“It’s late…or early,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “We’ll begin in a few hours. Get some sleep.”

The lights dim as he leaves the room, shutting the curtain behind him. I hear a door close. The one I always hear, that leads to his lab. He doesn’t go to his dark room of clocks.

I sit in silence for a long time just staring at the keys on the wall.

Maybe I failed, or maybe I stirred something in Alex that will prove useful. I’m not sure what damage I may or may not have caused—but I am sure of one thing.

I read Toyota on one of the silver keys while I was trying to unlock the door. Which means there’s a vehicle somewhere close.

18. Monster

18

Monster

Alex

Since our inception, humans have been consumed with the concept of time. The ancient Maya believed it was their sacred onus to keep time on its course, using mathematics and astronomy to develop a calendar that is as near accurate to the one we now use.

The ancient Egyptians revered their sun god, placing obelisks at the mouth of tombs to capture the rays of the sun and revive the dead. Those sun monuments served as a way to tell the time of day, a derivative of the sundial. They valued time even in death, mummifying those they honored to withstand the test of time.

From the Sumerian sexagesimal system, the water clocks of the Zhou dynasty, Egyptian shadow clocks, to the Frankish hourglass, every civilization has made a sacred practice of recording the passage of time.

My personal favorite is the pendulum clock. First to analyze the pendulum’s properties, Galileo discovered isochronism, simply meaning the pendulum maintains a constant period despite variations. Which he realized was exceedingly useful in timekeeping.

This method of keeping time was the most accurate up until the mid-twentieth century, when physicists proved atoms were the ultimate timekeepers. Introduction of the atomic clock changed the length of the second as we knew it, and opened a doorway into the future where the writings of H. G. Wells may become fact rather than fiction.

According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, a clock at rest appears to slow when compared to a clock traveling at a fast rate, thus giving credence to theories of time travel. I’ve dabbled in my own temporal theories, the results proving that particles traveling at virtually the speed of light decay slower than those at a latent state.

The history of time, a witticism in its own right. The desire to crack the space-time continuum is as deeply rooted in personal desire as it is in need of a scientific breakthrough.

However, there is only one truth every scientist can agree upon as cited by Einstein himself: there is no “master clock” for the universe. Time is relative to the observer.