STORIES

TWENTYSEVEN

John Hart was wondering if his captors had forgotten about him.

Quite a bit of time had passed, he reckoned. Enough to complete several fitful spells of sleep (if you could call it that; considering his physical predicament getting a truly restful sleep was pretty much out of the question) separated by long periods of not thinking about much.

It wasn't difficult for John to not think about much. Granted, it was one of those skills he'd indefatigably perfected over the years for situations exactly like the present one. Allowing your mental wheels to spin too furiously can do more damage than you might imagine when you're chained to a wall. So that particular well-honed skill was coming in quite handy. Beyond that, he'd always been able to drift on demand into a sort of mindless stupor when it was required. Jack sincerely envied his amazing ability to think about nothing and had always insisted that it was a blessing, not a curse.

Jack…

Yes, it was better both physically and mentally to try to stay calm. Too much obsessing about the terrible, unadulterated and undeniable dreadfulness of the current situation could easily drive him totally out of his mind. That is if he wasn't crazy already – something Wil had jokingly (was it?) accused him of countless times since they'd met. Well… he wasn't ready to start gnawing through his own joints to escape the chains. At least not yet.

Wil…

But his mind was starting to rebel against thinking about nothing. Various trains of thought were of their own volition beginning to speed through the blessed fog of nothingness; it was during one of those intervals when John began to wonder if the bastards had simply left him there to die.

From past experience John Hart knew he could go for quite a while without food. He could hypothetically survive for weeks. And indeed the worst of the hunger pangs, the hunger pains, had already dissipated. Not that food had ever loomed all that large in his life anyway: it was a necessity, not intrinsically interesting in itself to him. Additionally, and also from previous experience, he knew that he'd reached a sort of food plateau and there'd be no more body-shuddering hunger attacks. In a way it was a relief, but when he allowed his mind to consider it more thoughtfully he realized the implication was actually much more ominous – his systems were starting to shut down. Of course it was inevitable. He didn't have a lot of extra fat and protein stores for his body to feed off of – but still he knew he would continue to carry on without food for a long time.

Now water… well, water was a different story. That was going to be a problem. Again, from past experience, he knew he had about a week, tops. He always tried to keep himself sufficiently hydrated but thinking back on it – of late he hadn't been doing as good of a job as he might have. There was all that infernal desiccating alcohol he'd consumed with Ecba the night before he was taken, followed by just a few sips of water after waking the following morning.

Ecba…

Well, it was far too late now for him to beat himself up about water and wine.

"Too late, too late," John ruminated. He really didn't have a clue how long he'd been hanging out there. Hah! "Hanging…" He resisted an urge to giggle – now that would be a sure sign he was losing it. Certainly a goodly amount of time had passed. He looked around the room – the lights had stayed on even after the Halikaarn's body was disappeared. That was nice of the bastards; light was always good. There'd been no other visitors, no changes to the surrounding space, no sounds, no visuals. No stimuli of any kind really, except for the beating of his heart and the ever-present sensation of the small, hard weapon which Ecba had spirited into his waistband. Now that was something it would be so very easy to obsess about – if he allowed it to happen. And in fact he'd tried for a long time to somehow get at the blade, but without success.

But he felt himself ebbing, slipping away. He was constantly shifting between darkness and night and all points in between. At times he felt like he was already dead and in the grave, everything alive but him and everyone moving and going on with life without him, without even a second thought of him. Jack continuing on with his ridiculous adventures with his gorgeous Time Lord. Wil and that crazy ship of hers continuing to look for whatever it was that they were seeking. A flicker of envy briefly ignited in his heart but it took too much energy to sustain it. As he waned, gently, slowly toward a final destination, toward what appeared to be the end of his story, John eventually began to notice that the universe was beautiful and the people in his life were beautiful and even all those myriad bleak nights he'd spent alone and lonely had been beautiful. And as he softly slipped away he realized that Time itself was tenderly herding him, pushing him along in a direction not necessarily of his own choosing, but one which was nevertheless unchangeable and irrefutable.

Time… he and Wil had talked about the nature of Time quite a bit. Well, she'd talked, he'd listened. Lying in bed one night, the comingled sweat on their bodies cooling after making love, she'd explained to him that a deep, intimate understanding of Time was the greatest of the many well-kept secrets of the Time Lords. She was only coming to partially understand the great mystery herself. "The cosmos," she'd said, "is oblivious to Time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is Time-constituting. We build Time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each and every moment. Then they recede into the past. And what is this thing called the past?" she asked as she traced a finger slowly down his chest, and then lower still. He loved how she loved to touch him. "It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue – records that tell a consistent story.

"This is all amazing and beautiful to me, she admitted. "But not nearly as amazing or beautiful as the miracle that is our consciousness. It takes noisy, ambiguous, contradictory information from our senses and sorts it out into the mostly reasonable, rational universe that we perceive. It empowers us to identify things – objects, melodies, faces, beauty, ideas – and allows us to think about them. It is miraculous."

"Don't go all mystical on me now," he'd smiled.

She smiled back. "The miracle is that we are able to make order from the chaos that surrounds us. That we can construct a coherent narrative for the story that is our life."

"But surely from an evolutionary standpoint this is necessary?" he was suddenly serious.

"I can imagine other cosmii where it isn't the case, where chaos prevails, can't you?" she answered darkly.

He kissed her deeply, leaned back and slowly scrutinized her. "So Time doesn't exist?" he'd asked half jokingly, but only half.

She searched his face, her eyes painting him, and finally shrugged noncommittally, silently. Then she eagerly returned his kiss and they went on to do other things than talk about Time.

But back in the present, Time seemed all too real to John and despite his best efforts to stay positive he was starting to feel that for him the direction in which Time's arrow was moving was all too clear. Yes, he existed, the room existed, the chains existed and Time definitely existed, and it was gradually but inextricably running out…

And something else existed as well. Something else had wormed its way uninvited into his "miraculous" consciousness. It'd been easy enough to ignore at first but now it was becoming more than just a dimly perceived sound. There was an accompanying visual. "Ah," John said out loud, his voice cracking. "Perhaps still a problem, but a different kind of problem than I'd previously thought…"

What looked like water had begun seeping up through the floor and was gradually covering its surface. Slowly, very slowly, the flow was spreading, its level unhurriedly rising. The water was frigid; he could feel the air cooling as it gently circulated above it.

This time John actually did permit himself to laugh out loud.