It took me forever to fall asleep after the professor’s call. The prospect of suffering from schizophrenia was serious shit. First I thought that the fact I could smell the pipe scent was my way out of that scenario but then I found out that smells could be part of a schizophrenic episode. I actually learned that an olfactory hallucination is called phantosmia and I couldn’t help thinking the term was funny. I had been smelling a phantasm!
Don’t remember falling asleep but it didn’t take long for the stress caused by the professor’s news to wake me up again. The sun hadn’t come up yet, but it was useless trying to go back to sleep. I took my laptop to the balcony but just sat there sipping my coffee. My tongue still hurt, and that was pissing me off, but somehow, without even realizing it, I started a process similar to Einstein’s thought experiments.
While gazing at the still dark cityscape I asked myself how would a world without time look like. To answer that I first had to come up with a working hypothesis of what time was. That’s when I strayed from the pure mind experiment protocol and started writing. Maybe Einstein could do all this stuff in his head but I was no Einstein… obviously. So, I wrote this down:
Time is the fourth dimension in our space-time continuum. But if time is a dimension, what does it add to the other three? With one dimension we have a line. With two dimensions we have a flat plane. And when we add depth to that plane we have three-dimensional space. What happens to that three-dimensional space when we add the fourth dimension we call time? What are we adding?
I stopped writing and sat back on my chair while the first sunrays of Thursday began to shine behind the buildings across the street. In my mind I started to answer one question after another. If there’s no time there’s no speed because speed is distance over time. If there’s no speed then movement is impossible.
The idea that what time added to the other three dimensions was movement didn’t satisfy me so I kept grilling my mind. What happens when we make movement possible in the universe? Stop, stop, stop, I thought, let’s visualize first the universe without time. A universe without movement…
The images that kept creeping into my mind were caricatures of galaxies, stars and planets just frozen in time, like still pictures. I couldn’t move past that, so I decided to go for a second cup of coffee. On my way to the kitchen I found ‘Einstein’s handwritten note on the floor. I must have dropped it the night before and that’s why I couldn’t find it when talking to the professor. I picked it up and read it again.
“Doofus! Don’t you know the meaning of a figure of speech? Don’t ever walk into a field of energy like that. Look up the Akashic records and my thought experiments. And go into E=mc2.”
The last sentence hit me like a ton of bricks. E=mc2. Energy. Energy has frequency. Frequency is oscillations over time… It was time to take time out of Einstein’s famous equation. I remember seeing the face of the Timekeeper in my mind laughing.
I lost track of time while immersed in the task at hand. My trance-like concentration was interrupted by a call from the office. It was Joann, my senior copywriter, asking at what time I was going to stop by the office. The team wanted to show me the latest Chronologix materials. I told her to email them because I was going to be working from home all day. She suggested a video conference but I didn’t want to interrupt what I as doing so I came up with a lame excuse that I knew wouldn’t win me any brownie points with the team. About an hour and a half later they sent me the materials. I looked at them very quickly, didn’t catch any disasters and sent them an email saying everything looked good.
I worked non-stop until 7:00 PM that Thursday. Even forgot to eat lunch. I remember thinking that it was impossible for all that was happening to be the result of schizophrenia because people with that condition usually have a hard time organizing their thoughts, and, at the time I felt like I was intellectually “in the zone”.
Feeling suddenly famished I went to the fridge, grabbed some leftover Chinese food from like a week before, ate it cold and went to bed without showering.
I collapsed exhausted and slumbered… until the pipe smell woke me up.