Patience

Continuing with the theme of archive emptying, here is a storyboard/plotline I wrote up for a story I never even started.

* time is a closed, repeating loop
* the number of human lives on the planet is fixed
* no new lives are ever created
* when a person dies, or reaches the end of one life cycle, they are reincarnated as another person and follow that particular life cycle until its end. And so on
* somehow, the main character is made aware of this situation
* he continues to kill himself until he cycles through every possible life cycle in the hopes that he will eventually be reincarnated as himself and use this 'second chance' to make right some wrong (probably something to do with a girl/lover)
* the time loop always ends with total destruction and then starts over
* by being aware of the loop and altering it (by continually killing himself) he eventually reduces the lifetime of every person on the planet, causing a catastrophic breakdown of time
* he realizes thus and is forced to live out every life in its entirety, essentially on autopilot
* after he explains this to the girl, he is reincarnated as her, and while living her life on auto pilot he realizes she is in love with someone he understands is better for her than he is
* he accepts that she will never love him fully and is doomed to be a self-aware automaton

perspective: after-the-fact narration? Or after-the-fact until he is reincarnated as her? Probably after-the-fact; a memoir of everyone who ever lived.

the train metaphor: time is a train track that is a giant loop. There are many trains on the track. Every time a train reaches the end of the loop a new conductor takes over and drives the train for the duration of the next loop.



Looking back on this, I now find that last part, the train thing, most interesting. To the degree that if I ever summoned the motivation to re-visit this story, it'd probably just be about train conductors on a fixed loop.

Different Keys for Different Locks

His voice, pinched off at the end of sentences / Revolutions Two through Eight / And walk through the clutter, the dead automation / Circuits bled electricity until nothing was left, no power just silent snowflakes, the buzz and hiss of high tension lines conspicuously absent / Bare walls and hardwood floors and cold rooms. Oppressive empty space / You need to see the timing, like Tetris blocks locked in place / Serpentine vibrations that pass through flesh walls, while in the corner stacked journals tell dusty tales of imagined possibility, dry ink flaked off yellowed pages / Frightened by the speed of his tonal recognition / Wet reflections / wild lights / cloud passed electricity / Lightning is cloud feedback / This storm is a song, thunder chorus and lightning verses, rain fell like liquid percussion on glass ears / All of the songs in the world play at the same time and I try to decipher them, individual melodies like cells in ether / Planets and cells suspended in ether, the sound of a compressed spring / Burnt tongue coffee, like a swollen piece of sandpaper between my jaws / Yellow-tipped power cords and quarter-inch input jacks; again, in the empty cold room. Cracks in the floor, wide / Cracks the floor wide, like veins in the marble or rivers bisecting themselves on graph paper / Everything ends with a g / Golden maple floor, cracks wide in the marble, veins or snakes or / rivers / Little skeleton fingers make a fist around a pen / The floor is basement cool in front porch heat / Perfect cylinders / gears in motion.