The Project

 This is the end of my story. I am a child now and soon to be a helpless babe. It was all thanks in part to the arrogance of man, the belief in a doctor who could control the very forces of nature and bend the essence of the universe to his whim. My dreams all came crashing down around me due to some minor miscalculation on my part, a foolish and overlooked parameter that in my haste, ironically was missed. Now I will find myself drifting ever backward, ever onward, ever before and never after.

 Will I ever get my thoughts in order and funnel my mind back to the future days I hold so dear, to the correct and present flow of everything? My eleventh birthday, the first time I caught a baseball. Other things I had long forgotten rush back into the mind flooding up from the drain below as I revisit days long gone. What is my wife’s name? What university will I attend? I retain what I can, the start of it all, the formula, my own pride, but the little things are gone. My memories are a faucet running against the flow of gravity back through the leaky pipes of some old and ramshackle house.

 Days became years as quickly as thoughts become memories. The flow at once was one for one, but the dynamo was meant to accelerate that flow and so it did. My mind has adjusted to a backwards shift in perspective and I find myself forgetting things that I had learned only days before. The next day was the last, and when it ended, the previous came after that. It would not remain that way for long. At first, I stepped out of the machine and all appeared perfectly normal.

 Damned I was then. I had checked the equations, double checked. Certainly not. I could not have made some mistake, could I? Something felt terribly off, something went wrong. The dynamo accelerated, spinning faster and faster as I felt my essence pulled free from my timeline. I stepped foot into the chamber that housed the vast inner workings of the device, preparing myself for what was to come, and ordered my team to actualize the horological mechanism. Arrogance.

 Instantly, I would know if something were amiss. This was my life’s work after all and I’d be damned if anyone would use it to glimpse the mysteries of the universe before me. Was it arrogance that drove Prometheus to bring fire to man or merely a simple compassion and curiosity? Some claimed I was arrogant. When the device was ready and all necessary tests were complete and the proper safety protocols were in place, I declared that I would be the first to subject myself to its perceived wonders and refused all objections from my crew to the contrary.

 From what we had gleamed in our research, my team and I set about building the first prototype of the device that will change humanity’s limited understanding and interaction with the cosmos, a horological transmutation. A quantum leap in computing brought forth a chance to test wild new theories on the nature of causality. I am very excited to present the beginning of this project.

#FlashFicFeb