I arrived at the door to the classroom with moments to spare. Probably. I wasn’t actually sure how the Dean’s class worked. The temporal mechanics were vague and far above my level, but I was pretty sure I was right on time. Or early. Or late. Or possibly all three at the same time somehow. Time manipulation made my brain hurt sometimes.
Either way, I knocked on the door and then pushed it open, shooting Elonwy one last glance as I stepped inside.
“Ah, Mr. Wyndham,” came the Dean’s cold, implacable voice. “I was wondering if we would see you. You DID pay to attend this class, yes?” I looked up to find him standing at the base of the steps leading into the room, eyes pinning me like a butterfly to a board.
Swallowing, I looked around. “I…thought I was on time.”
“Were you?” he raised an eyebrow. His eyes pierced me like daggers for what felt like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than ten seconds, then he shrugged. “Fair enough. I haven’t actually left this instance since class started. I’ve been running this course nonstop for the last ten hours from my perspective, bridged across several weeks. I don’t like doing these, so I try to just get them out of the way.”
Frowning, I nodded and grabbed a random seat, sitting down to observe. The Dean walked back into the center of the cone shaped amphitheater, hopping up to sit on the table in the middle. “So, newcomers means a bit of rehashing. Which I suppose calls for cooperation. Show of hands, how many of you know what time is?”
Several hands went up and he snorted. “Trick question. None of you knows what time is. I don’t even know what time is. Why is that?”
This time, far fewer people raised their hands. The Dean pointed to a delicate looking girl with short dark hair. “Ms. Lehayne? You suspect you have some keen insight into a problem even I can’t find an answer to?”
“No, sir,” she said immediately. “I believe there is no problem at all. You don’t know what time is because time doesn’t exist.”
He grinned, the first sign of genuine enthusiasm I had seen from him. “Excellent. That is excellently put. Time does not exist. And yet, we study it, manipulate it, base our lives around it. Time, as they say, is the fire in which we burn. You claim this fire to be a falsehood?”
“I don’t,” she contradicted. “I said it doesn’t exist, not that it’s not real. The two statements are not synonymous.”
“Precisely,” he said with a satisfied nod. “There is, and this is completely true, no such thing as time. It is not a law of reality. It is a concept that we, as humans, coined to allow for the tracking of the progression of the world. As Ms. Lehayne stated, that does not make it fictional, any more than any other attribute or Ascendant construct is fictional. But the key to utilizing time properly is to grasp that simple fact. Time is a thing of our own devising. We created it. We control it.
“I am sure you have heard many explanations for what time is since coming here,” he said, hopping down and strolling over to begin scribbling on a board. “Time is four dimensional, time is a river, time is an omnipresent energy field, time is a mirror, an airplane, a cat with five eyes. Time is sentient, it’s autonomous, it’s jealous of women with curly hair, and men with hobnailed boots.”
I raised an eyebrow at those, but he just pushed on. “These things are all true. And they are not true. They are lies, and also incontrovertible facts. Time is what we make it. It is, above all other things, OURS. Time obeys. It capitulates. And the second you forget that is the second you cease to study or manipulate time and become swept up in its current. Time is fickle, if nothing else, and it will control that which does not exert control in turn. Time is OURS, ladies and gentlemen, and never forget it.
“This, more than anything, is the reason that this class is not offered for free, or at the beginning of the year,” he said wryly. “In order to understand what something is, you must understand what it is NOT. You must learn the rules before you can rewrite them. Each of you has been taught some form of temporal mechanics. You have learned a form of time manipulation, have learned to see or interact with the temporal flows in some way.”
“And those are, what?” I demanded. “Lies? Made up?”
He rolled his eyes. “Everything is ‘made up’ Mr. Wyndham. Family is made up. Love is made up. Language, mathematics, art, music. These things are all ‘made up’. Do you deny they exist? Do you consider them fictions?”
“I mean, no,” I said slowly. “But that’s not really the same thing.”
“Is it not?” he asked with an arched brow. “Time is the first of man’s great deceptions. Not against one another, though perhaps it is that as well, but against the universe. At the beginning of creation, before we understood what an Ascendant was, before recursion was defined, man looked up at the stars, watched their passage and decided to lie to reality. And guess what? Reality believed us.”
A hand went up. “Are you saying that time is the first attribute?” someone asked excitedly.
“Sure,” he said with a shrug. “Or the second. Or the billionth. I have no way of knowing nor would I care to pursue such knowledge. Regardless, the concept of time has shaped reality as we perceive it, as have all human concepts. Though most to a lesser degree. These things, however, are irrelevant. Can anyone tell me WHY I decided to tell you all this?”
I was amused to note that everyone was watching with rapt attention. Not the kind of attention you paid when you’d heard something before. Which meant either the Dean had lied about covering the old material again, or he was doing things out of order, which Elonwy had warned me might do. In either case, no one seemed to know for sure, though the short haired girl from earlier, an A-ranker, raised her hand again. He pointed to her imperiously.
“Is it because you want us to challenge our preconceptions?” she asked tentatively.
“Precisely!” he said energetically. “That is precisely why! Time is nothing. It has no meaning. We teach you the ‘rules’ that work best for us, ones that follow the warp and weft of the byzantine web of human perception as we recognize it, but ultimately, these are just guidelines. As I said, time is OURS. The time we teach is not YOUR time, only a first step to discovering your truth. Do not be bound to the outdated norms you consider ‘facts’ nor treat the teachings of your elders as gospel. There are as many types of time as stars in the sky.”
He stared us all down like a hungry wolf, and I felt a shiver go down my spine. “Now, you may be thinking, with that being said, ‘why bother listening?’ ‘why bother learning from you at all?’ Or any number of other absurd questions. Are any of you thinking that?’
Credit where it was due. The tanned, blue haired guy who raised his hand was brave, even if he was also obviously an idiot. “I mean…yeah,” he said sourly. “We paid ten thousand points for you to tell us everything we’ve been learning is bullshit?” He glared right back at the Overgod leading the class. “Doesn’t that seem kind of like a scam?”
“Maybe,” said the Dean with a shrug. “Tell you what. I’ll refund your credits. You can get up and leave right now, get a full refund, and there will be no penalties levied against you. Of course, just as you resent time wastage, I feel the same, so you will never be permitted to take this course again. But then, it’s just a scam, right? So I’m sure you aren’t worried about coming back here after this.”
“I…um,” the guy said shakily. “I don’t want that. I was just asking.”
“Well you know what they say,” the Dean said warmly. “There are no stupid questions. Only stupid people. Which would be you, in case you missed that. Now shut up until the course ends. I find your voice grating.” He looked around at the rest of us. “Anyone else? Remember, no stupid questions.”
He waited a few moments. “No one?” he asked in faux shock. “Astonishing. Now, those of you with sense the universe gave a toaster probably assumed I had an answer prepared for that rhetorical question. You were correct.” He slapped the board, where he’d been writing down some of the models people used to represent time. “These models work. All of them. Some well, some poorly, but they function. You can LEARN from each of them. Find what works well, find out if it works well for you, if it doesn’t toss it and find something else.
“These constructs are prototypes for your process,” he stressed. “They are examples of solutions your predecessors have come up with to problems you will face. You are not here to learn about time. You are here to learn HOW to learn about time. How to understand it yourself. You’re here to learn underlying elements that compose all concepts of time, and to find some strange ones that never occurred to you but sound good when you say them out loud.
He wrote out a sentence, smacking his chalk against the board when he finalized the exclamation point. “Questions make answers,” he said bluntly. “You cannot give a response to a query that has not been posed. Our job is to tell you the questions so you don’t need to discover them for yourselves. Your job is to find your own answers.”
I hadn’t been expecting this. Any of it. And honestly…I was glad. I loved the whole concept. The freedom, the innovation, they were…intoxicating. Sure, it was intimidating, and I planned to continue using the timepiece constructs because they fit my whole meta incredibly well. But now I knew that I wasn’t bound by what Professor Hawkins thought was true. I could rearrange things a bit, play with my results. And I did my best work when I was experimenting.
The class went on like that for a few hours. The Dean outlined the most common constructs people used for the understanding of time, then poked holes in them mercilessly. Then he poked holes in the holes.
Despite having told us there was no REAL definition of temporal mechanics, he gave us so much information on the subject my brain was starting to hurt. While time wasn’t a solid, factual thing, in the way some people assumed it was, it WAS a concept defined by humans, so there were common elements, just like the Dean had said, and he steered us through all of them.
Some he admitted were strong conceptual underpinnings. Clocks were a popular symbology, for instance. Mechanical precision was a logical and easy to conceptualize construct to work with, and it was a favorite for beginners with the time attribute.
Some people went with more esoteric constructs, like the river or even more abstruse ideas like time as a drop of water. Liquid seemed to be a popular medium for illustration, ironically for the exact OPPOSITE reason to clockwork. He talked and talked and talked, and bb the time the class ended, my brain was so full of information I felt like my skull was creaking.
Finally, the lesson ended. “Well, that’s all,” he said with a smile. “For you at least. Leave and come back at your next appointed class time. It will seem instantaneous for me, but that’s not your problem is it?” I staggered to my feet, heading for the door, but once I was out I didn’t head home. I took out the device my teacher gave me and asked him to send Elonwy to pick me up and bring me to him. My brain was firing on all cylinders, and I wanted to use it. I wanted to be part of the development team for my next demon.