1.2

Just in time. Blockades of minutes march together storm-walling like allies in the face of foe. It wasn’t a long battle. He was a new professional, grown out of the seconds. Flat cap and sandals tradition. The other boys from the school had gone earlier but on account of his tendril eyes he had to stay back, help the researchers make measurements, marvel at his natural freakishness.

Tick tock et cetera. The barrage completed hours at the top. You will run on my whistle. They shook with fear, who wouldn’t? The past was a very empty place. But like the minutes of yesterday used to say, “We’re just a drop in the ocean.” 

The words of his life flickered past, obscene memories never once thought of, emerged as if they’d always been there just beneath the surface. What did the cereal have to do with it? Frosted sugar-loaded processed cornflakes, fronted by an animated crow. “Tastes great ship-shape. Tastes great ship-shape.” He’d forgotten all about that little ditty and now the little ditty was claiming centre stage on his last few millimetres of life.

“Where did it all go wrong?” There were dreams emerging either side. His skin had become transparent like clear plastic packaging showing all the events which make his temporal form more visible, audible and sentient. After all this time thinking he was at last an individual. Born of his parents, destined automaton set to make his own path in his brief like. But he was just a motor-driven broadcast of sound bites, slogans, jingles and bells…

Existential fury is the best weapon against a conceptual enemy. Sticks and stones pass straight through imaginary bones. So do weapons of a more technological bent, chemicals, nerve-melting nanobots – they’re all redundant. The obsolete triangle of fury.

The system used by Temporal Warriors was, by its essence, self-destructive. There were no other ways of victory, for one to perish, so must another. There was a symmetry involved, a harmonic preponderance of the universe which seemed to behave like a sleeping baby whose nose, being tickled by a length of string automatically wipes his face, not conscious of its actions, removing the interference and returning to its dreams.

When one creature perishes, so must another, its all about balance. The principles of yin and yang were right after all. It was all true.

Driven siblings clasp hands, tormented to action, united in fury. Minutes jump over seconds, commandeer the hours. They search where they walk, they scream black hole banshees. Even the empty vacuum feels a shiver of anticipated fear.

“What’s it like?” Asked a journalist. Stomp-trodden into the mud, they march onwards, never to take their eyes away from the enemy. The last thing they’ll ever see, hands released and intermingled souls leaking out of the box. They are indeed more than the sum of their parts.

It’s ironic how the last thought that enters the mind of a man who is about to sacrifice his life for the good of his country was about toothpaste. Specifically, the micro techbubbles that apparently killed 99.9% of plaque and left a flexi-shine coating lasting up to 12 hours. Very clever stuff. Thought the minute. Very clever images of infographic plaque removal superimposed over the enemy. The enemy distracted by animated blue balls used to represent the flexi-tech foam was drained of all hate. All training drained from his plastic package as he became a vapid void of existence, just ripe for destruction. But energy simply transfers from one form to another. It can’t be destroyed.

This important fact was left out of training as it was thought by all the important timekeepers that it would prevent the killer instinct from emerging.

“We simply cannot have a philosophical army.” Said the General Timekeeper. The others sat around the great halls, built many years ago by hours and minutes gone by. They concluded that it was best just to let nature take its course and let the best hours emerge victorious. But of course no one returned. The past is a vast place..

The bundle strays were vacuumed up by death, no time for waste nots. She said, clipping vowels, stealing consonants from places of exotic nature that she’d never dared dream of. The bundles were full, just empty shadows really, nothing to say what they once were or to whom they once belonged. One woman’s treasure… began Death™, but she left the rest to hang, as old sayings go. The vestigial conclusions evolved into a raise of the eyebrow or stuff of whimsy. The last of them belonged to our once-heroic minute, a packet made of cheap plastic, not the faintest residue of dreams, ambitions, memories. It was all gone to the past, playing in the void, lost forever.

She took it to the recycling dump at the bottom of the sea. The manger, a man in his 30s with a perpetual expression of bafflement came to tell her they were closed.

“I never meant to work here.” He told her. “I was only supposed to be a temp. Temporary.”

“Don’t get me started.” Said Death™. She’d travelled over aeons to get here, from the beginning to the end then back again.

“There’s no such thing as temporary.” But like the rest she couldn’t be bothered to use more than a tut and headshake to explain. It wasn’t the sort of thing some lowly patron of empty plastic packets would understand anyway. She’d seen things he wouldn’t believe.

She backtracked to before the war. There’d be room for sure, but no, the great plague had ravished the villages and hamlets, and the recycling plant was only half the size in those days anyway. She flicked through to the future, past the boy with the unfulfilled ambition. She didn’t snigger when she saw him growing old, turning to decay. She was above that sort of thing. Through millennia, Death™ strode gathering the odd empty soul lost on its way to the places it yearned.

“They’re not getting any tidier.” She grumbled. In future times when the sun had swallowed the earth and souls made up most of the universe, the levy on recycling had reached preposterous levels.

“This is extortionate!” She yelled to some young upstart besuited economist.

“What am I meant to do? The problem is with inflation.” He told her. Raised his open palms and eyebrows too.

“What am I to do?” He repeated. So she did something that she never once thought she’d stoop to. Criss-crossed dimensions, looped the ends of time, roughed up the frayed edge of space. Creases in the universe make very good hiding places. She stuffed the empty plastic packages where they’d never be found, no new deity, she reckoned by a very long shot.

“Larger than the whole of space.” She said as she wiped the last dreams and pieces of soul from her hands. She took flight, back to the fields, mud suck blood soaked, age cripple carcinogerians. She smiled, back to home comforts..

Time swap. It is possible, like a lake, but made of a thousand puddles, the indivisible increments are split, four-way dimensions, produced by eight. The minutes awoke and time crept out from the grave. The clocks yawned and the sun-tilted rays of pink like the tip of a rainbow, begun to shed across the world. It had changed since he’d been gone. His skin creaked. Good old plastic packaging. There were no thoughts, just impressions. “Why” was a concept unfamiliar, its head had remained buried along with the ashes of the war.

It just was. No need for explanations, up is up and I am here.

Whoever I am.

There were others too, secondary soldiers, hours dusting their jackets and ironing their suits. There was no inequality. The first time he noticed there was something beneath the skin was when he was taking time to rub the leaves of a tree. They were so soft and fresh and green. He’d never felt anything quite like it. Bubbles rose and spontaneous creation performed its magic. Dimensions are never truly separated. They tangle fingers in many pies. This one had brought back from the void and idea, a little song ditty, it just popped and fizzed around his head like a long lost echo, demanding attention. Sparkle teeth, wavy locks, come and sample our latest creation…