The permanence of non-existence

Time travel was not all it was cracked up to be.

Of course, Victor had loved it at the start. Back when he had been Dr Victor MacMarrius. One of the greatest scientists of the Victorian Age, he had helped create not just the greatest invention of the industrial revolution, but of all human history. That wasn’t hyperbole. It was fact. He’d checked.

The renaissance had been fun. The dinosaurs were surprisingly feathered. It was nice to be able to bring toilet paper with him whenever he went.

Victor had witnessed every great civilisation rise from nothing and fade into the same. He had met all the famous faces he had studied at school, and many who were born long after he should have died. Plato, Socrates, Da Vinci, Tesla, Oppenheimer, Phil Collins.

Legends of different eras made real.

His time machine made the universe a television (a future invention he had little interest in), and he could watch any event he chose.

The problems though, were the three very nasty side effects.

The first real issue with time travel was, that in order to do it, Victor had been taken out of time. It no longer affected him. He was frozen exactly as he had been when he first travelled.

The first of May, eighteen-seventy-four. Twenty-five minutes to one in the morning.

Victors’ greying blonde hair was permanently messy. He had forgotten to comb it.

Since it was so late when he travelled he had naturally been tired. This meant low dark circles permanently clung to his pale eyes like two bats hanging from a cave’s ceiling.

Worst of all, and what Victor had lived to regret the most, his last test had been after he had dressed for bed.

“May as well give it one last shot before I go up,” he had thoughtlessly suggested to himself. How he cursed those words now.

The doctor had been travelling for eons worth of time now, and for every second of it he had been stuck wearing his green stripped pyjamas, and a red dressing gown. It hadn’t even been his favourite dressing gown.

For most of the past he had been able to pass them off as robes, but in the future he was seen largely as an escaped lunatic. Things had become mildly easier after the nuclear war. People cared less how one dressed after that.

The second biggest issue with time travel was that, just as he was frozen outside of time, Victor was unable to interact with anything that remained inside it.

He was a real-life Tantalus.

No drink would pour past his lips. No food would allow itself to be bitten. Victor felt no pleasures of the physical world, or pains. He was surprised by how much he missed pain. At least it gave meaning to dangerous action. At least it would have proved to him he was alive.

Doomed to be a watcher. That was the doctor’s curse.

Eternally sat on the sides to every event, no matter how meaningful or mundane. Like a gargoyle looking down from a cathedral tower across the city.

Living was about participation. Did it matter that he had seen the Colosseum being built? Victor couldn’t feel the stone when he touched it. He couldn’t smell the dust as it decayed over the centuries. He may as well have just gone forward in time a few years and bought a photograph of it.

What is the point in seeing wonders if you can never perform them yourself?

The third consequence of time travel was the worst.

For some reason (and Victor had spent millennia worth of time trying to calculate why) once he had stepped into a time, and subsequently travelled out of it, he could never return.

Countless ages were barred to him, mere moments in a day, put permanent prison bars, nonetheless. His solution had been a painful one. Though it had not been his.

“That can’t be right,” he complained, though he already knew it was true.

“Ja,” replied Albert. “I believe that when you travel it blocks off two minutes either side of the exact moment you left.”

The German scientist drew a quick paragraph of algebraic formulae on the chalk board.

He continued. “If you leave Berlin at midday on the first of June, nineteen-o-five, then you will never be able to be there again two minutes earlier or later.”

“To Berlin?” Victor had asked hopefully.

“Nein. To anywhere. To anywhere in the world. You can go three minutes before or three minutes later, but never less than two. How many times have you travelled?

He shrugged. “Too many. Maybe a hundred? There’s no way of knowing.”

Albert laughed in disbelief. “Oh, to have the option to be TIRED of time travel.”

“It gets old quickly,” Victor muttered.

“Well. I may have a solution, but it will be difficult Herr Doctor.” Albert fixed him with a warning look, and only when Victor nodded did the scientist continue.

“Since the block does not happen when you arrive at a time, but rather when you depart, you must live through the time. You wish to countlessly experience one moment of time? Then you must always arrive before it and leave well after it. Though you can never go to the exact same place.”

“Why not?”

Albert grinned nervously. “You will be there. Past you. Or rather future you. It depends on the perspective. Too many Doctors and things will get complicated. Not physics complicated but… socially.”

So that had been what Victor did. He lived lives in every era, never ending.

In total he must have lived for more years than the earth had existed. Of course he had gone mad multiple times, but he had always gone sane again after a few millennia. A few eras had been lost this way but after a while they all blended anyway.

No war nor natural disaster could harm him. Nothing of temporal origins. After he had lived his first million years, Victor stopped believing in time altogether. It was real for the universe. Not for him.

One day he stopped travelling and just sat down. There he remained until the end of days. He and his doubles. Sat in silence.

The last humans on earth. Long after the surface had been scorched by solar flares, and all life had died, they remained. One day the sun collapsed, bursting the solar system and careening him out across the universe.

He never saw any of his doubles again. He never cared.

It should have been a scientists dream. Victor watched supernova exploding and planets being born. But it meant nothing to him. Only one thing would end up catching his interest.

A black hole at the edge of the galaxy.

It was a mass of nothing. No reality. No light. Most importantly, no time.

“Maybe this will kill me?” he pondered. “That would be nice.”

He drifted towards it, and as his body began to tear and warp, Victor felt one last sensation.

Relief.