Day 92 - Temporal Story

Temporal Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

You don’t need a pair of fangs to be a Time Vampire, but a sharp pair of allegorical teeth and a willingness to bite down doesn’t hurt either. Time is one of the most finite resources and therefore one of the most precious; ergo those that wish to steal it are not looked kindly upon. A Time Vampire’s activities, while bloodless, are certainly not without dangerous and sometimes deadly consequences. The Time Vampire is a deadly cutthroat, often sociopathic and unsympathetic to the plight of those from which it pitilessly steals from.

The worst part about being in contact with a Time Vampire is that the victim doesn’t often know what is happening.  There’s no real way to know that time is being taken. Most time thieving is a hidden and fairly untraceable activity. Some of the victims feel sickly or strange or believe something is amiss, but they seldom know what. They think or say things like ‘there isn’t enough time’ or ‘I wish I had more time in the day’. Little do they know – their time is slowly being drained by those that are unseen, the hidden thief of thieves, they that prey upon that which is ultimately most precious.

Time conceived as an arrow is an irreversible process – it forwards from past to present to future. There is no pause or rewind or return. There are the things that have happened and the things that are happening and those are set. The things that might happen are just theory.

If that is true then the Time Vampire has power over two things, that which is happening now and that which does not yet exist. A Time Vampire could concern themselves with the here and now and focus on the theft of current time, but there is no true value in that. Current time of the victim is the same current time of the taker, but current time is changed to the past almost instantly, so it’s almost impossible to steal. As soon as it has occurred it is gone, so the Time Vampire gets nothing extra, nothing special or bonus for it. The Time Vampire appears to exist in the present, and appears to be stealing the present, but what they are truly interested in taking is the future. The future is the only place where additional time makes any real difference. The future is what can still be used and what can still be lost. The future is a commodity, and like any commodity, there are those that will do anything to profit from it. And as there is no way of knowing just how much time is really left for a person in the future, there’s no way for the victim to know that some of it is now missing.

One way of looking at time is that it is only a way of looking at things, a humanly devised measuring stick to put things in their place and understand relations. Time is always moving forward and everyone gets a finite amount of time to work with. The trick is what you do with it.  A neat trick about Time Vampires is that when they steal time from another person, they can time jump themselves. Most people exist in a straightforward way; they are there every second of every day, one moment after the next. They use their allotted time up in a pretty straightforward fashion. The Time Vampire on the other hand has the unique ability to skip moments here and there and move ahead of everyone else’s curve. They slip in and out of time for mere nanoseconds. But nanoseconds add up. Vampires are traditionally thought to be immortal, but that’s just a construct put in terms that humans can understand to examine mortality and the human condition and fear of death. Time Vampires are no more immortal than other vampires, but they do have the ability to exist over a greater span of the time line. First and foremost their time jumping allows them to skip ahead and outlive any of those that are simply or ignorantly using their time reserves up in order. Secondly, any time they steal from their victims, only exists at a particular moment in space time that comes from the future. That future time can only be used in the future. It does nothing to expand or enrich the present, for the present is already occurring and is basically set just as much as any past. In order to live in that moment, and use that extra time, the Time Vampire must exist long enough to make it to said future moment. If they used their time up living moment to moment, they’ll die just like any other person would die. If time’s up, then time is up. If they want to use someone else’s moment in the sun, then they must skip ahead to it. How quickly they skip and how often are up to them. Some Time Vampires live over a fairly normal human life span. They lived their seventy-two years, but spread it out over seventy-seven, or eighty. Some don’t mind the gaps in history; they skip whole years at a time sometimes. Those that invest wisely always have money waiting when they get to the future. Their lives might exist over a hundred or more years. Still not immortal, but they do get to see more than their fair share.

Of course there are those that believe time happens all at once, so time jumping isn’t so much as moving forward as it is just simply understanding how to move from location to location. But for the purposes of the Time Vampires and what they steal and how they use it, it’s much simpler to think of it in terms of time as a line.

There are also Time Vampire Hunters of many sorts; some that want to return the stolen time and others that want the time for themselves, but that’s really a different story. The Time Vampire in general is incredibly difficult to detect, and incredibly difficult to kill. Part of the magic of time jumping is that they aren’t always there and unless surprised, they can make the jump just at the moment the hunter was about to strike, giving off the appearance of being incredibly nimble and dexterous.

Constant guard must be kept against anyone and anything that seemingly is out to waste or take your time. You never know when one of them is actually a Time Vampire and your life is quietly being stolen from you.