2050 : Heirs Of Time 



She wasn’t going to be calm, making it impossible for him to concentrate on the dust storm outside the window swallowing the city as it crawled towards them slowly. Her voice fell on his ear drums as they vibrated at the same frequency of something chimeric, telling him that what she was saying was either really important or completely preposterous. It didn’t matter because his sense of sight was defeaning in a very satisfying way. The storm hit the window of the bus he was sitting in and he could hear every single sound in detail - the way the different sized dust particles hit the window making their own unique sound as if to announce their existence, the way the people in the bus sat in silence, unnerved, by what seemed like a daily occurrence. He heard her voice again, this time muffled by the passing storm and not by his active actions to do so. She seemed to be understanding that he wasn’t thinking through his body. As if his mind was a separate entity and his body, just a vessel to carry his order of time. She kept saying something to him but he couldn’t hear her clearly. He looked up at the roof of the bus as the storm started talking loud enough to seek attention from other passengers. It wasn’t ready to be accepted as just something that is to be dealt with on a daily basis. It was tired of being nice.
Being nice was a problem as it was taken for granted and misused by others even when they don’t possess or own that quality. It’s difficult to be noticed without being loud. But it’s not necessary to be loud to be noticed or to be noticed for that matter. She was trying to be noticed too. But it was fine, the dust storm wasn’t letting anyone be loud enough to be noticed. Everyone was silenced enough to just glance at each other in an honest way. Wondering and listening to time pass by, in their own time. “Though we march to the music of our time, our mission is timeless”, was blasted through the megaphones in the city. He collapsed onto the bus floor.
____ The sound of rain drops on the window was deafening, just like the night before the world changed forever. Watching the blue from the city lights reflect off the droplets that were still hanging on to the window, the doctor was snapped out of his time. “We have a problem doctor” said the nurse as she rubbed her eyes in the dead of the night. “There is a patient with no vital signs of struggle but there seems to be something wrong”, she looked worried. She had no idea what was going on. “Lets go meet this patient of ours” said the doctor wondering what could possibly be so wrong yet so mysterious.
“Hi how are you today..how aree..you today?”,asked the doctor to the patient who didn’t seem to understand anything. The doctor knew exactly what was wrong as soon as he saw his eyes that were pitch black. “Someone has been torturing him by making his body clock listen to various different time altering sounds” said the doctor as he prepared to inject the patient with a piece of music. A gentle strain of music, scarcely audible, seemed to make him reply.
With a nod and a smile, the patient said, "Continue the music, I pray you.” The doctor seemed intrigued by the patient wondering if this was a sign to be worried about the order of time.
_____
A few days passed and the patient was doing much better but still not here in this time. The rain was dying down and a sound could be heard from a park nearby.
“We created the use of music as a time altering thing that could help us slow down or speed up our activities. We used it to create certain emotions in times of need. We gave meaning to time through music and created a sense of belonging to the abstract concept of time. Music has evolved to show us that we don’t need to listen to it to understand it. The vibrations are enough to make us feel certain emotions. But even though we have seen music evolve into something that evolves time itself, it has forgotten to evolve the human race. There have been recent incidents that suggest that people are using music to create chaos in the minds of others. This might not seem like physical torture but mentally, when you have no sense of time or a convoluted sense of time, it can be dangerous. We will be trying our best to stop this”, the conductor of this world orchestra had just finished his speech. He keeps time acting as a sort of metronome for everyone and he also indicates dynamics and such to different sections of the orchestra.

“They don’t know what’s going to happen if they don’t keep this in control”, the patient had woken up to the sound of the speech.”They don’t understand that what it is like to lose all sense of time. Nothing seems right and nothing makes sense. Your mind is blank and in limbo.” The doctor was still staring out the window as he turned around and said, “It is something that has helped us over the years, but after you arrived at our hospital we knew there was something wrong. Controlling time was a simple idea through the use of music but time is not something to be messed with because we don’t understand it completely”. “Do you know how I got here?”, asked the patient still dazed from losing time. “You collapsed in a bus and were brought here by a few people. But strangely there was no ID or wallet on you. Do you remember your name?”, asked the doctor as he sat down on the chair next to his bed.
“Oh yes my name is Opus… surprisingly all my memory is intact. Thats the strange thing about time, you only have memories of the past and the anxiety of the future. And there is no universal present. Every moment of my life has made me who I am. I am made of everything that has ever happened to me. All my experiences are me. Not remembering certain things make me who I am. Time is being manipulated now and we won’t have memories, everything will be mixed up or completely gone. There will be no distinction between the past, present and future. Time is a sculpture. Being sculpted and transformed tirelessly for ever and a day. Time is only an illusion and things only change when we change them. Time slows down when we want it to. And speeds up when we want it to. Time stops.” There was silence for a second and you could hear the silence through the ticking of the clock nearby.
The doctor looked at him and said “ When Alice asked the white rabbit if he knew how long forever was, he replied saying that sometimes even a second can seem like forever. Time has always been a relative thing to each person. It Moves differently for you. It flows with you and for you. Slow down with it. We used music as a means to manipulate time because it is like time. It slows down things for you, it can speed up things for you, it can make you feel a certain way when you need it the most. I think people need to understand that they are still in control of their time. Maybe what happened to you was a reality check making you snap out of whatever frame of time you were in.”
“Yeah, this woman kept talking about something but I couldn’t hear her due to the time difference between us. She was saying something repeatedly but I couldn’t figure out what. And the last thing I remember is the storm growing louder and louder” said Opus, still a bit dazed from the distortion of time. “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane, by those who could not hear the music” said the doctor.
“She has been saying this to a lot of people over the past few days. And a lot of people come here having collapsed somewhere. They all have been talking about meeting a woman and her saying these words repeatedly to them. They all have lost their order of time and everyone is in a way.. waking up. The interesting thing about this saying is that everyone thinks Friedrich Nietzsche said this first but there is no evidence of him ever saying this. These words seem to have no point of origin and no sense of time. But it can be seen as a great metaphor for how music is time. And those who can’t hear it, thought the others dancing to it are insane. We now feel that experiencing time in any other way is insane, in this world of intentional manipulation of time. But time is dancing. Without choreography. Making us dance with it. It moves us the way music does.” They both remained silent, wondering about it all. How music changed and how time changed its meaning.
Clearly looking lost in their own time while realising it is not the same for everyone, and can’t ever be intentionally manipulated for everyone together.