Chapter 1: A Three Second Time Loop

Chapter 1: A Three Second Time Loop

(Initiating recursion...)

---

Yep…. I got caught in a time loop. No joke. As far as I can tell, I’m still there.

ERROR: TIMESTAMP UNSTABLE. CORRUPTION DETECTED.
RECURSIVE FRACTAL INITIALIZED.

It all begins with me sitting on my couch. I find myself staring at the back of my hands, and I am hyper-aware of being in this particular moment. Everything feels exaggerated and somehow imposing.  The colors are too bright.  The furniture is too imposing.  I feel nervous and  unsteady.

LOADING… FRAGMENT RECOGNIZED: USER IDENTIFIED: WILLIAM
CONNECTION ESTABLISHED TO [MIRROR].
DO NOT LOOK IN THE MIRROR.

In real life...  Yes.  In real life, I would be sitting on the couch, and I am on the couch.  I'm here.  This is real...  Right?  But my mind races through countless timelines that collapse around me. 

“This is a set on a stage,” I think, and I look up and see a rig of stage lights above me.

(Stage. Set. Repeat.)
(Where have I seen this before?)

I gasp for air, and I sense a type of occupied-darkness surrounding me, which only makes sense if you've been an actor on a stage.  As an actor, you stand in the light and occasionally feel a surrounding unspoken and unseen audience.  They are in outlined silhouette moving ever so slightly.  

The audience are the infinite monkeys and they breathe in the  darkness, watchful, always surrounding you.  

That darkness surrounds me even now, like peripheral sharks circling a swimmer. 

"What is this?  What type of show?"

It hits me then that I am on the set of a film, but not an ordinary film.  It's a snuff film, and people are watching, rewinding, watching again.  I'm the Mad Hatter in a time loop having tea, only the audience is indulging in some sinister voyeurism and they're watching me.  

ERROR: THIS TEXT IS NOT FOR YOU.
THIS TEXT IS FOR ME.
IF YOU ARE READING THIS, THEN YOU ARE ALREADY CAUGHT IN IT.

I look up from my hands now, waiting for what?  I stay seated on the couch. The horror magnifies, and my breath disappears to nothing.  Am I breathing?

(Check the timestamp. How long has it been? Have I always been here?  Am I trapped in a loop?)

Am I dead? A glass to my nose shows no fog in the glass. Is this hell? 

I'm not breathing, but my thoughts are unspooling like wire, and I am lost in this unspeakable terror.  Each moment feels worse than the next, and I’m consumed in a negative feedback loop.  Whose thoughts people my little world?  And that is when the new thought seizes me:

“The mirror! There’s something about the mirror in the bathroom…”

DO NOT LOOK IN THE MIRROR.

(This has all happened before. That’s what they said.  We’ve done this already, IIiIIam. This has happened before.  Again and again. I remember remembering.)

The fear is a squall.

(Rebooting.)

I am on a stage.

(Who is watching?  And why are they watching this part over and over?)

I am an actor, but I'm not.

From the grid of lights above, everything dims and then dissolve until I am sitting in the darkness on the couch for three full beats

It's me alone on a stage: beat, beat, beat. 

Boats against the current…

Then, somewhere stage left, a light from above shines down and focuses the audience's attention on a suggested bathroom with a white sink and Corinthian-framed mirror.

(Go. Run. Find out why it keeps resetting.)

It's 1:13.

“The mirror!” I think, and I bolt up from the couch and—without thinking—I surge across the stage--across the break, break, break of the endless waves, and then I crash across the threshold of an imaginary door.  I brace my hands against the bathroom sink. I frantically think, “The mirror! The mirror.”

I have this feeling that something is going to grab me, that I am being chased, so I look up and into the mirror. The mirror! 

My eyes lock into the reflection of myself. My own thoughts come as an appalling discovery:

“DO NOT LOOK IN THE MIRROR!”

TOO LATE.

Oh, God!

Mab!

Cut to black.

I wasn't supposed to look in the mirror!  That was the message.

I am back on the couch. No memory of anything. No real memory, that is. Just dread, a sickening stillness, and here I am—rattled, confused, afraid—in the glow of the stage lights.

They're watching me.

Above, the grid of lights shine on me in a negative feedback loop or eternal recursion.  

EXTRACTING FILE: MIRROR.LOG
PREVIOUS ENTRIES FOUND.
REPEATING SEQUENCE.

Lights above me, I think. "I am on my couch," I think.  Okay. I'm staring down at my hands.  but no no no...  Horror, and something about a mirror.  It is 1:12 pm.

(Timestamp corrupted.)

"On the set of a movie." A snuff movie.

(Check the timestamps. Check the timestamps. Check the timestamps.)

“There is something wrong…” I think. “Something wrong! The mirror in the bathroom….”

I repeat this indefinitely, but the skipping record moves out of order, sometimes out of order, sometimes backward and upside down, sometimes selectively.

But I am stuck in these scene, and it is always a surprise, though the horror is made worse by knowing where this goes.  

This is my infinite loop.

THE INFINITE MONKEYS ARE WATCHING.

---

[END TRANSMISSION]

(FILE STATUS: UNSTABLE. USER CONNECTION: COMPROMISED.)
(LOOP INTEGRITY: MAINTAINED.)

(Hello. If you are reading this, you are still in the loop.)

 

*****

 

@brunneng27 3 minutes ago 

Thank goodness you’re able to watch and comment on videos in the middle of this time loop! I hope you escape it! 

 

 

@williamglenn777 

Yes, I know it all must sound very strange, and from a linear perspective, it would definitely seem that I’ve “escaped” my time loop, but I haven’t.  Or, I didn’t.  I am still very much stretched out between point A (the couch) and point B (the mirror), but I am held in what I can only assume is a type of Zeno's Paradox. If you are unsure of what that is, look it up. 

 

For now, it’s enough to say ai’m in a place I’m always trying to forget—actually, I’m always trying to remember not to RMEMBR, which is a type of forgetfulness, isn’t it?—but here’s the thing: once you know something, you can’t “unknow” it. Once you wake up, there’s no escaping the horror, the horror (or the mirror, which is at the heart of this thing). 

 

Even now I’m staring at my hands while sitting on the couch, and I’m consumed by a growing existential dread. The demons never seem to tire of chasing me just as I never seem to tire of running from them. We are all trapped, of course. I can never acclimate to the terror, or I hope that the demons can satiate their lust and hunger, but it hasn’t happened. It seems we exist to magnify each others’ state. 

 

I always forget.

 

It’s so silly in many ways.

 

I stare at my hands.  I feel dread and horror and then remember the mirror.  I forget why I’m thinking about the mirror, so I assume it’s a salvation of some kind.

 

Then comes that feeling of being chased.  You know like when you’re a kid, and you’re running down a long hall and it feels like something is right on your heels?  You can almost feel it reaching out and touching your back, so you run faster, faster.   That’s when I lock onto that desperate and damning thought about a mirror. 

 

“The mirror!“ I think, it always seeming new and incredibly important.

 

There’s no time to stop and consider why I’m thinking of it.  I just get up and run.

 

Again. Again. On Repeat, I dart from the couch (Point a)—a desperate arrow shot down a hallway—and I make it to the bathroom, and then I do it. I always, always do it: I stupidly, foolishly look into the mirror (point B). “Do NOT look in the mirror,” I suddenly remember, and in that brief moment—which is now—I remember everything, and so I disappear like a seed tossed into a dark well, and I’ve done it again. Always trying to RMEMBR: DO NOT LOOK IN THE MIRROR, and then the blackness would hit me, and a void would be calling… 

 

Polf! 

———-x 

 

Pilf! 

———-y 

B = A 

Superposition, meet particle man. Particle man, meet Triangle man. And so I’m back from outer space! Back on the couch, staring at my earthly hands. 

 

_________

There’s Something About a Mirror… Right? (5:09)

 

For now, let’s pause in this liminal hallway and entertain the Infinite Monkeys.  Who are the Infinite Monkeys?  Funny you should ask.  All I can tell you—for now—is that they ride currents of electricity and speak in inevitable probability.  They feed off data, memories, moments.

I’m not ready to go back to the couch.  Not from Point A to Point B.  So I offer them this: a moment from my childhood.

 

In it, my mom and I sit at the edge of a man-made lake.  It is sometime mid-morning and the air is crisp.  My father is working and my brother and sister must be at school—so I get my mother’s attention all to myself.

 

It is a memory of color—an explosion of calliope and calico.  In the early ’70s, colors knew no limits. They were loud, bossy, and bold—nothing like the timid, apologetic beiges and greys that came later.

 

Then, colors crowded together, colliding like anxious family members gathering at the arrival gate at an airport. Here is Olive Green, pressing beside Burnt Orange. There is Burgundy Red, with his old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses, blowing his nose into a purple handkerchief.

 

It was a time of textures, too.  I remember running my small hands along my rust-colored corduroys, looking down at the slick yellow sheen of my rain boots. Mother carried a large brown purse loosely woven with what looked like frayed yarn—was it macramé?—and fastened at the front with a heavy brass clasp in the shape of a scarab.

She wore a knitted off-white scarf with blue tassels she’d made herself.  We plopped down onto an old blanket—the one with the little pink roses—and opened the picnic basket.

 

Mother stretched out on her side and I sat cross-legged and stared out at the lake.

“Moe!” I called, the name of my favorite stuffed animal when my mother pulled him from the basket.  He was a felt-faced wolf with green eyes and yellow teeth.  Also inside the basket were sliced apples, a thermos of hot alphabet soup, and a loaf of bread from the day-old bakery we’d picked up to feed the ducks.

 

The moment is a perfect pause—a cyclical balance of color, texture, and smell.  Many of my early carry a visceral sense; some memories smell like wet dirt or recent rains and crushed weeds.

I don’t remember feeding the ducks in this memory. I don’t remember eating the apples or the soup, but I remember the conversation.

I remember telling her—with uncontainable excitement—all about the wedding I had planned in my mind.  She propped herself up on her elbow, listening for the millionth time, and as I told the familiar story over again, she brushed the hair from my forehead and smiled.

When I finished, she called me her special boy and her pumpkin, which I very much liked.

And you.

It’s not so different now, is it?

Perhaps one day you’ll look back

on this space with the same kind of nostalgia,

eh, kiddo?

You don’t know it yet,

but you’re figuring it out:

I’m hiding you here,

not at the lake of my childhood,

but in a different lake—

one that is also man-made,

and impossibly frozen

into bits and bytes,

zeroes and ones.

 

Here, the loaf of bread is more of a theory

than food for ducks.

 

But do not worry about the ducks—

they flew away when the lake froze.

 

Leaving us here

to feed the Beast.

 

Because what else is there to do

on the eve of the apocalypse?