Fragments of Time
Signals in the Distance
The room was too sterile for the decaying building that housed it, as if it had been forgotten by time yet somehow kept clean in defiance of the world falling apart around it. Adam sat near the far wall, his back against the cold, unyielding surface.
His eyes swept across the room, taking in the lifeless white panels. The corners of the walls had cracks running up them, yet here in the center, everything felt unnervingly perfect, untouched.
Across from him, Sarah was pacing in small, tight circles. Her restlessness filled the silence with a quiet energy that buzzed in the background. Ben, calm as always, focused on adjusting the dials on the device.
The machine itself looked like an antique from some forgotten future, cumbersome and fragile, yet humming with quiet anticipation.
Adam shifted in his seat. The air felt thick, as if time itself had slowed down, waiting for something to break the tension.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Adam finally spoke, his voice low but carrying across the room. “How we define ourselves by things that mean nothing in the end.”
Sarah stopped mid-pace and shot him a glare. Her eyes, usually full of fire, now looked tired, though the intensity had not faded. “What are you talking about?” she asked, her voice sharp, already defensive.
“You know… the labels,” Adam continued, his expression unreadable. “Activist, physicist, detached observer.” He gave a half-smile, as if the words were an inside joke he was tired of hearing.
“We wrap ourselves in them like they make us different from each other. But they don’t.”
Sarah’s shoulders tightened. “Because we are different,” she snapped, more forcefully than she intended. “You wouldn’t understand. You don’t care about anything enough to fight for it.”
Ben glanced up from the device, his eyes flicking between Adam and Sarah, before settling back on the machine. There was an unspoken tension between the three of them, one that had been building for a long time.
It was in the way they spoke to each other, in the silences that stretched longer than they should. They had come together for a singular purpose, but their reasons for being here couldn’t have been more different.
“I think what Adam’s saying,” Ben interjected, his voice measured, “is that those differences don’t matter when you look at the bigger picture. The universe doesn’t care about your causes, Sarah.”
Sarah turned her glare toward Ben now. “And I suppose you think the universe cares about your scientific breakthroughs? You hide behind your equations like they’ll protect you from feeling anything real.”
Ben frowned slightly but said nothing. Instead, he returned to the machine, his fingers moving over the dials with precision. But his silence spoke louder than words. He wasn’t good at emotional responses; logic was his comfort zone, his armor.
The room fell silent again, and Adam shifted in his seat, feeling the weight of Sarah’s words more than he cared to admit. They were all in this room, waiting for the device to show them something, each of them holding on to the hope that it would validate their views. Adam wasn’t sure what he expected.
Perhaps he wanted the device to confirm that his detachment wasn’t apathy but something deeper. Maybe it would reveal that he wasn’t broken after all.
Or maybe it would show them something else entirely.
Divergent Paths
Adam’s mind drifted to a memory he had long buried. He had been twenty-five, standing at his father’s funeral. The air had been cool, but it wasn’t the weather that had chilled him, it was the absence of emotion.
His father had been a man of few words, a quiet strength who believed in hard work and stoicism. Adam had tried to emulate that, but as he stood at the grave site, surrounded by people who wept and shared stories of his father, he felt nothing.
There had been no tears for him, no aching sadness. Just emptiness. It wasn’t that he didn’t care; he just didn’t know how to feel in that moment. He watched as strangers cried harder than he did, speaking about a man he barely recognized.
He felt disconnected, not only from his father’s memory but from the people who seemed to feel more deeply than he ever could.
That was when he learned something about himself: He didn’t fit in with the rest of the world. The funeral was a turning point. He began to see himself as different from others, not better, not worse, just separate.
Emotion wasn’t something he could access easily, and it made him an outsider in more ways than one.
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Adam said aloud, his voice breaking the silence and bringing him back to the present. Sarah and Ben turned to look at him. “We think our differences matter so much that we never really connect.”
“You’re saying I’m wasting my time?” Sarah shot back. “I’ve dedicated my life to causes that actually matter. I’m not the one sitting around, doing nothing, while the world burns.”
Her words were like a slap, but Adam barely flinched. This wasn’t the first time Sarah had lashed out like that. It was who she was, always on the edge of a fight, always ready to defend her purpose.
“Sarah,” Ben interjected, his tone as calm as ever, “no one’s saying you’re wasting your time. But you have to admit, we’re all just… filling roles we’ve created for ourselves. What if those roles don’t matter as much as we think?”
Sarah crossed her arms, her frustration bubbling beneath the surface. “That’s easy for you to say, Ben. You’ve always lived in your head, in your little world of equations. You think everything can be solved with logic.”
Ben raised an eyebrow, but the usual sharp retort didn’t come. He wasn’t in the mood for arguing today, not with the device so close to activation. “And you think passion can fix everything?” he asked, his voice quieter now, more thoughtful. “The world isn’t that simple.”
The words hung between them, heavy and unresolved. Adam watched the exchange, a part of him wanting to speak, but knowing it wouldn’t change anything.
The differences between them seemed insurmountable at times, like they were all speaking different languages, even though they had come together for a common goal.
But the longer Adam thought about it, the more he realized their arguments were less about the device and more about their need to prove themselves, to prove their differences were real, that they mattered.
Waiting for the Signal
The room felt smaller now, as if the walls were slowly closing in on them. Sarah’s pacing had resumed, her footsteps quick and uneven. Adam could hear the faint sound of her sneakers scraping against the floor with each step.
“You two just don’t get it,” Sarah said, her voice rising in frustration. “It’s not about the labels, it’s about the fight. What are you fighting for? Nothing. You’re both just… existing.”
Adam glanced at Ben, who was still focused on the machine, pretending not to hear her, though the tension in his jaw said otherwise.
“I don’t need to justify my existence to you,” Ben said quietly, but the edge in his voice was undeniable. He had never liked being questioned, especially by someone who didn’t understand the intricacies of his work.
“Just because I don’t throw myself into every cause doesn’t mean I don’t care about the world.”
Sarah stopped in her tracks, turning to face him. “You don’t care. You just want to be right. About everything.”
The silence that followed was thick, and Adam found himself caught between them, an observer as always. He had seen this argument play out before, but today, it felt different. More raw. More desperate.
Ben stood, his composure finally cracking. “And you just want to feel like you’re making a difference, whether it’s true or not!”
Adam watched them, feeling a strange sense of déjà vu. This wasn’t new. They had always been like this, pushing each other’s buttons, forcing each other to confront uncomfortable truths.
But there was something more intense about it today, as if the device itself had amplified their emotions.
As the argument escalated, Adam’s mind drifted back to another time. He had been in his early thirties, sitting at a dinner party with colleagues. The evening had been uneventful, small talk, polite conversation.
But as the night wore on, the conversation shifted. People began sharing stories about their personal lives, stories of love, loss, family. When it was Adam’s turn, he had made up a story about a work trip, avoiding anything personal.
He remembered how disconnected he had felt, like an outsider in his own life.
“We all want to be right,” Adam said quietly, cutting through the tension in the room. “But maybe none of us are.”
In Time, All Things
The hum of the device grew louder, filling the space with an unsettling energy. Ben turned his attention back to the machine, his hands moving over the controls with practiced precision.
But Adam could see the tension in his face, the subtle twitch of his brow that betrayed his calm exterior.
Sarah stood off to the side, her arms still crossed, her face a mask of frustration and exhaustion. She had always been the fighter, the one who believed in something bigger than herself.
But now, as they waited for the device to activate, Adam wondered if she was questioning everything she had fought for.
“I’ve spent my whole life believing in something,” Sarah muttered, more to herself than to anyone else. “What if it doesn’t mean anything?”
Adam looked at her, surprised by the vulnerability in her voice. This wasn’t the Sarah he knew. Or maybe it was, and he had just never seen it before. “Maybe it does mean something,” he said, his voice soft but sincere. “But not in the way you think.”
Ben glanced at them both, his expression unreadable. “It’s all just… entropy. Time decays everything, no matter how much we try to hold on to it.”
“God, you’re such a robot sometimes,” Sarah snapped, the sharpness returning to her voice. “Do you even feel anything?”
Ben’s jaw tightened. “Just because I don’t wear my emotions on my sleeve doesn’t mean I don’t feel.”
Adam watched them, a sense of inevitability settling over him. They were all grasping at something, Sarah, Ben, even himself, but none of them seemed to know what it was.
The hum of the machine grew louder, and then, without warning, it activated.
Fragments
The room shifted. It wasn’t a physical change—there was no movement, no noise—but something in the air shifted. Time itself seemed to stretch and compress, bending around them.
For a moment, none of them could speak. The device had done something, though none of them could explain what. Sarah was the first to break the silence.
“What just happened?” she asked.
Ben stared at the machine, his calm facade completely shattered. “It’s not what we expected.”
Adam stood, feeling a strange weight settle in his chest. “No,” he agreed, “it’s not.”
The device had shown them something, but it wasn’t the grand revelation any of them had hoped for. There was no earth-shattering truth, no cosmic insight into the nature of the universe.
Instead, it had stripped away their illusions, their carefully constructed identities. It had shown them something far more uncomfortable: they weren’t as different as they thought.
“I don’t get it,” Sarah muttered, her frustration palpable. “What did it show us?”
Adam looked at her, then at Ben. “That we’re all the same.”
Sarah frowned, her frustration giving way to confusion. “What do you mean? We’re not the same. We’ve been arguing about how different we are this whole time.”
“That’s the point,” Ben said quietly, his voice barely above a whisper. “All of those differences… they don’t matter. Not in the way we thought they did.”
Sarah’s arms dropped to her sides, and for the first time, the fire in her eyes flickered out. “So what does matter?”
Adam sighed, the weight of the truth settling over him like a heavy blanket. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”
The room felt smaller now, the weight of the device’s revelation pressing down on them all. They had spent so long defining themselves by their differences, by their identities, their beliefs, their passions, that they had forgotten the most basic truth: they were all human, bound by the same desires, fears, and uncertainties.
And in the end, that was all that really mattered.
