You’ve enjoyed the power of stopping time your entire life.
You have as much free time as you want to work on projects, relax, and even catch up on sleep.
But then, one day, when you try to start time again… it doesn’t work.
During the last stream, viewer MookieMC was chosen at random to pick a prompt. Here’s what they chose for us to wrote: You can start and stop time at will. You’ve used this to your advantage your entire life. One day, you stop time and can’t start it again.
Watch the video of us getting the prompt, coming up with the opening,
and reading the final story here, or scroll down to read it.
Here’s what we came up with:
There’s only one person with enough “time on their hands” and that one person is me.
My friends always ask me how on earth I have the time to take care of the kids, do all of the shopping and cleaning, write the next book in my bestselling series Cute Coders, run my own indie gaming company, and work full time at Google on top of it all.
My secret? I’ll let you know in due time.
I sat back in my chair and looked at my computer screen full of the next chapter for Cute Coders 3: Beauty Salon Hackers. I’ve been typing away for hours and not a drop of the battery has gone. The same bird has been perched outside my window staring at me. And the clock on the wall still reads 3:04, just like it did when I began.
It was time to take a break. I slid my fingers together, and snapped. A simple move for most, but for me, it has greater implications.
The pop of my fingers signaled the world clicking back into motion. My laptop hummed. The bird outside tweeted and flew away. The second hand on the wall clock ticked onward.
Something gray flashed off to the side.
I looked over but there was nothing except my living room. I shook my head, trying to bring myself back to the real world. I’d probably just been so caught up in my work that I was seeing things.
It was time to move onto the next task for the day that I’d have to stop time for: scanning through the code for a new game we were developing to try and find a bug that had been causing my employees headaches for days. My bug-finding prowess was legendary. I could spot things in mere seconds that stumped others for weeks.
Of course, it helped that I had time on my side. I sat down at my work computer, opened up the code, and then snapped.
Immediately, everything froze. The nature show on TV I had on in the background stopped on an image of an albatross midflight. The cars outside were silent and still. I took a deep breath, preparing myself to devote however long it took to fix this. I didn’t particularly enjoy spending days on end in frozen-time—drinking and eating can be a pain in the butt—but I’d done it before and I’d do it again if I had to.
But as soon as I focused on the screen, from the corner of my eye, I saw something strange. Something that should be impossible to see right now.
Movement.
Startled, I shot up in my chair. The strange gray flash was back, but now that I was looking at it, I could see that it was not just a flash. It was a gray cocoon-shaped blob, covered in thick veins and tumors, constantly throbbing and wiggling as it hovered a foot off the ground in my living room.
Even worse? It was throbbing and wiggling in my direction.
I panicked. I snapped my fingers faster than I ever had before, immediately bringing the world back into motion, and making the gray horror disappear.
I leaned back in my chair, breathing hard, not having any idea what was going on. I’d been stopping time for decades, ever since I was a little girl and stopped time during tests to check answers in my textbooks. Never before had terrifying gray monsters been a part of the equation.
Maybe I was just overworking myself. Maybe they were just a hallucination. Even though I worked less than an average person when time-stopping was taken into account, I was still being stretched in all directions. Maybe I could use a break.
I sent an e-mail to the team, letting them know that the legendary bug-finder was going to have to take the rest of the day off.
The next morning was my most hectic in years. I usually stopped time for an hour or two to get ready for work at Google, leaving me plenty of wiggle room to shower, eat, get the kids ready for school. But suddenly I had to do all of that in just thirty minutes, like some sort of chump!
When I got to work my hair was a mess, my stomach was rumbling, and I’d forgotten to put on makeup. Worst of all, when I sat at my desk, there were a hundred messages waiting just for me. Meetings. Designs. Team building sessions. Project mapping. Just glancing at them, and thinking about trying to tackle them without stopping time, nearly gave me an anxiety attack. My heart was beating so fast it was hard to breathe. Outside the windows of my office, people were looking in, concerned. I needed to do something!
I snapped.
Everything stopped. The incoming messages. The stares. The panicking. I slouched in my chair and looked around for movement, grey or otherwise, but there was nothing. With a sigh of relief, I got to work.
An hour of stopped-time later, everything was in order. The fear I’d felt earlier was now just a distant memory. I raised my hand, ready to tackle the day head-on, and snapped.
Nothing.
Everything stayed frozen as if time stood still. The irony of the thought made me worry even more. Maybe I’d just messed up? I tried to remain calm and snapped again, as loud as I possibly could. Still nothing. No sounds. No movement.
No. There was movement.
Outside the office window, one of the gray creatures came pulsating down the hallway. Followed by another. And another. A whole line of the human-sized globules flowed and drifted together, their veiny cottage-cheese bodies quivering to some unknown beat.
They quivered their way right into my office, spreading out in front of my desk like eager clients. All I could do was scream and jump out of my chair, clasping and pulling down the plastic shades of my window, snapping nonstop to no effect.
The creatures came closer, hovering over and around my desk, surrounding me on all sides. There were so many of them. An seemingly infinite mass of festering blobs, pressing against each other, and finally, pressing against me.
I cried and yelled out, but it was useless. They pressed their gooey bodies against me, smothering me, as I kept snapping, hoping against hope that something would change.
And then, something did.
I no longer saw my office in front of me. Another vision crackled into view. A world, no, an entire universe of nothing but the gray creatures, floating around in an infinite void. There was no beginning or end there, everything only was. As it had always been and always would be. A universe without time at all.
But then, something changed. In a universe with no change, that was quite the event. My world flickered into view, with people and cars and blue sky and grass, but only for a second before it disappeared again.
It happened again. And again. Each time becoming clearer and staying for longer. The gray creatures were fascinated by it, wiggling around through their unknown domain.
A million strobes of my world later, as I followed the gray creatures, I finally saw myself. Snapping. Every time I snapped, that was when the world appeared to them.
I could feel their thoughts running through me like lifeblood. Having always existed, they knew everything. They knew what was going on. They knew that someone in a parallel universe, a universe with this strange thing called time, had someone in it that was stopping it.
Every time I snapped, I brought our universes closer together. First parallel, then intersecting. Now overlapping.
The reason I couldn’t start time again was because time no longer existed. Our universe had became engulfed in the grey creatures’ timeless universe. And they were very excited to explore this new world.
As I was enveloped by the creatures, my final thought was on all the time I would never get back.
Be sure to check out the video for reactions to the prompt, see some different ways it could have gone, and get my thoughts on the full story!
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 6:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming March 2019.
Featured image: Pakutaso