The Upside Down Clock
David Michael Newstead | The Philosophy of Shaving
“There’s no time!” Curtis repeated over and over, “Listen to me!”
He was furiously scribbling on a chalkboard in front of three other researchers: Brennan, Elizabeth, and Hamid. Each one was taking notes and closely paying attention to the scientific stream of consciousness spewing from Curtis’ beleaguered mind. He seemed to be a man possessed, pulling from some reservoir of madness and energy the others didn’t realize he had. But in reality, he was deliriously tired, severely overcaffeinated, panicked, and half psychotic. His eyes were bloodshot, his fingernails bitten into oblivion.
“Has this man been awake for days?” Elizabeth wondered.
However, these were secondary concerns, made less urgent by the very real and revolutionary theories his mania had produced. Hamid checked and rechecked every equation on the board. He was right! During an hours-long tirade to all of them about the dangers of climate change, Curtis had stumbled onto something truly Earth-shattering.
According to his calculations, it was possible to create small, pocket universes: adjacent dimensions faster than or slower than our own. Although each of these would degrade overtime and eventually cease to exist, they could serve useful purposes during their lifecycle. Then, as he explained in great detail, new ones would be made to replace them. And so on.
“Practically infinite crops yields!” he declared.
“Nuclear waste disposal…”
“A blackhole for excess carbon dioxide to fall into forever!”
Everyone began sharing ideas, talking in unison. The room seemed filled with excitement and endless possibilities.
In the years to come, each of them would remember this moment differently. Their careers, and therefore their lives, would diverge from this point onward. Hamid was the most professorial, earning a spot in the top echelons of academia. Elizabeth worked tirelessly to save the world and stave off climate disaster through a cluster of organizations and public partnerships. In contrast, Brennan attracted billions of dollars in investment for commercial applications of this emerging technology, each one more ethically questionable than the last.
“To think,” Hamid would declare to a massive audience, “… history changed that day and we changed the world!”
Curtis’ trajectory, however, was anything, but meteoric. To any outside observer, his burst of genius that day remained the highpoint of a scientific career in steady decline. He was too eccentric, many thought. Too manic. Troubled. Difficult. Abrasive. Abusive. Within a few, short years, he’d fallen into obscurity and lived in isolation. He continued to work and to theorize, but was largely ignored as time wore on. A footnote and nothing more.
It was at the end of this professionally humiliating ordeal that his greatest discovery came to him. For a decade, he went down a rabbit hole of research that no one on the planet seemed to care about. Then, for months after that revelation, he tried to convince himself he was wrong. It couldn’t be so! But it was. Again and again, his equations returned to the same inescapable and shocking conclusions. His life, the entire world, everything he knew… this was a pocket universe: a quickly decaying reality created as an offshoot of some original. Every day, on an atomic level, their horizons shrank and time whittled away. Everything was eroding.
He tried to call the others. He tried to warn the others. Curtis had projections. Estimates. They hadn’t spoken in so long. His associates all moved on with their lives, while his existence was a single, unbroken thought experiment he couldn’t wake up from. His voicemails were ignored, his letters and emails unanswered. There was precious little time and few options. Their dimension, he believed, would simply implode on itself in an instant like all the miniatures they’d manufactured in labs. Every waking hour, he rewrote and reworked his analysis, hoping for some different outcome, when in the end, he was simply transcribing the ticking of an enormous, unseen clock.
“Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait!” he said, suddenly slamming his fist down onto the table.
Had he done all this before? It felt so familiar, he thought. Curtis was in the middle of drawing out a potential short-term solution when that sensation overwhelmed him. He dropped his marker to the floor, then looked up in a daze. He had devised the method to create a pocket universe that mirrored this one. It too would collapse eventually like all the others, but he could crossover and buy himself more time to solve the more pressing issue. There must be a way, he thought, to go back to the dimension of origin. Or at least to map its location. To understand what was happening.
“Wait… I…” he sputtered.
Again, the shadow of a memory interrupted his train of thought. Curtis dwelled on that for almost an hour, struggling to hold onto the mental image. Yet, he could only vaguely sense its outlines and nothing more. The episode passed.
Had preparations taken any longer, it would have been too late. The molecular structure of that universe was now visibly coming undone around him. He toiled for a week before his recalibrated portal was ready. Then, as Curtis hurried across that radiated threshold between one world and another, the same feeling returned. It recurred, repeated like an echo that rippled over his mind. He saw himself standing there. He’d stood there many times. Behind him, the end was imminent. Ahead, crackling waves of energy bombarded him and inundated his body. As he weathered those incredible forces, he tried to maintain a single-minded focus, to retain the wealth of knowledge in his own head. Then, he stepped forward.
