text: &nbsp; Describe yourself. “I live in the moment”. Not in some kind of puffed up display of bravado, like, ‘watch me base jump off this cliff!’, or any kind of new-age-yoga-zen sense of ‘onefullness’. No, I literally live in ‘the moment’. The moment when time froze. &nbsp; Like a flash mob gone horribly wrong, everyone and everything around me is frozen in an instance. Mid way through walking, talking, cooking, cleaning, eating, showering, and all other expected forms of human behaviour. Whatever they’d been doing the moment that time froze, that’s how they’re stuck now. As does inanimate matter. Water which once flowed was now fixed in the air. Once flickering flames now stand static. &nbsp; It’s as if someone has hit pause on the movie of ‘the universe’, except, I’m some kind of exception. I can still move around. I can still interact with things. But not in the manner you’re hoping for, I’m sorry. The best way I can think to describe the way I exist is that I’m something of a ghost in whatever world this is. I’ve no idea how or why I’m trapped here, or how long I will remain here. I don’t even know if I’m alive or not. In a perfect instance, a single frame of time, what differentiates ‘alive’ from ‘dead’? &nbsp; This realm has been a collision of science and philosophy of sorts for me. &nbsp; &nbsp; **THE MOMENT OF OBSERVATION** &nbsp; I was mid argument with my girlfriend at the time, when she just froze. Actually, I was staring at the cracked linoleum floor in the kitchen and avoiding eye contact at the time. I had a habit of drifting off during confrontation. I wondered “How old was our floor? Who was the first person to notice the cracks in what would eventually become my life?”. And that’s when I noticed the silence. &nbsp; Do you remember that childhood saying, “Don’t pull that face. What if the wind changes and you’re stuck like that forever?”. Well, the wind changed, and my girlfriend was stuck in the midst of spitting vitriol at me. I thought she’d done it on purpose for dramatic flair, but after a few seconds I grew impatient and tried to cut her off. Muffled vibrations of words rippled in my throat and body, but as they exited my mouth, they became silence. &nbsp; Worried that we might be having simultaneous strokes, I grabbed her, and shook her. No response. Literally, she didn’t even move. Which was odd, because I could feel her moving in my hands, but visibly she was completely still. That’s when I realised that I couldn’t even see my own arms. I couldn’t see my own body. Turning around, I came face to face with myself. Like my girlfriend, I too was frozen in place. Staring at the cracked linoleum floor, looking pathetic. &nbsp; Was this an out of body experience? Was I dead? I could feel my limbs, but I couldn’t see them. Instinct commanded me to grab myself, to try and wake myself up. But unlike my girlfriend, there was no body behind the apparition that was me. I fell through myself, straight out the other side. This image of me was empty like a hologram of myself. &nbsp; I’ve read and watched my fair share of sci-fi. We’ve seen portrayals of the frozen time world plenty of times before. They always look like so much fun. The perfect platform for mischief. This is not fun, though. The rules of this... experience? They aren’t particularly clear. I’ve had to figure a lot of it out as I go, based on what I can experience, because that’s my only avenue for learning. I’m no scientist, so I could never figure this world out, but even if I could, it would be impossible. I can’t use the internet, because computers and electricity are frozen. I can’t read books, because light is frozen. That’s right, the one major element of frozen time which is always overlooked is the properties of light, and that it, too, can freeze. That’s why I could see the ghost of myself, but couldn’t see myself. &nbsp; When time froze, light froze with it, holding only the information of what it had just reflected off. If you pulled a blind down in a well lit room it made no difference, because light was already in there, projecting the images of the outside world into what should be a now dark space. Crazier still, you wouldn’t even see that the blind had been pulled down, because light would need to be able to move again to bounce off the drawn blind to show its new position. That’s why I could only read pages of books and screens that were already open. If I pulled a book off the shelf and opened it, I wouldn’t be able to see it. The phantom of where it had been would continue burn on the lightwaves filling the space around it, whilst the book disappeared behind the projection screen. Like the next frame in the reel of a projector, waiting for the projector to tick over to be revealed. &nbsp; So despite being able to see, there is also an element of living blind. I have to be careful with what I move. If I grab a bottle of water to drink, it would appear as if the bottle hadn’t moved, so I always made the effort to put things back where I found them. Even something as mundane as a bottle of water can scare the shit out of you if it’s invisible and you bump into it. Moved objects are the spiderwebs of this time-frozen-ghost-world, that send you into a fit of panic not knowing what you’ve just walked into, and if it’s still on you. No, I had to be neat and tidy in this world, to save myself the stained underwear of dealing with invisible land mines and unintentional booby traps. &nbsp; Regardless of the limitations of sight, to stay sane in a limbo like this requires a bit of creative exploration. I began to experiment with things, relying solely on my sense of touch to try to unfurl as many more rules of this realm as possible. From what I could tell, everything was frozen except for me, and except for things I interacted with. Breathing was laboured, as I sucked in static oxygen from around me. Breathing out was like blowing bubbles underwater. That slight pressure of resistance as liquid parted to make way for bubbles of air. Sound was a painful experience. Trapped as crests and troughs of frequency, the world was mostly a cacophony of single notes which would bend slightly as I moved around and my ear shifted from space to space. One day, I was absent-mindedly walking towards on of those hands-free, loud-talking mobile phone types, and I noticed that I could start to make out some of his words. It was like listening to a recording that had been slowed down hundreds of times, but the cadence of conversation became clear. If I ran full pelt at the loud-talker from 20 meters away, I could actually get a comprehensible full word. It was faint at the start, being so far away from him, and still in an incredibly slow motion pitch because I can’t run at the speed of sound, but I was finally able to hear my first word in this world. “Fffffffaaaaaarrrrrrkkkkkiiinn...”. &nbsp; “Fuckin...”. It was incredibly underwhelming. After that, I took to wearing a pair of noise cancelling ear muffs to block out the noise. My experiments continued. I played with objects being held in suspended animation. Gravity was frozen, so everything could actually be lifted up and left floating in the air. I couldn’t see that, but I could feel it. A squeezed bottle of water became a stream of water bubbles. Invisible patches of wetness in the air. Floating in the air until my fingers collided with them, kick starting them back to life as they broke free of their suspended membrane and trickled down the pores of my skin. &nbsp; &nbsp; **THE OBSERVER EFFECT** &nbsp; I remember once, back in the real time, I lost myself in an internet spiral. Looking at memes, as you do, I stumbled on to the Nyan Cat meme. Trawling the internet for different incarnations of the cat, I found Schrodinger’s Nyan Cat. Which lead to me investigating who or what Schrodinger was. Which lead to me poring over Wikipedia pages and watching terribly low-fi YouTube explainer videos about quantum physics, wave-particle duality, the observer effect, and other concepts which blew my mind. &nbsp; For those who don’t know, there’s a cat in a box, with poison in it which is set to be released at some random point in time. Whilst the box is closed, there’s no way for us to know whether the cat is alive or dead, until we open the box and confirm it with our own eyes (aka, observing). So, as long as the box is closed, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. &nbsp; Trapped in this world, surrounded by objects that are there but aren’t, this felt like the strongest piece of scientific knowledge I was armed with. Am I alive, or dead? Am I still in the kitchen arguing with my girlfriend, or am I in a restaurant eating the invisible remains of someone’s meal? Am I, presently, living in a superposition? I feel alive. “I think, therefore I am” and all that. But doesn’t being alive require a transition of time? Time was passing for me, but not for anything else. &nbsp; To an external party who’s able to oversee this whole experience in real time, I think I’d be a textbook example of something existing in a superposition. In this single moment of frozen time, which would have been less than a nanosecond in real time, I would have; been in the kitchen being yelled at, been in most other places in my kitchen, been running at a man on a phone out in the street, been shoplifting noise cancelling ear muffs, been eating someone else’s meal in a restaurant, and been in many other states and places over the course of however long I’d been here. A textbook example of something existing in a superposition. But, I’ve never read a textbook on superposition, so that claim itself will remain in a superposition until I can actually open a textbook to confirm it. &nbsp; &nbsp; **WHO OBSERVES THE OBSERVERS?** Which brings me to a more philosophical quandary I’ve stumbled upon. Morals. It would be remiss of me not to admit that as an only child who didn’t have an abundance of toys or friends, I had to conjure amazing fantasies to keep myself entertained. One of them involved this very kind of situation. A world where I could do anything that I liked. Enemies I could smite without fear of retribution. Beautiful women whom I could claim simply by my own will. Exciting adventures of building floating cities. Well, here’s the twisted adult version of that fantasy, and the naive ignorance of youth has long since left me, and I’m paralysed by my awareness of the moral injustice of doing anything untoward. Which has me wondering... &nbsp; Morals essentially exist in a superposition, don’t they? The cat isn’t alive or dead until an observer opens the box, observes the cat, and projects their interpretation of what they see onto the body of the cat. Equally, a moral isn’t actually a moral until an action is observed by an observer, who then projects they’re own moral code on to that action. In real time, if I slap a complete stranger, the moral judgement of that will come down to who’s observing. If I slapped someone’s mother, they’re likely to condemn the action as a ‘bad’ action. If that someone’s mother had a knife and was about to attack them, my intervening slap might be seen as a moral act of defending them. To a third party, witnessing this from across the street where their view of the knife is obscured, they might just see this action as a man attacking a woman. But even after these initial observations and judgements have collapsed the moral wave, interpretation is still open to change. Perhaps a second later the mother stumbles aside and drops the knife, allowing the Third Party to see this and change their moral projection. &nbsp; So, in this perfect instance, I can be both good and bad at the same time. That’s bizarre. I’m actively restraining myself from doing things that could be considered ‘bad’, which by my observation makes me ‘good’.