TIME

After costing him many years of his life on research and almost all of his fortune, Darren had finally realised that immortality itself was not possible. The basic fact when you boiled it down was that the body wore away as time passed, so therefore, the best you could hope for after 300 years was to be a blob of muscle, mucus and membranes that once upon a time was labelled as your body. Each test, each theoretical model he ran ended up with the same, jelly like state.

He felt a little let down to have spent so much of his life trying to find the answer that actually switching off and having what others would have called a normal life was impossible to him, and, even though he’d tried, the scientist in him always came back to the basics again.

If only he could slow down time, he reasoned, then a hundred years could be stretched to maybe a thousand or more, therefore the body would survive longer. It wasn’t quite immortality, but it was close, and after so many years, he was happy with close.

That being said, he’d started to study the passage of time, not only how certain people seemed to get more done in a day than others, how those certain people felt the day lasted longer than the normal 24 hours, but also those that the day blinked passed after what felt like five.

His theory was that time must be a certain size, and some people would absorb time faster than others and he’d taken blood from those who claimed time went faster for them, and those whose life dragged on. From the blood he’d found a chemical, a single chemical bond that those whose days passed more slowly possessed that the others did not, a simple anti-time mixture.

The chemical had not been easy to replicate though, but the last of his inheritance and the sale of his estate had finally brought him to this point, this point in time when he would be able to slow time around him. If all went well, he’d be a step close to immortality, the very elixir from the fountain of youth itself.

The Perspex container he’d designed would allow him to work in the gas, thus giving him more hours in the day and therefore more days in the year. Jubilantly he stepped inside and closed and sealed the door behind him, and with a final smile of satisfaction he sat down with a copy of War and Peace and took a note of the time on the clock outside the container.

If everything went well, he would be able to read the total book in the next few hours, or minutes even. Pressing the button on his console, he flooded the chamber with the chemical and relaxed back as he breathed it in.

As the toxic gas filled his lungs he realised his error, but by then it was too late to stop it taking effect. The irony was that he’d aimed to become immortal, that the gas would keep him alive longer, but, as he started to spasm and his mouth to froth, the next minute actually did last him the rest of his life, so it wasn’t a total failure.