The Monster of Time

(Trigger Warning: Contains mention of death due to neglect)

They say clocks used to make a sound. An incessant ticking marking the passing of time. Our clocks today are more accurate, I think. Time marked only by a steady changing of numbers, silently progressing until you suddenly realize it has all slipped away. 

These days, everything changes in a blink of an eye. Empires rising and falling like the soundwaves of a song, newly made and newly destroyed with each new wave of technology. Life is a frantic hum and we all race to keep up with the ever increasing pace. 

No matter what we overcome, what new marvels we create, we have yet to destroy the real monster. Time. The beast which slowly devours everything between its heavy, blunt teeth. The monster against which I have raged and fought for decades and now tears me apart, bit by bit, in silence. 

The black metal paneling of the chamber floor is cold against my bare feet. I stripped off my socks on purpose–the cold grounds me as I stare up at the enormous window that dwarfs me. The window stretches hundreds of feet above my head, stairs leading up to a short platform, so that it looks more like a monumental doorway found in an ancient temple–large enough for a god to walk through. Beyond the window is the void of space. I can see only a few lonely stars spinning in the vastness. 

This is my exile. This little orbiting capsule, permanently turned away from the earth, angled precisely so the sun outlines the window in harsh, bright light but illuminates nothing else. Because of this contrast of light, all I can see of the universe beyond is darkness.

This is my punishment. An experiment in isolation. Totally alone, continually diminished by vastness–both in my enormous black paneled chamber and by my only other view of the dark universe beyond. 

All this because I almost tore a hole in the space-time continuum and accidentally started a war in the process. The war, at least, was very short-lived, once the respective governments discovered that the explosion’s source was not, in fact, a terrorist, but, as they had labeled me, a “rogue scientist.” 

Now I am sentenced to replay again and again the sequence of events leading to disaster. 

This is the true punishment. Not the isolation. Not the darkness or the cold. Not the existential horror of drifting alone inside the empty expanse of space. But the nagging sensation that I might know what went wrong. I think I could fix the problem. And it would change everything. But I am trapped here, unable to rectify my wrongs. 

We have conquered so many things–Artificial Intelligence, Climate Management, Space Travel. But we have not yet conquered time. We are still unable to travel back, to reverse this current moment. 

I long for my lab most. For the buzz and whirr of my machines, the soothing voice of my Algorithm who I programmed to help me solve the world’s greatest puzzle–time travel. 

The media got it wrong though. I’m not some “rogue scientist” single-mindedly pursuing an idea for the glory of “doing it first.” I have to go back. To the past. It’s the only way for my life to be worth anything. 

The crime for which I am exiled and imprisoned is not the true crime, you see. The explosion was an accident, an outcome I could not have foreseen. The true crime occurred decades ago–one horrible miscalculation that destroyed everything.

 No. I will not absolve myself of my guilt. It was not a miscalculation, but a choice–my choice. I have paid for it for years, trying to reverse time. I pay for it still, here and now, drifting alone in a space station, the outcome of my attempt to put things right. 

When I think back to that fateful night, I still find myself making excuses, attempting to justify myself. I was still young. Still new to being a wife and mother. I was tired. Stressed. Overwhelmed. 

None of that matters.

I stare up at the towering window, framed in blinding sunlight and the rest consumed by shadow. Did they choose this design on purpose? Was this how Ezra, my son, felt when I abandoned him outside my front door? 

When I close my eyes, I relive that night again. 

Ben, my husband, away on a business trip. Beth, my best friend, drinking wine with me on the living room sofa. Ezra crying and kicking in his playpen. 

“I am so done with his whinyness today,” I say. “I’ve done everything. He’s not hungry. He’s not thirsty. He’s not sick. He’s just been in a mood all day. Even Nanny can’t calm him down.”

Nanny was a special childcare bot who imitated my voice and appearance through AI-generated speech and images to spend time with Ezra and calm him down when I was busy. 

“You could just stick him outside, like what you used to do with Pasta,” Beth says, her voice slurring a little. Pasta had been my dog through high school and college, a little tan corgi. Beth giggles a little. 

This is the moment I relive. The moment I must undo. 

I am a little drunk. My thoughts move sluggishly, fallen in a jumble at the bottom of my brain. I know that Beth is joking. But I hear myself agreeing with her, taking her seriously.

“Maybe I’ll do just that. Can’t hurt to try.”

“Stacy! I was joking!”

But I’m already lifting Ezra out of his playpen. He squirms in my hands, barely one year old. His eyes are puffy from tears, but he still reaches out to me with both arms. 

“Just until he stops crying. I just need one minute of peace and quiet.” 

And I set my baby boy outside my front door, on the porch of my house. And I go back inside and close the door behind me. And I stumble back to the living room couch and pour myself another glass of wine. It sloshes inside the glass, dark red. 

It is hours later when I remember what I’ve done. Beth is dozing on the couch. I run to the front door, heart in my throat, and fling it open. The night is silent. Only the distant sound of crickets. There is no wind. Ezra makes no sound. He is no longer sitting on the porch, but sprawled at the bottom of the steps, on the concrete. His fuzzy blue onesie is stained with blood. 

So much is a blur after that. The consequences of my one action. I call an ambulance. It takes him away. He lives, my strong little boy. But he would never walk. Never talk. 

Ben, my husband, immediately comes home from his business trip, arriving at the hospital in tears. He begs me to tell him what happened. 

I blame Beth. My dear friend, who I had known since middle school. This is the story I make up–I had left Ezra in Beth’s care. She sat outside on the porch with him. She got drunk while she was supposed to be watching him and left him there. 

Ben believes me. So does Beth. She did get drunk and doesn’t remember what, exactly, happened that night. 

Ezra was such a brave, brave boy. He fought so hard for three years, but a complication from surgery proved too much for his small body. I had to say goodbye to him when he was only four years old. The grief of Ezra’s loss and the pain of watching our son suffer for three long years broke Ben. We divorced just a couple months after the death of our son. The guilt–from the blame I had placed on her–drove Beth into a life of depression and drinking.

And so, with one wrong decision, I destroyed not only my own life, but the lives of everyone I loved. My husband. My best friend. And most of all–my son. 

It can never be forgiven. Only undone. 

The sound of metal sliding against metal, followed by a long scraping sound and a harsh chime bring me out of my memories. Meal time. The only thing that regulates my days and nights. The meal is the same thing every time–a slice of hearty bread, a tasteless protein sludge, and some type of vegetable mixture. All engineered to stay preserved and to provide the right number of calories and nutrition to keep me alive. 

Once I finish my meal, I place the tray back into the waiting slot and it disappears with a soft scrape and click. Everything here is mechanized and impersonal. So different from Earth, where even the most mundane machine has been given a voice and a personality, or at least plays music. Here, the only voice that will ever speak is my own, and the one that screams inside my head. 

I was so close. Twenty-five years of research, and I’m sure I was close to a breakthrough. Algorithm and I had worked for fifteen of those years together, running through equations and theories of how one might travel backwards through time. And not just visiting as a tourist but actually affecting it–reversing events. 

The explosion had occurred on our last test. Nothing living went into the machine during the tests. Not yet. Only the Cube, specially designed to give readings of various environmental factors.  At the moment of the explosion, I was in another city in order to meet with a scholar who was working on time theory. With the help of Algorithm and some other programs I had set up, I could conduct tests remotely. I had high hopes for a breakthrough on the last one. 

Instead, I accidentally blew up everything in a five-mile radius of the lab. Including a government building. Obviously, things spiraled very quickly out of control from there. 

The thing is…I am not so sure the test was a failure. I was never able to locate the Cube in any of the debris. Other scientific instruments at nearby research laboratories marked disturbances in various areas–including time. Scientists at a nearby university were complaining that their experiments were all off by two seconds. Sending the Cube back in time may have been successful–just the force required to do so ended up being far more…explosive…than I had anticipated. 

The knowledge that I may be so close to fixing everything is the worst part of my exile to space. I could reverse the explosion. I could reverse my divorce, the destruction of my friend’s life by alcoholism, and most of all, I could reverse the death of my son. It’s all so close, within reach. 

My fingers touch the cold glass of the window. I sink to my knees. I cannot complete my work. I cannot discover the secrets of time travel. I cannot reverse the destruction my life has caused. 

Instead, my great enemy–time–crushes me beneath its gigantic fist. Out here, time is as endless as the universe. It has no meaning or marking. It stretches out eternally, stretching me with it, pulling me apart atom by atom. I stare out at the dark universe. I can only see one faint star, blinking, alone in the vast nothingness. I am the lonely star and the void is inside me.