Tag: anteverse

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 6: The Timekeeper

An artistic rendition of the Timekeeper's eye as seen in Ray's dream

I recall finding myself surrounded by nothingness and a prevalent humming was all I could hear. A tall silhouette was walking towards me twirling what looked like a fancy walking stick with sparks coming out of it in all directions. He was bald and wore a glass derby hat, a midnight blue frock coat with gold trimmings and knee-high boots. As he got closer I could see that his eyes looked like the whole universe resided in them. He waved his fancy stick and directed sparks to a specific spot in the nothingness around us. A window started to form and his dark lips broke into a smile as he spoke to me:

“Greetings, I’m the Timekeeper and this is my domain. I call it the Anteverse, a place that exists an instant before your present. I can sense your curiosity regarding the humming. All you need to know for now is that it connects closely to what lies ahead: a future without time.”

I tried to speak but no sound came out of my mouth. Through the window created by the Timekeeper I could see the sun rising behind the cityscape. The strange entity continued its monologue:

“You’re being shown a road. Follow it and you’ll discover what the future looks like. I assure you it is not what you’ve been told before. Let me present to you something intimately linked to your quest. You see the city coming alive through the window? Just a short while ago it was all energy. What you seek is all about energy.”

A distant electronic sound started to break through the humming. As it got louder I realized it was my wake-up alarm. The Timekeeper and his Anteverse went back to the dream world where they originated as I woke up in a sweat.

I remember feeling very disoriented as I went through my morning routine. The weirdness of the previous night encounter with the ‘Einstein’ intruder combined with the acid-type dream of the man with a glass derby hat and a sparky thingamajig had rattled me more than I cared to admit at the time. I decided to shake it off by walking to the office that day.

Throughout the day I found it very hard to concentrate on the Chronologix presentation. My mind kept going back to the old man’s claim that I had summoned him. I ate half a sandwich on my desk as I worked over lunch. Around 2:00 PM one of our art directors brought me a promotional piece he got during lunch. It was a small glass derby hat.

He liked the piece and was talking to me about how we could do something like that as a follow-up piece for the new business presentation. I could hardly hear what he was saying. The little glass hat had a logo that read Clear Heads and the slogan ‘Hats off to great coffee’. It instantaneously transported me back to the weird Timekeeper dream. The coincidence was too much. I took a deep breath, told the art director to work out the specifics of the follow-up piece and decided to, once again,  go for a walk to clear my mind. Something that didn’t work at all that morning but out of pure stubbornness I decided to try again.

While walking, the details of the Timekeeper’s dream came back to me. Some of the character’s claims made me wonder what, if anything, was my subconscious trying to tell me. Was it that I was on the wrong track in my research about the nature of time? What road was I being shown? And what was that ‘future without time’ claim all about? After mulling over my memories of the dream for a while, I decided that if my sub-conscious was indeed talking to me through the Timekeeper character then I would follow its advice. If it believed that what I sought was all about energy then I would redirect my research towards the relationship of time and energy.

Feeling reinvigorated I went back to the office. My plan was to do some research but as soon as I got back I was pulled into a meeting to review what was being done for the Chronologix presentation. The meeting took the rest of the afternoon. Around 6:00 PM I finally made it back to my desk and the lack of sleep caught up with me. I dozed off until 7:30 PM when the sound of the janitorial crew’s vacuum cleaner woke me up. Figured it was time to go home.

I stopped by a hamburger joint on the way and had a blue-cheese burger with bacon and a large side dish of wedge fries with ketchup. It was delicious and I really, really needed that. I chased everything down with a Belgian beer which further lowered my engine’s revolutions. I was finally ready to call it a day.

When I got home there was a new security guard on duty. I asked about Alastair and he told me it was his day off. Of course, it was Tuesday, I had lost track of time. I asked the new guy if he had any information regarding the security tapes and last night’s intruder. The young man was still wet behind the ears but what he lacked in experience he more that compensated with good disposition. He told me he would find out and get back to me.

I went up to my apartment, opened the door and there he was again…

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 16: Bowl Time Revelations

Dreamlike image of Ray's ecounter with the Timekeeper during the Notre Dame/Stanford game

The drive to Gina’s home was almost uneventful. On the way I realized I had forgotten to buy some beer for the adults to chase down the BBQ food so I stopped at a convenience store and bought a six-pack of one of those fall seasonal craft beers that looked like it could do the job. The checkout lady, who had an uncanny resemblance to one of the alter egos of Melissa McCarthy’s character in the movie ‘Spy’, looked at me funny and said:

“Honey, are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine. But I know I look like crap.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. I mean you being a customer and all, but yeah, you look like you could use some rest… and maybe some chicken soup too.”

“I’ll do just that. Have a good day… oh, and thanks for caring,” I said and the lady’s face beamed with a smile.

I finally made it to Gina’s and as soon as she opened the door the first words that came out of her mouth were: “Ray are you okay? You look like shit.”

“And a good day to you too,” I said.

“Sorry I didn’t mean to… you know, it’s just that I haven’t seen you since Wednesday morning and you look like the rest of the week piled up on you,” she said apologetically.

“Don’t sweat it, my bathroom mirror and the checkout lady at the convenience store agree with you. I just haven’t been sleeping well.”

“Still having those weird dreams you told me about?”

“Sort of… but today is all about indoor camping, BBQ and some Notre Dame/Stanford football, not about weird dreams. What do you say we get this tailgating going?”

“Sounds good to me,” she said. “Chris, Mel, come on over. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Christian and Melanie were Gina’s niblings. He was six years old and she was four. I was surprised at how well mannered they were. Gina introduced us and Christian extended his hand to shake mine while saying: “Nice to meet you.” In my mind I questioned whether this kid was for real. Melanie was a little shy so she just said hi while grabbing Gina’s thigh.

Gina led the way to the kitchen and helped me unpack all the goodies. I had brought hamburgers and hotdogs for the kids and some Italian sausage and ribs for the over-21 crowd. The ribs were the unpack-and-heat-up kind; I wasn’t such an accomplished BBQer. As it turned out, the kids had had hot dogs the night before and little Melanie loved ribs so the menu was set at one hamburger for Christian, ribs for everyone else and Italian sausages as appetizers for Gina and me. I added one cheeseburger for me simply because I loved them, although I didn’t know how I would be able to eat all that stuff.

The BBQ in Gina’s backyard was in excellent condition and everything turned out delicious. I hurt my sore tongue with a hot sausage but I solved that with a cold brew. After eating to our heart’s content, Gina and I sat down to watch the game. I recall watching the opening kickoff and not a single down after that. Without warning I found myself in the company of the Timekeeper in the place he called the Anteverse.

“Welcome back to my domain,” said the strange creature over the constant humming that permeated the featureless place(1).

“What is this place… this Anteverse?” I asked.

“It’s the place that exists an instant before your present,” said the Timekeeper. “It exists between the construct of the past and the energy of the future.”

“What do you mean by the construct of the past?”

“As you have discovered, time is the universal materializer, and that means that what you call the past is a solid construct. Something like frames in a movie with each frame being a moment in time. The moments exist forever, unaltered, created by the effect of time on the three-dimensional space of energy, and spilling over into your present. See, you are actually living ‘in the past’. Everything that surrounds you is a remnant of the past; an existing past construct that spills over into your ‘now’. An that ‘now’ is the edge of creation.”

“So, if the past is a physical construct, then it has mass… Can it be visited?” I asked.

“Once materialized, the past stays there for anyone to visit. Like a museum with every instant of existence frozen in an endless stream. Its mass affecting the present from an unseen source.”

The Timekeeper went on talking about how the theoretical dark matter is in actuality the mass of the past, but I was more concerned with the nonstop whirring.

“What’s with the constant humming?” I asked.

“That’s time interacting with the energy of the future,” said the Timekeeper. “What you call the present is a materializing process and the humming you hear is the sound of time creating your immediate future.”

I had many questions and had lost track of time when a distant voice started to warp the Anteverse.

It was Gina pulling me out of the Timekeeper’s domain.

“Ray, Ray wake up. Hey Ray. Earth calling Ray. Come in Ray…”

“What… oh crap I fell asleep. Is it half-time already?” I asked groggily.

“The game’s over Ray, you slept through it. I tried to wake you up earlier but you were sound asleep and snoring like a bear in the middle of winter. I think there’s a video of you sawing wood in YouTube now. Sorry, the kids’ idea, and I thought it was pretty funny.”

“Oh well, I hope it goes viral. Who won anyway?” I asked.

“Not Notre Dame,” said Gina grimacing. “What was your bet with Bob?”

I took a deep breath and started to feel the pain of what was coming to me. “Must go to the office all dressed up in red and every time somebody mentions my name I have to say I went to Notre Dame because I wasn’t good enough for Stanford.”

Gina burst out laughing and said: “I’m going to have so much fun that day.”

 

(1) For more on the strange Timekeeper character go to Chapter 6: The Timekeeper, and Chapter 8: Time Out… Sh*t!

 

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 20: The Time Particle

Image of the Time Particle

‘Einstein’ monopolized the computer and his concentration was such that it vanquished me from his reality. The tiredness associated to the day’s events finally caught up with me so I went to bed leaving my distinguished visitor to his cerebral pursuits.

I laid down on my bed for some sleep but my eyes kept going to the point in the room where the blue light wall had been before. A question popped up in my mind: does time have a tool for the materializing process? I remembered the Timekeeper saying that time interacts with the energy of the future(1) in what constitutes the materializing process that is the present. I wondered what did time use to create the future? It definitely wasn’t the staff-like thingamajig the Timekeeper carried around. But while on that line of thought, I mulled over whether the sparks coming out of it were a clue to finding the answer to such a question.

Tiredness finally won, and as soon as I nodded off I found myself back in the Anteverse.

“Well, well, well… good to see you’re back to finish our conversation,” said the Timekeeper twirling the sparking stick while tipping his glass hat. “Where were we?”

“You said the constant humming I hear in this place is the sound of time building the future. And I was wondering what, if anything, does time uses as a tool to do its materializing?” I asked.

“The tool, as you call it, is a primordial particle that infuses energy with mass. Scientists in your reality named it the Higgs boson, the mass giver. I believe you might have heard of it by its most common name: God’s Particle. A designation disliked by physicists but one that is understandable in the cultural context of the creator god when you take in consideration that this particle creates matter where there isn’t any. The term is really a misnomer for the boson has nothing to with God and everything to do with time. It should be called Time’s Particle.”

I woke up…

I had no idea how long I had been in bed. All I knew at the time was that it was still dark and I was too excited to sleep, so I went straight to my computer and found ‘Einstein’ gone. Not the kind of surprise that would give me a heart attack, but it would have been nice to have him around to talk about the Higgs boson being time’s particle. Sans Einstein, the only option left was Mr. Google.

My search revealed that the term boson pays homage to the Indian theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, best known for the quantum mechanics work that provided the foundation for the Bose-Einstein statistics. By that time it didn’t surprised me anymore that Einstein’s name kept popping up everywhere I went.

The Higgs boson was named after Peter Higgs, the British theoretical physicist who predicted the existence of this particle way back in the sixties. Its presence was initially recorded in 2012 at the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and finally confirmed in 2014. There are several types of bosons and all of them have an integer spin, but the Higgs boson is the only one with zero spin, and it’s the one responsible to give mass to other fundamental particles. But, what I found to be the most interesting fact about the Higgs boson was that they break apart in approximately a ten-sextillionth (10-22) of a second. At the time I thought that number could very well be the time it took the present to materialize!

I sat for a long time staring at the computer screen. I wasn’t expecting a finding like that. Holy crap! I had stumbled into a possible measurement of the instant that is the present. I don’t know how long I sat there motionless. All I know is that at one point I fell asleep on the chair. The sun came up and a tiny ray hit me straight in the face. I woke up and stumbled to the couch where I continued my slumber.

It was way past noon and I was still asleep when I heard the knock on the door.

 

(1) Check out the full extent of what the Timekeeper said in Chapter 16: Bowl Time Revelations

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 23: Bedside Manners

Image of ghostly figure in hospital room bed

I woke up quite disoriented… on a bed that wasn’t mine… in a room I couldn’t recognize. Professor Murdock was seating by the door reading something on his iPhone. He noticed me waking up and approached the bed.

“Welcome back to the world of the living Raymond. You gave us quite a scare back there.”

“Where am I?”

“St. Joseph’s Hospital.”

“What? Why? I asked still groggy.

“I got your message yesterday asking me to stop by your apartment, but when I arrived nobody answered the door. Figured you had gone out and decided to leave, but as I walked through the lobby I casually mentioned to the security guard that you weren’t in. He found that curious because Ms. Caulder had left just a bit earlier and you hadn’t been through his station after that.

“I told him about the message asking me to stop by and he got worried. Exaggeratedly so, I might add. He asked me in a heavy Scottish accent to accompany him back up to your apartment, and once upstairs he knocked on your door and dialed your phone with no answer to either. He then called somebody to ask for authorization to enter the apartment using what he referred to as ‘the security protocol’. After explaining the situation to whoever was at the other end of the line he got authorized to enter.”

“His name is Alastair. The security guard’s name is Alastair,” I interjected.

“A very nice fellow. A little rough on the edges, but very capable. Anyway, once inside we found you unconscious on the kitchen floor. That’s when Alastair called 911 and we ended up here,” said the Professor gesturing with his arms to show me the hospital room. “The doctor says you need plenty of rest because the whole chain of events was most probably caused by acute exhaustion. They still have to do some tests but that’s the initial prognosis.”

“What do you mean by the whole chain of events?”

The Professor’s answer was delayed by the entrance of Gina and Bob.

“Oh good, you’re back with us,” said Bob. “Sorry it took us so long to get here buddy but the Chronologix presentation kept dragging on an on.”

“That’s usually a good sign in a new business pitch. Good for you guys!” I said.

“Well you know how it is. These things can be very unpredictable. Some times they make you feel like you hit the ball out of the ballpark and then give the assignment to somebody else. So we’ll do all the follow-up antics during the next couple of days and keep our fingers crossed. We’ll know for sure in a week. How are you feeling?” said Bob.

“Dizzy… a bit unfocused… like I’ve been disconnected from reality for ages. How long was I out?”

“Close to 24 hours,” said Gina. “I got here last night after Alastair called…”

“Alastair called you?” I asked surprised.

“Of course he did. You added me to the list of people to call in an emergency. You remember that don’t you? I tend to agree with him that finding you unconscious on the floor of your apartment qualifies as an emergency. Anyway that’s not all he did. He also made sure that the people in the hospital knew that the Professor and I were authorized by you to receive information regarding your medical condition.”

“Wow, I didn’t know he could do that,” I said.

“Which brings me to the point at hand before you two arrived,” said Professor Murdock. “You’re here today Ray because of a whole chain of events that started way before you started seeing this Einstein character.”

“What Einstein character?” asked Bob.

“We’ll explain to you later Bob,” said Gina.

“You had been working very long hours and sleeping poorly for a while,” said the Professor, “and that brought forth an exhaustion induced brief psychotic disorder during which two things happened. First you bought a pipe and some tobacco and started smoking it without any recollection of doing so. That’s what caused the blister on your tongue by the way. Then the pipe smoking served as a trigger for the Einstein hallucinations.”

“So Einstein was never there…” I said with a hint of sadness, “but it all felt so real. It still does…”

“All in your head,” said Gina.

“And speaking of that, I brought something that will make your head feel a lot better,” said Bob as he got a Stanford cap out of a paper bag and placed it on my head. “Don’t you feel a lot smarter now? I figured you would need one after Saturday’s YO! Bowl.”

I took the cap off my head and looked at it while pondering the consequences of my alma mater losing the Notre Dame/Stanford game.(1)

“Thanks for the gesture Bob, I’ll be sure to wear it when I get back to the office,” I said sarcastically.

“I’ll have the cameras ready to go,” said a grinning Bob.

A nurse came in the room and announced that visiting hours would be over in 10 minutes. Gina said something to the nurse that I couldn’t hear and soon after, everybody said their goodbyes and I dozed off again… just to ‘wake up’ almost immediately back in the Anteverse.

 

(1) For the details on the consequences Ray has to face due to Notre Dame losing to Stanford  see CHAPTER 16: Bowl Time Revelations

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TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 24: Mind Over Matter

Dreamlike image of man running in the clouds

I opened my eyes to find myself back in the Anteverse.

“You’ve been a pretty busy man,” said a voice behind me.

I turned around and came face to face with the unearthly Timekeeper.

“The materializing process associated with your ideas has been pretty interesting,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Although ideas are immaterial, pure energy constructs if you will, they do produce actions in the material realm.”

“I don’t understand…”

“As you lay in a hospital bed, people are reacting to your ideas and furthering the concepts you’ve brought forth.”

“But how can that be? I haven’t…”

“Your friend the Professor has been making inquiries. And those queries have prompted other minds to question their previous beliefs. Your ideas on time have taken on a life of their own Ray.”

“But ideas are energy, as you said; how do you come in contact with them in the materializing process?”

“Ideas shape the present. Many times in the human experience matter is shaped by the ideas that first envision its form.

“Some people believe that what happens in the mind is not real, but the truth is that everything that transpires in the energy universe residing in your brain is as real as the material world around you. Even the most outlandish ramblings of a mad person are real because they exist in our reality. The only difference between the energy constructs within our mind and the physical ones around us is the presence of matter in the latter. But matter is not what makes something real. If such were the case, then we would have to conclude that feelings like love, pride, and gratefulness don’t exist.

“This is important because it would be erroneous to believe that your interactions with Einstein didn’t happen because they only occurred in your head.”

“But the doctors…” I interrupted.

“The doctors gave you their diagnosis and I ask you: did it say that nothing happened?”

“No of course not, it said that I had some sort of psychotic disorder.”

“That’s right. And that diagnosis certifies that the events, which transpired inside your mind, did in fact occur. As I said before, everything that happens in your mind is real. And by definition, so are dreams like this one. If you take only one thing with you from this experience let it be to keep on dreaming Ray. Dreams define the shape the world takes in the future. Einstein once said that imagination is a preview of life’s coming attractions and if so, then I would say that dreams are the trailers.”

As the Timekeeper talked I felt myself being pulled away from his realm back to the hospital bedroom. It was dark but I could see Gina sitting next to my bed reading something on her iPad. There was a knock on the door and a nurse came in with some pills for me to take.

“What time is it?” I asked Gina as soon as the nurse left.

“Close to midnight,” she said.

“This might be the medications talking, but I could have sworn I saw you leave with the others once visiting hours were over.”

“I did, but just to pick some stuff in my car, and then came back up. Talked to the head nurse about staying with you for the night.”

“I thought you didn’t babysit coworkers,” I said with a smirk.

“Ray, Ray, Ray you can be so dense for some things. Of course I don’t baby sit coworkers,” she said and gave me a kiss on the forehead.

 

EPILOGUE

Commencement day at Princeton University some years later… Gina and I are walking hand in hand through the beautiful campus.

“I really liked the main speaker’s speech,” said Gina.

“Absolutely. I read some of his work on the matter of time and found it fascinating. It’s amazing what brilliant scientific minds can do with science-fiction concepts. They always find a way to make the impossible a reality. He deserved the Nobel,” I said.

“And look at you, with a Princeton degree.”

“I couldn’t have done it without you,” I said kissing her.

“Well, you’re a Tiger now.”

“An Irish Tiger,” I said.

“That sounds German… Irishteiger,” said Gina smiling.

On a bench close by, an old man lowered the newspaper he was reading, looked at me and winked. I could have sworn he looked exactly like Albert Einstein.

 

T  H  E     E  N  D

 

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