Don't Blink

Stop. I am Bernard, and my time is infinite.

I can think a million thoughts in the time it takes the penny you dropped to plink against the floor. I can write my thesis in the time it takes for the plink to reach your ear.

Everything is possible. I can conquer every situation. With time, I am never unprepared. I can learn, train, think my way through anything. Ever had one of those moments in your life where you have to make a choice and it’s like there are two paths before you and everything’s moving so fast and you can’t think, your mind’s just filled with the ticking of your watch and you wish it would all just stop. Pause to breathe. To clear your mind. To make the right decision at the time it matters the most. I can do that.

And since I have time in which to think, I took the time to wonder how it is that this whole thing works. It appears that, apart from me, the rest of the world freezes like a moment captured on the film of a Polaroid. If that be the case, then I make two conclusions.

The first, that my time is in fact not infinite. I simply become unstuck from the rest of time, but time still courses through my body. My own timeline is unaffected and I will still grow then age like the rest of us, and when I rejoin the flow of time that the rest of the world follows, I will be robbed of a few moments of my life.

But the first depends on the second not being true. In fact my whole existence depends on this not being true. Take a look at that Polaroid again. See that coin frozen in mid-air? If everything is totally still, then it must be so right down to every atom in every molecule in everything around me. No matter is moving. So what? Well temperature is a measure of the speed of vibration of molecules in space, right? The faster they move, the hotter the entity they belong to feels. The slower, the colder. And what if they’re not moving at all? That’s what they call Absolute Zero. We’re not even equipped to deal with -40^oC, let alone -240^oC. I shouldn’t last two minutes at this temperature.

But it's ok; I am made immortal by the power of CITV.