Time Control Tome

The night air is cool on the verandah as I stand here, a glowing beacon of whiteness among the muted colours that lie beneath the darkened sky. A wall of clouds drifts in front of the moon, flashing periodically. Ominous and silent, the monsoon from the North gathers and closes in. The lightning is coming down so far away that I cannot hear the thunder yet, but it draws near. The air is damp and electrified, and the lightning flashes faster and faster among the clouds. Soon I will go back inside and it will sound like the gods dragging immense granite blocks around in the sky for some fiendish purpose. And then the ground will not be so muted, and in the flashes of horrible light we will see the strange things that crawl about by night - bizarre nocturnal animals, creeping plants that cannot bear the touch of day, drifting gamblers, unsleeping monsters. All disjointed, all disoriented, all confused by the light, driven by some primitive urge to seek the rock that hides them from the day, but relaxing and uncoiling when the lightning dies away, only to be startled afresh by each burst from the heavens! And then it will rain, and perhaps these creatures will be washed away in the monsoon before they recover their senses. But not likely. The kinds of things that live in the dark in this place are resilient and nigh-on invulnerable. Not that their hides protect anything that would be traditionally considered "life" of any kind.

I should know. I have become very hollow, and I stare at the sodium lamps, watching their interference patterns through my ocular sensors. I imagine they are distant fires - cracks opened up in the Earth by the lightning, consuming the land as they widen, twisting reality about them as their light spreads from the source like chequered spears. A fist-sized bug of some kind flies towards the light, turning bright orange as it approaches, becoming the flame it seeks as it dances around the source of its desire. It will continue this hard-wired behaviour until it falls exhausted to the ground and is devoured alive by the swarming ants below. It doesn't notice me watching it - even if it did I doubt my viewing its final flight would gratify its stupid, primal urges. In any case, it flashes like fire, tracing lines through the interference pattern, darting back and forth, imprinting itself on my brain. Probably not forever, though. Memories fall away alarmingly. I can no longer remember a lot of names and faces that were important to me less than a decade ago. Pieces of my life fall away like wet sot by a flowing river bank, to be borne away into the past. This, I assume, is normal enough - my brain is expelling information that could never possibly have any relevance in the future.

Meanwhile, the clouds lighten in front of the moon and form a grotesque skull shape. The sky flashes several more times, but I still can't hear the thunder.

I am replacing myself, piece by piece. I am still mostly empty, because I am not experiencing anything new but am forgetting at an accelerated pace. The speed of time increases from one second per second to two, now three, and before I know it the sun whips up and down in the sky like a yoyo on the string of a crazed toddler, I lift off the ground as the Earth rips around the Sun at such a velocity that the atmosphere is stripped off, and the days melt into weeks, and years, and I blink and I've missed an entire afternoon, just lost doing whatever I'm wasting my time with. The skull melts away into the clouds.

I, however, am filling myself up with words. I am very serious about this. Most of my recent memories and experiences are those I read in books and nothing else. I am becoming something else - something not human, probably. But it stops the decay, if only temporarily, and while I can't keep up with time, it slows down its effects and recreates the parts of me that are melting into the timestream.

I know that people can go on forever with nearly nothing. When all else is stripped away, they have at least some kind of self, even if only a bunch of dulled instincts wrapped in a leathery shell. But time must go so fast for them - left in that state, thirty years will rip past like a night's dreaming as their brains edit out the repetitive experience of living and automate most of their actions until everything is absolutely routine and nothing needs to be observed any longer. And when you're up to your neck in the timestream, hurtling along with the current, only seconds of real time exist until you're dashed against the wall of Death and your atoms are released to rejoin the dance of ages.

The moon comes out through a crack in the clouds. A distant rumble of thunder.

And so, on this ominous night at the edge of the monsoon, my mission becomes that of time control - to slow down time to the extent that I can afford patience, so that I can have time to work out what I'm doing. By experiencing new things, by thinking and learning, I will ward off the steady acceleration of time I have experienced and keep at least something that I can call a self intact. If I relinquish this control on time and let myself become one with the stream, I will almost certainly panic and find that ten or twenty years has torn past in the time it will take me to complete this sentence.

I have learnt only a single thing in these past six or twelve months. As Tolstoy had one of his characters say, "The strongest of all warriors are these two: time and patience". But time has to be brought under control. If we allow ourselves to go freely along with time, our patience will only amount to minutes before we too gaze on that far shore.