Temporality               by: Rocketman

 

"Time does not exist."

Standard opening.

"What you perceive as time is merely an illusion. Take the moment of your deaths. Hopefully not any….time…..in your perceived future. It is not an end but merely one of the numberless components of an inconceivably vast, seemingly frozen structure."

"All the experiences you’ve ever had and all the ones you will ever have are fixed in place. Albeit the fact that there is no space or place for them to be fixed. But, as we have recently discovered, all this is not limited to eternal, immutable forms. In fact there are countless permutations that are bypassed."

Gee. Yawn. We’d all learned this back in physics class. Kerry wore a sneer, anxious to interrupt the professor’s speech.

"Now all this is known to you, of course."

Duh.

"What you haven’t been told yet though is that these theoretical, expectedly inaccessible alternates can be made to connect with your personal consciousness. Naturally this doesn’t affect the perceived worlds of anyone else in the Platonic structure who will not have such freedom of perception."

The professor sighed, "Back in the last century, an American author, Kurt Vonnagut, wrote a novel on a similar subject. It was called, "Slaughterhouse-Five". In it, the protagonist unwillingly moves non-linearly through his life, even to the moment of his death. And he is able to perceive this fact. Something no one has been able to do, until now."

This brought us forward a little. After all, we all were a little curious about why they had brought the three of us here. Julian adjusted his glasses.

"Our research department thinks that consciousness can alter the reality which it inhabits. Just an altered selection of static states over another. Wait. That’s getting a bit ahead. First we have to break the bonds of the Platonic structure that we all are confined to. Once we’ve achieved that, you’ll be able to shift to any point in your life, even the future. Whether you’ll be able to retain your memory of the experience lies in practice."

"The regiment for breaking these bond entails mind relaxant drugs, trance training, and neurological stimulation. As yet, we haven’t been able to confirm any…."

Julian blurted out, "It worked."

"Huh?"

"You sent me to test the process."

The professor’s mouth was slightly open. "You’re not joshing me?"

"Not at all, sir."

"What about the others?"

"They’ll be arriving, so to speak, soon."

I watched Julian with a perplexed look that faded after a moment. An alien, but familiar sensation filled me. Memories I couldn’t possibly have were present.

"I suppose it’s time to return now."

Kerry and I nodded in agreement with Julian.

With an effort of concentration that seemed both beyond me and simple at the same time, I was in another room, sitting on a cushioned pad.

The professor smiled, "Well, we’ve fulfilled causality."

Julian coughed, "Frankly speaking, sir. I doubt that it was necessary anyway. Temporality does not exist."

"Sure, but it backs up your claim those many weeks ago."

"I suppose."

He looked at each of us carefully, "Now I want to go to a point in the Platonic structure which is perceptually old for you. Perhaps childhood or as a young adult."

Kerry and Julian sighed and I just closed my eyes. I’d become a great at putting myself into a trance these past few weeks.

I picked the first day of my senior year of high school.

"Wake up, Ian." I turned in my bed. It was just as it was those many years ago. I pulled those wildly arranged covers off and sat up.

I scratched at my tangled hair and walked over the bathroom. In the mirror, a saw a chubby, teenage, acne-bombed me that I figured I’d left far behind. Well it was back.

Focusing, the first thing I did was make my face blemish-free. Next, away with my dull brown eyes and in with a reality where they were brilliant green.

I pulled my pajamas off, standing there naked. Pondering of what I was doing, my youthful penis shot to attention. Then, off with the extra weight and height.

Down to 5’6" and one-hundred-ten pounds. I placed the weight I had now in my hips and on my chest. I’d add the nipples in a bit.

I worked up with my feet, the cute, dainty kind that snooty Melody always had back in these days. Slender, shapely legs. After all, I was seventeen, with estrogen and all.

The most vital part, my currently throbbing penis, would get into the act later.

I pressed my waist in to give me a 35-23-36 figure. Hands and arms whose only adequate definition would be ‘girlish’.

The face, my window to the world. I modeled it after Melody’s, with a touch of my first wife thrown in. Long, silky, reddish brown hair.

Now for that last bit.

I was hesitant. I clutched the shaft as though it were a rope, trying at same time to tell myself to jump, let go of the rope.

My hands drifted away. I felt near bursting down there. Away.

Just like the others, a snapshot between a snapshot. One moment there. The next, not there, with a slit in its place.

Remembering to put my nipples on, I looked myself over.

A completely different person, a person I always yearned to be but was shut out from being due to genetics stood there. A person that I never figured I could be, but that I had always been, in some Platonic structure, somewhere in that spaceless, timeless structure.

I took a quick shower.

"Mia! Hurry up! Your breakfast is getting cold."

The professor was right about quickly forgetting about other points in the structure. But then, I didn’t really want to remember them. I wanted to live in this Now.

And in essence, I was.

I would live in this Now forever. And I could choose to perceive it for all that time. But despite the fact that I could move differently through the structure from most everyone else, I wanted so much to return to linearity.

And I wanted to experience putting on a bra and seeing myself in it and talking with female friends on equal ground and talk to my mother as her daughter and scream at concerts and fold my arms over my breasts and cross my legs in a skirt and flirt with men and go shopping for lovely clothes that compliment my body and wear a bikini to the beach and lure the attention of the male beach goers and go to a salon and chat with girlfriends about the latest gossip and have romantic dinners and be thought of as beautiful….

"MIA!!!"

"Coming!"

First I better take care of that bra.

 

"…Life is but a dream."

The End

 

Author’s Note: The science in this story is based upon real theories proposed about the non-existence of time. The only thing fictionalized is being able to move between Platonic structures, but that’s not too far from the realm of possibility.

 

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