I’ll save that egg for later
Lt. Hawthorne Ahlowen, Investigative Officer, S.O.E.C.S.
Late spring.
I had eggs Benedict for breakfast.
Later we pulled up outside the quiet mansion in the countryside, parking between the other scene investigation vehicles and the arm-thick cooled cables that led down the Gothic stairs and into the generator in the garden, giving off a thin mist.
The ferrets got out of the way as I followed the superconductors through winding hallways and open doors which let brown leaves blow in behind me, through dusty morning rooms and under ornate chandeliers with a lifetime of blown bulbs. Eventually I reached the apparatus, which rested in the centre of a drawing room whose carpet had once been worth more than my job. Ruckled and muddied by the wheels of equipment trollies, it lay forlornly under the eight-foot metal sphere at the heart of the affair.
Going by the notes that Rufus Armitage had written and which I had read thoroughly over my eggs, time behaved differently inside that sphere. Outside it, all was normal. As the mind’s eye moved through the layers of piping, wiring, coils and cooling that surrounded it, all remained normal. But when one crossed the infinitesimal barrier- the perfect, mathematical sphere inside its precisely-machined but imperfect steel sister- it was all change.
On the first egg and the first chapter Armitage seemed mad, despite the tidiness of his handwriting and the ruled exactitude of his diagramming. It seemed as though he were designing a time capsule, your classic time-does-not-pass-inside-the-wondrous-container nonsense. Get inside it, command in your will that it should be opened in a thousand years and you shall step out needing not so much as a shave.
The second chapter changed my impressions of both Armitage and the machine. He demonstrated a capable grasp of n-dimensional mathematics, hyperplaited string mechanics and revelation theory. The latter has to do with the quantum effects of the revelation of an atom’s spin, charge and balance, not with anything religious.
By the third chapter my mouth was open and I was mopping egg from the pages of what was probably a historical document. It was not that I could not find any holes in the theory; it was that I was sufficiently impressed by Armitage’s obvious intelligence to believe that he probably would have. There was also the matter of his being sufficiently cunning to amass a fortune of sufficient size to install a bank of portable fusion generators on the lawn next to the carp pond, and to contract out enough materiel and manual labour to implement the designs. There was a folder packed with invoices and bills of lading.
By the end of the folder I had abandoned my final egg and was on the phone to the duty officer of the Serious Ontological and Epistemological Crime Section, of which I am an investigatory officer. Then I was in my car, revving quite hard all the way out into the countryside and down the leafy lanes to Armitage’s property.
They always seem so proud when you read their notes. I could imagine Armitage smiling into his moustache as he scribbled on that piece of paper, tucked it into the back of his notebook, climbed inside his machine and switched it on.
By “switched it on” I mean “activated the field ignition timer,” but you know what I mean. Armitage’s butler certainly did not as he calmly drove the notebook to SOECS as instructed, squeezed it through the letterbox and went home for lunch.
~
We stood around the machine, the device, the Installation, or however you want to refer to it. It seemed quite obvious how to switch it off. There was a large red switch. Which instructed a powerful computer to perform a long series of delicate operations, but was nevertheless red and inviting.
Armitage certainly wanted us to pull it. His notes explained that because of the nature of the spherical field, all the control and field maintenance systems needed to be outside it. The field could only be generated from the outside, and as nothing could cross it, it could not be deactivated from the inside.
He was relying on us to switch it off. So everyone else stood back, and I pulled the switch, which moved with the smoothness of never-before-operated equipment.
The fans, pumps and hydraulics around the steel sphere calmed down significantly as soon as I operated the switch; a huge load must have been taken off them. There was a slight change in the texture of the air as a huge static charge being generated by some part of the system disappeared.
And, in a pleasingly and doubtless intentionally dramatic manner, a section of the steel sphere swung open on hydraulic rams and revealed a man-sized opening. The inside of the sphere was semi-well-lit; there was a ring of dim LED lights around the upper interior. I noticed that some of them were out; Armitage’s engineering was not perfect after all.
I looked inside. There was a small of xenon, plastic and that musty smell you find in old cellars. The same smell had been present as I walked through Armitage’s ancient property. I was not surprised.
I was also surprised at the lack of Armitage, or of anything else conclusive. The inside of the sphere was very small, its walls quite thick. I shone my torch inside. There was a metal chair lying untidily on its side, a flat circular floor at the bottom, and not much else.
I climbed through the opening, the sides of the sphere pleasingly solid and unwavering as I braced my arms against them. Although cramped, there was enough room for me inside.
I was slightly annoyed. This had the makings of another hoax. One of the “My notes say I have vaporised myself / autocatapulted forwards through time / twisted myself through nine dimensions; but in reality I and my money are safe on the Kisaravadra beaches, with champagne” variety. I have seen several of those.
In this case, Armitage’s notes claimed he had constructed a chamber inside which, upon the application of a very large amount of amps, time would continue to pass- while time stopped outside. The inverse of the stasis chamber.
His final message implied that he had planned to stay in there for (subjectively) a few hours. From the outside-the-chamber point of view, time would of course seem to continue as standard. But somewhere during the operation of the machine, the fields would cast their spells and, instantly, extra time would have passed inside the steel sphere. Armitage would have emerged a few hours older.
In reality, it seemed that he was a few glasses of champagne happier and a few thousand miles away. There was no mention in description or theory of the sphere’s being able to neatly vanish away its contents; besides, it still contained a chair.
I got out my camera and began documenting the inside of the sphere. It was very dusty, much more so than the rest of the admittedly dusty house, and the chair was old and covered in scratches. There was not much to document, but I crouched down under the low domed celing, thinking of warm, sunny Kisaravadra, and what Armitage was running from.
~
After about twenty minutes of taking careful pictures and making notes I was imagining Armitage’s feud with the gangs of Coloscaterne and his well-executed plan to fake his disappearence into the eleventh dimension. Which is why I was very surprised when the door to the steel sphere flashed decisively down, loud on its hydraulics, and slammed closed; much more quickly than it had before. I was annoyed. Could he not leave us in peace without attempting silly jokes?
I tapped on the door, waiting for my colleagues to lift it open, and took another photograph. I thought affectionately of the egg Benedict I had left on my kitchen table, and looked forward to it later.
Then I heard the superconducting cables begin to hum loudly again, an increasing rattle from somewhere under the steel sphere, and the jarring, rising sound of something spinning up in the den of machinery underneath the sphere.
I tried the door- I tried to try the door. There was no handle on the inside. Just a smooth, machined surface.
I picked up the chair and banged it against the door, which did not give. A sizable quantity of dust fell out of the gaps between the legs and the seat, and scattered on the floor. Along with what had fallen off the chair before, there was now a small pile of it. Dry, grey dust.
I was always quick in school.
It was as the field switched on that I realised what had happened to Armitage.
It was as the whirring of the superconductors and the bass rumble of the machinery rose to a crescendo and then fell instantly into complete and utter silence that I imagined him sitting on that chair as he activated the machine.
He had intended to stay in the machine for a few hours of subjective time, his notes said. To an outsider, an afternoon would have flicked by for Armitage in an instant.
But an instant for the outsider could just as well have been a week for Armitage. Or a month.
Or a hundred thousand years. Enough time for half the milliennium-rated LEDs in the celing to fail. And for Rufus Armitage to waste away and starve and die a terrible lonely death and fade and rot away to dust, the dust that lay on the floor of the steel sphere, scattered by my boots.
All while time was frozen outside, unmoving; the sun still in the sky, birds frozen in flight, a leaf fixed in mid-air. My colleages beginning to look up and realise that the sphere was closed, the superconductors were running, and something was going on.
There was total silence. I could see the field now, a tiny glitter just inside the surface of the sphere, impervious to touch, vibration and sound.
I thought of my egg Benedict, sitting on my table at home, probably still slightly hot; the steam frozen now, a translucent sculpture in the still air.
I sat on the chair and doodled quietly on my pad, feeling the fear and the panic and the tears approaching quickly from far away.
I had been looking forward to that egg.
