The Time Tribulations

by Travis Borne

  Marlo, Jon, and Rafael rode the most boring ride hundreds of years and a cold, gray world could hand over. Talk about the plan bounced around, as well every minute detail of their upcoming mission. They told each other stories, enough to stuff novels and pack entire libraries, and after they’d stopped traveling they even found a home. Residing dead bottom of the crack which seemed to divide the marble of a world in two, was their new pad: riverfront property, cave. And just beyond the small, dark hole’s entrance was the river, a slow-moving flow of black magma; the sludge farted and burped, crawling along like rot on a dead body, almost too slow to clock.

  It was Jon’s idea to jump, ending it cleanly, quickly. The three of them speculated it would be the easiest possible way out. Sick of being cold, and the stories—that were somewhat entertaining—well, something had to change. Words had long since ceased to flap from benumbed, nearly frozen lips. The desire to converse, or fight, had become as dead as they felt. And after returning like weary nomads covered in fine gray dust and red metallic powder, seeing that ship land again, and again, over and over and over…

  They would lay on the ground like cadavers, before setting out on another trek. A million repeats were like million-pound weights on foreheads: man makes choice, girl dies, sometimes man dies, man rages, repeat; every fathomable possibility played out in Jim’s nightmare. Watching it, after every vacation, was the headache god of headaches.

  Eventually the variations stopped and the same scenario played out. It was the very first: Jim holding Amy’s shoulders, releasing her, then spinning around like Satan incarnate—maybe even redder than the infamous, dark one. There was one exception, however: Lia. She had the fortitude of a woman treading water in Satan’s realm. Lia pushed, fought, screamed, and never gave up. And Amy’s skin bulged, sometimes like a wax mannequin in a fire, others like a stress ball with a person inside. But Jim never noticed, he only saw Amy.

  Marlo and Rafael could bear witness to Lia’s pain no longer, for they could not help her, and finally agreed with Jon. A running leap—all together now! Into the deepest, darkest void of a scar they could find, which by chance, was where Amy had fallen: Marlo dove like a professional diver; Jon, feet first; and Rafael, sprawled like a skydiver. They soared past the bone-brimming ledge, heading all the way to the bottom—importuning, each in their own way, any chunk of code, on-duty tech, or god who might be listening; hopefully, this would finally do the trick.

  They fell for what seemed hours. Icy winds floated them miles to the left. “Cold, damn fucking cold,” Marlo cursed; so often he blasted, and so different from his previously wise, crackerjack, enigmatic self. But within minutes of his curse, with a sardonic grin, he let out a fucking, “Ahhhh,” one that could tantalize a perpetual-motion machine. Goodness happened. The warmth was orgasmic, touching each of them like air touching a baby sliding from the womb.

  It was a hot tub and the air was the first favorable happening in over two hundred years—until it became superheated. Their ahhhhing, like children in a heated pool, turned to screaming, like children being boiled. They screeched—it burnt their lungs to take it in—then they hit. Jon landed in the black magma. Rafael broke 206 bones, several times like the 80s pencil-break challenge, until the bones couldn’t be broken into smaller segments. But Marlo got the worst of it; he went face first into a crevasse and it crushed him like a garbage truck compacts garbage.

  The pain lasted for, for fucking ever! It was plenty of time to grasp the totality of their new situation: they realized they could not die. Life was a Galapagos tortoise trying to solve The Labyrinth. The sheer indefiniteness, while existing as distorted, broken piles of mush, had arrived to each of their minds like a jury-duty summons; it shocked the only thing left to persecute—their sanity.

  Marlo became a clump of crawling guts, like those that’d went to war with a meat tenderizer, and he eventually oozed out from his crevasse—at which he might as well have owned a mailbox. His robe had become hard and black over the decades, such as clothing left outdoors in the Tennessee wilderness for one year, and his skull was flat. He healed like a scab that couldn’t get away from a fingernail and his brains percolated through a warble on the top of his head as if he’d become a human volcano; it spewed more timely than Old Faithful. Brain juice was the best color adorning his new look: rotten, green bile garnished his encrusted red mash; he’d be Christmas save for the yellowed bones ruining it. And he could hardly move, at first, but eventually managed to lob himself about like a bloated seal, one that had survived a shark attack, one that knew how, at least, to work itself back and forth. Ultimately Marlo healed, but in a distorted form that left him useless.

  Jon was broken too, but after a time, months, he could walk. His legs had been burnt severely by the magma that had cushioned his fall, and were like black bone sticks; he eventually learned to balance on them.

  Rafael’s white Spaniard shirt had puffed like a parachute, but it didn’t help much in the high gravity. He hit a flat spot on the ground, landing on his stomach—sprawled out like a snow angel. His bones healed exactly where they’d broke and he re-inflated like, lying still for months.

  A reunion, after much time.

  Time.

  Fucking time.

  “Please, God, Man in the Machine, Ron, Devon, Ted—no more time!”

  It was Rafael who found Jon, in time, and easily they both found Marlo, who had decided to live a life of cursing. Without his power he’d become a child, whining and bitching constantly. His raspy voice echoed throughout the canyon in which they found themselves. For days, weeks, years, the old man griped and moaned, which turned into song, howling and crying. It wasn’t for pity, that they’d decided to put the crippled old fart out of his misery; it wasn’t because he had healed so abnormally, or because he had become a monster; it wasn’t, even, because he really had gone mad. They decided to kill Marlo because he wouldn’t stop yelling, singing and yelling, cursing and singing and yelling, like a drunken sailor haunting the sea, sunburnt and dehydrated, distorted like a pile on the ground that lobbed itself around only once in a while. His voice, near the end, had become an incessant cackle, gritty and indistinguishable from words.

  Rafael brought down the rock.

  Marlo couldn’t die, though, and they knew it. But at least the noise stopped—for a time.

  Even ash would regenerate, eventually. Like copies of copies their bodies couldn’t regenerate their initially manifested states so Rafael and Jon learned to take care of what they had. Jon’s legs repaired themselves after several decades, although never completely straightened. Rafael’s bones clicked and popped henceforth, but he managed well. And Marlo existed as a pile; they had to kill him at least once every ten to forty years. They knew he was alive and feeling, however, and did it for the sake of their own sanity.

  “We’ll have to wait it out, until Ted unplugs us,” Jon said one day, a conversation they’d already shared countless times. But where time was a glutton, conversations tended to repeat.

  “I know,” Rafael replied, a few days later.

  It was a slightly cooler in the dark cave and Rafael had fabricated a light by collecting tiny specs of glowing jewels found in the magma’s crust; between the two hunched, squatting souls, the faint glow made them spooks in the darkness. Unmoved for years on end, they sat facing each other. Talking. Talking slowly—or not. They became turtles, sometimes letting days go by before replying, savoring every syllable of a new, or reused conversation. Chronos, god of time, had become a greedy billionaire with bottomless pits for pockets and everything eventually became new again; there was no end to the spending of His currency.

  A burgundy glow framed their window to the world. It wasn’t much brighter outside, just enough to see the glittering black river of magma edging what had become their beach; and the sharp stalagmites were cones in its obstacle course. Some were grand, sharpened like dull knives, with contorted arms. Others were poised like an incubus with exaggerated parts, laughing
at the crooked stones about its feet, each crooked stone its succubus, looking up wickedly, or crawling like obsequious crabs at its feet.

  The stone figures out and about were their clouds, and for two hours per day Jon and Rafael received the equivalence of red candle light. Rafael turned his head, and like the minute hand on a clock, so did Jon. They imagined the misshapen rocks as people, a sidewalk with passersby; something with tusks, perhaps a woolly mammoth, red snow and horseshoe crabs, and a demon—there’s a witch with three arms and a deer skull for a head. The succubi are crawling around the incubus again.

  Rarely were the visions pleasant but as time went on, they cherished even the nightmares. It was the only thing they had and like a married couple in their nineties, Jon and Rafael shared their hallucinations as if the old mental channel had reconstructed itself.

  After 360 years, or there around, Rafael stopped counting the days in his head. Another hundred—or fifty, or five hundred—years later, Jon said, while sitting on the rock that seemed to morph into him, basking in the faint glow of alchemistical lava jewels in a state of perpetual glow, “We’ll have to wait it out, until Ted unplugs us.”

  Several days later… “I know,” Rafael said, slowly. Outside, Marlo was screaming again.

  They had burned him, dragged him into the slowly flowing, charcoal sludge. But Marlo kept coming back, as if growing from the ground. They even cut him into pieces but like seeds all traces of the parts regrew. The resulting polyps crawled like lazy slugs on a mission. Reluctantly, Marlo always put himself back together.

  They even took him far away, once. But the screams were traveling spirits, and distant haunts were somehow worse. Echoing through and around the steep walls of the crevasse, Marlo’s diabolical song distorted Rafael’s and Jon’s reality. They began to lose touch with what was real and what was not. They dragged him back before another year had cycled.

  There was, however, no better way; every sound tortured their ears. Noises were poltergeists’ taunts and they saw things that weren’t there. It caused them to make terrible sounds of their own, and the first few thousand—felt like a thousand, a million—years were tough. Jon and Rafael had gone crazy together many times over, yet eventually learned it was better, by one dollar out of Chronos’ billions, to remain quiet. And they would assist each other, sway sanity like a car with a sleeping driver, back onto the road as needed.

  500 years.

  Marlo, screaming again, the faint glow of red leaving for the day, shadows outside twisting the rocks into everything and anything imaginable in their minds, and all turned dark save the sparkling dots sprinkled about. The incubus and his wanton crabs withdrew once again. Jon sat facing Rafael; he said, “We’ll have to wait it out, until Ted unplugs us.”

  A few months later, the red glow returning, they hadn’t moved as much as a finger. Their wheezing breaths, the dripping noise, dust particles falling from above—no way out. Marlo let out a howl, he’d been alive longer than ever. His screams no longer bothered them and they no longer killed him. Rafael, facing Jon, opened his eyes and said, “I know.”

  But they both knew—because once it had been a lively topic of conversation—what would happen if they were suddenly unplugged. The disparate levels of cognition would be too much too quickly. On the account of Jim’s ability to travel deep, deeper than even Marlo himself had ever dared, a logout needed to be handled carefully—like a diver ascending from a record-breaking dive—by one in control of the system. Marlo was in no way capable and possessed no control; even a lawyer couldn't distort the meaning of the word control to infer that he possessed a smidgen.

  However, unplugging was the only way; unplugging would send them to the padded white room. But they no longer cared, even death would be better than remaining in the oven where they had ended up, although a wiped or scrambled mind was most likely. They often imagined themselves, “Ahhhh,” and how nice it would be: lobotomized, relaxing in a real bed, one made out of cool, fluffy cotton, arms bound, drooling, brainless, “Ahhhh,” anything.

  “Imagine…breathing in that air. Real, cool air.” Who said it? The married couple they had become, hadn’t a clue.

  The mental channel was back, in one sense but not another, and not using the system. They shared thoughts, somehow, and hope was annoying pollen on a beautiful spring day: smells of flowers or farts, for this air could support none, sunlight on the face, robot or human, and spaghetti, lakeside fishing and laughs, even nerve-racking flights in the hover-jet. Rafael missed his family yet had in a sense forgotten them. Jon missed the old cave, being trapped there—it would be better, it was better, with young Amy, and once upon a time with his love, Jodi; he had trouble remembering them too, although he still tried sometimes. The memories, however, had become corrupt and he couldn’t discern ones that had actually happened, from twisted thoughts.

  600 years.

  Marlo sang distorted hymns. He no longer paused to breathe. Sometimes the gagging and choking sounds would become rhythmic, and other times, cries of low and high pitch, sending unraveled, weird and distorted thoughts into the minds of Jon and Rafael.

  Jon no longer moved; he blinked once a month. Rafael sat facing him, eyes closed. They could feel no longer. Not the hot air on their skin like an iron, not the breaths going in and out of their lungs: searing, hot air, lungs ablaze in a constant state of unwelcome regeneration. Jon occasionally said something but the words no longer registered and Rafael stopped responding. For another thirty years they remained frozen like burnt popsicles that could never melt. Then it happened.

  77. Six Levels of Hysteria

  Only Rafael was in part cognizant. Jim and Jon looked like they’d taken an amateur lobotomist’s best effort, with drooling bloodshot eyes and puckering mouths like a toothless old man’s.

  Lia screamed at the top of her lungs, when Ted touched her shoulder. And she wouldn’t stop screaming, a glass-shattering high-pitch made eardrums a gear shifter. Lenders that had unexpectedly been logged out went from a discombobulated second gear straight into reverse, and Ted and the others went from panic-stricken fifth to screeching first. Hands became earmuffs and none were safe—save for Jim and Jon; their mouths mumbled obliviously like horse lips reaching for the high-up branch.

  Rob Price assisted Ted in restraining Lia after a needed breath brought a second of silence. The docs arrived as well as some replacement lenders. The twins, with Ron and Devon, attempted to aid Jon and Jim. Others watched in horror as Lia went berserk. Her eyes looked like those in Rafael’s robot head before it received the sphere, and she pushed out a second scream that made ears bleed.

  The sedative kicked in rapidly. However, it took a good minute for the respite to work gear-shifts back into neutral. Patterned breathing, like that of a pregnant woman during the last push, became settling huffs of relief.

  Rafael sat up. He put his white robot hands on his white robot knees and looked up at nothing in particular, as if he hadn’t even heard the chaotic screams; Ted looked down at him for answers as the docs took over. “I’m—” Rafael stuttered. “—we’re—back.”

  Ted nodded somberly.

  Being a machine, Rafael had better control when the time eventually came. Had it been 633 years or 633 million, no one would ever really know. But Rafael had prepared for it. He’d readied a mental schematic, knowing exactly which circuits he needed to tackle first when it happened, and he’d rehearsed his plan for centuries. Now, it was working on autopilot. He needed to modulate billions of pathways within his neural network, and was moderately successful. Like dominoes the size of buildings, to dominoes the size of an atom, important restructuring filtered down through his neural network, repairing his mind. But it still had taken him a comeback-from-a-kick-to-the-nuts to regain visuals; hearing arrived next, and then he realized where he was.

  “Rafael,” Ted said. “Can you hear me? Rafael?”

  He rebooted many of his internal systems. Looking about, he was mostly operational within about two m
inutes. Jim’s skin was reddish and his head had fallen to one side, facing him; drool fell from his mouth like white rapids in slow motion and his eyes were as wide open as human eyes could get without being stretched by fingers; no pupils or irises, they were white marbles with bloodshot claws. The docs tended to him and Lia first, because remarkably, Jon came around.

  Jon looked up at the ceiling. His head wobbled like a submerged bobble-head doll. He saw the status meter on the broadcast needle, yellow and dropping, and he turned to see the flashing lights above the screens in the tech area. The HAT was black, but flashing as if it contained a lightning storm. Then Jon passed out. Rob Price caught his fall.

  Rafael finally acknowledged Ted, merely nodding.

  “What happened to them, Ted?” Old Doc asked. He was kneeling on the floor and checking Jon with basic instruments.

  “They’ve been operating at dangerously high levels of mental activity for almost eight hours.”

  Both docs shook their heads, then shrugged to each other. Young Doc said, “We’ll take them to the new hospital.” Ted nodded. And there was no shortage of help to manage just that.

  Old Doc didn’t pretend to understand but he knew from what he’d learned, things were once again dire in the broadcast room. “Don’t worry, Ted. We’ll look after them. They probably need rest. The recent ability to dream is doing wonders, hopefully—”

  “I know you’ll do your best, John,” Ted replied. Old Doc was an old friend, and it’d been a long time since Ted had called him by his real name.

  At the BROCC, Ted asked, “What happened, Rafael?”

  “We’d been trapped. Marlo’s safeguards were no match for the human mind, especially Jim’s—the gift he received from Amy, and perhaps, something else—I can’t...I don’t… Jim was able to hijack the system and his subconscious locked itself into a loop. Much pent-up rage he possesses—” Rafael shook his head. “—it was very strong within him. We think the bad memory, the decision he’d made with Amy, triggered it. Like a black hole, it sucked him in, and us in with it. I’m okay now, a credit to having control over my subconscious mind and systems once again, but the three of them—Jim and Jon, especially Lia—Lia had it bad, Ted. They—might not recover.” Rafael locked his gaze upon the plummeting status meter on the main screen. Within 1.4 seconds he assembled a timeline based on its rate of descent. “Only 14 minutes 55 seconds until red status, the outer defense ships could begin shutting down in less than that. Let’s see if we can get this back online.”