After reading it, Jason folded the book, his face turning pale and twisted, as if he couldn’t believe we were now stuck in a completely different timeline.
We know for a fact that time is irrelevant in space, but speed matters. Over the past 700 years, humanity has tried to turn back time—much like how Superman flew in the opposite direction of Earth to save Lois Lane. But one question remains unanswered: What about the world where Lois stayed dead?
I’m not entirely sure if Jason was right. The two of us were trapped in the swing of a backward pendulum, where the clock seemed to have stopped. Everyone around us was frozen in time. This was no joke, and certainly not some Japanese adult video where we could do kinky stuff to frozen strangers. We had a much bigger problem: the world we were stuck in was probably NOT the real world we came from.
The book—bearing an old dhoby mark and dated fifty years in the future—was precisely what made this place so unreasonably wrong. We were caught in a temporal distortion while inside the elevator, which dumped us into a parallel dimension with an entirely different flow of time.
We might still be in the same "reality," but existing simultaneously on a different plane. In this world, nobody moved. We tried using the elevator multiple times, but it wouldn't budge. Time moved so agonizingly slow that pressing the damn close button took what felt like forever before the light finally lit up. My watch was dead. My phone was dead. The sun refused to set. I tried using my sleep cycles to measure time, but it was useless.
It was our fault. Well, my fault. I knew this temporal device could bend time and space, separated only by speed. We merely wanted to see what 2076 looked like, so we hooked the device up to the mall elevator. But now, we were accelerated—our physical forms straining to catch up with the "actual world."
Days blurred together. At first, Jason and I spent hours at the food court brainstorming. But after endless wake-and-sleep cycles, we grew distant and ran out of things to say. The device needed to "speed us up" so our physical bodies wouldn't have to compensate for reality, but none of that mattered anymore because we couldn't reactivate it.
Eventually, I stopped asking where Jason was. I stopped shaving. There was no one left to care or interact with, and I knew Jason couldn't give a damn about me either. I spent most of my time crashing at Mr. and Mrs. Pearling’s penthouse. They didn't mind—they were forever frozen, watching a retro Charlie Chaplin hologram.
I couldn't believe how screwed I was just because of a stupid curiosity about the future. I realized that by the time my body fully adapted to this timeframe, I’d be physically accelerated into my late 90s without ever having lived my actual life.
Then one "day," while staring out from the 42nd-floor balcony, I spotted something on the pavement below. Even from 84 flights up, I recognized it immediately—it was the thrift shop book Jason had picked up, the one with the final page dated 2076.
I sprinted down all 42 storeys. At the bottom, I found Jason’s clothes lying next to the book, but Jason was gone. No blood, no body, no sign of a struggle. I looked up and saw the door to one of the upper balconies wide open.
Where was Jason? What happened to him? The temporal device was still tucked away on top of the elevator. The frozen people around seemed to have shifted ever so slightly, though I couldn't be sure anymore. The only logical—or completely unhinged—explanation I could come up with was that Jason had jumped. He used the acceleration of terminal velocity to force himself "back."
The thought haunted me through endless daytime nightmares. To go back, I had to jump.
One "morning," I woke up with a chilling calm. My mind’s final defense mechanism had broken. I walked up to that open balcony, felt the cold guardrail, and looked down. I climbed over, bracing myself for the leap, unsure if I’d survive the fall or if my clothes would just end up on the pavement while my consciousness snapped back to reality.
But before I could even get my footing, I slipped.
Holy shit! I wasn't ready!
Wind roared past me as the world blurred into a hyper-accelerated streak. My life flashed before my eyes: vintage magazines featuring Jane Fonda, my ex-girlfriends, and the plushie dog I used to sleep with as a kid. I closed my eyes, accepting my fate—either I’d drop out of warp, or splatter onto the pavement in 2076.
Then, a sharp pinch on my nose cut off my air supply, dragging me awake.
"You must be exhausted, snoring loud enough to wake the dead! Time to wake up and take a proper rest!"
My Home Minister was standing over me.
Thank God. It was just a dream. I got up, took a pee, and refused to go back to sleep. The chill down my spine was way too real.
I sat down at my computer desk. Sitting right beside the keyboard was a book titled The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck*... and when I flipped to the back, the final page was dated fifty years in the future. 😨
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