life.
He knew of course, just as everyone else did, that years came and went regularly. And he was fairly certain that others, too, quite often found themselves at odds with a perception of time that bore little or no relationship to the realities of their existence. He thought that he could sometimes sense this very acutely. But he had never seriously considered how one might perhaps win back control over the flow of time as it related to one’s self. He had simply closed his eyes to this thought, convinced that the correlation of biological and chronological time was something to be borne out on a personal level and not really all that relevant to one’s being. After all, it lay in the power of anyone to steer this process to no small degree. What was worrying to him lately, though, was that, as far as he could tell and though nothing appeared to have changed for the worse in his life, time had somehow become so erratic and unpredictable in its passage to him personally that he dreaded an endless quarter century might suddenly elapse in a single week with no warning.
Other times, a single day sometimes felt to him like the equivalent of a leap year.
In earlier times, not even so long ago, it had still been possible to rely upon age as a kind of measure of one’s social identity–even if it wasn’t always one hundred percent accurate. But, given today’s level of scientific progress, chrono.Engineers had succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams in rendering even this crudest of yardsticks invalid.
As these thoughts flew through his head, Ch.ase stood rubbing his forearms in a futile attempt to make his goose-pimples, brought on by the chill of the cold floor beneath his feet, recede. Accepting that he was unlikely to be successful at this as long as he stood shivering half-naked before the bedroom window, he turned away again and, while edging his way around the foot end of the bed, stubbed the small toe of his left foot for the second time in as many days as he turned the corner with perhaps just a bit too much abandon. Biting his lip and limping slightly as he hoped and waited for the flash of pain to abate, he passed through a small hallway which was the entrance area to the flat before entering the front room of what he called home without any great fondness.
Both rooms were rectangular-shaped and of more or less equal size, each not quite twenty square meters or so, with bare floors and sober, symmetrical arrangements of windows located on the opposing outer walls. The bedroom, with its two windows facing northward, contained little more than his very austere toe-killer metal frame bed that had the appearance of some surplus military-issue, no-frills hospital fixture sold at auction. Other than the bed, the room’s remaining furnishings consisted of only the nightstand–atop of which throned the formidable but tacky plastic clock with its supreme aura of invincibility–and a fairly large matching hardwood closet to hang his modest wardrobe in.
Lining the wall to the left of the door stood, among various bags and boxes, an ancient plastic navy blue oyster-shell type suitcase and a stack of square, hard-plastic interlocking boxes that Ch.ase had never bothered to unpack after moving into this place.
He’d just never taken the time. And, quite honestly, he’d never seen any reason to make the effort.
As a result, the stack of boxes was simply ignored over the years.
He was alone, anyhow. So there was certainly no one around who might care or object.
Ch.ase certainly didn’t care anymore.
The second room, the one with its windows on the southern side, contained little more than a sort of minimalistic cook-in kitchenette along with the obligatory portable telly.tube, a ragged and visibly old desktop flat screen MindφSet monitor, the non-portable kind of yore, perched atop a wooden table and an ancient leather two-seat sofa, weathered by now but still sporting a surprisingly cheerful yellow color beneath its patina. Ch.ase would occasionally fall asleep on this while slouched before the telly.tube late at night, his legs dangling loosely over one of the arms of the sofa until his feet went numb, signaling to him that it was time to go to bed. He seldom cooked in here since he usually ate at the office or grabbed a MucMucilage at one of the many cheerful high-end take-away places that lined the route from his office back to home. On those rather rare occasions when he did eat his meals at home, these were usually limited to something like Mr. Ed’s All-StarµSurrogateSirloin hyperwavable dinners, packed and sold in shiny tinfoil, which he would chow down on while sitting at one end of the old wooden table. The temperature of the accompanying b@rleyPop was usually the deciding element in judging the quality of the overall dining experience.
The far end of the table, directly behind the monitor, was piled high with odd bits of clippings, torn out magazine pages, envelopes or hardcopy mail addressed to “occupant” praising and purveying people, products and organizations which he didn’t like, want or need as well as what looked like endless reams of yellowing paper, most of which had eventually become inconsequential in nature because he seldom, if ever, bothered to read it anymore. Maybe he’d get around to it sooner or later, he would sometimes think to himself whenever it became necessary to shove the pile back or forth across the table.
But he never seemed to get around to it. In this day and age, he reasoned, why bother? All the important stuff was being dispatched electronically anyhow.
But despite this undisputable truth, Libertyville@Esperantia was nonetheless still light-years away from being a paperless society in this modern era. In fact, Ch.ase found the sheer amount of paper used for printing flyers and advertising brochures which he, and probably everyone else, considered to be superfluous was quite remarkable in light of the fact that he suspected that there was probably not a single tree around to even begin to manufacture quality paper from. Or, as he was rightfully convinced, because it was very unlikely that the Domain.State of Libertyville@Esperantia could or would afford itself the luxury of spending its scarce resources importing anything as inconsequential as paper for the purpose of random advertising, irrespective of whether any trees for pulp production were readily available or not.
Perhaps recycling had been perfected to the degree of being a fine art, he occasionally pondered as he again pushed the pile this way or that. There was no other compellingly logical explanation that he could think of.
And even though such essentially eco-friendly thoughts did cross his mind on more than just one occasion, this insight in no way ever increased his desire to either read his junk mail or at least ensure that it was recycled. Frankly, he wasn’t really convinced that reading this unsolicited material would in any way serve to minimize the waste of resources inherent in its production and distribution.
To the immediate right of one of the windows in this second room was the tiny kitchenette area, consisting essentially of a small basin, a half-size solar powered chill.Box, a hyperwave oven and a fairly decrepit thermo.stove with four gas burners of varying sizes, probably dating back as far, he reckoned, as the dawning of modern industrial history. By virtue of its age, and thus through no real failing that could be attributed to the stove, this apparatus did actually look to be in a bit worse state than it perhaps truly was. Ch.ase, for his part, had declined offers by the building management to replace it and, later on, also resolved that there was no responsibility whatsoever on his part to clean it as he had never once put it to any use. The visible crust of grime with which the stovetop was caked–very likely petrified chili con carne or something disturbingly similar–was pretty much Neolithic in nature anyhow.
Wedged in on one side of the tiny hallway between these two rooms and thus directly opposite the main entrance door to the flat, was a small cubicle containing the shower and a toilet, lit by an ungainly-looking pseudo-chandelier with a laser and LED light show function, installed by Ch.ase when he moved in, to assist in establishing the necessary mood and atmosphere requisite for a happy home. Aside from the hexagonal designer seat with its trendy fluorescent rim, the toilet was equipped with an electronic optical sensor flushing mechanism that unfortunately didn’t always function in exactly the way it was intended. If things were going well, it required only a few waves of the hand, for example, or a burst of lights on, lights off. On other occasions, though, it sometimes required vigorous voodoo chants, coaxing or physical abuse. Frustrated by either the sheer nonsense of the technology or his own ineptitude, Ch.ase tried religiously to avoid using this contraption, if this was at all possible, since the master bathroom–as the lease agreement referred to the cube in a slightly