Irrelevant time

‘Why did you get a latte? You always have an Americano?’ Burton asked as he scooted into the spindly café chair and placed his satchel on the floor next to his foot.

‘It’s good to try new things, don’t you think?’ answered Marty.

Burton gave Marty a suspicious look. Marty had drunk an Americano every Friday since espresso machines had been invented. At least that’s how long it felt. He had never known his friend to drink anything else. They started every Friday with a coffee, before work, and ended it at the pub near the Burton’s office, since their first year as faculty. Haskins, the “new guy”, joined their ritual, for the pub portion at least, about ten years ago, and it had continued, unbroken, ever since. It was such an unwavering routine that Marty even came for a drink at the pub before his Mom’s funeral two years ago. Try new things, indeed.

‘What is really going on, Marty. You don’t like new things. You don’t even buy new shoes until water seeps up through the soles of the old ones. Why are you getting wild and “crazy” all of a sudden?’ Burton emphasized the word crazy with air quotes because he knew it irritated Marty, the psychologist. On more than one occasion, Marty had lectured him on using the inappropriate label for mental health disorders. This time, he didn’t even flinch when Burton said it. His friend must really be out of sorts.

‘I just really need to break up my routine,’ Marty cast his eyes about to see if anyone was eaves dropping then whispered, ‘I’ve been losing moments in my day. Like I am fast forwarding through my own movie.’

Burton shook his head in confusion. ‘You mean you’re forgetting things? Senility?’ laughing as he said it, to break up the serious tone, he added, ‘Welcome to the club. Last week I fed the dog three times, because I forgot I’d already done it. Good day for him.’

‘No, not like forgetfulness. You know how you pull out of your driveway to head to work and sometimes you arrive in the parking lot and realize you completely spaced out the whole trip? You don’t even remember driving?’

‘Yeah, that has happened to me a few times. You drive on autopilot. It’s just irrelevant time. When you have a function that you do repeatedly, your brain just skips to the end. Why? Did that happen to you today?’ Burton asked, sipping his coffee.

‘It happens every day, lately. Every. Day.’

Marty paused, letting the statement sink in.

‘Every day? Well, then you don’t need a new coffee. You need to find a new way to work. Take the bus, man.’

Exasperated, Marty dragged his hand down his face. ‘It’s not just the commute. It’s in front of the microwave when I am heating up my lunch. When I do dishes after dinner. When I brush my teeth at night. Any time I am not actively interacting with someone or focused on something, I just find myself at the end, with the task completed. As if my brain just couldn’t be bothered to participate.’

‘Have you seen a doctor about it?’

His question received a derisive stare as a response.

‘I know you are a psychologist, but maybe you should talk to a physician. There may be a physiological reason for it. I don’t know. Blood pressure issues? Maybe something more serious. Get checked out.’

Marty gave a quick nod and then said, ‘Fine, fine. I’ll do that, but maybe you can help me as well.’

‘How? I’m not a medical doctor.’

‘No, but you are using your work to reconstruct images from brain waves.’

‘In chickens.’

‘Close enough.’

‘Not even close. Chickens have a brain the size of a butter bean. We are just studying how they see a seed grain versus how they think about a seed grain. Very simple and only to help to develop AI determinants in memory formation, not to reconstruct a chicken’s existential thoughts,’ answered Burton, unconsciously shaking his head as he spoke.

‘But you could upscale, couldn’t you? You have the sensors…that’s what they are called, right? You could cover a shower cap in sensors and just monitor me for the weekend. As a favor. Just to see what my brain is processing when I have irrelevant time moments.’

Burton didn’t respond for several moments, just twisted his coffee cup around and around, slowly, like a merry-go-round while turning something over in his head.

Finally, when he snapped out of his thoughts he sighed then said, ‘On one condition.’

‘Okay?’

‘I get to call you Bird Brain for a month.’

***

‘Let me get this straight, you made him a hat with sensors that you put on chickens?’ Haskins asked, the glee playing across his face.

‘He asked for it,’ replied Burton before taking a gulp of his Belgian ale.

Haskins laughed like he’d just heard a good joke. Marty shot him a sour look for making the request sound ridiculous. He’d already explained his missing time issue to their third companion. Haskins didn’t see the problem with the phenomenon, as he’d said, ‘I pay good money to a guy named Rico to feel like that.’ For someone that found life, with all its variety and color, to be an experience, rather than an event to be documented and captured, a bit of time slip was no cause for concern. Marty suspected that if Haskins accidentally fell into one of his physics experiments and was vaporized his last words would be, ‘Cool, man.’

‘Doesn’t human experimentation require approval or some shit like that?’ asked Haskins, cramming several crisps into his mouth before adding, ‘I wouldn’t know. I only look at quarks.’

Burton winced and replied, ‘It’s not really an experiment. The sensors are passive, picking up the electrical signal of his brain and collecting them on a digital recorder. I’m not manipulating him in any way. I’m not sure it will even work. The analysis programming is all set up for transforming electrical brain activity from visual stimuli into an image we can see…for chickens. I suspect there will be too much activity from Marty to parse anything out. It will be noise, like feedback.’

Haskins raised his eyebrows. ‘So, no approval needed?’

Burton sighed. Marty could see that unapproved use of the equipment was giving Burton anxiety. Marty interjected, ‘I am offering my professional opinion on Burt’s transformation algorithms and equipment, if you like. No IRB approval necessary.’

Burton raised his eyebrows in some form of agreement and took another drink from his glass. Haskins let out another deep laugh and said, ‘Good luck with your chicken hat, Marty. I look forward to the results.’

***

‘Are you sure you weren’t watching a movie and just forgot about it?’ asked Burton.

Marty had worn the sensor laden hat all weekend and experienced three episodes of spacing out; one when he’d been driving to the grocery store, one while mowing the back garden, and the third when he made his dinner Sunday evening. Chicken, rice, and broccoli, just like every Sunday. Marty documented the time after he realized he’d had an event, to give Burton a time marker for the periods of interest. He’d returned the sensor hat, the digital recorder, and his time record back to Burton on Monday, a cumulative 20 hours of brain activity. They had agreed that he wouldn’t wear the sensor array while he slept or when he was naked or otherwise indisposed. As Burton said, ‘Let’s not traumatize my grad student with images of a middle-aged man on the toilet.’

The analysis took the entire week. Burton sent him an email letting him know that they were able to process the blank outs into three separate recordings. Now, at their Friday morning coffee, they were reviewing the analysis.

‘Here is where you get into the car and start driving,’ he said, pointing at the tablet displaying a grainy black and white version of Marty’s field of view from the driver’s seat of his car.

Now your brain activity starts to reach a plateau,’ continued Burton as he pointed at a black screen, ‘then it becomes active again, but at a much higher rate than before.’

Marty stared intently at the screen, expecting images of the road to return. Instead, he saw the pock marked surface of a desert. Pits in the landscape alternated with piles of rocky rubble. An occasional scrubby bush made an appearance. The perspective moved, as if he’d continued his drive to the store, but in Arizona instead of Hertfordshire.

‘That’s it for the first spell. The second is more interesting and confusing.’

Again, Marty could see a black and white grainy image, but this time of his garden and the top of his mower. It was mesmerizing in its utter monotony.

‘As before, your brain activity plateaus,’ he said as the image went blank, ‘Then it becomes hyperactive.’

Now they could see a line of people from above, like he was looking down on a queue at a bank or a shop, but they weren’t really people. The individuals in the recording were humanoid but had rolled shoulders and longer arms. Their necks were shorter and thicker, and their heads were topped with scale plates, rather than hair. Their overall appearance reminded Marty of Arnold Swarzenegger, if you were to compress him into a box; muscled and compact, in an uncomfortable way. A jammed up Lizard Arnold.

‘I don’t understand. What is this?’

Burton shook his head and said, ‘The third one is weirder.’

Again, the image started off with Marty’s activity – preparing chicken and broccoli – the image was his view of the pot on the hob. The screen went blank, then refocused on a plane taking off at night, lit up from underneath by lamps embedded in the ground. Marty stared intently. Not a plane. A ship? The ship ascended into the night sky, where a bright, cloudy star formation hung. The recording stopped and Marty and Burton just stared at each other. Finally, Marty said, ‘I don’t understand what is happening. Is my brain picking up a satellite signal or something? What are we seeing?’

Burton slowly shook his head and said, ‘I really was hoping you were going to tell me you had a Netflix movie playing on your phone and we just caught the interference. I don’t understand where the images are coming from. We should show Haskins. He might be able to tell us how a satellite signal might be impinging on your neural activity or interfering with your ability to form memories. He gets a lot of defense funding. I’m sure he’s seen weirder.’

Marty nodded his head in agreement and sat quietly for a moment thinking. Burton finally broke the silence, ‘I can also review the literature for other technology effects on neural patterns. I seem to recall a spate of studies around electromagnetic waves and sleep disruption. Maybe this is similar.’

Buoyed by the possibility of a logical explanation, Marty finished his Americano and wished Burton well until he saw him again at the pub that evening.

***

Haskins reviewed the three recorded clips for a fourth time, getting more serious and silent with each round. His beer remained untouched and he nervously drummed on the table with his fingertips. Marty was becoming increasingly agitated, not because of the repeated watching, but from the change in Haskins’ demeanor. As long as they’d known each other, his friend had never been upset, nervous, or distant. The resolute optimist, Haskins took everything in stride, making it seem like it was expected. Everything from parking tickets to a spot of melanoma he had removed last Spring all garnered the same response, ‘It could always be worse.’ At times, Haskins’ laid-back style irritated Marty, but now its absence made the world seemed off kilter, like a skinny Santa or a nun wearing lipstick. It just felt wrong. Marty was afraid to ask Haskins what he was thinking, that his impatience would upset his friend more. Apparently, Burton was even more impatient. ‘What is it, man? What do you think this is?’

Haskins sat back in his chair with a scowl on his face and picked up his beer. He chugged down half the pint, then answered pointing at the third recording image, ‘This is the Helix nebula. It is in the Aquarius constellation, about 650 plus light years away from Earth. It’s recognizable, even from this angle, because it is commonly referred to as the Eye of God. It looks like an eye, don’t you think?’

Both Marty and Burton nodded their heads, more in confusion than agreement.

‘We are looking at the nebula from a different perspective than what we see from Earth telescopes, whether terrestrial or orbital. What this tells me is that this view is from the other side of the Helix nebula, meaning that this image has traveled more than 650 light years to get here,’ pursing his lips as if he was about to say something distasteful, he continued, ‘To arrive and be captured on your recorder, those images would have to travel at the speed of light for nearly 700 years.’

‘So…its alien?’

‘Of course, but you’re missing the point, Marty. It wasn’t picked up by SETI or some amateur astrology enthusiast. It was signaled through your mind.’

Marty felt incredibly stupid at the moment. He wasn’t a dumb man. He nearly always completed crossword puzzles, got the punch line of a joke before everyone else, hell, he even understood French films. But now, with Haskins was staring at him like the answer was grotesquely obvious, he felt like he’d just heard a string of random words. Burton interrupted Marty’s confusion with an outburst, ‘What are you saying, Haskins?!’

Sighing, Haskins swallowed the remainder of his beer and leaned in, as if revealing a conspiracy. ‘I’m saying that I think Marty is quantumly entangled with a creature 700 light years away. The energy that is flowing across his synapsis is the same, but opposite of the energy in this other organism, like an instantaneous signal they both share. You,’ he said pointing at Burton, ‘have recorded that signal and used your software to interpret it into a visual image, which gives you a simultaneous view into the mind of another being.’

‘So, what do I do with that?’ asked Marty, a hard knot forming in the pit of his stomach.

Haskins stood up from his seat and picked up his backpack, a grave looked etched into his face. ‘Keep it to yourself, Marty. Every military on the planet…maybe every planet…would not hesitate to pick you apart to find out how quantum entanglement communication can be harnessed.’

Slinging his backpack over his shoulder, Haskins walked out of the pub, lit a cigarette, and disappeared into a crowd of students wandering past. Marty and Burton sat quietly for a long while, then Burton stood, tossed back the remainder of his beer, and similarly left. Marty remained at the table, considering the gravity of Haskins final statement while he pushed his glass around for a while. Abandoning the remainder of his drink, he picked up his bag and moved to the pub exit. As he left, he cast a look back at their table and realized that his Friday routine would now permanently change. Perhaps that disruption would be enough to keep the irrelevant time at bay.