Untitled II
Eros smoked a cigarette as he looked down at the Grand Canyon beneath him. Sitting on a plateau on the north face of the canyon, most of the other face was visible to him as the sun arose. The density of the rock formations and the eons that had been required to shape them provided a direct and neat contrast with the instantaneous nature of the wind swirling around. And, of course, the speed with which anything fell... The millennia lay exposed before him in the strata; almost all of human history was represented graphically a few feet behind a potentially almost immediate departure from any individual human history. Eros contemplated how long it would take someone to reach the bottom from near where he sat: let's see, that's 9.8 meters per second squared, and we're about 1.2 kilometers up -- the wind speed could vary, but probably not as wildly as one would think, say from 10 to 20 kilometers per hour today -- so terminal velocity would probably be around 190 kilometers per hour with normal air resistance ...
The thought trailed off; he realized that there in front of him lay a more direct way of bypassing chronological measurement of time than any stimulant man might ever synthesize.
Eros looked as he usually chose to in modern days: about thirty, male, well-muscled but not bulky, lightly tanned with dark hair, and on that particular day he fancied a small, thick mustache. He looked vaguely Italian, French, or Spanish, and spoke English in an American dialect with a slight and indistinguishable European accent. He had on full-length black slacks of medium thickness and a pair of East German army boots over grey dress socks, which were just thick enough to avoid chafing. He wore no shirt.
Around an hour later, Eros was still smoking, and thinking. Obviously, he was then smoking a different cigarette, but the tenor of his thoughts remained close to what had passed before. It was a Sunday morning, turning towards noon, with little to no clouds. It was pretty. For all you impressionable kids out there, the God of Love smokes American Spirits. Of course, he's not about to develop cancer from inhaling a little carbon monoxide. the real issue, he thought, is that most humans suffer heart failure at the start of similar plans, which makes the whole thing rather useless. and if one of them didn't, cratering is such an unaesthetic end. things speed up until they stop dead, but even a more sudden stop than that would be preferred. perhaps doing it for temporal reasons would negate their instinctive fear, though. He wondered whether pilots on large airplanes ever had such thoughts on a regular basis; after all, they had a good 10 kilometers to benefit from. It just didn't seem quite as compressed as the possibility before him, as there was no earth beside but only below. He knew astronauts didn't; being removed from the attachment of gravity, at least on a personal basis, would make this sort of perception of time abstracted and unreal. it's a shame depressed stockbrokers and the like, jumping off of office buildings, could never get this experience -- even if they weren't slammed into the side of the concrete and glass by the winds around the top of their skyscrapers, the transitory nature of those constructions obviates the perception one could gain here -- all skyscrapers can speak of is their failure at permanence. silly humans. no, the issue here is one of the termination of such a procedure -- the use of some other means to escape the loop that the natural termination presents. the anticipation would be heightened with such certainty removed.
A young man, well tanned, walked up to him. He looked around twenty-three, with two shallow scars cut vertically down either cheekbone, heightening the leanness of his face. He wore plain blue jeans and a white t-shirt with no design. He was of medium height and slender.
"Hey, my name's Ned. Nice, isn't it?"
"Eros. Yes."
"Invites the question, as they say."
"Indeed."
"Good day for it." Ned paused. "About how long would it take, you think?" he asked politely.
"I figure around 15 and a half seconds. There wouldn't be time for the wind to really figure into it."
"Wouldn't be time. That's good." Pause. "No, I mean that."
"The issue, of course, is the conclusion." Eros went on.
"Oh, of course. Naturally." Ned was cheerful. "I have a gun, if you'd oblige me."
Normally, Eros would've considered fucking the young man -- he was fairly attractive, and the fact that he was dealing directly with the temporal anomaly in front of them, not just the physical formation of geography, made an arousing perversity -- but he knew the young man would orgasm anyway when he died.
"So I'm going to hit you at the last possible second before impact. ?" Eros made it halfway between a question and a statement.
"You got it."
"You know, there's probably a fair bit of wind interference there, not to mention the delay you'd have anyway, shooting someone from that far away." Eros hefted the handgun thoughtfully. It was a Glock 9mm, and it felt like the clip was full. The bullets were Teflon-coated. "And this isn't really much of a long-range weapon, though it is nicely simple. You're putting a lot of trust in me as a marksman."
"I'm sure you're a very good shot." Ned grinned. He had stripped off his t-shirt when he had handed Eros the handgun. He had a plain chest, not very fat nor muscled. He took off his sneakers and jeans.
Then he jumped off the edge. Eros tracked him with the metal sight as he first tumbled in a ball, then flattened out into a spread-eagled position, even though Eros knew it made little difference. About 12 and a quarter seconds later and the target a little over 735 meters farther down from him, Eros squeezed the trigger three times, and three bullets came out of Ned's chest 60 meters above the canyon floor. His blood was a nice medium red on the canyon greenish-brown, gradually darkening, and Eros estimated that although Ned might not have been quite clinically dead at the moment of impact, he had long since gone into major system shock, in terms of that sort of timing. Good enough. Eros sat down, slightly satisfied with the events of the day, and started to smoke another cigarette.
last revision September 24, 2005
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