When I reached two billion years, the pressure became almost palpable, and I gripped the handlebars of the motorcycle tighter, as if to assure myself of the material support of some known object. We changed the scale to millions of years per second and soon we were at a time depth of a billion years. “What is it?” I asked not too happy about the unforeseen complications. On their return, the judging panel extracts each competitor’s radioactive stove and, according to the degree of radioactive decay of the event, determines the ranking. I sped like lightning through the historical period, then into pre-history and accelerated, so now it only took a few minutes to get to the period where I lost Eliza, and even as I looked for her, I was aware that I couldn’t have stopped even if I’d caught a glimpse of her.
