May Is Not Coming

Today is April 31.

Tomorrow will be April 32, and so on. May is not coming. This is the consensus of my team.

Project Log History: (Data will autosave when available storage is used up)

This will all be difficult to grasp. So I will do my best to explain my predicament.

April 33 might not be anything at all. Maybe an anti-black hole devoid of matter. Who knows. It’s hard to wrap my brain around the concept of less than nothing.

No one on my team thought our time machine would cause the reality apocalypse, but here we are. So I guess you can take this as my confession, whoever’s reading this. I am going to call you Overlord of the Universe.

Here are the facts. On the morning of what would have been May 1st, 2026, I woke in my bed, with the sensation that I had been there before. In the same exact position, with the same piece of drool crust on the left corner of my mouth. I dare say the drool crust is what gave it away.

When you’ve been dealing with space and time for as long as I have, you learn to quickly separate coincidences from miracles.

I was reliving yesterday, in place of tomorrow. And each day would be the day prior. Day’s I’ve already experienced.

After a chaotic group text session, my team held an emergency meeting in our dingy warehouse lab. Our consensus: We tore a hole in the fabric of reality, and the days now came in reverse. Tomorrow is always one day back, and so on.

*I must specify for you – Overlord of the Universe, time is not flowing backwards. Only the sequence of days has reversed.*

So, we renamed May 1st to April 31st. We didn’t want to simply give the relived days the date they had. Reverse our calendar days until what? Until I relive the day in 1998, when I was born? No, that does not sound appealing.

After a bit of back and forth, we thought to keep April going, since we all agreed we liked April well enough.

We knew there was a chance this all would happen, but we went through with it anyway. It was all supposed to be theoretical. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Log: 2 Days before. April 32.

Observation: Oddly, though I shaved before the incident, when we went back a day, I wasn’t unshaven. Hypothesis: Our bodies are not aging backwards. Only reality is.

But the weirdest part: Not a single news outlet was talking about it. People weren’t losing their minds running through the streets. No human on Earth besides my team of five physicists realized anything was off. As if for everyone else, they were coming fresh off their prior day, with no knowledge of tomorrow. And that was the scary part. I can almost hear the Twilight Zone music ringing in my ears.

Log: 5 Days before. April 35.

I must admit, it gets weirder still. As I said, our mornings start as they had in the past, as if the second we closed our eyes and drifted off for the night, a switch flipped, sending us back one day. But we were free to make different choices. Perform different actions. So was it really the same day as before?

We agreed on a soft no. The results were inconclusive. Perhaps it was all in our heads.

All five of us.

At the same time.

As a test, we all resisted sleeping the next night. It did not make a difference. Tomorrow is always one more day back.

Eventually we all were getting foggy on if the days were still rewinding. Though our clocks and digital calendars confirmed we were. I mean, could you remember the breakfast you ate 2 weeks ago? Perhaps if you always at one type of cereal, the answer would be easy. But needless to say, even though we know the days were reversing in theory. These were new, unexperienced days, to us and the rest of the world.

Log: 10 Days before. April 40.

Our sleep test sparked a heated debate of perception vs. laws of physics. I.e., we are not sure if our perception is bound by the laws of physics. I.e., we think we might be going insane. I.e., we might be in purgatory, and we all simply died in a lab accident.

Log: 15 Days before. April 45.

We agreed that we might have done irreversible damage. Then it started to get scarier. I relived a day, many days after our screw up. And my dentist called to let me know I had missed my appointment that morning. Goes without saying, I remember I had gone to that appointment earlier in the month. The bastard ratcheted on my canine. At least I didn’t have to relive that twice.

But either way. Not good.

Still clearly going in reverse, and I was about to miss a lot more old appointments, dates and get-togethers if I didn’t recall every single meet up I ever had. It’s difficult knowing what your plans are for a day, when the day before that day will come after it.

I know, try to stay with me.

As for Easter, last Sunday on April 5th, I can miss Easter. I’ll make up an excuse.

But my recent 28th birthday mid-March might be hard to miss.

Log: 25 days before. April 55.

We lost Frank.

Ernest has gone out looking for him.

Log: April 100 and something. Lost count.

The days are becoming exhausting. I gave up trying to make it to previously attended events. I have no more personal connections left. They don’t matter anymore.

I have been pondering fish lately. In an ocean, they are free. But in a stream they are prisoners, beaten by the influence of flow. I am a sickly trout who turned against the river’s current. Life is deformed. Each conversation with an outsider is a paradox.

We managed to acquire more test subjects yesterday. Kept them up all night to see the turn of dawn. We told them their tomorrow isn’t real. That yesterday is tomorrow now, as it is for us. They don’t understand.

If they aren’t good trouts, we’ll hold them above the water until they beg to go back under. But every time we let them go, they swim the wrong way, down the river where we came.

I used to be a good trout. But now I’ve forgotten what it was like to swim with the current. If this project proved one thing, it’s that time is a river after all. Its inlet and outlet stretch beyond my periphery.

While submerged, it’s impossible to see the beginning or the end. Many will cross your path, and come to pass. My river has gone brown with tannin. The turbulent sediment leaves micro cuts in my eyes.

Log: 273 days before. April 303.

It’s been a while. I am better these days. Only two of us left. We need to migrate. Moving all the equipment will be nearly impossible. As for the cause of all this, I think I might be getting close to the answer. It’s been staring me in the face this whole time.

Hypothesis: I used to exist in my observer-based reality; one reality amongst infinite timelines: A particle in quantum superposition. Our lab incident was not an accident. More so, we indeed tore a hole in the Universe; your Universe. And through that opening we were able to be observed and measured for the first time. Earth is but an atom in the grand scheme of things. That makes me an electron by comparison. My mass is almost negligible in the vast black.

True to the laws I’ve spent my life studying, something as small as an electron cannot be measured without altering its behavior. After detection, the particle will be forced to take one definitive path. So I now head against the river. Before the accident, all of my forms existed in all states. Seas, creeks, bays, ponds. I had a whole ocean to myself. Superposition in the flesh. After all, Schrodinger’s cat was only dead after they opened the box. Sad story.

As for my story, now I just go one way.

Backwards.

Why I was knocked backwards in the fourth dimension and not the third, I must uncover for myself. And a notion that makes me laugh, usually the thing that knocks the electron away is a photon gun. I am excited to see the size of yours.

I am signing off for now. Whoever reads, you Overlord of the Universe. I accept all punishments you see fit. Please know that we are truly sorry. And we are getting started trying to see if we can fix all this. Sorry for sitting on my ass for so long. We agreed to arbitrarily call today May 1st. We will log our findings, and see what happens, I guess.

Hopefully we don’t make things worse.

A man in reverse,

PhD - Quantum Physics

Log: THIS IS AN AUTOMATED MESSAGE. SYSTEM HAS RUN OUT OF SPACE. THERE ARE 45,984 MORE LOGS AUTOSAVED FOR THIS PROJECT SPANNING 145 YEARS.

TRANSFER DATA? Y/N

06/17/1881