Forty Leap

What if you could travel into the future? What if you couldn’t stop travelling into the future? You might lose a minute or an hour. You’d get bewildered stares from your family when it takes you five minutes to retrieve your sister in-law’s cup of tea from the next room. You’d have to beg for your job when you missed a week because of jumping into the future. Blocks of time would suddenly be behind you. And during those blocks of time, people might leave. People might die. The world might change around you. What happens then if you start to lose years? Then people finally start to believe your story? Then they want to study you. They want to harness your curse as a power. As the generations pass you by, what does the world become in your absence? Who are you when you finally emerge into each new era?

I’ll tell you who you are. You’re Mathew Cristian, that’s who.

When Mathew begins to lose time, he loses the ability to maintain his secure lifestyle. He struggles to preserve what he has known for so long just because it is all that he does know. But as his leaps through time get longer and longer, the changes around him grow more and more stark. He emerges from his leaps disoriented and out of place. Sometimes he is hunted. Sometimes he is revered. He meets and forms strong bonds all because of his condition, only to have those bonds broken by that same condition. And yet, though the state of the world is different from era to era, the world itself rarely changes. Eons may pass, but humanity is a constant. Everyone is excited, preoccupied, afraid. And the further he goes through time, the more he evolves as a person, the less frantic becomes his search for a cure and the more curious he becomes about what’s on the other side of the next leap.