Kevin Lim

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS GOES CRUNCH

 

The woman looked skeptical.

She flicked back a lock of neon green hair, asking, “Are you sure this’s a good idea, Edgar?”

“Sure I’m sure, Terra!” the pale-blond pony-tailed man replied. “If all my calculations are correct, this should cause a complete temporal lapse.”

Terra crossed her arms. “The last time you tried something like this, O Smart One, all that you lapsed into was a coma.” She glared at him pointedly. “Now jog my memory; how exactly do you figure this will work, and why do you want me along?”

Edgar rolled his eyes, sighed, and gestured toward a blueprint of a jumble of shapes representing a two-axle vehicle colliding head-on with a disk-shaped wall. “Simple!” he explained. “We merely accelerate to some unheard-of speed and time will freeze on us!”

Terra snorted at the outlandish idea. “You mean we’ll both freeze in cold storage at the morgue.”

Edgar frowned, but let it slide. “You, unbeliever, are coming because, firstly, your beauty has captivated me…”

Terra yawned, suppressing a groan. He’d inflicted the same line on her four years ago, when they’d first met.

“…and second, I also want to know if I’m your type…”

Same old, same old. Terra’s head sank as she began to snore.

“I guess, um…I guess your abilities would be a distant th—”

“All right, all right, let’s get going already.” Anything to make him shut up.

 

Terra surveyed the test area with mounting disbelief. “We’re doing it here? In that?”

She was staring at a shabby old 1602 Toyota Camry sitting at one end of the narrowest road in the history of public transportation. She slowly turned to Edgar. “Couldn’t you find anyplace wider?”

“And get wasted by incoming traffic? Forget it.”  He popped the door open and eased himself into the driver’s seat. “What are you waiting for?” He handed her a stopwatch. “Hop in.”

Terra reluctantly complied, but asked, “Why the stopwatch?”

“The faster our velocity, the slower time passes, remember?”

He inserted the key and twisted. The car choked noisily as it started.

Terra winced. “What speed do you expect we’ll have to do to break the space-time continuum?”

“Sixty, maybe seventy,” Edgar replied as he undid the parking brake. “Why?”

“Because, by the sound of this junk pile, it’d take a miracle for it to accelerate any further than forty-five MPH per minute.”

“It’s a long road.” Edgar shifted the lever into the D position. “We’ve got plenty of time. Press start on that, will you?”

As she pressed start, his foot pressed down on the gas pedal. Terra was flung back, forward, and back again as the car jolted into movement.

At length, when the odometer read 30 MPH, Edgar asked, “How long thus far?”

“Thirty seconds. Not there yet.”

The odometer climbed to 40. “How about now?”

“A minute and ten. Nope.”

Another half minute later it had soared to 60. “We’re going pretty fast!” Edgar exclaimed. “What time now?”

“Minute and forty! Time still hasn’t stopped!”

Suddenly the road ahead of them dropped into a cliff. Edgar gulped and leaned on the brakes, screaming, “Has time stopped NOW?”

The car sped over the cliff anyway.

“No, just my heart…”

“Right…MAYDAY! BAIL OUT!!!”

 

Terra wearily dragged herself out of the Terra-shaped hole in the bottom of the cliff. “Well,” she muttered brokenly, “that proves Einstein was a fraud, doesn’t it?”

But Edgar was ecstatic as he bounced out of his own Edgar-shaped hole, eyes locked on the ruined, LCD-leaking stopwatch. “No, he’s right! Look; the stopwatch isn’t moving at all anymore!” he exulted.