I wish there was an opposite of time travel. I mean I guess that would be stopping time. But I wish there was something more profound. A friend recently asked me why we were even friends at all and I replied that it was due to infinite improbability. And reflecting on that, I fell in love with the idea of two people meeting each other--despite all odds--throughout the ages. You know, different lives, different times...all that. But that one's been done to death. Souls are always transcending time and finding each other and making beautiful babies with CGI irises that look just like the irises of the last blah blah blah. So I thought what if there was this reality where space travel was the stuff of science fiction. Not like From the Earth to the Moon, but like moving through planar space. Like imagine people are stationary and they live in this reality in which everything is hinged on eventuality and they all just allow time to pass around them until something happens and that's just the way life is until the story's protagonist discovers the ability to move through space. And he falls in love with a girl who has the same gift. And they traverse the globe while people watch on in wonder. Or maybe they don't see them at all! Because people never see time travellers in all those stories. They keep that shit secret-like. But the point was that this guy and this girl would criss-cross the planet and keep running into each other. They'd be like the first explorers. A whole massive world that the entire population is just glued to, waiting for their lives to come to them, and these two are able to miraculously flow across it. They break free of their stations and wander. And while they wander, every now and then they find each other. They begin to sense each other's existence no matter where they are. They are so profoundly free in this world that they are drawn to each other's freeness. I know a smart person would have said freedom there, but freedom has so many preconceived notions and visualizations attached to it. Freeness seems like it's just whimsical-albeit-wrong enough to express the thing that draws this guy and this girl to each other. And every time they are drawn to each other they fall in love just a little bit more but they are meant to roam and so they do. But eventually they begin to surpass their lives. In travelling and wandering and roaming free; in moving, each had lived beyond his and her potential. They didn't stand and let their lives pass them, they sprinted through life to the point that it stood still and they rapidly neared its end. And so drawn to each other more powerfully than ever before, they find each other one last time and they are so happy to have shared the secret of the entire world. And they embrace and they love each other and that is the last thing they do as their love pushes them beyond the boundaries of time or space and they wink out of existence.
Or something like that. I'm not so good at endings.
But then that whole thing creates so many problems. Why are people just stuck in space? How are they born? Where are they born and if it's in a different place than where they end up, how do they get to the place they end up? Are there all these people just kind of toppling off of each other like a pile of unpeeled potatoes? Does that make the concept silly? Where did civilization come from if nobody has ever been able to move? Or is this reality on some sort of different plane? Is the entire earth just covered with people from end to end and they all just serve one purpose or another? Like pixels? Rather than walking across a room carrying a hammer, does the hammer move through time from one person's hand to the other like animated reality? And given that reality, does the space the protagonists move through exist in a separate dimension? Do their bodies transcend the first reality and move in a world completely devoid of other people and that's how it stays secret? Does this complicated set of rules make the setting too complicated a place within which to create a story? Would it take too much explaining or is that a good thing? Does complexity create grounds for development and therefore allow for more writing (which in my always-rushing-to-the-end-of-a-project case is a good thing)? Or do the laws for this reality need to be completely re-thought out? Are people not human beings? Are they sentient moments being projected through time like frames of film? Is the story less about the base science fiction premise of two people warping dimensions or is it about something more inconceivable like something as abstract as a moment or a memory isolating itself in an infinite current of other moments and manifesting itself in the form of a being? Could it be a creation theory? Could this story suggest something as fantastical as Time becoming sentient and conceiving itself in a physical form so as to experience Space? Is the real love story between Space and Time and only represented by these two gifted souls destined to find each other? Or can the two realities mix into one story? Like did Time create the girl and she was stationary like all the others in the first scenario and Space created the boy so that he might search the world over for Time's daughter? And maybe just as he's about to run out of time her finds her and suddenly he has all the Time in the world? And his finding her finally gives her Space to roam free and their union--the union of Space and Time--gives way to reality as we know it now in which we're governed by a strict mixture of the two? Could I turn this into a religion and be rich beyond measure? And then on my death bed renounce everything I'd ever taught and ruin the lives of countless people?
That might be cool. Hell, I am pretty good at endings after all.
Who else?
- Sad Blogger
Episode 2 - A Bucket of Beeps
11 years ago