“The World in Amber…” my lips uttered without my consent.
These were the words my uncle had said during our last phone call.
Could this have been The World in Amber to him? This painting?
“Hey, Mugino,” said Akira. “You’re gonna want to take a look at this.”
I turned around to see her pointing down at a small leatherbound notebook lying open on a desk in a corner of the room. I walked over and looked down at it to see my uncle’s distinctively sharp, angular handwriting scrawled all across the pages. Akira and I sat down cross-legged on the floor together and read it through.
I’ve decided to write an account of these events to set my thoughts in order.
It all began three days ago. I only know this from my wristwatch; all other clocks seem to have stopped, just like time itself did that fateful day. That is the only way I can think to describe it: time, the world, and everything in it—all frozen in the blink of an eye, at just past five in the afternoon. And then all was quiet.
I tried walking around the neighborhood for a bit, but I was unable to find a single breathing body aside from myself. People, objects, animals—they’d all gone stiff as marble. For a moment, I thought I must have died and gone to purgatory. Been hit by a car veering off onto the sidewalk, perhaps, and killed before I knew it. Though if this is limbo, then it operates by strange rules indeed, as I notice myself growing tired after a few hours of wandering about, and I am visited by a familiar hollowness in my stomach should I neglect to eat. So no, I am relatively certain I’m still alive. Though not entirely.
“The same thing happened to Uncle Kurehiko…”
So there was at least one other person who’d experienced the timefreeze aside from Akira and myself—and someone I was related to, no less. The next several pages of the notebook were a record of the time he spent in this frozen world, written in the form of a daily journal. He made hypotheses, investigated them, and formed conclusions about the rules by which the phenomenon worked, including how far you could throw things before they’d freeze in midair. What radius around his person was exempt from the timefreeze’s effects. How the law of conservation of energy entered into things in this context. And even some conjectures as to what caused the timefreeze to occur and what might bring it to an end. The journal went on like this for several weeks’ worth of entries, with virtually all of his logic aligning with what Akira and I had already surmised ourselves. This confirmation felt extremely validating; it seemed we may have been right about the triggers being despair and hope after all…
There is a piece in my workshop entitled “The World in Amber,” painted on an F80 canvas. It simply appeared in the back of the room one day, yet I have no memory of ever having painted it. Nor do I have any idea how I ever managed to gather the necessary supplies or devote the hundreds of hours necessary to paint such an intricate piece.
I’d always found it strange and unsettling, but now I feel like I might know why.
Perhaps there was another instance of time having frozen around me once in the past, and I simply painted “The World in Amber” in that interim. A ludicrous thing to suggest, I know—and it does nothing to explain why I don’t remember painting it. And yet, as an explanation, it feels strangely right to me. And assuming this is, in fact, the second time I’ve experienced this bizarre time-stopping phenomenon, then it might also explain why I feel so oddly at ease within it, despite the circumstances.
So I was right about the wasp painting being The World in Amber, then. And although it was admittedly only a hypothesis of his, it seemed he’d also experienced multiple timefreezes in his life. And just like me, he’d lost all memory of the previous ones.
Perhaps the strangest thing to me, however, is that it’s still light outside. The sun still looks just as bright, and when I hold my hand up to it, I can feel a gentle warmth. But shouldn’t photons be affected by time stopping as well? And why am I still able to breathe normally, if air is presumably only flowing within a few-centimeter radius of me? Should I not suffocate to death, then, when all the oxygen in my little air bubble runs out if I remain in one place for too long? And yet I feel just fine, even after a full eight hours of sleep. And I have many, many other questions aside from that. Are light waves the only form of electromagnetic wave immune to the phenomenon? Is the earth itself still rotating, and if not, what effects might that have? Would that not affect gravitational pull?
The one thing I can say for certain, however, is that I find this phenomenon quite favorable for my purposes. Obviously, there are a number of inconveniences that come along with it as well, but I have everything I need to live my life comfortably and focus on my work. It’s almost as if someone designed it with me specifically in mind.
Perhaps this is a gift, then—a brief respite from the woes of everyday life, bestowed upon me by the heavens. Or a sort of grace period meant to give me enough time to prepare to face the cruel future that awaits me, so that I might live to tell the tale when at last I do.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to dub this phenomenon the “Moratorium Effect.”
“The Moratorium Effect, huh…?”
It was a name only a jaded cynic like my uncle could think of. And yet, considering that Akira and I were also hiding away in the timefreeze and biding our time for fear of what the future might bring, it felt oddly fitting.