The Prison of Time

A One Shot for SciFi Spring 2024

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash

‘You are judged and found wanting,’ those were the final words my ancestors heard at the End. Only it wasn’t the End but merely another stepping stone, another “learning opportunity” as my grandfather would have said. He didn’t say that though, those words that he’d repeated for his entire life up until that point turned to ash on his tongue in the Final Moments when the mysteries of the universe were laid bare, where society had been perfected, all the formulas discovered and, what predecessors called, utopia was upon us.

Yet here I sit on a desolate planet admiring the well crafted stone my father and a thousand others carved to commemorate the End. They didn’t carve it, the machines did that, but the men and women put in the commands to those now long dormant feats of engineering. I am the only one who remains from that cohort, those men who gave their lives to uncover the formulas of reality in an ever upward march of progress, or so they believed. No one remembers them now for most had no progeny and the numbers mean less than nothing. A formula does not provide warmth at night, nor comfort from sorrow, or satiate hunger. The Equation does not bring happiness, companionship, hope, or anything else that makes life worth living, it is dead, soulless and desolate. Much like our world, my home in which I am amongst the last. I have heard of others, out there, amongst the ruins, from travellers and searchers, but…

The first block of the obelisk depicts Prometheus with fire hidden in his stalk of fennel, this was the beginning and had it remained there I would not be standing upon a desert. Of course to my father and his father and his father and so backwards forever, my father would believe, Prometheus was a myth, a representation of humanity creating fire and thus the first step in controlling nature, subjugating reality to our command. How did they not see what their laws told them? All action has an equal and opposite reaction. All things are cyclical, all things come and go, as certain as death follows life. Yet my ancestors were blind to their own findings. And so here I stand upon once fertile lands reduced to a desert and for what? A quick peak under Nature’s skirts? An extra trinket for the mantle piece? Such devastation for so little creation. For all things humanity creates require destruction as the catalyst, fire is the first and greatest of these catalysts but it is far from the only one.

My grandfather spoke of the purpose of it all as a perfect state of being. Of perfect justice, of sublime living, of complete understanding, he spoke of a world without squalor, without poverty, without war or division, where hardship was no more and everything was plentiful. He spoke of Heaven but he did not believe in Heaven, that was the purview of superstitious ignoramuses. Prayer did not lead to the good life, science did. Yet here I sit, in a desert that was once fertile farmland, lush forests, and babbling brooks. There is no distinction here just unending cracked earth. Oh sure the sun rises and falls as it ever did, the rains come and go, but nothing grows for the dirt itself suffers with corruption that only Time will heal. Time. The great enemy. Time, never enough but always too slow.

For all grandfather’s knowledge he had no wisdom, Heaven is Heaven, the Earth is the Earth, and an understanding, a reduction of all the inner workings to their base form only creates flatness, a great indifference of all things. How does something great come from the reduction of something? Take apart man and what do you find? Component parts that are less than the whole and when reassembled remain less than the whole for he has been killed in the process. But what has been killed? What has been lost? All the parts are there. I know not but I know I shouldn’t pry. Perhaps there is a purely material realm, if so it is not Earth but it might be Hell.

The End was inevitable. All things end, it is an immutable law of the universe, my ancestors own theories of reality said as much. Yet, somehow, they held this indelible faith that progress would continue until “complete” (whatever that meant) and then be held in stasis, as if life were a puzzle to be solved and not something to be experienced.

How much time, energy, blood, sweat, and countless tonnes of Nature’s Bounty was poured into solving life? Solving the universe? All around me I see the results, the desolation it caused. Destruction for creation but always more destruction, much more, than what was created. Timeless landscapes carved up, seas and rivers poisoned for aeons, the sky itself corrupted, and here I sit in the Desert of the End. A world of nothing for everything was consumed.

Time. Time heals all. Far more time than I have, than my children would have if such a thing were possible. Alas, we have been judged and found wanting but those who strove for the End do not suffer the consequences, I do. The last of my people, a weak and fickle lot distracted by shiny baubles and obsessed with navel gazing questions too busy to do something as simple as live. Time to them was a prison, an obstacle to their goals, but without Time there would be no experience, no ebbs and flows, no joys or sorrows, no boredom or excitement, there would be no Life without Time. That which judged my father and grandfather and all those who came before them knew this fact. ‘You are judged and found wanting,’ those words are etched into the obelisk, a denouncement of all it stands for, a warning not to repeat the mistakes of the past, for we have been sent “into the past” my father had said, commanded to repeat history as a punishment. A misconception of it all, but what could someone so wedded to progress think but that for he believed, until his last breath, that he’d done everything right. Cursing whatever entity had judged him until he perished. Perhaps it was God, or perhaps it was merely the world around them, their own thoughts that some man or woman uttered and the illusion was shattered. I know not, but I am alone for all their hubris.

Do I sit and stew in this hand I’ve been dealt? In this world I did not create but must suffer?

Nay, I refuse to cease living. With my cloak and my staff I will venture across the desert to find those who survived, those who Live.

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Thanks for reading this short vignette masquerading as a One Shot. There’s a bigger story somewhere in the seed idea but only this too-on-the-nose-exploration has been forthcoming so far. Either way I hope you have enjoyed this peak into a distant world. Till next time!