Body

Time Hoppers

Even I was surprised by the changes that seemed to have swept the outside world, this time. I mean, the last time I had been out I had been totally unable to communicate with anybody, but, at least there were bodies. This time was incomparable. I was hardly able to identify the life that filled the space. It seemed as if larger organisms had just disappeared ... images far beyond the reach of any human language ... But I was finally able to understand what I was really doing ... where I was really going. I was going to The End, to The Final Moment of Time ..... to Oblivion.

There was no turning back at this point. There was nothing to turn back to. I had made my commitment and was now wholly immersed in the experience. Maybe I should have left the group a long time ago? ... gone on some deep space mission ... some travel to the edge????.. Maybe I should have, but that opportunity was now gone forever. And it was gone not only for me, but for all the group.

I started thinking back to the last time that I had seen the Phoenix Gang. They had left the chambers to go out into space. Their first mission was on a ratio of two thousand to one. That is to say that they went on a mission with a round trip time, to them, of two years, but an Earth-local time of four thousand years. Of course, the whole idea of a round trip didn't really mean anything anymore. To come back to a place four thousand years later is just as good as never coming back. And the Phoenix Gang aged in the process. They were living life in slow motion - relative to Earth - while I was hopping through time totally devoid of any motion at all.........

But that was the decision that I had made. At least I had had a choice in the matter. Some others hadn't.

I turned around and walked back to the chamber room. It was time to go back under ... into the future.

As I approached the door some very strange emotions were rushing through me. New ones, I think, because I couldn't identify them, or even classify them in any way. Perhaps they were part of some process the body, or the mind, goes through as it prepares to die? The hormonal ace up the sleeve ... some new application of neurotransmitters... whatever. All I knew was that I was approaching a feeling of finality that I had never even had an inkling of before. I was going to experience not only the end of a process, but the end of ALL processes.

I pushed the door open and looked, once again, into the waiting room. Occupying the desk this time was Susan. As I looked at her I felt sadness sweep past the other emotions. She was one of the people in our group who had really had no choice ... the product of two past group members who had been left many hops before.

Her parents, Sarah and Armand, had both been interesting and fun people. They were born about two million Earth-years apart, though they were still, obviously, the same species. Armand was older, in terms of birthdates, and had met Sarah some eight million Earth-years after her birth. They both felt that the chance meeting, over the whole expanse of time, was more than that. It was fate. Armand was, biologically, about 31 years old, while Sarah was, biologically, about 34. They got married and decided to stay in the group. In fact, Sarah, the mother, had gone through several hops while she was pregnant with Susan.

By the time that Susan was born, some six hundred thousand Earth-years after the conception, there was just barely a viable social exterior environment to go travel in. So, Susan's parents decided to take one more hop with her, to see if something better was to be had. At the next stop her father didn't make it out. This happened every so often. People do die taking the trip. There is something about bugs in certain physiologies... Anyway, Sarah pretty much freaked out when she awoke and heard the news about Armand. She immediately had herself put down for the long trip.

The long trip was when you went under and left instructions not to be woken up until just before The Last Moment of Time. Right before the universe collapsed back in on itself you would be woken up to see it ALL end. The chambers had built up considerably over the millennia and there were quite a few people on the long trip. Sarah would certainly not be alone for The End. So, Susan was left with no connections to anything in the world, except for the group. And with the group she stayed.

I scanned over the waiting room and saw that there were two others, Jack and Tom, sitting around. Jack was waiting to go back under while Tom had just come out. The two of them did quite a bit of traveling together. They would try to meet each other, in person, at least every ninety or a hundred million Earth-years, exchanging notes when they not in sync. They were enjoying a small game of chess.

I walked in, everyone looking up as the door shut, loudly, behind me. That door has served as the one real constant through all these years. I waved hello and approached Susan. She smiled as I walked over. She had a beautiful smile that felt warm, but with that hint of melancholy behind it. She looked to be about the same biological age as me, now.

I stopped to speak to her for a little while. It was mostly small talk, mutual compliments... I told her that I wanted to speak with the chess mavens and that I'd be back after. She said that she wasn't going anywhere, and laughed lightly.

I went over to Jack and Tom and screamed a loud greeting. We all hugged and took in each other. [It was strange. Even though we were hopping through billions of Earth-years, biologically we were only really experiencing a few years. But still, there was some sort of feeling that it had always been a long time since one was last seen. Maybe the mind was trying to align the horizons that it had to work with, since we had all experienced rapid aging of our friends, back in the days of human life outside. That was when this was for recreation, and not necessity!] I looked over the board quickly. It was pretty sad. Neither of them had ever been any good at the game, but they really loved playing. I forced a smile-like look onto my face.

They sat back down to their game and went on to make excruciating moves and annoying analyses over and over. I couldn't really bear to watch, but they loved it. Rushing to Oblivion through mediocrity. I sighed.

We spoke for a few minutes, but they really didn't have much to say. Jack was going back under. He had been out for three months and had spent the time mostly just hanging around the complex watching historical scenes, playing games... Not that there was that much else to do anymore. He said that he was going back down for five million years. He just didn't see any point to coming up sooner.

His conversation took on a decidedly dark tone, but when I pressed him with some questions he refused to go any further. He would make some stupid joke and try to redirect the conversation. Jack was, sure enough, a nice guy, but I never liked that type too much. For some reason, I had always been bothered by their vacantness, their lack of ... I don't know. And here I was, stuck with them for eternity.

But why did they bother me so much? After all, what have I done with my life so far? Why was I seven billion four hundred and twenty thousand years removed from any possible interaction with the world of human life? Every so often I would ask myself this question. Here I was, running fast forward through time ... to what end? How did I ever get into this?

Everything really started around the beginning of the third millennium. We were experiencing a boom, economically and technologically. As with the punctuated equilibria of evolutionary systems, we experienced a serious phase change in the structure of human society and knowledge.

I had been part of a project investigating suspended animation - technology that was crucial to any further endeavors in space. The costs involved in sending a self-contained society out into space were far too great, both economically and psychologically, so the only way that we were ever going to get a team into deep space would be to slow down their biological clocks. Well, it was either to slow down their biological clocks or to extend their life spans. The former approach ended up being much more reasonable, and there was something very strange, and very interesting, about the idea.

As the project progressed, there became a need for human volunteers. The initial periods for testing were ever so slight, a tenth of a second, two seconds... Everything went fine. But as people were being kept down for longer periods, say three weeks, a subtle side effect began to make itself known. There was something interesting, to some people, about hopping through time. It was nothing like sleep, there being no dreams at all ... just an imperceptible instant. To just close your eyes one moment and have the next moment be weeks later was a strangely interesting feeling. Being part of the research, I was one of the first to experience this.

My first long test was three and a half weeks. Before that I had gone down for a day or two... nothing spectacular, but three and a half weeks was different. I noticed some changes in my friends and things just felt different. On the next test I was down for 3 months, and the effect was profound. People seemed to split into distinct groups based on their reactions to this effect. Some liked it, some disliked it, some were scared of it... It was a control issue, for almost everyone, but where they placed the source of control seemed to determine how they viewed the experience.

I loved it! And was the most frequent research subject at the lab. The personal side effect, at the time, was exhilarating. I had basically managed to slow the aging process in me, dramatically. In the first ten Earth-years after I started going under suspended animation, I, biologically, experienced only nine months of aging.

There were two profound effects that I noticed. The first was that I was losing my connections to people in the world. It was hard to maintain relationships with very little communication. This caused a certain withdrawal from society, in general. The second effect, however, was truly unique. I was able to see the fast motion development of life! It was a totally different perspective than I, or any other human, had ever had before. Between these two effects was a tradeoff, and a precarious truce. How each person dealt with these circumstances was, as I have said, different, and there was a good deal one could tell about a personality, using only the view towards suspended animation.

Most people had assumed, before it became a workable and affordable process, that suspended animation was a technology that would only have uses; that it would be for sending teams on long missions, saving dying people, ... but they had overlooked the fact that it had a recreational side. Hopping through time was an experience that was, potentially; exhilarating, risky, dramatic, mind expanding,...

I do have to admit, though, that the economic aspects of suspended animation ended up doing more to drive the post-invention development than anything else. The lab had hired an interesting fellow to help market the project, which we had all assumed meant dealing with governments and large companies - those who could afford pieces of distant space travel - but, instead, he went to Wall Street. He was going to sell the experience as an investment package.

Everyone knew that money, compounding any real rate of return, would eventually grow to a massive size (in surplus terms), if one only had the patience to not take anything out of it. But we all have to live, and we need this, or that, every once in a while, and there are unexpected expenses... Well, all of this could be avoided by setting one's investment and then going under suspended animation for some period of time. An investment hop. The length would be based on assumptions about the various economic developments and could be dynamically overseen. When one awoke, if all went well, he would have a nice bundle of funds and would then be able to live out the rest of his life as he saw fit. Not a bad deal; set your finances, close your eyes, and the next moment you experience will be as a wealthy person! All one had to give up were most of the relationships he had developed, but even that could be taken care of if one went on a "charter" trip. That is, he went with a whole group of people ...

The investment strategy was extremely successful, and helped bring the cost of going under suspended animation to a very affordable level, which was a bonanza for the thrill seekers, like our group. In fact, I don't know if our group could have even survived, otherwise.

Our group had been born very early in the development of the technology. I was really the first, along with a couple of other people from the original lab. It was little more than a friendly competition, to start with. We had thought up a new measure of age that took into account the time spent under suspended animation. This really grew out of the way that our ages were being treated by society. The first birthday that I had, after the testing had started, brought the problem to the fore. We were celebrating my having aged a full year, but I had been under for more than nine months since my last birthday, so I was only three months older, biologically. As we were joking about this at the party, we devised a scheme for measuring "life-time" and started keeping score at the lab.

As all competitions serve to maximize the component being used for measurement, so did ours. We started a list of the oldest people at the lab, which after not that long, in our terms, turned into the oldest people in the world. This got some press and attracted more people.

In the beginning, it was really a great time. The group was an interesting collection of people, and we all used to go out on field trips around the world, and eventually the solar system, every so often. It was not that we timed our periods under, but that we set dates for trips and meetings, and people would just make sure that they were out then.

And the group was a dynamic being. It grew quickly in the beginning, with people from every generation coming in. There were varying lengths of Earth-time that people would spend with us, and The Wall served as our main identification point; our "home". This was where the current list of ages was kept and included little biographies of each person, describing whatever there was to say about the person, though mostly it was a list of hops and dates. And people would drop out, deciding that they wanted to live the rest of their biological years in some environment they had found, or they would meet something outside of the group... Then high ratio space travel appeared. This pulled a large percentage of the group away, since the effect was essentially the same, that of stretching one's personal time over the fabric of "universal" time.

Anyway, a great deal has happened since my last time down. Man had put up a valiant effort, but eventually he got run over by evolution. At first there were challenges from hybrid forms, and then a massive reorganization occurred. I can't even begin to describe the higher organisms. I mean, they had senses that man could never comprehend, in much the same way that I have senses that my individual cells could never understand. There were traces of man left throughout the universe, but his existence was reduced to traveling from special station to special station, and these were rapidly disappearing. Besides, they were more like the wildlife preserves we used to have on Earth, with other entities watching man live...

Man really didn't have anything left to do. He had research that had to be done for the maintenance of man's share of universal entropy, but he was not working for the universe. His basic existence was sustained by others... those watching. There was no more poetry to write, no more math to create/discover... Anything that man could find, had already been found. There was no more art to create. All emotions could be called upon with the trivial application of a machine that was invented a long time ago...

This was the world that I now inhabited. There was really nowhere to go, except to the End. It was the only distinguished point of time left, and there was really nothing to be gained by living in this time. I could have lived out my life with some people from the group, but there just didn't seem to be any purpose to it. Other animals lived out meaningless lives without any problem, but only because they didn't have access to meaning. For me, either give me meaning, or give me a special point of time.

And that was it. I walked back to my personal chamber, to go under for the long trip to Oblivion. I would have only a few moments left in my life, after I went under, but they would be the last moments of time!

As I lay in the tube, waiting to go under, I reminisced about my life and thought, "The Grateful Dead had been right, it certainly has been a long, strange trip to here." I never imagined, when I had started time hopping, that I would end up in anything like this. But hopping ten months was so exciting that I had to try two years, which was even more exciting. So I had to go for ten years, fifty years, a thousand years, five million years... It kept getting better ... life grew more and more interesting ... But I couldn't get myself to stay in any single environment. Normal life had gotten too slow for me. I had to see if the next stop would be even better yet. It was beckoning me forward. ........... Until I went one hop too far and finally realized where I had really been intending to go, the whole time .... on this trip ... to The End of All Things.

I could hear the words running through my mind,

"I was only going to live one life, anyway. So what does it matter how far, over the life of the universe, I stretch it out? There were other pursuits, and personalities, that would have led me to, essentially, the same social environment. At least now I am participating in something that can never be told to anybody, ... will only be known to a select few, .... the only distinguished point of time accessible to life in this universe. If I had it to do all over again, would I change things? Well, I guess the Last Moment of Time is something that only needs to be experienced once, but I would certainly aim for another pursuit like this. In a replayed life I think that I might travel to the edge of the universe, instead, ... although ... I guess that's really the same thing! I must ...

just be .......

living out my .....

natural ......................