we are always time travelling.
Derpy Hooves knew very little about time.
Though, she knew enough about time to make it to the present. And occasionally, to the near future.
A dozen lemon-surprise muffins, according to the recipe book, took 45 minutes to make, including prep time, baking time, and glazing time. By taking 5 minutes to premeasure the ingredients and place them in color-coded bowls, she could reduce the total cooking time to 35 minutes.
Causing 5 minutes to vanish from the continuum.
On the other hoof, with her strabismus, sometimes she would pull on what she thought was the oven door handle—and instead, a horrid sound of clanging metal on ceramic tile would reverberate in the kitchen.
And 15 minutes, plus a few bandages, would be spliced into one of the tick marks on the timeline.
It was supposed to be a 20 minute trot from Derpy’s house to Doctor Whooves’s loft apartment above his laboratory. Therefore, adding 35 + 15 + 20, she should have started cooking 70 minutes before her planned arrival time at Doctor Whooves’s place.
She packed the lemon-surprise muffins into a sturdy plastic Tupperware, placed it on a special tray mounted on a saddle, and began her trot to Doctor Whooves’s home. It was a cool spring morning in Ponyville, the birds were out, and Mrs. Cake waved hi to her from the door of Sugarcube Corner as she was opening up shop for the day.
Derpy reached a diagonal intersection in the road. She panned her cross-eyes from left to right across the intersection. From the left corner: with an overturned wheelbarrow spilling hay onto the street…to the right corner: with a few ceramic pots containing bright pink flowers.
As she panned from left to right, her left eyeball twitched, causing the wheelbarrow to appear briefly after the flowerpots.
She checked the time when she reached the doorstep of her coltfriend’s home.
“Hello, Derpy,” Doctor Whooves said.
She had leapt forward 30 minutes into the future.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Usually it takes me 20 minutes to get here. Oh, you see? I brought muffins!”
Doctor Hooves spoke frequently of time travel. “To skip across time, or to stop it dead in its tracks,” was what he always described it as. Doctor Hooves always bemoaned about how Derpy just did not understand time travel. They occasionally got into arguments about it. “We are always time travelling,” Derpy said, in her own defense, but that Doctor Hooves agreed with, at least from a philosophical standpoint.
Derpy sat and watched the Doctor tinker with the work-in-progress time machine in his laboratory. He had been working on it for over a decade now, but he still didn’t even have a barely functional prototype. She watched him fiddle with some tiny color-coded wires, looking at them through magnifying glasses. She watched him drop the screwdriver in frustration, making a noise on the floor. She watched him take a bite of her home-baked lemon-surprise muffin, only to quickly return to his tinkering, a rise of his eyebrows the only indication that he liked the taste.
“You should take a break, Doc,” Derpy said. “This is driving you crazy.”
And that’s when the Doctor mumbled a little mantra as he continued to fiddle with the tiny wires: “You don’t understand, you don’t understand, you don’t understand.”
Apparently, she didn’t understand time travel.
Derpy put the rest of the lemon-surprise muffins in the fridge, since her coltfriend refused to eat any. Frustrated, the mare knocked the screwdriver out of the Doctor’s teeth, causing it to fall to the floor and roll across the room towards the wall clock.
The hour hand had moved—they were shot 2 hours into the future.
“Please, stop working. We should go out now, Doc. The museum’s going to close.”
Derpy took Doctor Whooves on a date to the watch museum. She saw the posters hanging in the town square and thought he might enjoy it. It was a travelling exhibit, that made a continuous circuit around 27 different Equestrian cities, stopping at each for an average of 21 days. Adding 4 days of downtime/travelling time per city, that was 25 x 27 = 675 days, or about 22 months per loop.
There were a variety of antique pocketwatches on display. The room was small, and the aisles were dark and narrow. Derpy leaned closely on her coltfriend, so that she wouldn’t stagger too much and crash into one of the glass display cases.
They were the only ponies in the museum, and the curator, bored out of his mind, gave the couple a very enthusiastic lecture on the intricate mechanisms of the manually wound pocketwatch.
There were gears, he said. The user turns the knob, which stores the mechanical energy in a spring. The spring releases the mechanical energy, turning little tiny gears and wheels inside the watch at a regulated pace.
And it makes time tick along.
One silver pocketwatch was from 354 Celestia’s Reign, or almost 700 years ago. The curator still wound it daily, and amazingly, it was still ticking—but it was lagging behind at 892 C.R. Or, roughly 200 years into the past.
“They always move more slowly when they’re older,” the curator explained. “The gears accumulate micro-scratches that increase the friction.”
Derpy wondered if the watch would slow down even more. And even more. And for every tick of the second hand, a million reflections would pass by the glass display case, from a hundred different stops along a never-ending loop of 27 Equestrian cities.
And eventually it would grind to a halt.
Time did grind to a halt, did it not? Time always ground to a halt. If the moment is brief enough, time always halts—a moment so brief that nothing moves, not even twitches.
Time could halt for longer periods of time, though. There was that moment before she kissed Doctor Whooves goodnight—and the bead of sweat rolled down her cheek because she was afraid that she’d miss because of her poor depth perception—and moving closer, inch upon inch, smelling his cologne mixed with the musk of a long day, that wave of pleasant thoughts that filled her head upon contact.
A second could feel like an eternity, and a lifetime could vanish in a blink of an eye. If that was not what Doctor Whooves meant by time travel, then what was?
Ponyville was a small town, and Derpy pretty much ran the post office alone. Once a month, though, Mr. Supervisor (not his actual name) would come in from Canterlot and check on her performance. He was a tired, sour-faced stallion, with a gruff voice, and twice as many wrinkles than would be expected for his age. He frowned a lot.
During the monthly check-in, he would yell at Derpy for about 30 minutes in the back room of the post office about how she kept delivering packages late or damaged, how incompetent she was as a mailmare, and how “important” and “time-sensitive” customers’ packages were.
“Every second counts, ya hear me!? No time to waste!”
And in the 30 minutes it took Mr. Supervisor to explain this to her, another seven motes of dust settled on the unattended post office counter.
Mr. Supervisor was the kind of pony that treated others like tools. He was the kind of pony that did not stop to see how beautiful time was. He was the kind of pony that wound his watch so vigorously until the fragile gears inside became dislodged, or the teeth became warped.
“Where’s your left eye looking at!?” Mr. Supervisor yelled. “Look at me when I’m talking to ya! Idiot! You’re gonna be fired if this keeps going on!”
Some of his spit landed on Derpy’s brand-new mailmare hat.
The angry threats came every month, but the firing never came. He yelled the same things to her every time. Same sentences. Same words. Same angry frown. It was like he thought every month was the first month that she’d ever broken a package. Or flipped upside-down inflight. Or crashed into a lamppost, dropping letters all over the road.
The first month, over and over again.
Derpy had many “first month” moments during her job. Although her job gave her the privilege of saying “hi” to every single pony in town, few were willing to say “hi” back to her. Most ponies did not even open the door for her. One shy colt hid behind the door sidelite and trembled while she pushed the letters into the mail slot.
Even the ponies who did open the door for her, most of them would open it for a few seconds, take their mail, and maybe, maybe say a curt “hello, thank you”—then shut the door in her face.
As if each time was the very first time they had ever met.
Derpy saw it all as sheer madness. The Month, the Day, the Hour, they were beautiful, were they not? Each one exactly the same, yet perfectly unique. Her cross-eyes colored every moment with a different hue. Some days, the streetlights were surrounded by iridescent halos…like two Sonic Rainbooms. Other days, they were two brave soldiers, standing tall and proud, shining their torches in the night. Other days, the flower bushes outside Roseluck’s home exploded with twice the colorful blooms.
“Do you not see it? Do you not see all those blooms?” Derpy said out loud once.
“These bushes aren’t at their peak period yet,” Roseluck said, picking up her letters scattered across the floor. She was one of the few ponies on Derpy’s mail route that actually bothered to talk to her. “In two or three days time, though, there’ll be twice the number of blooms.”
It was like Derpy had an eye into the future.
There was one story about time travel that Derpy understood very well. Two twin foals grow up in the same house in Ponyville. One twin builds a high-speed rocketship, with engines that can travel at a large fraction of the speed of light. At great personal risk, the young filly goes off on a daring adventure into interstellar space.
The other twin stays in Ponyville, holed up in her home.
The adventurous twin returns just a week later, anxious to tell her sister all the amazing things she saw during her brief journey. She goes back to their childhood home, and she’s shocked when she finds nopony but an old mare, lying alone in bed, at death’s door—her twin.
And the adventurous twin lives on, while the one who stayed behind passes away.
Derpy cried when Doctor Whooves first told her that story. It was a tragic story, she told him. A tragedy. Why did the twin have to go to space alone and leave her sister behind? And why did the young twin have to see her sister so old and frail, at death’s door?
“But Derpy, never mind that. Think of the contribution to the advancement of time travel if such a scenario were to occur in reality! It would be a superb presentation of a complex scientific principle only understood by a few gifted ponies!”
“What scientific principle, Doc?” Derpy asked.
He answered her question, using strange vocabulary and complex equations on a blackboard that she could not comprehend. She used her poor vision as an excuse for not understanding her coltfriend’s explanation.
One thing she did gather from the story, though, was that her cross-eyes were kind of like the twins. One looking straight ahead, following the paved path…the other pointing skyward.
She was a superb presentation of some complex scientific principle that was only understood by her, and a privileged few.
The rest dismissed it as a tragedy.
A brown-colored stallion with a strange accent came to see Derpy at the post office, just before the closing of the day.
“Come on Derpy, let’s go home,” her husband said.
Derpy took off her mailmare hat, and rested it on the counter. There was some fraying on the edge that she had never seen before. A lot of fraying, actually.
When did that happen? she thought.
“Sure,” she said to her husband. “Let me lock up…erm…sir. Wait for me outside.”
Her wings creaked as she flew for 7 seconds to the door—the 7 seconds felt like forever, as her worn, tired wings struggled to lift her off the ground.
She could practically hear the scratches in her watch gears as they struggled to tick along.
Derpy followed her husband outside. The two elderly ponies took a long time to walk the 200 meters back to their home. It was almost winter, and the sun was starting to set quite early in the day. The sun was in their eyes as they walked. Derpy ended up guiding her husband across the diagonal intersection, since her vision in the glare was no better than her regular vision to begin with.
Derpy saw one of the Cake twins—who was it? The female one. Was that Pumpkin Cake or Pound Cake?—waving good night to them from the door of Sugarcube Corner as she closed up shop for the night.
“Have you managed to create your time machine yet?” Derpy asked her husband as they walked.
“No. I haven’t,” he said, with an apathetic look.
“What’s missing?”
“I don’t know.” His voice croaked.
Derpy opened the door for her husband. Dust covered all the wires and metal instruments strewn across the laboratory floor. They were all supposed to do something—not travel in time, but at least throw some little blue sparks into the air, perhaps?—but her husband was unable to explain it to her anymore, even if he wanted to.
“What’s for...supper?” he asked, almost forgetting the word for the last meal of the day.
“There’s nothing left in the fridge. Except for some muffins. Lemon-surprise.”
They sat in a niche in the mountain of stuff on the laboratory floor. They ate a half-dozen muffins each for dinner. They washed it down with some milk, and some pills that their grownup daughter Dinky had ordered for them.
“How is it?” Derpy asked.
Doctor Whooves took another slow bite. It was getting harder for him to chew and swallow properly. “The pills? Disgusting.”
“No. I mean the muffins. Are they just as delicious as before?”
“No. They’re better.”
Derpy giggled. She honestly felt just like she did when she was a young mare. Sure, many things had changed. She got tired more easily. She forgot ponies’ names more often than not. The blooms on that rose pony’s bush quadrupled. The watch museum exhibit was back in town again, after making how many circuits…? 25 + 27 = 675…? 22 / 25 x 27 = 22.2527? No that wasn’t right. She lost count.
She also forgot how long it took to make a dozen lemon-surprise muffins.
But…she felt the same. She felt the same excitement every time her cross-eyes created a new spectacle for her out of the mundane scenery. She felt his warmth, even if she didn’t remember his name.
She remembered their first goodnight kiss. And how time had halted in that moment.
They washed up, and played a game of chess together, ending in stalemate, before calling it a night. They climbed into bed together, slipped the covers over their heads to stay warm, and closed their eyes.
“Good night, Doc.” She remembered his name.
“Good night, Derpy.”
Tomorrow, they would go to space.
Author's Note
To the quantum physicists and watchmakers out there, I apologize for any inaccuracies.
I got the idea for this story after recently going through one of the worst bouts of writer's block depression that I've ever experienced. You can take it for what it's worth.
