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TIME FLIES

Time is what hinders everything from

being given all at once.

Henry Bergson

It began with a premise, a subtle hypothesis of stunning magnitude: When positive and negative gravitational forces are set on a collision course at retrograde absolute speed, the theory asserts, the impact creates a void inside which time can be frozen -- life extended, you hear -- perhaps forever.

So the Foundation approved the grant and a team of biophysicists and geneticists from the Theoretical Physics Research Institute and two eager Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit flies -- a male and a female -- went to work to test this astonishing concept.

The flies were placed in a biotronic accelerator, a state-of-the-art synchrotron developed by the Institute’s Entomo-Ontological Laboratory.

Temperature constants and reverse wavelength spectral illumination were maintained throughout the project.

Three seconds later, the fruit flies mated with great eagerness. The first pupae hatched forty seconds later.

On the fourth day, or three hundred thousand fruit-fly generations later, fifteen offspring matured and exceeded their natural life expectancy by twelve hours, the equivalent of four human years.

Early on the twelfth night, sixty-six flies outlived their earliest progenitors by five hundred and eighteen fly-years.

A male and a female were removed from the accelerator and released outdoors on the seventeenth day. Six thousand fly-years had elapsed and all memory of an earlier life, of a once uncontrolled and free existence, had since been erased.

Disoriented, dazed by the sudden foreboding vastness around them, the flies climbed erratically toward the limitless expanse. Feeling the sun’s breath upon their wings, aroused by some anomalous threat, they flew toward each other, met and clasped briefly in mid-air before imploding and vanishing without a trace.

The rest, having lived six million years in human-equivalent age, were destroyed on the twenty-first day with massive isotopic concentrations. Their potential life span can only be expressed in astronomical terms.

Immortality? Easy. It’s all neatly packaged in a self-nullifying theorem. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would have been proud. But involuntary confinement and loss of selfhood is a high price to pay for immortality.

And so, Project Fruit Fly was scrubbed. The Institute issued a carefully worded summary report that no one bothered to read and which was subsequently consigned to a dark and dusty vault at the National Archives.

Invoking the Freedom of Information Act, I requested a copy. The request was denied, first on “administrative grounds,” then for reasons of “national security.” I appealed. The appeal was rejected. I was cautioned not to insist. The warning had the bureaucratic incivility accorded a pesky nobody or a dangerous agitator.

And then one day, not far in the future, the few who could afford their own biotronic accelerator granted themselves life eternal; the many who could not, lived and died serving them.