The Shape of Time

“What’s worse—” Safeguard Yug wondered “—death or posthumous humiliation?” Standing to attention with the other aides on the central dais of the Grand Confluence Hall, Yug’s mind was in overdrive, conjuring up everything that could possibly go wrong.  

Suspended high above his head was a massive  sculpture of darkly glittering obsidian, depicting a fleet of spacecraft penetrating a solid wall and emerging on the other side. The Breakthrough, custom-built for the occasion, had been commissioned by his irascible boss, the Chief Safeguard himself, who had entrusted Yug with the responsibility of having it installed over the central dais of the Hall. 

Yug glanced at the hulking mass nervously, praying he had done a thorough job. He resisted the itch to reach into his pocket and fiddle once more with the controls that kept the sculpture suspended. He had checked and rechecked the installation all week, of course, but if the damned thing chose this moment to fall—He shuddered inwardly. Quite apart from the fact that it would kill him instantly, it would also be a very public and mortifying display of his incompetence—and in this land where pride and honour were everything, the latter was a far scarier prospect than the former. 

Trying to shake such morbid fears from his mind, the young safeguard scanned the cavernous hall. Under giant holo banners that read “The Greatest Country of All Time: Now”, delegations from the country’s various work guilds chattered excitedly.  Bringing all of Now’s guilds, with their conflicting outlooks and prickly egos, together under one roof was normally a recipe for trouble. But on this occasion fortunately, they were all agreed: this was too momentous a day for frivolous quarrels, a day that would change the face of Time forever.

Time. A world at once ancient and modern; a world static in its individual sections, and yet fluid in its entirety; a world of contradictions, because it was a world aligned along the dimension of time, where past, present, and future lived shoulder-to-shoulder. 

Every country in Time called itself ‘Now’, the country to its left ‘Before’, and the one to its right ‘After’—a system of nomenclature that might have caused a lot of confusion had people travelled between countries. But on Time, everyone was locked into their own Nows, and it was of little consequence what the people of Before or After chose to call their lands. 

Every Now grew linearly in one direction. It built its huts or skyscrapers, made its discoveries and inventions, fought its battles, and had its philosophical debates, all the while expanding to the right till one fine day—nobody knew how, when, or why—a gigantic wall, a Border, sprang from the ground and rose to the skies, and the country could grow no more. To the right of the glistening Border, a new country, more technologically advanced than its predecessor, would be born and begin to stretch its limbs, so repeating the cycle. Centuries and millennia and epochs and aeons marched on, and Time expanded, with each Now in turn becoming a Before to its After. 

Until Now. 

Now, the newest country on the face of Time; a country of highly advanced science and technology. Their technology had gone from strength to strength till finally, they had come unto a power so potent that it had the potential to change Time forever: the power to cross Borders. 

Before and After, Past and Future—the whole of Time now lay wide open to Now. And at today’s Grand Confluence, the leaders of Now would decide how to use their newfound technology, christened the Breakthrough, to cement Now’s ascendancy over Time. 

The mood in the Hall was euphoric. The first reconnaissance missions across the Border into the lands of Before and its immediate predecessors had returned with the reassuring news that the people of Before and beyond were nowhere as developed as Now and posed no discernible threat. With that risk factor eliminated, there was talk of great adventures, of voyages of discovery, of the chance to study other cultures—the various delegations clotted together, animatedly discussing what the day would hold for their respective guilds.

But as Yug’s eyes roved over the gathering, they snagged on a diminutive figure standing apart, solitary even in this milling crowd. The white Seekers’ robes, the hair cut in a sharp bob, the erect, confident posture—his stomach lurched as he recognized the familiar figure of Seeker Aadhya. 

Aadhya had once been a rising star in the Seeker Guild, an outstanding scientist of great repute, widely touted to become the next Chief Seeker. But then, she had embarked upon a course of scientific investigation that went against some of Time’s most deeply entrenched beliefs. And from there on, things had gone south incredibly fast for her. 

Seeker Aadhya seemed to sense his gaze, for she turned and met his eyes. She smiled, not cruelly or even accusingly, but Yug flinched nonetheless. He wished he could disappear, but he was pinned in place by protocol, helpless as a specimen on a slide, and all he could do was lower his eyes in confused guilt. Yug had once been Seeker Aadhya’s favourite pupil. He had been at her side through her meteoric rise, but when he had seen her teetering on the precipice of an equally steep fall, he had baulked. He had thought it imprudent to be associated, so early in his career, with someone who attracted such waves of criticism and ridicule that there was no way he could avoid some second-hand splatter. And so, he had distanced himself—distanced himself so completely, in fact, that he had left the Seeker Guild altogether and joined the one guild that was above all criticism and ridicule, for it held the security of Now in its hands—the Safeguard guild. 

But why must he feel guilty, he thought defiantly. Was it a crime to be successful? 

In the Safeguard Guild, Yug had risen fast in the ranks and was now aide to the Chief Safeguard himself.  His parents were proud of him and his friends secretly envious, the neighbours curried favour and his entire extended family sang his praises. He was riding high on the shoulders of everybody’s approval, so much so that… that— he sighed internally— so much so that there was no one in whom he could confide about just how miserable he actually was, chafing under the boot of the Chief Safeguard, who enjoyed keeping his aides in line with a daily dose of humiliation. If there was a searing regret at having exchanged Seeker Aadhya’s vast, open landscape of curiosity and exploration for the Chief Safeguard’s straight and narrow path of unquestioning obedience, it would have to be kept carefully hidden from everyone’s sight.

His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival, at long last, of the Chiefs of the various Guilds. They mounted the steps to the dais, grave and self-important, bestowing stiff nods upon the gathering. Chairs scraped back as they settled their considerable bulks into them. Yug scrambled to hold the Chief Safeguard’s chair out for him and take his position behind it. 

The Chief Overseer cleared his throat. He belonged to a work guild that Yug secretly felt did no actual work but liked to pretend it was they who held the whole show together on Now. “Dear friends,” began the Chief Overseer grandly. “We are gathered here to deliberate—”

The Chief Developer, head of the engineering guild that built Now’s infrastructure and technology, shot to his feet. “Our top priority should be to mine the Past for rare-moment elements,” he declared emphatically. 

There were nods of agreement. It was a matter of concern to all that rare-moment elements, needed for the core components that powered Now’s technology, were getting perilously scarce . 

“The reconnaissance missions have shown that Before doesn’t use them as much,” the Chief Developer continued. “And there are countries further back in Time that don’t even know of their uses. They’re bound to have vast, untapped reserves.” 

“But wouldn’t that mean getting into conflicts with those countries?” the Chief Ideator from the guild of philosophers and policy makers asked. 

“Why should it?” the Chief Developer demanded. “They don’t use the stuff, what objection could they possibly have to our taking some?” 

“Even if a conflict were to arise,” the Chief Safeguard cut in smugly, “what can they do to us? We’re far superior. They can’t face us militarily in their lands, and they sure as hell can’t follow us into ours to conduct raids of their own. They can’t touch us!” 

Everyone conceded to the truth of this statement, and it was unanimously agreed that securing a reliable supply of rare-moment elements from the Past would be an excellent use of the Breakthrough . 

“With that out of the way,” the Chief Safeguard declared, “we must come to the main point of discussion—”

“I was about to do just that—” the Chief Overseer began, eager to regain control of the confluence he was supposed to be overseeing. 

Yug’s impassive expression did not betray the wry thought that the man had no clue what the main point was—indeed, each of the Guilds had its own views on the matter.  

“—which is to address the biggest security threat to our country,” the Chief Safeguard continued without missing a beat.

“What security threat?” the Chief Ideator asked, concerned. 

“Well, in all of Time, there are only one other people who can possibly pose a threat to us,” the Chief Safeguard said darkly. 

“You mean the Gods?” 

Yug was not surprised to see the Chief Devout rising in outrage. The Chief Safeguard had alluded to something that was bound to raise hackles, especially among the devout.  

Before Now invented the Breakthrough, the Borders had been impregnable to all matter, but not the illicit trade of information. By its very nature, information traded through the Borders was far from reliable. The further away its source, the higher the likelihood that it was a mere remnant or distortion of its original. Therefore, for the most part, people in Time dismissed the information traded in from the Past as myth and rumour, and that from the Future as science fiction and fantasy. Yet, one piece of information had stood the test of Time and percolated into every country: that of the Gods. 

The Gods were believed to be the first peoples of Time, the citizens of the very first country, the Beginning. An advanced race of beings, they were rumoured to possess tremendous superpowers, including the power to change Time itself. They were the ones believed to be behind the Borders, their whims deciding the destinies of countries. And for this, they were worshipped by the devout, resented by the rest, and feared by all.

“You want to fight the Gods?” demanded the Chief Devout, aghast. 

The Chief Safeguard was unfazed. Yug and his other aides had helped him come well-prepared  for any sanctimonious fuss the devout were likely to kick up. “It’s not a question of whether we want to or not,” he said emphatically. “It’s inevitable that we will.” 

Though the prospect of going into conflict with the Gods made Yug uneasy, he had to agree with the Chief Safeguard’s assessment. The instant Now had acquired its Breakthrough, Time had reached a flashpoint. There were now two superpowers at the opposite ends of Time, and in all the universe, two superpowers have rarely gotten along with each other for too long. A clash of civilizations was inevitable.   

Most of the others agreed. And so, after the briefest of discussions in which the Chief Safeguard bulldozed through all of the Chief Devout’s protestations, it was decided that a clear message had to be delivered to the Gods that Now was going to be the master of its own destiny. 

“Does anybody know how far back in Time we will have to go to find the Gods?” the Chief Seeker asked, his brow furrowed in thought. 

“Nobody does,” the Chief Safeguard conceded. “Which is why we have come up with an elaborate plan involving an entire series of fleets with solid supply lines.” He gestured and Yug hastened forward, waving his hands to conjure up a series of holo-maps and figures he had been working on for weeks in preparation for the Confluence.

But before he could begin to explain them, a voice rang out. “Wait! Before we overreach ourselves… a word of caution.” 

Heads turned in confusion. The voice had originated not from the dais but from among the spectators below. Seeker Aadhya. 

Yug’s heart thudded loudly in his ears. He, better than anyone else here, knew of the research Seeker Aadhya was conducting into dimensions beyond that of Time. She had hypothesized an N-dimensional model of reality and was building an entire new science around the forces that governed such a model: forces powerful enough not just to penetrate Borders, but to bend Time itself. Her theories had hitherto remained within Seeking circles, and even that famously tolerant group had shunned them. She wouldn’t dare bring them up here, in the presence of the most powerful citizens of Now, would she? 

Apparently, she intended to do just that. 

“If we go back in Time, we will cause disruptions in forces that we do not even fully comprehend yet,” she stated. “Whatever we do in the Past could well have a ripple effect on Now.” 

There was a rumble of voices in the Confluence Hall. 

Yug fidgeted fearfully. He had a very bad feeling about how this was going to go. 

“I have already assured you there’s nothing they can do to us,” the Chief Safeguard snapped impatiently. 

“Oh, I don’t mean militarily,” Seeker Aadhya said, making a dismissive gesture that suggested his assurance was a mere fly to be swatted away.

“What do you mean, then?” he demanded, reddening in anger.  

Yug knew exactly what she meant. And if she said it out loud here, she was as good as dead. 

Everybody knew the world was flat. Time extended linearly from Beginning to Infinity—that was one of the most fundamental learnings imparted to every child of every Now in Time. But, every once in a while, some eccentric would contradict this universal truth with the notion that Time bent back on itself, End touching Beginning. 

Nothing struck terror in the hearts of the citizens of Time quite like the idea that their world was not flat but cylindrical. For that meant they would eventually run out of Time. Where would new countries come up? Would the world stagnate? Or was Time a palimpsest of civilizations, each country built on the back of some long-forgotten predecessor, the discoveries it considered its own a mere extrapolation of what had already existed before? 

Such questions had no easy answers, so the easiest answer was to declare them heresy. There were countries in the Past where people were allegedly subjected to all kinds of horrific punishments for propagating heresy. Now, however, prided itself on being a progressive, broad-minded, civilized country. And so, it put heretics to death discreetly, minus any unseemly public spectacle. 

Yug stared helplessly at Seeker Aadhya. His mentor. The person who had turned the dictum of “obey, don’t question” that his Safeguard parents had drilled into him from childhood on its head. She had encouraged him to question everything, to think for himself, and to challenge anything he couldn’t logically accept. She was the only person in his life to tell him that his natural curiosity was a gift to be nurtured, not a sign of insolence to be kept in check. The only person who had allowed him to be himself.  

From the subconscious undergrowth bordering his now carefully trimmed and landscaped mind, something called to him: a fierce loyalty that demanded he do something to stop his mentor from throwing her life away. 

His hand slipped into his pocket, feeling the contours of the control device. 

He hesitated… the consequences of what he was about to do were… But there was no time to think of that. Seeker Aadhya was squaring her shoulders in that all-too-familiar stance of defiance. He had to act now! 

“I have strong reason to believe—” Seeker Aadhya began. 

From above, came the high-pitched metallic screech of something under great strain. 

Heads and eyes turned upwards. 

“—that if you go far enough back in Time—” 

Above the dais, the huge obsidian sculpture lurched ominously to one side. 

People recoiled in terror.

“—you will come back to where you started,” Seeker Aadhya finished. 

But nobody was listening. Pandemonium had broken out in the Grand Confluence Hall as those on the dais scrambled to save themselves, none more urgently than the man who, only moments ago, had been talking so casually about the slaughter of millions, the Chief Safeguard.

#

Yug trudged miserably through mud and rain, bringing up the rear of his infantry unit as he laboured under the weight of the heavy field comms-pack on his back.

It was a month since the Grand Confluence had ended in disarray, and he was still paying the price for the debacle. The obsidian sculpture had merely tilted and not actually fallen, nor had anyone been hurt, but such “irrelevant details” had not spared Yug the Chief Safeguard’s wrath. After a public castigation harsh enough to disgrace ten generations of his descendants, he had been demoted to the rank of foot soldier . 

And all for nothing, he thought morosely. 

The distraction he had caused had perhaps saved Seeker Aadhya from the death sentence, but it could not undo the bold statements she had already made. And for those, she had been arrested and sent to Forgotten, Now’s most dreaded high-security prison. 

Nor had Aadhya’s intervention succeeded in halting, or even slowing, the Chief Safeguard’s ambitions. He’d gone ahead with the plans for three expeditionary Chrono forces, made well before the Grand Confluence—plans Yug had helped put in place before his fall from grace. 

Yug hadn’t imagined then that he would be marching with a comms pack on his back in one of the units of Chrono I, the all-infantry force tasked with the mission of pushing forward in Time, fanning out beyond the known territories of Now, expanding Now’s realm and making sure no Border came up to halt its growth.  

In the meantime, Chrono II, a mining fleet with an armed escort, had gone back in Time to Before and the lands beyond, to mine their rare-moment elements. Their first halt would be a country some four Borders away in the Past, where early reconnaissance missions had detected large deposits of Eternitium, a rare-moment critical to the manufacture of the advanced communication systems of Now. They had started on their mission the same time as Chrono I and Yug had watched them leave, full of themselves, laughing and joking about how the unsuspecting natives would probably take them to be gods. Yug had doubted the natives would drop to their knees to worship the “gods” plundering their resources, but he was in too much trouble already to go about voicing snarky comments. 

The largest contingent of all, though, was Chrono III. Chrono III had gone back in Time, too, but it wasn’t restricting itself only to Before and the few countries beyond. Instead, Chrono III would keep going as far back in Time as needed to find the Gods and bring them to heel. 

Chrono III was the contingent the Chief Safeguard had spent the most effort on. Well, not personally, of course. It was his aides, including Yug, who had slogged through long days and sleepless nights working out the logistics of its mission. Yug knew the details like the back of his hand. 

Chrono III had Now’s fastest airfleets armed with its most powerful weapons of mass destruction, weapons capable of wiping out entire countries. The vanguard of fighter aircraft was supported by a chain of supply fleets. And bringing up the rear was a fleet of cartographers, tasked with the onerous job of mapping Time down to the last nanosecond. Excited to map the past, Yug had aspired to join Chrono III in the early days of planning—until he had come to understand the Chief Safeguard’s ulterior motives. The mapping, Yug had been shocked to realize, was no mere academic exercise. The Chief Safeguard understood better than most that when Borders faded into insignificance, it would be the people with the maps who would have all the power. And while lesser men spoke of romantic notions of adventure, exploration, and discovery,  as far as the Chief Safeguard was concerned, Now’s Breakthrough Technology enabled something far more potent: colonial expansion. When the citizens of Now had already decided they would have no Future, he was confident of bringing them around to accepting that there should be no Past either, and that all of Time should become the empire of Now. And so, the cartographers would proceed at a slow, careful pace, taking stock of the lay of the land—the peaks and valleys of days and nights, the meadows of years, the plateaus of decades, and the undulating seas of centuries. 

Chrono III would be well on its way by now, and Yug could imagine its ominous progress back in Time. Would it reach the Beginning? And what would that mean for Now, which, having decided it would allow no After, had declared itself the End of Time? 

At noon, a halt was called, and Yug gratefully lowered his burden to the ground. 

Fifteen minutes later, he was bent over the comms-pack, brows furrowed in thought. He had opened it up but could find nothing wrong with any of the components, nothing visible to the naked eye, but— 

“Status, soldier?” a voice barked. 

Yug clicked his heels and snapped to attention as his unit captain strode over. 

“Any improvement in comms?” 

“No, sir,” Yug said. “I can neither send nor receive a signal.” He hesitated, then ventured, “I’ve been trying to figure out what the problem might be, sir, and—”

“You’ll try no such thing,” the captain snapped. “You’re no developer, and you’ve done enough damage already.”

Yug flushed. “Yes, sir.” 

The captain was convinced it was Yug who had somehow damaged the comms-pack, which was why he had Yug lugging its deadweight all day as punishment. But Yug knew he had done nothing. One moment the device had been working just fine, and the next, it had become unresponsive as a brick. 

“HQ must have sent someone after us by now,” the captain declared over his shoulder, walking away. “Fresh comm devices are likely on the way out to us as we speak.”

Yug frowned down at the comms-pack at his feet. In all his life, he had never known a comm device to glitch, let alone fail completely. It wasn’t an oversight that Chrono I hadn’t brought extra devices or maintenance personnel along. These devices had been built by the best minds in the Developer Guild, and they didn’t fail, period. 

And yet, this one had. Even though its components looked perfectly fine on the outside, it was almost as if every last atom of Eternitium in their inner workings had mysteriously evaporated. 

Whatever we do in the Past will have a ripple effect on Now. Seeker Aadhya’s words came unbidden to his mind, and Yug couldn’t shake off a growing sense of disquiet. 

A fortnight later, no resupply crew had arrived with fresh comm devices, and the captain was giving Yug increasingly murderous looks as though that, too, was his fault.  

And then, out of the blue, their unit came upon something extraordinary: a Border! 

Yug stared at it in utter astonishment. The rise of a Border was a cataclysmic event that sent seismic waves through the country it ended. A Border coming up so stealthily was unheard of.

The captain was just as flummoxed. “Where did that come from?” With comms down, he could not ask HQ for fresh instructions, nor could he communicate with any other units of Chrono I. All the unit could do was follow the orders they had been given at the outset: keep pushing ahead.   

Approaching cautiously, they were befuddled to see that the Border did not look new. Instead, it was worn and weathered, like it had been standing there forever. 

They crossed over warily, bracing for a hostile reception. 

But—they blinked in surprise—there was no one in sight. All they could see were vast, open grass meadows. Yug spotted herds of some kind of furry, muscular four-legged creature with horns and tusks, grazing calmly in the distance! Had this After been around long enough to evolve a whole new species? 

“What is this place?” the captain muttered in disbelief. “And where are the people?”

“There!” one of the soldiers called, pointing. 

Through their looking glasses, they saw a cluster of huts in the distance, smoke issuing from a communal fire at the centre. Clustered around the fire were figures dressed in sack-like clothing made from the pelts of the animals they had just seen.  

“Them?” the captain said incredulously. An After was supposed to be more technologically advanced than its predecessor, was it not? “But… they look—” He groped for the right word. “—primitive!” 

Unsure how to proceed, the captain gave orders to set up camp for the night in a shaded glade. The soldiers sat around their sleep pods, murmuring among themselves in confusion.  Yug sat in silence, his mind in turmoil. 

All those frenzied calculations from years past, those discussions bristling with energy, those long conversations with Seeker Aadhya rose in a surge of questions. Could it be possible that Time was indeed cylindrical, not flat? What if this was not a new country, but a very old one? So old that it was the Beginning? But then, wouldn’t this be the abode of the Gods? Where were the mighty Gods? Which brought him to the final question: what if there had never been any Gods, only a potent story that had caught the imagination of peoples across Time till it had hardened into fact? 

Come morning, the unit was still undecided what to do. But as they were collapsing and packing away their pods, a deep hum sounded across the skies. They raised their hands to their eyes, peering at the horizon. 

Something was approaching. Fast. 

To Yug’s horror, he saw it was a vast fleet of aircraft. 

There was chaos in the panicked ranks. 

“They are an advanced country, after all!”

“All this was just some kind of elaborate camouflage!” 

“Take cover!” shouted the captain. “Everybody! Move!”

As everyone scurried for cover, only Yug stood on the hillock, eyes glued to the fleet. 

A sliver of ice ran down his spine as he realized what was happening. 

“No! Stop!” he shouted, running out into the clearing, waving his arms wildly to attract the attention of the fleet. 

“What’s he doing!” the captain yelled. “Go get that lunatic before he gets us all killed!” 

“No, we must stop them,” screamed Yug, even as he was tackled to the ground by two beefy safeguards and dragged into cover. 

#

Chrono III had been travelling back in Time for many weeks now, crossing Border after Border. 

Somewhere along the way, they had lost contact with Now. They attributed it to range—they were, after all, farther away from Now than anyone had ever ventured before. More inexplicably, though, they had lost comms between themselves as well. The ace developers in their ranks were hard at work trying to fix the glitch, and for now, Chrono III was making do with visual signals between the individual crafts of the fleet. 

The vanguard of fighter craft flew at the head of the fleet, well ahead of the rest. For the first couple of weeks, they had kept their eyes peeled for any sign of the Gods. But the countries they traversed as they went back in Time only got progressively primitive, and there was no sign whatsoever of a powerful civilization equal to their own. By this time, their initial enthusiasm long jaded by the monotony of endless travel, they were barely paying any attention to the ground scrolling past far below. 

They noticed neither the tiny figure so desperately trying to attract their attention, nor his companions dragging him into tree cover. 

A Border rose before them, and Chrono III’s vanguard crossed through as usual. 

Within minutes, they had all straightened in their seats, their lethargy gone. For, in the far distance, they could see soaring spires reaching for the skies. 

The Beginning! They had found the Gods! 

The Beginning was a highly developed civilization with the Gods-alone-knew what defence capabilities, and the only advantage Chrono III had was the element of surprise. They could not afford to fritter it away. Their instructions were clear: the instant they detected the Gods, they were to launch their missiles.  

As multiple fingers pressed down on missile-release buttons, perhaps a few men wondered absently at the vague familiarity of the distant skyline. But it would have never occurred even to those few that this could be anything but the country of the Gods. 

After all, they had been travelling in a straight line back in Time.

#

Across the Border, Yug watched helplessly as fleet after fleet of Chrono III’s vast contingent darkened the sky like an enormous cloud before crossing over into Now. He had not questioned the conceit of destroying the Beginning, just as he had obediently gone along with the hubris of declaring themselves the End. And now, there was nothing left, either to question or obey. They were the Gods they had set out to destroy. And as the missiles struck, blasting a Now-sized hole in Time, the truth was finally clear: Time does come around. 

###