Unseen Worlds: SciFi Challenges

Moments in Eternity

"Yes! I too am sad-bored-tired!" he cried. The outburst distracted the other workers and Marvin took the opportunity to throw himself in the river unnoticed. As the Djel propelled his buoyant body away, the workers comforted their comrade. It was only later that they noticed the strange visitor had mysteriously disappeared. But from that day forward there was a new god in the Djelibeybi pantheon - Marvin, the god of emotional turmoil.

~

Floating on a river was a new sensation for Marvin. He could have stated or calculated a trillion tiny facts about rivers before this - the solutes in the water, the rate of flow, the likelihood of being eaten by an aggro hippopotamus - but the actually feel of a river was entirely unique. And if Marvin allowed himself to be honest for a moment, he quite enjoyed it. Fish swam by, nibbling him experimentally, and the wildlife on the river bank was interesting and exotic.

The first time it happened was quite by accident. Marvin watched with fascination as Tsortian hawk dove into the river and captured a fish. As the hawk flew away, Marvin's mind focused on it, on the moment. In those moments a fish was dying, but a bird was sustaining life. In those moments, Marvin's mind emptied of everything, save the present. And in those moments, Marvin found he was not depressed.

Of course, it didn't last. And Marvin didn't even realize at first what had happened. But as his huge brain began to reel again, spinning at the same speed as the galaxy, he noticed that he began to feel it again - sad-bored-tired.

How odd, he thought. For a moment it was almost like being...happy?

Marvin tried to shake it off and forget, but in truth he forgot nothing, ever. And the moments of presence came again. At one point, Marvin stopped thinking about the geometry and rate of the water gushing around stones, and instead just felt it. He let himself feel the river with his whole being, and as he did so his whole consciousness seemed to be one with the river. He was empty of thought, empty of worry, empty of anxiety. He was just a river. Until he bumped into a rock. The force, while not painful to his durable casing, jarred him from his revery and made him begin to think once more.

He noticed that the time disturbances from the desert could also be found along the river. It was strange because he had assumed the pyramids were to blame from the weird events he had witnessed there, but time also behaved strangely in the waters and around them. And the trickery of time was not the only oddity that Marvin experienced.

There were creatures that should not have existed and events that defied every force of nature that Marvin knew to be absolute. At first Marvin believed that his sensors were malfunctioning. But after a thorough self-diagnostic came up empty he had to admit it to himself - the laws of physics, the very code of creation, was being defied. I mean a giant space tortoise was one thing, but amphibious fire creatures and overt reorganization of reality were another. At one point, Marvin witnessed an elderly woman bend another to her will merely by suggesting that magic was at play.

Magic? Marvin thought. But there's no such thing.

Marvin was certain of this. He knew the laws of the multiverse backwards and forwards. Magic was not amongst them. But despite this unshakeable knowledge, Marvin found himself witnessing stranger and stranger things everyday. His sensors were confounded, his processors perplexed. This was truly a bizarre world.