When there is time

*This story contains sensitive subjects including drug use, sexual violence and pregnancy termination.

There was a dark fog that was slowly covering the planet. It was alive and it grew and was deadly to everything it touched. Scientists spent almost three decades working on it but time was running out. Simon was one of the scientists.

Simon was working longer hours on it than any other person, on any other team, in what was left of the whole world. He had no family, no love interests and barely any friends. He was liked well enough and his colleagues all thought of him as highly intelligent (most of them were genius’, being scientists, and so this was a high compliment from them) but Simon was too busy with work to engage in many social activities. He was friendly to all people and he didn’t have any malicious or annoying traits. He was a voracious puzzler and once he got his mind set on a puzzle he became obsessed with solving it, and usually he could.

Cleo was a sad child.Her family was highly dysfunctional; mom was an alcoholic; father was in and out of the picture (mostly out) chasing women and get rich quick schemes. She spent most of her time alone and she cried a lot. Her older brother was gruff. He spent most of his time with friends playing sports and when he was around he often tormented her so they were never close. She was a victim with most of the kids at school too. Her sensitive nature made her an easy target for bullies. Friends frequently turned on her for more comfortable relationships and popularity.

Simon had a sample of the fog in a six-foot square glass containment unit in his lab. Next to it was a table with computers and piles of reports. Next to that several whiteboards with various words and equations. At the bottom of one was a quote by Benjamin Franklin “Lost time is never found again.”

The dark olivine mist started somewhere around five hundred miles west of Australia in the deep ocean.It went largely unnoticed for several months, only a pale whisp floating over the water, but then it grew outward from its original spot. Meteorologists were the first to notice it because it didn’t travel like a normal cloud and it existed right at the water level. It gained in size only around two acres in the first few years. People thought it was odd but they didn’t think much else of it. It was a wonder and many came to look at it. Scientists came to observe it. Simon was one of the first. A school sanctioned expedition brought him to the site with other nerdy high school students.He was the first to see it’s destructive qualities. He noticed a bird fly through it and fall instantly dead into the sea. It made him sad. He began studying it from that very first day and he decided to attend MIT so he could study it in a proper lab.

As a teenager Cleo struggled. She constantly looked for ways to get past the emotional pain that clouded her thoughts.She loved sea creatures and spent countless hours milling about the local aquariums. Every family trip she insisted on going to any sea life exhibits no matter how small. Her mother was extremely negative and hyper critical of her so she felt discouraged from pursuing her dream of being a marine biologist. At the age of 14 Cleo (lost and always feeling alone) began subconsciously making poor relationship choices because she was desperate for love and acceptance. She was raped by her first boyfriend. She felt ashamed but didn’t realize for years that it was rape. She didn’t know that being held down and forced to do the deed by your boyfriend was an illegal act. She thought sexual violence was something that happened in dark alleys by strangers and left the victim hospitalized. She never did anything about it except allow the experience to control how she reacted when other boys wanted to be with her.

At the age of 16 she met Michael at a party. She had already been with over a dozen men by then and never liked the act, but he changed that within her, she felt good when they were together. Michael became obsessed with her. She mistakenly thought his constant attention and desire for her was love, but it wasn’t. It was the wrong kind of attention. Within a few months the emotional and physical abuse overwhelmed her and she was lucky to get away from him. She was also deeply scarred and fearful, but her desire to be loved was too strong for her to resist their advances. There was a part of her deep down that believed in the fairy tale. She wanted to trust that true love existed and that someday her prince would come and rescue her.

Cleo buried her feelings and began to hang out with the party crowd drinking every weekend. She often ended up being taken advantage of by men.At parties she would meet an attractive guy and talk for hours getting closer and closer, drinking more and more.With each beer her thoughts became more convinced that he could be the perfect one, the one that would whisk her off and fix all of her problems. He (whichever “he” it was for the night) would be thinking ‘another beer and this will be an easy lay.’

Simon basically lived in his lab; in the beginning he used the obvious substances to try and control or manipulate the noxious gas. He tried fluorocarbons hoping to neutralize the toxins. It grew slightly larger, just a fraction of a millimeter, but he could measure the difference. He sprayed it with soda lime. It grew.He tried peroxisomes, and again it grew.Eventually he tried more complex methods and more intense products. He got multiple degrees trying to learn everything he could that might help. He went to the lab early in the morning and stayed late into the night sometimes even sleeping there.

At the age of seventeen Cleo realized she was pregnant, she was too scared and ashamed of herself to go through with it so she borrowed some money from a friend and they went to the Dr.’s office and had it taken care of. It was painful and she felt empty inside afterwards, but the dr. was empathetic, he seemed to understand how she suffered. She went back to him twice more in the next few years until he was no longer kind. On her third visit he was abrupt with her. He wouldn’t make eye contact; just did the job and sent her away. She felt dirty and confused. She knew it wasn’t right to do it so many times and yet she sought out other Dr.’s.Each time she needed to do it she went to someone new. Deep in the recesses of her mind she was looking for someone to show her acceptance.The last Dr. made sure that she would never have this problem again. That time it was a woman and she used her tools to ensure that Cleo’s womb could never hold onto a fertilized egg again. Cleo was twenty-four at the time. It was her tenth visit to this type of Dr. She hated herself for it.

The mysterious haze grew thicker and larger more quickly as time moved on. A few decades after it was first discovered it had grown to envelope two thirds of the world. The planet was in crisis and only the richest citizens could escape it by moving to new countries every time it grew closer to them. Simon’s obsession with controlling it was his sole purpose for life. He built larger containments in his lab and he exhausted himself with formulas.The origins and makeup of the mist were almost impossible to identify. He requested the top specialists in every known field. Governments sent him more than he asked for. They were arriving monthly at first and then weekly from countries that had been completely enveloped by the poisonous gas but everything they tried made the mysterious cloud larger. He even resorted to everyday things like household cleaners or natural enzymes, but it grew. He tried orange oil, activated charcoal, it grew. He consulted with hundreds of other scientists and they came up with hundreds of new formulas but it still grew. Though he wasn’t proud of himself, he even tried his own urine out of sheer frustration (and after several beers one night) but it still grew. Eventually the other scientists succumbed to their grief. They left the labs to mourn their lost friends, families, and homelands.They departed to live whatever life they had left.

They gave up, but Simon could not stop trying. After a few weeks of being alone he began to enjoy the company of the green cloud. He found himself enthralled with just watching the reaction of whatever composition he introduced into the tank. He would throw things in there that he had put in there many times before just to watch its colors change and the gas thicken.

At the age of twenty-seven Cleo had no prospects in life. She worked a multitude of jobs, but none she ever really cared about or stayed at for very long. She sold drugs for drinking money and partied with rock stars. She flipped her mindset in those years. Instead of feeling like a victim, she believed she was the one in control of them. If no one wanted to save her (if they all only wanted to use her) then she would be the one that used them. She let them take her out for expensive dinners, help her with money and pay for drinks, cigarettes, and cocaine. In exchange she put on the best performances of her life both in and out of the bedroom. Her act was so good that she almost believed it herself. She only picked up on the ones that wanted to party. She would help them procure drugs (and of course hook herself up), introduce them to the lifestyle and the glamorous world of late nights with famous people, at least until the fun ran out. If they stopped paying she stopped playing with them. If they started to want more than just fun she ghosted them: She wasn’t going to allow anyone to get close, and she had no interest in connecting with someone only to get hurt again. Her mantra was simple: she was just killing time until time killed her.

Cleo was extremely beautiful; she was dark and complicated and men loved to talk to her. She listened to them, told them what they wanted to hear. They found her intoxicating. They would go to great lengths to try to please her, but the more they tried the lonelier she felt, and her sadness grew larger than she could manage (no matter what she did to try to oppress it). Most of the men she found herself spending time with quickly realized how broken she was and moved on. By the age of twenty-nine Cleo was getting tired of being stuck in a cycle of hating herself, doing things that felt good, then feeling depressed and as low as anyone could feel. She developed bi-polar disorder and felt controlled by it.

Simon was alone in his lab.The world was now completely covered in pure desolation, and yet he continued to work, mostly because there wasn’t anything else to do. Once the earthly death sentence had reach America, it was multiplying faster than ever.It only took a couple of weeks to engulf every section of the country leaving only Simon’s lab at MIT unaffected.

Cleo was at the end of her rope. She couldn’t subsist the party lifestyle anymore; she was too sick; it no longer served its purpose of holding back the mental and emotional trauma. She knew something needed to change but she had no idea how to do it. One night she just gave up, she laid down on her bed and began to think. Initially her mind was all over the place thinking through every memory, talking herself through every problem life had thrown at her.Sometime late in the night after several days of lying there barely moving her mind cleared and she could feel something calming. It was fuzzy.She began to change into a lovely green glow and she could see and feel herself becoming bigger, infinite.

Simon was alone in his lab, staring at the fog, it was now creeping into his space. He had been staring at the mist in the large glass box for so long he had forgotten what the mist actually looked like outside of it.As it came closer he stared blankly at it, defeated, no longer thinking about how to control it. No longer caring about how to cure it from existing.In that moment he saw something beautiful. He saw something he hadn’t seen in the almost thirty years he had been studying it. He saw life. He saw it breathe.

Cleo saw all around her beautiful shades of grass, sage and dark skies with thousands of fuzzy lights. Patterns danced rhythmically around her, through her. She stood up and made out the face of a man. He looked tired, a little sad, and very handsome. She felt connected to him in a different way than she had ever been connected to anyone. It felt pure and real and she stood up and reached out to him.

Simon watched the mist swirl around him and he felt its presence. He saw it turn into a beautiful woman. Simone felt the sadness of it and he realized that he had been hurting it but also hurting for it. He became suddenly aware of how sad a lonely he was. He felt intoxicated by it and he reached out to touch Cleo. He swirled around her and she around him, their bodies ceasing to be corporeal. They were smoke, they were millions of blurry colored lights, a nebula of new life. They felt each other’s warmth and spirit and in what seemed a single moment (and yet somehow also an eternity) they knew each other. Cleo saw Simon’s desire for her, his obsession with trying to fix what was broken within her. Simon realized he had spent most of his life searching for her. As they became one with each other she no longer felt afraid of pain, she no longer blamed others for it but embraced it as something she had been hiding from. A deep sense of contentment and love came over them both and they relaxed into each other until one could not be detected from the other and no words needed to be spoken; no thoughts needed to be contemplated. The truth was now known. Time wasn’t lost; it didn’t exist. There was all the time in the universe now that it was whole again.

The end