# The Door of Time By [jbschirzinger](https://paragraph.com/@jbschirzinger-2) ยท 2023-03-25 --- If one had the faculty of far-sight, one could see through the mists of time and pierce the veil of that once was. "Do you know what has past such that you know what will transpire," asked the master. Moclin snapped his attention momentarily back to the discussion. Yes, the vapors from the ceremonial fires must have swept him up with their soft enticing hymns that danced on ancient winds. His mind needed to arrive at an answer. Not just any answer would suffice since it was clear his teacher was testing him. His teacher. He had picked this teacher, or so he had told himself. In reality, the teacher had selected him long before he was born. He only apparently seemed to possess willpower that experienced something that allowed him to form a narrative that he soothed himself with by saying "He" had chosen. With a certain level of far-sight, most free choice shrank down to whether one sided with good or whether one sided with evil. It was an infuriating juxtaposition for minds that wished that reality were more complex and less black and white. Yet, the more one gazed into the far times the more black and white reality became. It was an undeniable truth. Those that said certain animals did not perceive color probably only meant that those animals only evolved to the point of seeing reality for what it was. "Did he know the past..." The past. The past is such a long, rolling river. One stops on a certain bank, picks a point in the water, and says everything before this juncture is past, and everything past this point is not yet and is therefore the future. Some cultures had no words for this temporal distinction, finding it useless. Some simply referred to all of it as "The dreaming"--since in a very real way--nothing was ever anything and life with all of its choices was more akin to a passing mist. "The past," his mind carefully turned over the statement as though some wave had been suddenly produced in an ocean that instead of moving inland bounced back toward its point of origin only to be then diminished back into some finite point--like a rock thrown in a "casting away of the witness" ceremony into a lake. How many thoughts when considered would coalesce just like this and bounce back to their respective points of origin--like thousands of millions of stars in the sky suddenly sucking up all their light and dying and being reborn. His teacher was not asking about all those pasts, though. He was only asking him about the timeline of immediate importance to the tribe. The one that encoded and held the potential for their near future. All those other pasts touched upon his own present but like fingers in the sand some left deeper impressions upon his civilization and its collective dreaming than others. To kill a dream of a civilization is to kill its ability to tell a story. Once its story is removed, the language is not far behind. Once the language is gone, the culture is absorbed by some other dialect which belongs to the collective dreaming of others. Such a culture has become a strange person in a strange psychic landscape though they may be in their own land. Soon enough, even the land that was once theirs becomes as recognizable as a childhood home from 50 years past under subsequent new owners. There are shades of recognizability in the character. A certain manner of being that relates the original design but a wall here or there has been removed. A clear hallway that was indicated by the plan has now been turned into a succession of bedrooms. The blueprint has been savaged and what results is not quite a recognizable structure. Though one may have spent many years within the walls of the place, the fact one was ever there at all is hardly knowable to anyone--nor does anyone care to tell the story of when such a time was so. The reality is only the present owner, and their imposition of will upon the house. The past. Suddenly, Moclin was gone. What was present instead was a 75 mghz Compaq Presario and someone playing a game on the screen. Some kind of jungle maze game, clearly. Darius Moclish was the teenager playing the game. He tried to get in as much gaming between waking up and going to school as he could. This game, for him, always clawed at him. The simple premise of the game was to survive the jungle, obtain a key, and access the hidden temple. What was in the hidden temple? " "Probably just another boss fight," reckoned Darius. Whatever it was, it would have to wait for another night. Darius wore two hats, you see. In the day time he was Darius, but at night, he became the n1ghtmarew@lker. You do not get a name like that unless of course, you have something to do with hacking. For Darius, he was the right kid, at the right place, at the right time. The 90's were ripe for would-be hackers since nobody understood teenager OR computers and certainly not anything remotely related to hacking. Darius had emails to answer in connection with a message board he frequented. Before he did that though, he needed to generate a PGP key to sign his message with proving his identity as n1ghtmarew@lker. It concerned, of course, a matter of hacking commerce since Darius had dipped his foot in the "Warez" scene. He had used PGP a million times, but generating a key was always especially fun for him since it was somewhat like moving away to a different place and assuming a new identity. Darius ran the command to generate the key. Just like that, Darius was gone. Moclin came out of his deep vision with a start. Something about the numbers on the screen looked familiar to him even though the entire vision was confusing. He recognized the pattern. Moclin cast a wary eye up to the mountain where the Door of Time was said to be. "I see you glimpsed something of what is to be," said the master. "But did you dip into the past or the future to find inspiration?" Moclin could not answer the question. What was evident, however, was that he had seen some key in some other form in some other place that somehow resembled the disk key to the door on the mountain. Either the door was about to close, or it was about to open. Moclin tensed his jaw. Was his drop expanding or collapsing into the point of origin? Was it the "Big bang" or the "Big crunch"? "Time and untime," the master whispered to himself. Whatever was happening was at the threshold. Something was about to be born, or die--or both at once as either of those events herald. Somewhere out there, Darius was composing his email and somewhere out there, a door was cracking... --- *Originally published on [jbschirzinger](https://paragraph.com/@jbschirzinger-2/the-door-of-time)*