#*Sorry so late again! I suck. Busy week. I bought a car!*
—–
The sun was shining, birds were singing, and Pyotr was headed to meet his best friend for lunch.
They had met in their first semester at University, and had been inseparable for nearly a year. It was a great feeling, having a “bro” to count on, after so many years pretty much alone in high school with nobody but his sisters to confide in. It had been even worse when he came to America for school, knowing nobody on the whole continent and having to navigate a new culture along with his studies.
But Jeremy was different. He was a true friend, always willing to lend an ear, and with infinite patience for Pyotr’s sometimes-thick accent. Pyotr felt like he could tell Jeremy everything, and in fact he pretty much had done so. Sometimes they would just talk or play video games for what felt like hours, but afterward only minutes would have passed. Jeremy had suggested that they just enjoyed hanging out so much that time felt different, but Pyotr had a different theory.
Pyotr was a physics student. Jeremy was more into electronics and computer science, so sometimes he didn’t see the same things that Pyotr saw. To him, the world was made up of logic and flow charts. But Pyotr’s world was filled with uncertainty on the quantum level. And uncertainty meant possibilities. Like the possibility of proving that the differing perception of passage of time could be more than just in the mind.
With Jeremy’s help, he would do it one day. He would build a time machine.
-*-*-
Pyotr spotted his friend sitting at one of the outdoor benches and headed over. He was excited to discuss the new book he’d been reading about relativity, but a flash of red in the sun made him put that on the back burner. Petra was out today.
Petra was Jeremy’s girlfriend. They had been living together for as long as Pyotr had known them. Jeremy was completely devoted to her; he called her his Princess. It was a sweet story: they’d grown up next door, been high school sweethearts, and moved away to go to school together, escaping her cruel father and overbearing mother.
There was something sad about Petra that Pyotr could never quite put his finger on, however. Something in the way her face would go blank when she wasn’t doing anything and when nobody was talking to her. Pyotr thought maybe there was more to the story, that she’d had something really bad happen in her past, but he really didn’t want to pry.
Petra tended to have bouts of depression that kept her indoors sometimes, but when she came out on the campus it was always a little brighter of a day. The lunches she made were delicious, and just being around her made Pyotr feel a little happy. He didn’t have a crush on her himself, of course. He just liked her as a friend, and he loved to see her and Jeremy together.
“Hey, Pete,” Jeremy said, smiling and gesturing to the seat opposite himself and his girlfriend. “Have a seat. We brought extra.”
Pyotr sat down and grabbed a sandwich from a plate on the table. “Thanks. You make these, Petra?”
“She did,” Jeremy said, patting her hand on the table. “She’s been feeling a lot better lately.”
“That’s great to hear. I’m sure everyone missed you.”
Petra smiled. “Thanks, Pyotr,” she said.
“Is nothing. Jeremy, I wanted to tell you about the book I am reading.” He bit into the sandwich, taking a moment to enjoy the taste or perfectly-mixed tuna and mayo. “Mm. That’s good. So anyway, this book… it’s got some really exciting theories. The author thinks that if you could find a way to generate a strong enough neutrino bubble, you could make a small machine slide out of sync with Earth’s time, since it would bend the gravity waves around it.”
Jeremy raised a brow. “You know, I really think you’ll get it done. You understand so much more of this stuff than me.”
“Do not worry, I will still need someone to build the machine. We will do it together!”
Jeremy grinned. “You know, speaking of time machines… I think it’s about time I showed you something. But you have to keep it a secret.”
“You know I can keep a secret.”
“Well… it’s a pretty big secret. Petra, why don’t you head home while I fill my bro here in on a few things.”
-*-*-
“You are messing with me.”
“I swear I’m not. It works, I just don’t know how.”
“So you have a device that manipulates time. You have had it over one year. And you are just now telling me this?”
“It’s not exactly something we like to advertise. And I don’t use it all that often. I can’t get it to run in reverse without almost killing me, and there’s just too much risk involved. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”
“And you think I can figure it out?”
“Pyotr, you’re a genius. I know you can figure this stuff out. I want to lend it to you for a little while, see what you come up with.” He placed a small cardboard box on the table between them. “Never mind the wires in the back. I added them so I could plug in a control device.”
Pyotr took the box, nodding solemnly. “Your secret is safe with me. I will see what I can do.”
-*-*-
Pyotr chuckled to himself, sitting in the grass on a little hill overlooking the campus. Imagine, a second-year Comp Sci student having the secret to time control in a box. What a laugh. He’d played along to see how far Jeremy was willing to go; clearly there was some sort of punchline coming. He just didn’t know what it was yet.
The box held two items: a notebook, and a remote control. The notebook was a plain gray one with a spiral spine, and the remote was one of the old universal ones that people used to spend hours trying to set up so they wouldn’t need a second control to use a VCR.
Pyotr laughed, flipping through the notebook. According to the notes, the remote could control time. What a ludicrous idea. It worked like an old VCR, too. Pause, Play, Fast Forward, Frame Skip, Rewind… although rewind was apparently very limited.
Pyotr rolled his eyes. A device like this, if it was real, would have changed everything. It also would’ve probably either killed its user or everyone else. What with the speed of the Earth’s movement and the risk of whiplash to anyone you so much as bumped into, not to mention the sonic booms you’d leave everywhere behind you. Pyotr’s dream had been to travel from one point in time to another. This was another level of fantasy beyond it. Still, he thought, it was fun to imagine. He picked up the remote, pointed it out at the campus, and pressed Pause.
The silence was what hit him first. Nobody really notices the amount of noise they live with day to day; it’s just a background ambience. The silence washed over Pyotr like a wave, deafening and at the same time clear and relieving. His ears popped, filling with the sound of his own breathing.
Pyotr stood up and took a step. The grass where he’d been didn’t spring back up; there was a perfect impression left where he’d sat. A few yards away, a bird hung in the air, frozen on its approach to a tree branch. And down the hill, dozens of students stood perfectly still.
Not stood, he realized as he walked toward them. Very few were actually standing with both feet planted on the ground. Most were in the middle of walking from one place to another, halted mid-stride by some unknown force. Halted by Pyotr, and the remote.
“Bozhe moi,” Pyotr whispered, walking out onto the sidewalk and waving his hand in front of a student’s unblinking face. “It actually works.”
-*-*-
Pyotr was a scientist before anything else. He established a safety, starting and stopping time several times to ensure that he had the effect under control, then began taking notes on the properties of the phenomenon.
Inertia seemed to be conserved in objects almost at the moment they left contact with him. A ball thrown would stop less than an inch from his hand, hanging in the air, but would resume moving when time started. A ball placed in the air would hang there, dropping to the ground when time re-exerted itself. But if the ball was stopped and picked up, then placed somewhere else, its inertia would vanish, a puzzle that perplexed Pyotr to no end. The laws of time might be broken, but that didn’t mean the laws of thermodynamics no longer applied.
Even worse, Pyotr found that if he just nudged an object instead of grabbing it, he could change its position without changing its direction. He could push a dart into position to make it hit a bull’s-eye, or even turn it around with two fingertips to make it fly back the way it came, but the moment his hand closed around it, its motion died completely. It seemed to support the idea he’d read about with the neutrino bubble; as long as an object remained at least outside his field of effect, it behaved as normal, but once he exerted enough effect on its surface it slipped out of time with him. The effect worked the same with large objects, provided he had two hands on the object, and he wondered for a moment just how large of a thing he might manage to move, since gravity was no longer making any sort of lifting difficult. It was a lot like what he imagined it would be like to live in microgravity, except that anything he let go of would stop moving, and he couldn’t float around.
The experimentation was slow and deliberate, and Pyotr soon found himself rubbing his eyes wearily. He hadn’t had a lot of sleep the night before, and now that he’d been in and out of stopped time for a few hours he was starting to get tired. He walked back to the hill where he’d originally used the remote, leaving footprints in the grass, and laid down in the sun to take a nap.
The sun was still shining when he awoke. According to his watch, five hours had passed. He stretched and rubbed his face, then stopped in surprise. He ran his hand up and down his cheek. There was no hair growth at all. He’d been using the remote long enough for at least half a day to pass, relatively speaking, and yet his hair hadn’t grown, which seemed to indicate that he was no longer aging while he used the device, which was just impossible.
And nothing excites a theoretical physicist more than seeing the impossible.
Pyotr did every test he could think of, moving solids, liquids, and gases, measuring the movement of a sunbeam to establish that time was in fact stopped and not slowed, picking up objects to bring them out of time, and even testing whether an insect on his arm and in his hand would be stopped along with him.
There was really only one thing left to do: human experimentation.
Pyotr was dying to test how people reacted to non-temporal stimuli. He went out onto the campus again, looking around at all the students and faculty who were trying to go about their day. He had never been a big fan of unethical experimentation, of course, but then he had never held the greatest discovery in human history in his hands, either.
The basics were simple to test. Pyotr knew from Jeremy’s instructions that bumping or moving someone wouldn’t cause fatal whiplash, which was a definite concern. Changing people’s poses – an arm raised or lowered, for instance – seemed to confuse but not alarm them; they would behave as though they had experienced a twitch or muscle spasm when time started again. Moving someone to a slightly different position caused disorientation and mild dizziness. Interestingly, it was easy to move someone back to their original position and posture; Pyotr suspected it had something to do with the vacuum of displaced air where they were removed from, but the effect was strong enough that perhaps other forces were at work as well.
Checking his notes, he realized that he was going to have to be more invasive to actually view responses in the test subjects. First he tried “appearing and disappearing” – standing in the middle of a crowded area, he started time and then stopped it a second later. Several people seemed to notice that someone had been where he was, but nobody really made much of it. They didn’t fully realize what they’d seen, but anyone walking toward the place where he had appeared veered around as if avoiding an invisible person.
Auditory stimulation was less successful. Since all the noise he made was compressed into an instant, Pyotr was unable to make anyone notice more than what was probably a loud burst of sound, like a thump or a click.
However, tactile stimulus was very noticeable in his subjects. He tried tapping shoulders, nudging elbows, brushing a hand across a cheek. In all cases, the subjects felt as though someone had touched them, some even looking around for whoever it was.
Pyotr sat on a picnic table, eating french fries from an unwary student’s cafeteria tray and pondering the situation. He certainly wasn’t a Behavioral Studies major, but it was still intriguing to test people’s reactions, and the things they noticed or didn’t notice might prove useful in understanding what was going on when he used the remote.
A young couple standing under a tree nearby caught his eye. The boy was in the middle of saying something; the girl was clearly paying attention, but did not seem terribly interested. Pyotr’s mind raced with ideas for how he might test their reactions as he set the fries down and stood.
-*-*-
Ashley clenched her jaw a little tighter, fighting not to roll her eyes and holding her plastered-on smile. She really hated guys like Brad: entitled, self-absorbed, ignorant morons. Sadly, that was the price she’d have to pay if she wanted a boyfriend who could afford to give her the things she wanted. And Brad was definitely a good candidate in that respect.
All the boxes were checked off. His family was rich. He had access to his trust account. He wasn’t ugly or gross; in fact he was handsome, if you were into broad shoulders and square jawlines. Ashley preferred long hair, full lips, and a D-cup, but that was irrelevant. Besides, just because she was dating a jock didn’t mean she couldn’t play with her girlfriends when they were alone.
Still, the conversation was never-ending. It had hurt trying not to roll her eyes before when he went on about fantasy football, but now he had digressed to some backward hick rant about Mexicans and refugees. If he would just get it over with and ask her out, she could be free of this torture.
It was her own fault, she reflected. With her long blonde hair, fair skin, and thin body, she could have just flirted her way into Brad’s pants, and by extension his wallet. But that would mean putting out a lot, and she really didn’t want to do that. No, she had to be the listener, the confidante, the cute girl he could talk to. Laugh at his jokes, smile, seem interested, and he’d spend all his time boring her instead of groping her. She thought she’d found a loophole, a way out of the game, but right now she was envying some of the other girls who just acted dumb and let the guys fuck them.
She was just contemplating bailing out of the conversation when something happened. For some reason, she had a sudden picture in her mind of Brad with no shirt on. It was weird; almost like, for a split second, he’d been bare-chested, but still carried on talking to her.
Brad didn’t seem to notice anything, of course. Ashley rubbed her eyes. She must be getting tired; it wasn’t like her to have fantasies about men without-
“Hey Ash, you okay?” Brad said.
Ashley shook her head, feeling the heat in her cheeks and forehead. “I’m fine,” she lied.
“Good. Anyway, the wall will-”
Ashley took a deep breath, willing herself to stop blushing. There was no way this was happening. No way had she just fantasized about Brad Pinkton naked, with sunlight bringing out every edge and curve of his muscular body. No way had she just imagined his cock, so close she could just reach out and touch it.
A breeze or something blew by, and Ashley shivered. She could feel her nipples stiffening, poking into the padding of the push-up bra she wore to “accent” her curves. That in itself was bizarre; she usually couldn’t feel the wind through the padded cups. Even stranger, it felt warm, like someone had been rubbing and pinching her breasts instead of just the air moving across them.
The chill was barely gone when her brain messed with her again. This time, Brad was naked again, but his cock was standing at attention. It was much longer and thicker than before, with a slight upward curve. At the same time, she felt a tingling between her legs, as if something had brushed across her pussy.
She blinked, and the vision was gone. The bulge in Brad’s pants, on the other hand, was very real. She could see it outlined against his upper thigh, and it looked like her imagination wasn’t far from the truth with regards to his size.
Biting her bottom lip, Ashley stepped closer. “Hey Brad,” she heard herself say, “you wanna get outta here?”
-*-*-
Pyotr chuckled to himself. He’d had no idea that people were so easy to manipulate. Granted, it was hardly difficult to convince University students to have sex, but still, it took almost no effort at all to convince the girl, Ashley, that she was interested in her companion Brad’s body. Just a couple of flashes and a little stimulation. As for Brad, well, all Pyotr had to do was show Ashley’s breasts to him for a second and he was apparently ready to go.
Pyotr followed as they walked quickly toward the parking lot and Brad’s large black SUV. When they got in and closed the doors, he stopped time and entered the back seat. After all, a good scientist must document all the results of his experiments. Besides, what man turns down a free show?
-*-*-
Ashley moaned, leaning back in the big passenger’s seat. Brad was driving with only his left hand, taking her somewhere – she didn’t know or care where – while his right was in her panties, two big fingers pumping slowly into her pussy. She was soaking them and her panties already, although a part of her still wondered why she was even doing this.
Brad pulled her hand over and wrapped it around his dick. Ashley started stroking him without thinking about it, opening her eyes and looking over at him. He was eerily similar to her fantasy, right down to that upward curve, and he was rock hard already. She stroked a little faster, moaning again as she felt her pleasure building.
Suddenly, just as she was almost there, Brad pulled his hand away. He reached up and cupped the back of her neck, pulling her down toward his lap and guiding her mouth down around his cock. Ashley started to pull back, groaning in annoyance at his selfishness.
She managed to get as far as the tip when something washed over her. It felt like every inch of her body was softly caressed at the same time. Her skin broke out in goosebumps, sending a shiver up her spine.
The shiver was followed by a jolt of pleasure radiating out from her crotch. Ashley moaned and sucked Brad’s cock back into her mouth, breathing fast through her nose as the haze of cumming pushed out her thoughts. By the time it passed, she found herself bobbing up and down, stroking Brad’s length with her lips, tongue, and fingers, while Brad’s hand on her head guided her to go faster and deeper.
Ashley lost track of how long she was down there, sucking, stroking, smearing Brad to the base with her spit as he tried to reach her throat. She kept her fingers in the way so he couldn’t gag her, but it was a near thing even with her hand there.
Finally, just as her jaw was getting tired, Brad pulled over and let her up. “Backseat,” he demanded, kicking off his shoes and shoving his pants down onto the floor of the cab.
Ashley pushed turned and crawled between the seats. On her way past, Brad grabbed the waist of her jeans, so she let him pull them off, revealing her ass and her little red thong.
She barely had time to get onto the seat before Brad followed her, pulling off her top and pushing her down on her back, kissing her hard and grinding his cock against the damp spot on her panties. He pushed her bra up and cupped one of her tits, squeezing it greedily, then reached down to pull her panties to the side, spreading her thighs and pressing his tip to her entrance.
“Mh.. w-wait, do you have a-” Ashley tried to object, but her words turned into cries of pleasure. Her pussy was on fire; it felt like the best vibrator in the world had just kissed her clit. She came again, shivering all over, hips bucking up reflexively.
Brad took advantage of the reflex, grabbing her by the hipbones and thrusting. Ashley cried louder as she felt herself stretch open, squeezing tight around every inch but too slick to even slow him down. Brad sank to the hilt, and Ashley could feel him pushing on the back of her passage before he pulled back and thrust in again.
-*-*-
Pyotr stopped time and adjusted himself. There was nothing worse than getting an erection when you couldn’t move to fix it, and no living man could have watched this without getting one. He shifted, stretching his legs and moving out of his hiding place on the floor of the front seat, crawling in back to get a closer look.
It still took surprisingly little “convincing” to get his subjects to keep escalating their encounter. Brad had needed none at all. Ashley, on the other hand, was clearly reluctant. When Brad shoved himself in her mouth, she had nearly ended it, but Pyotr’s intervention had overwhelmed her so much that she’d sucked him like a whore. All he’d done was trail his fingers all over her skin, then rubbed between her legs for a minute or so.
The second time Ashley had objected, Pyotr went with a more localized response. He’d moved Brad out of the way and sat, reading a book on his phone while one hand slowly and gently teased Ashley’s clitoris. He had no idea how long he’d done it for, but for Ashley it was a mere instant, and she had responded dramatically. He would have to remember that trick; women would probably appreciate a man who could make them cum in an instant.
Of course, all this observation and teasing was not without its toll. Pyotr’s cock ached in his jeans, straining to be free and leaving a little sticky spot on the inside of his thigh. He reached up and cupped Ashley’s breast, rubbing the front of his jeans while he considered the situation.
Oh well, he thought as he unzipped and started to stroke himself. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t already tainted the results of the experiment.
He knelt on the front seat, unpausing time and watching as Brad started pumping into Ashley. There was no slow build-up, either; the man went right to work, thrusting in and out, each grunt and thrust met with a cry or a moan from the girl.
They clumsily pulled her bra off, and Brad arched his back so he could suck on Ashley’s little pink nipples while he drove into her harder. Ashley’s face shifted rapidly between a masque of pleasure and a wince of pain, and Pyotr had to wonder if she was used to such forceful treatment from such a well-endowed man. Something told him she wasn’t, and the thought of it made his own dick throb in his hand.
Pyotr matched Brad’s thrusts with his own strokes, watching as the man pulled Ashley’s legs around his waist and started grinding harder into her, crushing her body under his own and moaning next to her ear.
“Baby here it comes,” Brad moaned. His thrusts got faster and became more erratic.
Ashley, apparently in the midst of her own climax, grabbed his sides and pushed back. Brad got the hint and pulled out, grabbing his cock and rapidly pumping it and groaning loudly.
Pyotr stopped time and crawled in the back seat again. It seemed that his timing was perfect; there was an inch of white cum protruding from Brad’s cock already, frozen in the air. Pyotr turned away from him and knelt over Ashley’s body.
Even in disarray like this, she was quite beautiful. Her hair had spilled across the seat under her like a golden sheet, and the sweat on her skin caught the sun in a way that made it seem like a spotlight was shining on her. Her small breasts were thrust toward the heavens; she’d been panting and frozen in the middle of a deep breath. And down between her legs, her shaved pussy glistened, coated in her own lubricants.
Pyotr’s breath caught in his throat; he realized he was still stroking his cock and was dangerously close to cumming. In fact, there was no time to stop. Stroking faster, he shot hard; streams of cum flew from him and froze in mid-air, hovering over Ashley’s face and breasts.
Pyotr sat back on his heels, breathing hard. He wiped the sweat from his brow, then took a minute to catch his breath.
There were three long strands of fluid extending from where he’d been and two shorter ones. Pyotr made a note to determine the relationship between speed and distance travelled when objects left his control, since it suggested a set amount of relative time until things froze. He readjusted, zipped up, and got into the front seat, once more peeking carefully to watch Brad and Ashley as he started time.
Pyotr’s cum hit Ashley first, landing on her face and breast with an audible splat and making her flinch in surprise. Brad’s load followed, thoroughly covering her chest and stomach.
“Whew, babe, that was great,” Brad said, leaning back on the side door.
Ashley wiped Pyotr’s cum off her face and looked up at Brad. “Y-yeah… I guess it was, wasn’t it?”