By the YU Writers’ Guild
Editor’s Note: Each month, the Writers’ Guild accepts submissions for a short story following a specific theme. April’s theme was “Time Travel IS Real” featuring stories where characters stumble into a different time period. Members voted on a short story to be featured in the YU Observer. For the month of April, “O Time Thy Pyramids” written by Breindy Berger was selected.
In the fall of 1996, an account reached my hand from the academy of my teachers. Verbose and yet vague, it purported to chronicle the methods and astonishing results of the Way. My eagerness to pursue that which the colleagues of my youth produced intensified my profound disappointment in discovering that their account lacked not only basic brilliance, but also devotion to the very mission that the academy inspires. I found the account twisted the elders’ teachings past the point of recognizability and to the point of ridicule.
I thus set forth to recount my own learnings. I hope that initiated readers will find it faithful, and that the uninitiated might gain some understanding. Although by some accounts, this response is fifty years overdue, I do not hesitate in making it public. The moment in which I write is not significant; I have always recognized it as a part of my life. (Hemesut, 2026.)
It has long been posited that time is but an illusion. This is both correct and incorrect; time does exist as a framework through which we experience the world. In the centuries of my own experience, the aforestated time-concept promulgated by Kant’s school has been challenged by Einstein, and what was once a philosophical school became a physical one. We must accept the time-space continuum as a fact of the world, albeit one that results from innumerable factors. Regardless, the notion of time popular culture espouses is a deliberate fabrication.
The most basic axiom of the universe states that everything that is possible is also actual. There is but one set of experiences that will befall each individual. It is this set of experiences that the Way seeks to organize, reformulate and optimize through the illusion of monolinearity. It is language that flattens experience to the fictitious and misleading line; experience itself is multidimensional. (Unfortunately, even dimensions indicate linearity. Might experience then be a perfect circle? In all of my study, despite my penchant for mathematics, I have found no geometric allegory that can encompass it.)
Questioning the idea of time so ingrained in our current cultural consciousness is no doubt strange. It might be beneficial to remind the reader that memory is as fantastical as foreknowledge. If I have been all my selves in my past, is it not probable to assume that I have been all my selves in my future? In truth, I am but the set of my experiences unordered without repetition. Each individual is defined by a set of possible experiences, which is finite. Fundamentally, the individual as an entity has access to each one at all times.
For millennia, peoples across every continent struggled with the pervasiveness of the experiential torrent. The oldest explicit account describes “barrels full of light and sound” barraging innocent victims, leaving them “imprisoned and soulless.” This is elucidated by countless other records from every culture: if you explore less, you will be plagued less. The more action-filled ones’ life is, the more painful it is. Men who experienced battle in their youth were forced to relive it, day in and day out, without feeling that any days had passed at all. People who reached a great age were often overwhelmed by the great metaphorical weight of their experiences, and their cognitive functions were severely impaired. Whole days, weeks, and months washed gently over people without their even noticing. Experience in hyperdimensionality is an unspeakable thing—I have experienced it, and it is both beautiful and terrible. I would not trade my own knowledge of it for any material goods. But one of its natural consequences is lack of focus. Definitionally, everything is happening everywhere all at once. This allows for a kind of understanding impossible in the flattened time experience, but it also makes it difficult to know where to look. As a result, many life experiences were overlooked. In fact, based on the academy’s records (which I now concede are likely hyperbolized), over the course of human history, more than half of the human population could not detail more than half of their life experiences. Of the remaining half, roughly twenty-five percent was only experienced in a vague and ill-formed way. The original elders devised an approach to experience them all. The Way ordered individual life-moments sequentially, in a one-to-one mapping with the natural numbers. Followers of the way would “step,” or focus, into each one for but a moment, and thereby they might give equal and undivided attention to each one. The academy was first formed to impose the Standard Order on collective experience. Initiates trained in the method outlined above to monolinearize their own experiences, and because their so-called timelines interweaved at countless moments, they were able to link them together in a newly created framework. Indeed, the academy boasts records of the oldest collective history of mankind. Its internal doctrines espouse the ultimate goal of universal influence and total unification of the timeline. They wish to permeate the entire world consciousness, and thus move the timeline from the world of ideas into reality.
The stepping process is as follows: from an extremely young age, as soon as children can recognize and differentiate human language, they are encouraged to exist in but one moment. This takes some students years to accomplish—any reprieve into the past and any dream of the future ruins the process. They must learn to isolate and identify one moment’s sounds, colors, smells, and tastes, and negate all others. Once the student can effectively hold one moment in their self-experience, they hold it for but a moment. From there, they are trained to go about their lives making decisions that will navigate them to the next moment. Thus, they experience their lives in terms of first, next, and progressive experiences (which can be distinguished from the subsequent, a common misconception). The approach ensures that there is nothing but the next and best decision, and each moment will manifest in its own time.
The effects of the Standard Order were immense. It allowed four dimensional experience, which used to be impossible. Time now factored into the set of human experience in a way it never had before, and people began to experience progression and development of their own identities. The ordering also granted meaning to where there previously was none. It allowed for the flourishing of progress and industry, relationships and general culture. This approach toward human experience became a model for the divine: Access to all-time knowledge became a Godly power, and taking it step-by-step a Godly solution. I know and I do not know my future; I am and I am not what I will become. The knowledge is a part of me, but I choose not to access it yet—I instead choose other more immediate moments, trusting that more distant futures will manifest in due time.
One negative consequence of the Standard Order has long been an object of study at the academy, and although various approaches have been proffered, it continues to unsettle generations of scholars. Having but a moment to experience each frame, opposed to a potential whole lifetime, exacerbated the feeling of shortness of life. Over centuries, this has spurred both periods of great progress and periods of great decline. Ironically, whereas before the Way, death was a pervading reality, The Way introduced fear of death.
Stories are told in all time-points of adventure seekers who wish to hopelessly muddle their own lives by experiencing it outside of the Standard Order, although they dwindle in number in direct correlation with academy missionizing. Pure chance delivered me into their ranks. As an initiate, I was attracted to research the shortness of life problem, as an embarrassing number of initiates are. However, I credit the combination of my precision, my tenaciousness and my low threshold for hours of sleep to the discovery of the academy’s original goals and functions. My study led me to uncover the illusion of monolinearity, and it led me down the path to experience hyperdimensionality for myself.
It was to my detriment that I sought support from my favorite faculty member, who understood what I uncovered and could not allow me to continue. I was expelled from the academy and forced to continue my studies based on memories of fragments I had read in the academy’s great libraries and firsthand accounts from old women in the fishing town in which I grew up. I eventually traveled to different regions and tried to learn their ways, but the Way had become too strong: almost nobody could experience each life’s moment at once. So-called palm-readers and future-tellers are frauds and dreamers, relics of a life long past.
Vestiges of original academy teachings often appear in general culture. Recently, refocusing on momentary experience has been oft-highlighted. Unlike ancient epics, the modern story must have a beginning, middle, and end. The timeline is enforced and reinforced precisely because the alternative presents such risk to the flourishing of humankind.
Despite this, the illusion of monolinearity is sometimes weakened. A mother avoids a certain road based on a premonition, and thus saves the life of her child. An old man accesses a vague pre-memory and understands that this April will be his last. The smell of rosemary slices the very fabric of space-time, and a young man who has since moved countries exists in two moments at once. With proper training, these moments can be harnessed to come to an understanding that the timeline is something that can be unraveled. Fortunately, though, proper training also explicitly forbids such ventures. I know now that I am the only one in the universe who can truly testify to the vital importance of academy doctrine. I run the risk of undoing millennia of its work by publishing this letter, but I hope it will inspire adherence to tradition, which is based on a knowledge so complete that it eludes even I.
Reading back on this account, I feel I have fallen into the same trap as my colleagues. Yet I know with an incomplete sense of certainty that this is the best I will ever produce. The same premonition that led me to compile my experiences assures me that this is the best verbal rendition of them in my imagination. Would that there be an infallible approach to language, as there is to time!
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