Take your life and seize it, he had been told. The voices of elders had intoned this motto over and over. Those words rang in Professor Rine’s mind each day he worked, his hand turning meticulous calculations, trying to ignore the sounds of others in his life, parents, wives, and children, as he worked.
This process began in a corner of the garage and then moved into an office space upstairs when Rine managed to get a real job. Still, he tried to ignore the voices around him, completing his maddening work. One wrong twist and the result would be…complicated.
From the garage to a gala. Now Rine stood at the podium, the doors opening, a banner behind him:
Slow Down, Speed Up, Enjoy the Pace.
In the end, the machine would do just that. The professor’s new invention would allow its user not to turn back time but to exist in the moment as he or she wished. This meant speed–fast, slow, but no rewind. Rewind, of course, was the trickiest part and would involve looping, other dimensions, or some such theory.
This lack of rewind caught in the professor’s throat even now. The hours he had spent on it could not be retraced, and he could find no way to find them again. Rewind was simply too difficult a function of reality.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Rine announced once the gala room had filled posh guests. “Feast your eyes and…take your time.”
Men and women, rich and richer, were offered moments of their lives in bits and bursts. Joy filled hours, days, and even weeks and guests slowed themselves into rapturous budding delight, as if stranded on an island of their own intense pleasure. Someone would eventually come to collect these lingerers as their coffers emptied and filled the professor’s account.
Surgeries were recovered within seconds and the most painful moments flashed in a millisecond. Sorrowful breakups and losses were sped up and users could cherry-pick the moments they wanted to slow down on. Long commutes were made much simpler as drivers wove in and out of seemingly frozen traffic. No more lonely nights. One could simply speed through them.
As the evening progressed, guests were so busy they hardly took notice of the professor’s setting. Occasionally, he would speed up, the slow down to a normal rate, but most of his life was now spent on fast-forward.
Coins kept rolling in through the evening, but Rine would not stop and smell any roses, much less count the bills. Along with his family motto ringing his ears, the sharp and pointed words: “When you are going to come down and eat on…” “When are you going to finally show up on…”
The questions always ended in that dreadful word, summing up his life’s work.
“Why isn’t he smiling more?” one lavishly-dressed guest paused to wonder. But the wondering passed in a millisecond, per her setting.
Rine estimated that, at this rate, he would have mere days left on earth, which was fine, just fine with him. His house was empty, his rooms were bare, and he had missed all of his life for the sake of the swiftly turning clock.
No rewind button he tried would seem to work, the professor mused, as he slipped out of the gala doors into the spinning world.
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JD DeHart is a writer and teacher. He blogs about books and authors at readingandlitresources.blogspot.com and publishes poetry at onpossibilitypoems.blogspot.com.
An original idea and well-told story. Very nice.