by Zach Smith
“You need to work out more,” said Dr. Gustov. “Half an hour, three times a week. Get sweaty, get that heart pumping. You could stand to lose twenty pounds, and your blood pressure will go down to where it needs to be.”
“Doc,” said Edward Cresswell. “I’d love to do that, but I just don’t have the time. If you can give me an extra hour or two a day, I’d gladly work out.”
“Actually I can help you with that,” said Dr. Gustov.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I got a brochure here. It’s not really medical but it could help.”
He handed the brochure over.
Edward began to read it out loud.
“The Dechronozation Chamber. Need some extra time? For a small fee Dechronozation LLC can give it to you. Our patented chambers allow its users to experience one hour of time in one minute.” He stopped reading. “How does it work?”
“I have no idea,” said Dr. Gustov.
“Do you have one?”
“I do, and yes it does work. I get more sleep, time to work out, time to do things I wouldn’t otherwise have time for.”
“This can’t be real,” said Edward.
“It is, believe it or not.”
#
After that doctors visit Edward went to the Dechronozation showroom. The cheapest models cost about eight grand and looked a bit too much like coffins. They were meant specifically for sleep.
Others were bigger, similar to Japanese pod hotels: a bed with enough room to sit up, a TV/DVD player for entertainment, and a light to read by. Internet, cellphones, and cable did not work inside the chamber when it was on.
The salesman took Edward into the demonstration room. He set the timer for fifteen minutes, while they chatted about the new technology.
“The chamber has to be isolated from the world,” said the salesman. “It’s not as though the Dechronozation Chamber is a time portal.”
“Can I go in and out as I please?” asked Edward.
“Not exactly. There is a time delay between turning the chamber off and the door unlocking. It takes five minutes inside, so that time can sink up with the outside.”
“What if the power goes out?” asked Edward
“There’s a battery back up. If the power goes out it will shut down the machine automatically, and an alarm goes off when it’s unlocked.”
Right on cue, the alarm in the chamber went off.
When they left, Edward looked at the clock, no time has passed at all, and outside the same cars were still waiting at the light outside the window. But it still all seemed like a highly orchestrated trick, it was just too good to be true.
There were Luxury Models as well, as big as a studio apartment, with an internal septic system that could be flushed when the chamber was turned off. But that model was fifty thousand dollars. If price was no object an entire house or mansion could be set up as a Dechronozation Chamber, but Edward couldn’t afford anything like that.
He ended up going with the Model A Deluxe.
#
Edward watched as the chamber was installed in his house. It wasn’t cheap, but if it could do as advertised, or as he thought he had experienced in the showroom, it would be well worth it.
The Model A Deluxe was the size of a small college dorm room: a bed, TV, small desk, power outlets, a little college boy fridge, enough room to stand and sleep. They built it into the smallest room in his house.
Before the drywall went up there were pipes clocks and gauges mounted to the walls, almost reminiscent of an iron lung.
“You have any questions?” asked the head contractor who installed it.
“Does it work?”
“Yes sir, spent an hour in there myself a minute ago.”
“Really? Didn’t even notice.”
“That’s the point,” said the contractor.
Edward smiled and rubbed his hands and tried to get the workers out of his house so he could put his new toy to use.
He picked up his copy of “A Thief of Time” that had been on his bedside table for too long, walked into the Dechronozation Chamber, and closed the door. It still had that “new boat” smell from the fiberglass interior and he assumed with time it would either go away or he would get used to it.
The outside clock read 3:35 when he went into the Dechronozation Chamber. He set the timer on the door for one hour, he didn’t need to be in there too long. It was his first solo trip into the fourth dimension, he was just trying it out. He could have set the timer for as long as twelve hours, but one hour was enough.
He thought of working out while inside the chamber, maybe doing some sit-ups or something, but he figured there would be time later for all of that, and soon was lost in the words of Tony Hillerman.
There was a click, and a low whirring noise, that quickly turned white bleeding into the surroundings and became hardly noticeable.
He looked down at his phone. He had lost reception and connection to the internet, and the clock on the home screen read 3:37. He put the phone down, picked up his book and continued to read where he had left off.
An hour later there was an alarm and a click that told him the chamber was deactivated.
He looked at his phone. At first, it said 4:35, then when the reception came back read _ _:_ _ and then 3:36.
When he looked out his bedroom window he saw the truck from the installation team still in the driveway getting ready to leave.
#
Edward started making his way through his collection of books and DVDs picked up with good intentions and a dollar at library sales, that he never had the time at home to enjoy with life getting in the way.
For an hour or two after work, in the middle of the week, Mr. and Mrs. Cresswell would spend long romantic weekends in the slow time room with a bottle of champagne, a dish of oysters, and a couple of rom-coms. All Edward had to do was set the max time six times, and they would have three full days to themselves in a little over an hour.
But the real draw of the Dechronozation Chamber had to do with his off-kilter circadian rhythms.
He was not a morning person, every morning he would wish he could crawl back into bed, looking forward to nothing more than getting back home and back in bed and call it an early night. Of course, those early nights never seemed to work out, he had too much to do, and his early nights turned into typical nights, and then late nights and the mornings were that much harder to get started.
That all changed with the Dechronozation Chamber. When it was getting late, he could pop into that little room with a book or video game, and stay up until three or four in the morning, and still get to sleep by ten.
If he tossed and turned all night, and didn’t fall asleep until late, and didn’t want to get up the next morning, which was most mornings, he could pop into the Dechronozation Chamber and grab an extra hour or two of sleep without being late for work.
#
Work had been piling up at the office, it was the busy time of year, and Edward had nearly a thousand pages of data to process for one of his clients. He may have had nearly all the time he wanted at home … but work was a different story.
The data was loaded onto a thumb drive after work and brought home. He took his laptop into the Dechronozation Chamber. After fifteen minutes and two pots of coffee, Edward got through all the paperwork.
“This was a tall order Cresswell, I can’t believe you got it done in time,” said his boss. “What’s your secret?”
“Can’t tell you,” he replyed with a Cheshire grin.
Eventually, he did tell.
“I don’t believe it,” said Mr. Biggs
Edward brought Mr. Biggs over to his house to show him the Dechronozation Chamber. He had Mr. Biggs leave his cell phone outside the chamber to clarify that only a minute passed while they chatted about work for an hour.
“I still don’t believe it,” said Mr. Biggs.
But he did.
#
A few months later, a couple of Dechronozation pods appeared in the break room. Everybody had an hour lunch, and now up to five one hour breaks while only eating up a few minutes of the company’s time. Productivity went up ninety percent.
By that point the Dechronozation Chambers were better known, even hotels were showing up that rented slow time rooms charging by the minute. The technology had gotten even better by that point, and with improvement to the technology, they could condense a full three hours into a minute.
Dechronozation LLC stock rose to monolithic levels.
Everybody from celebrities to CEOs, to middle management, to the grunts and even the Lumpenproletariats were using the facilities to get a little downtime and a little personal time in an epoch when everybody wanted everything yesterday.
Back at Edward’s office, some of the cubicles had been converted over to Dechronozation Chambers. Various employees could work in a slow time capsule until their daily tasks were finished, and then go home, and stay on call for the rest of the eight hour day. It was a good set up… for some of the employees. Despite showing Mr. Biggs how to slow down time, Edward wasn’t among the staff that received the new cubicles.
#
It seemed as though nothing would ever stop Dechronozation LLC… until the bodies started showing up.
The deaths were always on the news and sensationalized.
Due to a power surge, a man named Jose Buendia spent a hundred years in solitude one afternoon. A lot of money was given to his family to keep it quiet, but the story still got out.
Another man died in a fire. Fire doubles in size every ninety seconds, and the five-minute door lock delay and an errant candle turned the Dechronozation Chamber into a Dechronocrematorium. Afterword the company recommended wax burners instead of scented candles.
A few people had heart attacks and if the paramedics were able to get to them sooner they may have survived.
Soon you had to sign waivers. Time was apparently not only a precious commodity but a dangerous one.
These incidents were few and far between. Millions of people had used Dechronozation Chambers, and less than a hundred had died as a direct result.
The bigger problem was a study that revealed people who used Dechronozation Chambers heavily were dying at younger ages. The study did not offer a reason why, and only suggested that the contraption was somehow killing people prematurely.
Apparently, the obvious reason was so obvious that people either ignored it or forgot it in their fear of death. People aged inside the Dechronozation Chamber according to their observed time, while the outside world aged in real-time.
Some politicians ignored this fact and pegged their aspirations on fear and the slowly growing body count. Seven years after the Dechronozation Chamber was invented, they became illegal.
#
A government official came to Edward’s house to oversee the removal of his old Model A Deluxe Chamber that he had spent nearly fifteen years inside over less than six nonconsecutive months.
“Look, man,” said the official. “I don’t really care what you do in your own home, but these things are dangerous, we are removing it for your own good.”
Edward didn’t say anything, as he handed over the check for the removal, for which legally he had to pay.
“Think of it this way,” said the official. “Benjamin Franklin put it best when he said: ‘Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise.’”
Edward’s response to the official earned him another fine.
Zach Smith is a writer of creative non-fiction and short fiction in a variety of genres from the suburban Philadelphia area. Recent stories of his have appeared in Grandpa’s Deep Space Diner and New Pop Lit. He is currently working on publishing three story collections: Clouds Over Pancake Mountain, Tales Along Turtle Heart Road, and Realms Beyond Midnight World: A VHS Mix Tape. You can find links to some of his other stories and obscure reviews at:
theobscuritysymposium.wordpress.com.