Time

• Jack Semini, Grade 11, Calamvale Community College
• Short Story
• 2019

Excellence Award in the 'Inspired 2019' competition

Silence. That was all that existed within its universe…silence. No sound of the nuclear reactions within the heart of stars, no fiery supernovas as those stars died and were reborn, no screams from the billions of souls spread across a countless sea of life and stars. For it had existed before all that, for it was time.
It had lived, if it could be called a life, for countless billions of years. For time had seen the universe born with a blaze of light and time would live to see it burn out to the blackest of night. It had borne witness to the forging of countless stellar empires by fire and blood, and their slow decay into dust and relics of ages past. Yet here it stood gazing upon the third world of nine circling around a yellow star, a blue orb covered in lush life giving and filled oceans, broken apart by continents warring upon a tectonic scale.
This little world filled it with curiosity, such hardship and pain, yet such drive, filled the minds of this planet’s inhabitants. Memories flashed through its celestial body, memories of war and blood as well as names, the Black Death, the Spanish Inquisition, Passchendaele, the Kristallnacht, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So much death and destruction for such a small world.
Time was no stranger to pain or death or loss, it had watched the universe for millennia before after all, but something made it pause on this planet. It had long ago resigned to accept the evil of the universe as well as the good, a perfect balance would always be maintained and must be maintained. Yet this made it question, how could it allow such evil to thrive. It began to question who it was, what it was, and whether it should take things into its own hand. Time thought perhaps it could stop this evil before it spread throughout the cosmos, destroying cultures and civilisations that it had nurtured to be good and even those that it had nurtured to be evil. This species, these humans as they call themselves, where the ultimate plague upon a universe it had seen blossom like a flower from a tiny bud. Perhaps it should finally break its apathy for the good of all things, for that is what it represented, the culmination of every emotion, every thought, every action within this universe...
Every action? It was paused by that thought. If it was the representation of every action, then it could be capable of such evil and such suffering…no impossible...or was it improbable. Did it truly represent apathy? It searched, more thoughts and emotions flowing through its body and mind, a thousand years of humanity’s future stretched out before it, such loss but also something else something it had not felt so strongly before.
For the first time since its strange and miraculous birth, time was humbled and quietened for here was a species that possessed the purest form of hate and anger and thirst for war, and yet there was something else as well. Other names filled with this strange emotion, the Christmas truce, Apollo 11, Peace Lake, Villers — Bretonneux, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. All of these names and more coursing through its body showing a love more powerful than all the hate and pain bridled within this planet, than time had ever experienced across the wide cosmos.
And thus, all there was, was silence.