Time's Arrow

[Rattlesnake]

((Anthony Jones continued from Ineptus Mechanicus))

Time passed, whether they willed it or not. It had been... eight, nine days already? It was frightening that he found himself blinking, mumbling, splaying his fingers one by one to recount each on. Days that dragged and congealed and whizzed by in alternating shifts, crumbling away from the steady advance of time. Back at home, there were times when he might hardly take note of such a duration, where nothing happened except routine worn so smoothly it hardly made a ripple in its passing. Or days spent in between the assignment of his responsibilities in his youth, collections of moments marked by the occasional rising and setting of the sun. And for some, that would even be true in that same instant. Their subjective experience slipping past while his own dragged, like two wheels of a wagon going around a curve.

But wasn't that the way of things. People suffered, animals suffered. None of that stopped just because you chose or allowed yourself to avoid thinking about it all. And that was no grand revelation. He wasn't special for observing it. It simply was. The things that happened to them all in this place would go down in history, perhaps as a footnote, maybe a name here or there picked out for remembrance regardless of the relative acuteness of their suffering, because the human mind simply didn't have the room to acknowledge the worst and most important events of everyone else's existences.

His companion, certainly, was not among those who were taking any of it well. Not physically wounded, but perhaps in need of some reassurance or platitude Anthony couldn't find the mettle to muster up. "Not a fuckin' scrap of something useful," he found himself muttering instead as they picked through another defunct dwelling. Really, he wasn't entirely sure what would pass that judgement. Certainly nothing of the bore or caliber that seemed likely to simply fall into their laps.

"Should probably get some fresh air, then," he followed up, and they dissolved together back into the unknown.

((Continued elsewhere))