Uncategorized11 May 2020 11:42 am
F. J. Bergmann
We fall into time as a dead leaf into a river. —Don Paterson Chrono-Man invented time travel by accident, trying to fit too much into one day. He stretched time so far that when he let go it flung him like a stupendous slingshot across the millennia. Now he can access any temporal continuum just by judicious over-commitment. Chrono-Man wears LED knitwear that ripples where it shouldn’t. Balding, jowly and anxious, he has a small potbelly and a heart condition. He is the champion of last-minute saves, last-ditch efforts, and lost causes. His heraldic totem is a rubber band twisted into a figure-eight couchant— the symbol of infinity. His motto is I can make time for that. Quicksand is Chrono-Man’s arch-enemy. As fast as Chrono-Man can stretch time like a Spandex Speedo, Quicksand can spend it: urge it on faster and faster; use it up. Quicksand wears a red suit with a spinning hourglass lapel pin and has red—scarlet—hair and eyes, to match his suit. He is a lively date. He can make time speed up, but not slow down. He likes to drive the ambitious, and those who volunteer for more than their share, to destruction. Quicksand is the god of second thoughts and abandoned efforts and stressing out. His catchphrase: It is later than you think. Speed time up as it stretches, and the elastic of that substance will snap, as Quicksand and Chrono-Man chase each other up and down the time-stream. You yourself may experience this chronological effluvium as having some resemblance to an actual river: sometimes the current is slow and stately, each shore so far away that it fades to a dark fog of treeline on the horizon; sometimes a rapid current tumbles you down titanic falls. You are only a marker by which that current can be measured when those rivals meet at the end of time and total up their scores.
