Discovery of the Moment

Note from the author: While many of you will classify this as "sci-fi", I want to make it clear that this story is more than just that. It will span a lot of different categories, with Incest being a major theme. I don't know yet how many chapters this will have or where, exactly, it'll go, but I do believe that it'll go on for quite a while- possibly novel-length. Who knows? For now, just sit back and enjoy the tale as it unfolds. I know I will! And, hey, if you enjoy it enough, please feel free to submit a vote and comment to let me know!

The story I am about to tell you may make some of you uncomfortable. Some of you may become angry or indignant. I want to make something absolutely, crystal clear: while I am guilty of some pretty unethical things, most of which I will recount in this story, I am not really a bad person. I love my wife and daughter both very much, the way any good husband and father ought to. I wouldn't consider myself to be a cold-blooded murderer. I don't hold any real malice towards anyone. But some of the things I've done may lead you to believe otherwise. Most of the things I've done, I did so out of typical human curiosity. Other things... well... some of the things I've done, I hope, will be understandable and forgiveable. If you can't forgive me for my transgressions, or at least simply accept the fact of them, I have only one bit of solace: at least you will not be able to hold me accountable. And so we begin, first with some exposition so that you'll understand the world that I live in (which is and is not the same as yours)...

Have you ever found yourself sitting in a quiet place, alone and with nothing much to do, just taking in the surroundings with only your mind to keep you company? And, in those peaceful times, have you ever noticed something out of the corner of your eye, something that you'd swear was there but, when you looked directly at it, you found yourself looking at... nothing in particular?

Some people theorize that those things just out of your field of vision are ghosts. Or portals to another dimension. Or angels. Something other-worldly. Science might tell you that it's just your imagination. Religionists might say it's God. Pagans may claim that they're spirits. But now I know that they are all wrong.

Those things you catch a glimpse of out of the corner of your eye are real. Every bit as real as you and the chair you're sitting in. It's just that they're out of sync with us, mirages of the things that happen in the space between the seconds. A fly zipping along, twenty feet away from you, and your peripheral vision sees just a fraction of a second where the fly is frozen in time. Or the air molecules stand still. Or a passing vehicle stops inexplicably. It's things that are in motion, everyday things that we ignore because our conscious minds interperet them as being in motion- things don't just freeze in time. But what we see in those brief glimpses are those things indeed sort of "stuck" in time.

Ever since I was a child I noticed those things. At first they were unsettling to my young mind. I couldn't understand what they were or why I could see them more clearly than other people. And my parents, unable to see the things I saw, taught me to ignore them and disbelieve in their existence. "It's nothing, honey," my mom said countless times. "You're just seeing things."

But I knew that I wasn't "just seeing things." I argued the point often as a child, much to the consternation of my parents, until they sent me to a psychologist. After months of sessions with the shrink I came to believe what the head doctor told my parents: that my mind was seeing things just like everyone else, but it was sort of freezing a moment in time within my head- like the pause button on a VCR. He attributed it to a weird manifestation of a photographic memory. "Relatively harmless," he told us. "He'll grow out of it." And with a full year of treatments and appointments, he was right. Well, kind of. He simply convinced me through hypnosis to disregard my "visions" and stop thinking about them. I presume that, with a treatment like this, people call it medical "practice."

Years and years went by with me under that psychologist's spell. The events still occurred, but I had been trained to simply act as though nothing had happened when they did. For brief moments I could be caught "staring into space" and then I'd shake my head like I was trying to loosen some cobwebs and I'd continue with whatever I was doing. Teachers thought I was having problems with daydreaming, but the episodes never lasted longer than a second or two, so they never bothered me much about it, except to call my name a little louder if they were talking to me at the time about something. Girlfriends decided that I was being privately brilliant. Regular friends simply thought that I was weird or "spacing out." And, being under the influence of the psychologist's hypnotic suggestion, I didn't disabuse them of these notions and played along, never arguing or belaboring the point when someone noticed it. "It's nothing," I'd tell them. "Just something I've done since I was a kid. Can't explain it."

But as I got older, I became more skeptical and cynical about this strange behavior of mine. I started to question it and the cause behind it. The funny thing about hypnotic suggestions, you might be interested to learn, is that the "patient" cannot do anything that he or she does not really want to do. With time I started to combat the suggestion that my "episodes" were nothing to concern myself with and began to focus on them with a new intensity. Slowly, with patience and a strong force of will, I began to break through the hypnotic suggestion and it eventually disappeared entirely. By the time I was well into my thirties, an adult male with a beautiful daughter and loving wife, the block on my mysterious episodes fell to pieces and I was once again able to fully be aware of them on a conscious level.

The first really amazing breakthrough came for me when I was 36. I was watching my 17-year-old daughter's last soccer game of her Junior year at high school, just a few weeks away from her 18th birthday. She'd been playing soccer since she was 8 years old and was very good at it. Both me and my wife Sarah were extremely proud of our girl's accomplishments in the game and the good it had done for her both physically and emotionally. We, Sarah and I, were sitting on the bleachers, cheering our daughter Kelly on as she peddled the ball down the field towards the opposing team's goal, when something out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I couldn't really tell what it was, just a blur that caught my interest. Without actually thinking about it, I physically turned my head to look at it and, much to my surprise, it didn't disappear like it had when I was a child. This time, while surrounded by dozens of people, the episode wasn't an episode. It had become a Moment. A moment in time when everything else stopped and the thing I was looking at, which happened to be a man calling out to his own daughter on the field, was stuck in a perfect, statuesque pose. No sound came from this mouth, he didn't move a single bit. I looked fully at him and he did nothing. Frozen.

I stared openly at the total stranger for what seemed like an eternity, but I'm guessing that it was only one or two seconds at most. And while I stared at him I quickly became aware that everything else had stopped, too. The man wasn't just paused, but everything around me was halted as though I had freeze-framed Reality. And as soon as I came to this startling realization, time seemed to snap back into motion and the man was suddenly yelling again. "Go, Bethany!" he shouted. "Stop her!" He then stopped and glanced at me briefly, noticing that I was staring at him with my jaw dropped open into a perfect "O." He knitted his eyebrows and said, "What?"

I played it off and shrugged. "Sorry," I said. "I thought you were someone I knew." I offered a lop-sided, embarrassed grin and turned my attention back to Kelly's game. I looked just in time to see her kick the ball into the net, which brought a round of cheers from everyone on the bleachers.

"Did you see that, honey?" Sarah exclaimed as she grabbed my arm in excitement. "Did you see that?! What a shot!"

I smiled at her and joined her in cheering on our daughter enthusiastically. Any good father would. But even so, my mind was awhirl with what I had just experienced. It was buzzing with questions and possibilities. At the forefront of my thoughts, even as I felt jubilant over my daughter's amazing success on the field, was the primary of all questions: Could I do it again?

Over the next few weeks I bent myself towards recreating my experience as often as possible. I came to find that, with some effort, I could indeed do it again- repeatedly. And each time that I did, I learned that I could draw out the duration of my experiences from a few seconds to a few minutes. At first I was just awed by what I had discovered, amazed at how quiet and surreal everything was in the "between" moments. I'm sure that most people have seen TV shows and movies where time "stopped" for a character, where things became frozen while the characters could interact with their environments. For all intents and purposes, that's pretty much what my experiences are like. In the beginning stages I was simply content to sit still and observe things around me as I learned how to control my strange ability. But, as my control grew, I became bolder and more curious. I began to move around and interact with this frozen world I had found myself in.

Some might think that I had learned how to freeze time, but I don't feel that would be a proper description of what I can do. Rather than freeze time for the rest of Reality, I think it's more apropos to say that I have learned how to step outside of Time. If you think of the Time/Space Continuum as a sort of studio recording, where there are various tracks of audio playing all at the same time to produce a song, you could imagine that I personally represent one of those tracks and I have somehow discovered how to isolate myself from the rest of the music. What's important here is that I can achieve this state not only as a singular entity, that is to say my own body, but I can take other things along with me such as clothing or anything I am currently touching when I step out of Time, like my cell phone or watch or MP3 player. This is important because it means that I can isolate multiple "tracks" from the Time-Stream, which can be very useful for long "trips" when I take them.

Understand that stepping out of Time is not a simple matter of just doing it and then, let's say, getting into a car and driving somewhere. That would be virtually impossible to do. Why? Because when I'm stepping in between one second and the next (which is, essentially, what I'm doing- I'm existing between the seconds), complex chemical reactions cannot occur, Which means that gas cannot be combusted to create heat or energy and batteries cannot release energy from their chemical reactions. Believe me, I've tried it. When I'm "between" (which is what I call it) and I try to use anything which requires complex chemical reactions or machinery, all I get is nothing. The engine doesn't turn, the motor doesn't start... nothing at all happens except that I sit there, turning an ingition key for no particular reason. In the end, it's a good thing that I can't drive while I'm Between- while I may be in motion, no one else is and driving in a frozen world could have disasterous and deadly results. And forget about using guns. Only simple tools like scissors and wrenches can be used unless, of course, I drag something with me into those Between moments.

But some things do remain constant. On a hot summer day the heat is still there- but there is absolutely no wind. While light atoms don't necessarily move, they still retain their luminescent properties, so I can still see things without worry- even when the light is coming from light bulbs and whatnot. Electricity doesn't flow like it should, but I can still get one hell of a jolt from a wall socket (I learned that one the hard way). On a rainy day, the water droplets are still in the air and they can still get me wet- but they are frozen in place, just like everything else. And water itself is an extraordinarily interesting thing to observe when I'm Between- a body of water, while motionless, is still malleable. I can still dip my hand into a body of water and still drink. The strange thing is that the water reacts to me the way a pool of tar might react to someone in normal time- it's thick and resistant to change and doesn't really flow unless acted upon by another force (me). Actually, all liquids are like that. I haven't tried it yet, but I suppose that I could step outside of Time at the exact moment when someone spills a drink and stop the liquid from ever hitting the ground. But that's not the point of this story, is it? You're not interested in the physical properties of the universe when time stands still, are you?

No indeed. You're interested in the possiblities. And, frankly, so was I.

What would you do with my gift? Rob a bank? Have guilt-free, anonymous sex with people without them ever knowing it? Learn the secrets of the rich and famous? Stop crimes? Save lives? These, I presume, are the normal things that a person would do or attempt if they found themselves in my shoes. And, yes, I did them all. Well, except for the bank robbery- it proved to be too much trouble and I realized that I couldn't explain how I suddenly became extremely rich without alerting the authorities. But I did, on occasion, manage to sneak out a few hundred-dollar bills when I found myself short on funds. A frozen world in a time of need can easily become a giant ATM- but I've always picked money from places that wouldn't really miss it such as banks, major retail outlets and casinos. Is it the lesser of two evils to steal from those who steal from us? Ethics, I will admit, have become a much fuzzier thing for me these days.

By the time I was able to control how long I could stay Between for indefinite periods of time, I began to realize the potential adventures I could have. I could do anything I wanted, good or bad, and no one would be the wiser. And the first time I realized this was on a particularly memorable day, about six months after my discovery. On this particular day I had gone Between and decided to stroll around the house to see what my wife and daughter were up to. Yes, to spy on my family. My wife was in the process of making dinner, standing next to the sink while cutting cucumbers for a salad. Her hand held the knife just as she was about to chop down on the vegetable and, looking over to the stove, I could see the frozen billows of steam coming from a saucepan of spaghetti sauce. When I went to the stove and smelled the steam I was pleased to learn that I could do so without any hindrance- and it smelled wonderful, too. I turned back to my frozen wife, walked up to her and planted a loving kiss on her cheek- a kiss that she would never be aware of, but it was heartfelt just the same.

I went deeper into the house to seek out my daughter. Walking past the living room, I saw that the TV was on. An image of George Clooney was frozen on the screen. I believe the scene was from a rerun of ER, which was one of my wife's favorite shows to watch. Passing the living room, I went upstairs to Kelly's room. She wasn't there, but I knew that she was home. The only other logical place for her to be would've been the bathroom. So, without a thought or concern in the world, I walked to the bathroom, opened the door and was surprised to see my daughter right where I expected her to be. She was bent over at the waist, completely naked, dipping her hand into a bathtub full of what appeared to be hot water. Steam rose, frozen, from the spout and the bathroom mirror had become fogged with more of the same. It felt warm and humid there, staring at my naked daughter, and I actually apoligized to her frozen form, not realizing that she couldn't hear or see me. I felt a bit foolish a second later when she didn't react to my intrusion and I remembered the state I was in.

It was truly amazing, I must admit, to see my daughter in this intimate, vulnerable state of undress. The years of soccer and general athletics had done wonders for her young body. Her skin was flawless and held a slightly pink hue under the warm bathroom lights. Her sandy blonde hair was undone and hanging down over her left shoulder and I noticed that her hair had a slight natural curl to it that was quite appealing to look at. Her muscle tone, as evinced by the way her leg muscles pulled taut while bending at the waist, was exquisite. Allowing myself only a brief second of indulgence, I glanced at Kelly's upturned ass and noted how firm it seemed and how it so beautifully framed the cute, tiny pussy lips beneath. I decided that gazing upon the beauty of my daughter's sex was, perhaps, going a bit too far and, besides which, was not the end of her. There was lots more. I approached her side and knelt down to look at her face. But it was her breasts, large and hanging pendulously while she bent over, that really caught my attention. I was stunned at how well my baby's body had developed and tried to reconcile how I had missed the changes over the years. I intellectually knew she was a pretty and attractive young lady, thanks to all the boys who kept knocking on our door, but I hadn't truly appreciated just how womanly and beautiful she had become right under my nose. Her breasts held a sort of largish bell shape as they hung down and were capped by two very erect nipples, which sat upon quarter-sized areolaes. Thin blue veins could be seen creeping and crawling their way under the surface of Kelly's magnificent breasts and I found myself totally enthralled at how, even when frozen in time, my daughter seemed to possess so much grace and poise.

I know it's sick and perverted for me to have done so, but I couldn't help myself. My curiosity got the better of me and I just had to know how those wonderful bits of flesh felt. I slowly and cautiously reached up to touch one of those untouchable globes, the left one, absurdly worried that she might suddenly come to life and scream at me for doing so even though I knew she couldn't possibly do that, and I soon felt her hard nipple press into the softness of my palm. The sensation was utterly unique. As I applied more pressure to her left breast, my hand fully cupped the rest of the flesh and I was amazed to find that it moved and conformed to touch just like any breast in normal time would. Unlike my wife's breasts, which I have felt countless times and are truly terrific, Kelly's had the firmness of youth. They were firm and soft to the touch and amazingly warm and I thoroughly enjoyed the illicit feel of them as I freely groped my daughter's breasts with both hands. Oh, dear God, it was absolute bliss! But it took me only a few seconds of fondling those wonderous teats before I realized that, like any man would, I had developed a raging erection. An erection for my own daughter. Then my widened eyes fell upon the underside of my daughter's body, focused directly on the place where her pubic hair should have been. It was all gone, every last strand. What a way to learn that my daughter shaved her pussy completely bald! I gazed at that forbidden spot and licked my lips.

I pulled my hand back and contemplated this new truth in silence for several long seconds while my nude daughter, frozen in time and preparing to take a bath, stood bent over beside me. What was I doing? I'm the girl's father, for Christ's sake! How could I sit there and fondle her and enjoy it like some sleeze? I mentally battled and berated myself for my lascivious and lust-laden thoughts, all the while fully aware that I had succumbed to a most base desire. I wanted to do this. I wanted to do it as dearly as I'd ever wanted anything in life. But why now? Was it just the convenience of the situation or was it something more? And how could I reconcile my devious desires against my paternal insticts as this innocent girl's father? I couldn't, pure and simple. I couldn't reconcile anything and all I could do was try furtively to ignore every signal that my body was sending up to my brain: this is primal, you idiot, and you MUST do it!