Stop!
Chapter 1 — Stop Moving
“Stop!” Jen’s thumb came down on the button at the side of the gleaming silver pocketwatch, and everything around her stopped. Even when she’d seen Carlos move from one side of the room to the other in an instant, she hadn’t quite believed it. But the watch was ticking along normally, and everything else was stopped. The sound of people living their lives still drifted in from outside the room, this thing clearly had a limited range, but Carlos stood there frozen with a cup of coffee halfway to his mouth.
She paced cautiously around the room, still not quite sure how this would work. He’d tried to explain, but she really wasn’t into all that science stuff and her mind had ended up just drifting off. It was when she had this amazing, high-tech gizmo to play with that she’d actually learn about how it worked. She walked over to her friend and waved a hand in front of his face, to which he didn’t react at all. She considered for a moment going into the bathroom and turning the watch off. Would he be surprised by empty space where there had been a stunning young woman a few moments earlier?
But Carlos had already shown off his invention by traveling across the room in the blink of an eye. He must be expecting her to do the same, which would make it quite hard to surprise him. And she really wanted to surprise him; not just out of general mischief, but because he always seemed to be in control of the situation, and she couldn’t resist the temptation to get one up on him for a change. Then an idea came to mind, but she had no idea if it was going to work. She reached up and carefully opened his fingers. It was like posing a mannequin, and he just stood there with an empty hand raised as she took the coffee cup away.
It took several minutes for the kettle to boil, and Jen paced nervously, wondering if the watch would run out of power more quickly if she was expanding her personal time-field to allow it to work. Would time just start flowing normally if she used it too much? Eventually the whistle came, and she walked back into the lounge to see Carlos standing exactly where she’d left him. She put the mug of hot chocolate into his hands, and carefully closed his fingers around the handle. She took a few seconds to look at her handiwork.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. It was quite nice being able to admire her friend’s body as well, without feeling like anyone was judging her. Carlos was a major geek, having stayed in college for as many years as was possible before going into teaching. But he wasn’t some pencil-necked nerd, or the sack of lard that some of his friends had turned into through spending all day staring at test tubes. He spent his weekends dressed up as a viking, swinging rubber swords at other well-muscled geeks. Jen had seen pictures from some of their events, and she firmly believed that the muscles he’d built by throwing himself into an activity he loved were much more attractive than the mass-produced fit bodies of the losers in her office with computer-generated diet and exercise plans.
She’d even wondered once or twice if there would be something special, quaint or primal, about curling up with a viking physicist in a tent of skins on one of his longer excursions. She hadn’t asked to try it, though. He was a joker, and he was her best friend. That was something too valuable to risk by letting herself focus too much on how how he looked in those rugged, previous-century clothes. He’d probably stink of sweat, too, and maybe not in a good way.
Jen was confident in her own appearance, but she had no idea if she’d be able to entice her friend even if she had the nerve to try. She was about average height, and just a couple of weekly donuts over average weight, but she tried to keep herself in shape. People had told her that they could get lost in her emerald eyes, but the guys who said that as often as not vanished like leprechaun gold the following morning. She had smooth skin, showing off her grandmother’s Chinese ancestry a little more than her mother had, and dark hair that hung straight down to the middle of her back.
She’d followed her own thoughts for long enough now. The chocolate would be cool enough to drink, so she returned to the position she’d been in before, and clicked off the switch on the watch. Carlos’s hand resumed its steady path to his lips, albeit now carrying a different mug of a different drink. Jen thought she saw a sudden ripple on the surface of the chocolate, but she could have just imagined that. She was sure that among the hordes of obsessive nerds in various sci-fi fan groups, there had been many pseudo-scientific papers written on what should happen to a moving cup if it’s switched with another one while time is stopped. She wondered for a second if the mug on the kitchen counter had jumped into the air a fraction, retaining its momentum from before the time stop. Right now, though, she was more interested in watching Carlos’s expression as he tasted his drink.
Carlos loved hot chocolate, but had started drinking coffee instead after one of his friends told him he was putting on weight. He knew it wasn’t true, and it was doubly obvious to Jen that his figure was about as close to perfect as a guy could get, but he’d decided to cut down on sugary drink anyway, to satisfy his friend. He took a long sip, then lowered the cup again to ask: “Did you do something?”
“Like what?” she grinned impishly. As if she could deny responsibility here.
“I don’t know, have you been drawing on my face or something? The way you’re staring, it seems like…” he paused a second, and half finished his drink in one gulp. “Well, I heard you activate the watch, so I know you’ve had at least a few seconds to do things that I couldn’t see. You moved maybe a couple of inches, and the watch was in your other hand, but I was half expecting you to be behind me, or something. Why do you keep looking at me like that?”
“That’s not the mug you had before,” she didn’t know if he could genuinely have not noticed, but somehow that blank gaze was even more annoying than the times he’d popped out of thin air to surprise her, “I got you a new drink. Wondered if you’d notice. Do you remember what you were drinking?”
“Uhh… chocolate? Certainly tastes like it. I started drinking it again today, you’re not going to get on my back about the amount of cream I have, are you?” Then he thought for a second, and continued as if he’d just realised, “And thanks for the top-up. Guess I was watching you intently to see what it looks like when someone vanishes. I didn’t even notice the change in weight.”
Jen started absent-mindedly nibbling on her bottom lip, unsure what to say next. She couldn’t believe that he could have completely failed to notice that his drink had changed. He must be trying to mess with her head, some kind of irony or postmodernism, or whatever he called it. It was fun at times, layer upon layer of nested in-jokes giving an extra intensity to their friendly banter. But sometimes she just wished she could be the one who knows what’s actually going on, just for a short time.
“Stop!” she thumbed the button again, and walked through into the kitchen. She picked up the mug of coffee, which thankfully hadn’t shed its contents due to any kind of conservation of momentum. A quick taste revealed that it was indeed incredibly bitter coffee, with just the barest hint of cream to soften the flavour without adding any unnecessary calories. He’d been so convincing when he said he’d started drinking the chocolate he liked again.
Then illumination dawned. Not knowledge, but at least a wild guess. She thought back to a time years before when they’d both been students. She’d been in the little flat that Carlos shared with Matt and Dodge, waiting for him to come home so that he could help her with some maths that had somehow become necessary on her sociology course. The three guys had a computer in the lounge area, connected to a small TV, so that they could watch videos or whatever. Jen had decided to look for something to watch, and had proved herself surprisingly lacking in self-control when it came to checking out the contents of the guys’ porn stash. She’d told herself that if Carl turned out to have a ton of images of Asian girls, or something like that, then it might be worth trying to drag the guy out of the friend zone.
She hadn’t found out what kind of girls he liked, because there was no way to tell what in the chaotic collection was his. But she’d found some short stories and comic strips that got pretty steamy pretty fast. Some of those had dealt with all kinds of science fiction devices, and she still had a copy of quite a few of them. One idea seemed to be that if you changed something subtly enough, a person’s brain would fill in the gaps to make it right, or something. It seemed like there was a whole genre of that stuff. It was ludicrous to assume that badly written internet erotica had predicted the effects of a time-stopping device in ways nobody could have foreseen, but it was the only thing that she could think of.
She’d switched Carlos’s drink, and he remembered that it had always been chocolate. She wondered just how much else he could get away with. She pondered for a second, and then went to rummage through her wardrobe. Would Carlos notice a sudden change of clothes, if he wasn’t expecting it? There was no way he could miss that, surely, but then she couldn’t see how it was possible for anyone not to notice that their drink had changed.
Jen already knew this experiment would be interesting, but she didn’t even suspect how far she would be willing to take it…