Time Sink

“We have all the time in the world,” Sam said. 

Jerry looked up. His hands were deep in the guts of a irregular black box, one side off and wires poking everywhere. Multicolored lights were blinking in a quick pattern across the top. “It still might not be enough,” he said. He carefully pulled one hand out, slowly releasing a blue wire as he did, and wiped his forehead. His hand was shaking.  

“Take your time,” Sam said. He sorted through the jars on the metal shelf, glancing at the labels, and scooped up a quart Mason jar that was slightly glowing blue. “Here. What are you saving it for?” He leaned over to hand it to Jerry, squatting down on the floor. 

“Put it back. I told you, I’m not using it for this. Use your own time.”  Sam acted for a second like he was going to toss the jar to him, and Jerry jumped, throwing his hands out to catch. “Goddamit, that’s not funny. Don’t mess with my time. Put it back!”   

Sam just laughed and slid it back on the shelf. He sorted through the jars while Jerry sat back on the ground with a grunt. “If we don’t have all the time in the world, we sure have a lot of it,” Sam mused.  

“Nobody else needs it now. And all the time in the world won’t be much if we don’t get this figured out.” Jerry leaned in and adjusted the shop light to focus on the innards of the box. “Help me with this. Hold this.” He pointed to a wire, but just as Sam reached down to help, the lights on the device started to dim and a low rattle was audible. “Dammit.” Jerry picked up an empty Mason jar that sat next to his box. “How are we out of time again? Get me some more. Quick.”

Sam sprang up and carefully but quickly pushed through the jars, glowing in all different colors, and grabbed one from the back. Unscrewing the lid even as he turned, he handed it to Jerry. Jerry snugged it right up against the box, and the lights powered back up and the rattle settled back into a barely perceptible hum. 

The jar looked like it was empty, just glowing pink. But even as they watched, the level of glow dipped just a bit. 

Sam wasn’t laughing any more. “That one lasted barely an hour. There are more in the back, but at this rate we’ll run out of time completely in about three days.”  

“We just have to fix this, that’s all there is to it.”  

They worked together, doing everything they had figured out in these desperate days since the invention of the time sink. Once a device was invented that collected time, that captured and rationed actual time – or people’s complete perception of it, it wasn’t decided and it turned out it didn’t matter – it was only a matter of time. People gave away time, sold it or bought it, lived twice or twice as fast, and it disappeared. At first only the wealthy had a time sink and could live their lives some way other than going forward one second per second.  But very soon, in hardly any time, some others stole time to get their time sink more quickly. 

It turned out time was local, which blew every theory anyone ever had about time and space. And matter and energy, for that matter. A time sink collected time and the person nearby could experience it, but it was like Nestle sucking out the aquifer and destroying the water table of a whole region. The further you were from a time sink, the more time was taken from around you, and the slower things went, until they just – stopped.  If you had a working one left, you could wander the cities, safe in your own little bubble of time, and just pass every person, every dog, every leaf falling from a tree exactly where it was when their time ran out like terrible museum exhibits.   

And the damn things were temperamental. The biggest glitch was they became time hogs – sucking up way more time than they gave out. A little was expected, it took energy to run it and from the beginning the device syphoned a little off for itself, but it got worse and worse. 

People started collecting extra time, and saving it for later. Bunkers were built, to protect time. But then, time was sucked up even more quickly and people ran out before they could get to their stash. 

And it turned out – once time was collected and stored by a time sink, it could only be used by a time sink. You could have years worth of time all bottled up, but if your time sink died you could open every jar and dump it on your head in your last seconds, and you would run out of time, and be stuck in your last second forever. 

“I don’t understand why this won’t recalibrate,” Jerry said in frustration. “If we could get it back to one second per second, we have enough for years. It’s like a year to fifteen minutes at this point. Stupid thing!” He raised him hand, and Sam jumped as Jerry brought his wrench down on the device with a solid clank. “Just kill us, already! This is so stupid!”  

Sam jumped across and tackled Jerry, knocking him to the floor before he could hit it again. Jerry swung back at him and kicked him off and raised his fist for a punch, but they both froze and slowly turned to look at the time sink.  The sound had changed – it was a lower pitched hum, with a perceptible wave. The sound rose and fell like a long tide. The pattern of the lights had changed as well, going much more slowly. 

“Oh my God.” Sam scrambled over to look at it.  

“Don’t touch it!”  Jerry leaned in close, barely breathing. “Look!” He pointed at one of the gauges. “One second per second. Holy shit.”  He fell back to the floor. “Ok. If it holds, at least we have some time now.” 

After they both finally calmed, they took stock of their situation. If the proper ratio held, they really did have enough time for years. When Jerry carefully examined it, he saw the place that the wrench smack had fixed. There was a specific connection that went a specific way, and then the time could get calibrated.  They practiced on some other spare time sinks in the bunker, and found it worked for them as well. If there had been any quality control, any attempt to understand what they were doing, the whole time drought could have been avoided.  

They made a solemn vow to each other to never run a machine at more than a second per second, for any reason. That was what had really caused it – it turned out it was addicting to speed time. To skip the bad parts, get to the good parts, live the great parts over and over – no one really wanted to go through life one second per second.  But it was either that, or run out of time.  

‘This isn’t so bad,” Jerry told Sam a few months – real months, one second to a second – later. They had five time sinks, at minimum time, set just so their fields overlapped. They had gone out and given time to other people, and brought them back, and had a nice little community now. It was easy to get food, or anything really. Take a time sink and go foraging. Once an aisle of a grocery store was in time, you could get what you needed. Even the ice cream was still frozen. They had made it a priority to find the other time bunkers and bring their contents back, so they now had enough time for a hundred years, even with five (or more, if they decided to build their little community) time sinks running.  

“Yeah,” agreed Sam. “After all, we have all the time in the world.”