.
“Are you mad?” he said. “Who are you anyway, and how did you get in? As a matter of fact, I don’t want to know. Just please get out of my house.”
To the sound of rolling thunder, the man stepped into the light and took off his head contraption.
Dr. Pascal took a sharp breath.
“I’m you, and you are me,” said the old man. “Now, grab a cup of coffee because it’s going to be a long and complicated night.”
Dr. Pascal listened to the old man's tale, amazed to see himself so old. He described astonishing future events that would lead to a catastrophic collapse of the universe after a parallel dimension of time was accidentally created during Gala Connor's calibration procedure.
“We’ve treated time as bound to space," the old man said, "but time is also bound to our perceptions of time and its passage. In everyday life, time-space and perceptual processes interact, but they do not influence one another in any measurable manner, except for the odd distortion or sense of deja-vu. Yet, the glitch caused our time dimension to become inexplicably entangled with Ms. Connor’s own sense of time. The interaction created an entirely new dimension of time and topology of space. This new dimension follows its own rules and historical stream.”
“If this is true, how can the two dimensions coexist?” said Dr. Pascal shaking his head in disbelief. “The historical streams should never meet as per the rules of vibratory mechanics.”
“Under normal circumstances, yes, you would be correct. Every historical possibility is an independent bubble in the sea of probabilities. This new dimension behaves differently, however, and poses great danger to our existence. It’s like another bubble stuck to our own bubble of time. If one dimension bursts, so does the other. That’s precisely what happens five decades from now. The novel dimension is too unstable. So, you must prevent it from coming into existence.”
“Why couldn’t I just cancel the appointment?”
“It doesn’t work,” said the old doctor. “We ran the simulations over and over. The event happens before the cause. I know it sounds bizarre. Just trust me. This is not the first time we meet, you and I. You must go through with the calibration procedure and stop the entanglement from happening.”
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, Ms. Connor thought as she stared at the alien sky. But when you suddenly entangle yourself to another, everything travels faster at the thought of love.https://t.co/LOH6POH3mE
— litguru (
In the morning, at the appointed time, Dr. Pascal greeted Ms. Gala Connor in the laboratory.
“My word,” said Ms. Connor looking around in wonderment, “look at all this instrumentation. Is that the machine?”
“Indeed,” said Dr. Pascal putting his hand on the plush chair embedded within the exoskeleton of the analytical engines.
“It looks magnificent!”
"Before you sit, please remove your dress," Dr. Pascal said.
— litguru (
She placed her hand on her heart and looked at him with inquiring eyes.
"The brass could interfere with the instrumentation," he explained.
"Of course," she said. "We must be thorough and scientific."
He stepped aside and busied himself with the instruments while she removed her garments.
“Would you mind helping me?” she said. “These dresses nowadays are just as complicated as time machines.”
He laughed nervously, and with slightly trembling fingers, he helped her unstrap the layers of her carriage dress, being careful to avoid contact with her body.
“You men are so lucky," she said, "you don’t have to wear so much gear."
“I should think so, yes," he said, feeling a swift feeling of exhilaration and blood rush.
“There!” she said. “Should I remove the rest?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Dr. Pascal said. “There is no metal to interfere with the instruments.”
“I see you’re well acquainted with women’s clothing attire," she said giving him a sideway glance. "Your wife has taught you well.”
“I’m not married,” he said.
“Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry in your affairs. Where are my manners?” she said with a laugh.
“I don’t mind in the least,” he said. Then he motioned towards the chair. "Please take a seat, Ms. Connor. We're ready to begin calibration."
She sat on the soft chair with a gleeful look on her face, like a little girl about to go on a carnival ride.
“I’m now going to strap this helmet contraption onto your head," Dr. Pascal said, raising the chronostasis stabilizer that the old man had given him. "Please let me know if it’s too tight.”
He put the helmet on her head as the old doctor had shown him, then adjusted the lenses to capture the image of her left eye.
“Just look ahead, and soon you’ll see a dot appear floating in front of you. I want you to focus on the dot. When it disappears, the image of a clock will immediately replace it. I want you to look at the clock and find the moving arm that marks the seconds.”
“Sounds straight forward,” she said adjusting her position on the chair.
“Are you ready to begin, Ms. Connor?”
“Yes, doctor. And you can call me Gala.”
On the tubular monitor, Dr. Pascal saw a faithful copy of what Ms. Connor was seeing through the lenses of the chronostasis helmet.
The way the old doctor had explained it, the procedure took advantage of a perceptual time illusion in which time appeared suspended. After having made an eye movement towards a dynamic stimulus, such as the seconds arm of a ticking clock, the time duration of the stimulus was lengthened. That is, the movement of the arm appeared slower than it really was in objective reality. For a brief moment, time was extended in the mind. The helmet made use of this perceptual time distortion to prevent the new dimension from forming. Or so the old man had said.
Dr. Pascal conducted the calibration procedure the way the old doctor had shown him. With Ms. Connor sitting on it, the machine flashed, hissed, and vibrated. Then with a final loud sigh, it blew off a cloud of steam that gently enveloped the astonished lady.
“Oh my goodness,” she said in awe and delight.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” said Dr. Pascal.
“Just marvelous! What a grand adventure in time!”
The procedure completed, Dr. Pascal thanked Ms. Connor for her assistance.
"I can't wait for the real thing next week!" she said.
After she left, he remained in the lab to check the results of the test. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Ms. Connor was still in this time stream and no new dimension came into existence.
At home, he waited until late in the night, expecting to see the old doctor come pay him a visit. Dr. Pascal had many questions for his future self. But the old doctor did not show up. Why should he? The timeline was back to normal.
He fell asleep with a tome on his lap, an old fable about the deep sea.
"Doctor, I don't have much time. So please listen carefully!"https://t.co/GIz67MJaqO
— litguru (
Thank you for reading my story. In part, the story was inspired by a recent scientific development in which scientists inadvertently created a new time dimension: PHYSICISTS CREATE NEW PHASE OF MATTER WITH "EXTRA" TIME DIMENSION.
