And Another One Tinkers With Time

And Another One Tinkers With Time

Causality Breathes it's Last

Chapter 1 by Myocastor_Coypus Myocastor_Coypus

There is such a thing as state-funded student housing in certain countries. It consists basically of a gigantic dorm, often in several blocks three to four stories high. There are various types of accommodation, ranging from the bottom tier 9m² room with just bed, cupboard, desk and fridge, through the 13m² with bed, cupboards, shelves, toilets, fridge and micro-kitchen, to the top toff luxury of a proper living space all the stuff in separate rooms, a compressed apartment.

You, John Smith, live on the fourth floor of Block B, and are neither a toff nor a pauper. You are, like most people in the residence, shut into a tiny single room with one door, and one window, barely deep enough to take ten short steps across lenghtwise, and barely wide enough to be able to stand in the middle of the room and not touch the walls when rasing both arms up. However, you have your own toilets, your own two electric rings for cooking, kitchen sink, and a small fridge. Everything you need to do you can do in the privacy of your little artificial cave.

On this particular morning you wake to absolute quiet. This is odd. Not one sound around you. No airconditioning fan, no wheezing groaning fridge, no footsteps in the common corridor. The first thing you imagine is that the entire universe is holding it's breath for your benefit, that everyone everywhere has simply stopped dead, just to allow you a few more minutes of sleep. It occurs to you this is a terribly arrogant interpretation of things, but by that moment you've already decided you're going to savour the blissful silence until your alarm rings, and you're already slipping out of wakefulness. A dreamless, half conscious drowsy fog falls over your brain.

This time it's rather worrying than odd. You remember waking up to silence, drifting off, and here you are again. It's just as quiet as before, and it isn't even any less dark. Granted at this time of year, even when you roll the shutters up the amount of light gained during the day is not huge, but right now it's black as Vanta black wherever you turn your eyes, including where the window should be. Yet there must be some substantial time since your last awakening. You should know the difference between a ten second blackout and an hour-plus long one, surely?

Most certainly time to rise, at any rate. You pull out from under the covers, swing your feet off the bed and plant them on the floor: damn cold down there. Now sitting up, and still not fully coordinated you launch your upper body upwards and hope it lands somewhere stable. After mission success, you fumble around for your telephone. Now to see what time it is, and see exactly how wrong you are -- must be -- about how much you've overslept.

Well, let's see. You have your alarm set on your phone for 06:45 every morning during the week, because every morning you have to go across town to Uni for a lecture at 08:00. And you definitely wake up comfortably in advance of the alarm most days, provided you didn't do something stupid the night before, like completely fail to get to bed before midnight. The earliest you've woken up before the alarm, based on those occasions where you checked the time, has been in the whereabouts of 06:25 - 06:35-ish. This night was quite unremarkable. Yesterday you went to all your classes, you ate responsibly, you re-read all your notes at the end of the day, and ended it all on a bloody good wank, all well before even crossing 11:00pm. Now, you know two things: 1) that blackout felt like bloody long one, like longer than your standard meditation sessions of thirty minutes apiece; 2) your phone screen has been showing 06:37 for the entire time you've been thinking since picking up the damn device.

WHY?
HOW?
WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?

FUCKING GET BACK ON TRACK ALREADY!

It is at this point that something finally occurs outside of your seething mind; all at once the narrative interrupted snaps forward to where it should be, 09:56 to be exact. Unfortunately, as the single person to experience this, as it were, in real time, you suffer sensory overload and your brain goes into shock. Limp, your body collapses.

How long are you ?

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