006: VIDEO | ACTION

[intheblanks]

[January first, and the new year's starting off with a beaut of a day. In case you missed it, the video display is tilted upward to a sky of perfect blue, then down, to golden sand and golden skin - winter has just about bleached him of a tan but his colouring has a natural aversion to pallor

Comments

[saidrepent]

[It's the first word of Chase's little speech that catches Raymond's attention, but even after it's clear he doesn't mean the same kind of "timekeeping" he's accustomed to, he listens in.]

How do you suppose the ticking fits into all this?

[intheblanks]

Are you looking for the apocalyptic conspiracy theories? Try the city guide, half of it could have been written by medieval monks.

[It took Chase nearly three years of City time, longer including the return trip home, to get around to reading the thing.]

[saidrepent]

No, and I already have.

Just curious as to your opinion of whatever...biological impacts it might have. Or has been known to have.

[intheblanks]

The only remarkable thing about the ticking is that we're all still aware of it. Which, I assume, is the point. It's not a normal response, but there's no clinical term for something getting under your skin.

[saidrepent]

Perhaps... [He'll mull over that later; for now, he's glancing down at his left wrist.] But I don't think it would be accurate to say there isn't something about this city that has a biological impact on our bodies' sense of time, perhaps less simple than not knowing the date.

In any case, considering the discrepancies between whatever dates everyone here has apparently been pulled from, I'm not sure if the exact year here is even relevant.

[intheblanks]

That was something like my point.

[He's not as dismissive as he sounds. As much as he'd like to be nonchalant about a fairyland full of monsters and comicbook characters - an absurdity in rational terms - any disinterest is feigned. Not always all that well.]

Whatever the objective of this place is, it doesn't want us feeling displaced as standard. Look at the effort to mimick what we're used to. Only one other planet in our solar system has approximately the same rotation cycle as earth. This place doesn't have a twenty-four hour cycle of light and dark by coincidence. It's lulling us between the shorter, sharper bursts where things get turned on their heads. If the clock's affecting anything, I wouldn't say it's our perception of time so much as reality.

[saidrepent]

Hm. [That's something worth thinking about.]

For those of us whose sense of time is more deeply intertwined with our sense of reality than others, though... [He shakes his head.] As far as I can tell, it's having the opposite effect.

[intheblanks]

You'd have to explain what you mean by that.