June, 2002

The bookstore stood in a long shopping center full of shoe and outlet stores of various sorts. It was near the south end of the strip, and tucked away modestly among the fronts of those next to it, but it wasn’t modest. No, this bookstore was anything but that. There were always cars in the parking lot, for the bookstore was not only open twenty-four hours a day, but on holidays as well. Yes, there were always cars in the parking lot. That is to say that in actuality, the parking lot was always full, and in fact, overflowing. It was hardly inconspicuous that most of the cars parked in front of the bookstore’s closest neighbors belonged to patrons of the bookstore. But then, this wasn’t just an ordinary bookstore, either.

You see, people always buy an armful of books when they go to any bookstore, but rarely do they actually have time to read them all. At least not in the context they find most desirable. These bookworms of whom I speak would rather not work for a living, but rather, simply just read. I know I would. Most people have so many things to do when they get home from work, that the only time they end up having to read is late night, and propped up in bed against the pillow upon which they will later be slobbering. Sex? Well, only if you want to cut into your reading time, the average bookworm thinks.

It really breaks down like this: most of us live a somewhat respectable distance between our workplaces and our homes. Commerce just doesn’t thrive in the neighborhood. I don’t personally know anyone who lives next door to a skyscraper. So we have to commute. This is a given, and most people don’t have a real problem with it. Some do, however. Let’s say you work twenty miles from home. That twenty-mile trip translates to about a forty five-minute commute – one way. So add this to the nine hours we are expected to be at work (eight for work and one for lunch) and suddenly, your workday is at ten and a half hours. This is unacceptable to some – myself included. Now considering you need eight hours of sleep to refresh, you’re left with five and a half hours to do all that you want to do before sleeping. And this time must include showers, visits to the restroom, eating dinner and breakfast, and sex. When the hell’s a man supposed to read?

Enter the Time to Read Bookstore.

Time to Read was largely successful in dealing with this dilemma. This, in turn, made them the most successful bookstore in the history of ever. That is until their big temporal mistake – but we’ll get to that later. Simply put, the reason Time to Read put Barnes and Noble – among other large booksellers – out of business at the beginning of the twenty-first century, was because of the one simple commodity they sold. The single finite factor that kept them ahead of the game was the one thing that no one else in the industry sold. And they sold it like water in a desert. This simple commodity was simply taken for granted by the other retailers – hence their demise. You of course have guessed by now what it is I am talking about.

Time.

Time to Read sold time. Pow! How much better could it get? The customer could walk in and buy the new Anne Rice novel and a three-hour slice of temporal pie in which to read it. This, of course, was unheard of before Time to Read entered the booksellers’ market. And it remained the only bookstore that offered time as a purchasable commodity well into the twenty-first century, when it was met by an untimely demise. Pardon the pun, but there’s really no other way to put it. I digress… I will get to the demise of the most successful bookstore ever, but not yet.

Let me first tell you how they bottled time and sold it over the counter. The most common thought would be that they simply gave you access to a time machine, and let you add a couple of hours to your day. Well, in fact, this wasn’t far from the case. But it wasn’t exactly how they did it. Every time you transcend temporal limitations, the world must stop and go with you. So if I buy two hours to sit down with my copy of Crichton’s newest masterpiece, the world gets those two hours as well. It obviously goes without saying, then, that there’s no business in that. We could all pitch in together and buy and hour and collectively enjoy a long lunch. No, the way they sold time was in units apart from the temporal span of a normal day. One could essentially walk up to the counter and buy an hour or two, and reap the benefits of it immediately, though the time they were buying was not actually free. And by free I don’t mean cost-wise. What I mean by free is not allotted. The time they were buying wasn’t really just ‘extra hours in a day’, but rather, it was borrowed. Stolen would be another fit. The time you were buying in one-hour sections was from a distant past. Needless to say, these stolen hours started adding up quickly, and with no regard for the livelihood of those living in our past.

The many-worlds theory suggests that all time is alive in the here and now, living only dimensionally apart and separated from the time we witness as present. With this theory in mind, one cannot conceive taking time from the past – as it is still alive and well, albeit suffering from the suddenly missing ticks on their watches. Well, Time to Read didn’t consider this too thoroughly when they built their business model. The general consensus went something like this: “Those people are done with it, they’re all dead and gone, so let’s just take their time. We obviously can’t sell time from the future, where we all conceivably have to exist at some point. So we shall sell the past. An hour at a time.” So that’s precisely what they did.

An hour was quite expensive when one really considered it – weighing it against how much he charges for an hour’s worth of work. The average American made somewhere between 20 and 25 dollars an hour at the turn of the twenty-first century. Therefore the typical hour was worth about that much in the minds of the customers. But when asked to consider the actual mining of that time, and its relocation to your personal benefit, it was fairly easy at once to accept the otherwise exorbitant price tag.

A one-hour unit of reading time could be used wherever – and indeed, whenever – the customer wanted to use it. But it did have a theoretical limit – an expiration date, so to speak. This calculation was based on the half-lives of the primary constituents to the particles that time was actually comprised of. That’s a whole other facet of explanation though, and I’d rather not go into the quantum mechanics of temporal delineation. So if you were to buy three hours of reading time, you could typically be said to have about a week in which to use them. And wherever you saw fit to sit down and activate them. The only technical limitation – and indeed, it was built into the very fabric of the components you had purchased – was the how. How you used this hour was limited. You could read. That’s all you could do with it. You couldn’t sleep, or eat, or micturate, or write, or have sex. You could read. And that was it. Now, if you chose to sit there staring at the page, and not moving your eyes, that was your call. But you were limited to reading, so to speak. This was built in to ensure the safety of temporal passage. Look at it this way: someone buys three hours to read, but instead of reading, he uses those hours to run out and kill someone, whereby his alibi – “I was reading! I have a receipt!” – covers him. It was simply forbidden by the laws of physics, which were set into motion and authority by a force much greater than that of the bookstore from which you obtained the reading time.

So back to the price: how much did an hour of reading time cost? Well, I’ll tell you, but please keep in mind the trouble it took the bookstore to mine that time, and develop the technology, and to bring it to fruition, to pay the energy bills, et cetera. With this in mind, you will be more apt to accepting this figure. Okay. Ready? Five hundred dollars an hour. Now, I will tell you, the price came down a lot after the first few months, when the novelty of it became more popular. Once it caught on, it sold like hotcakes. But it never waned during the expensive times either. At five hundred dollars an hour, only the rich – or wealthy at least – could afford it, but afford it they did. They bought the heck out of it.

I mentioned the price coming down. It did. It was halved after about four months. Then it was halved again, where it stayed until the company bought the farm. So a hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour, for all the hours you could possibly afford, and you’d be a reading fool!

Of course there were revolts against the company, and government sanctions that tried to stop it, but in the end, none of that mattered. It was a perfectly legal commodity, and as long as people were willing to buy it, it was sold. There was, after all, nothing constitutionally wrong with selling time your great-grandfather had spent sitting on his front porch reading, so that you could sit on your front porch and read a little. He was done with it, and now you could buy it and use it too. Pow! But how did they keep you from doing anything else with the time? Well, that is the simple part. They mined only reading time. By taking time from the past only from hours spent reading, it became an inherent property of the sixty-minute segments of illustrious time that all you could do with it was read. It was beautiful. And consider this: a lot more people spent a lot more time reading back then. There was, after all, no radio, no television, Internet, video games, or other mindless activities like there are in abundance today. Granted there were time-wasting activities to be found back in the past, but there was a lot more reading as well. A lot. So we have collectively some million years of reading to be sold. If five people read for five hours, you had twenty-five hours to sell. It truly was ingenious.

Now I mentioned Barnes and Noble going out of business in the twenty-first century. Yes, you read that correctly. Look on the Internet or in the phone book now, and you’ll find hundreds of Barnes and Nobles out there. That’s because Time to Read is no more. Let me explain this a little better. Time has a tendency to repair itself when something tears into its fabric. And these little eddies in the space-time continuum can be repaired by the demise of such things that would cause it a rift. So when the Time to Read bookstore chain went out of business – and in fact, out of existence entirely – the time it had stolen somehow snapped back into place and repaired itself as though it had never been affected at all. It’s most interesting how this all came about, too.

Time to Read had been stealing time, as I have mentioned, from the past. But as I also said, they had not considered the many-worlds theory in their business model. So to think that the past is still alive and well beside us in place, but not dimension, did not cross their minds. Well isn’t it obvious then, that they didn’t consider the future either? They in fact, precisely ignored it.

Now let’s break this down a little. Time to Read developed a way to mine the time from our ancestors – I won’t go into this technology, and for the simple reason of my not wanting to cause another catastrophe the likes of which I couldn’t afford to be responsible for – and that was their undoing. What they had simply and utterly failed to realize, was that in the near future, we were doing the same thing. Time we are stealing now doesn’t seem to affect us negatively. You buy your three hours, you take the little electronic card and insert it into the rental computer you checked out from the same bookstore. That card is activated where and when you sit – and stays in effect until your time runs out. Much like a game card at an arcade, in fact. There is always an ambient light when reading, but all else is pleasantly blank. It is historical time you are spending. It won’t show up on your watch – or anyone else’s for that matter – but you will experience it no less. If you pop the card into the small computer while sitting on your couch, everything seems to disappear around you, and you have the next three – or four, or however many units you bought – hours to read without being disturbed or called back to your home-time. And the person watching you use the card will never be the wiser – assuming you haven’t told them what is going on. Here’s what they will witness: you slide the card in and freeze for just under a millionth of a second – completely unnoticeable – and pop back into action, slide the card out, and get up to go do whatever you wanted to do after finishing that book. Three (or four, or five) hours just passed in the blink of a millionth of a second. Congratulations! You just read on borrowed time.

So what happens in the twenty-second century, when Time to Read is still in business, and they are stealing time from us here and now? Well, that was their flaw. The splinter in the woodwork of their business model. And the reading of said business model happened right here in 2002. Sometime in the late summer of 2016, that very hour was mined. It was stolen and sold to a young woman, who used it to read part of a Danielle Steel novel. Well, the same hour cannot be used for two different events – not in the way it was mined. They only took that facet of the dimensional realm. In other words, it wasn’t taken from all the realms around it – only from the reader using it right then, right there. Just one session of that hour, if you will. So with the weight of this knowledge, you can begin to understand the peril of selling an hour you had originally used to develop the technology. The hour the developer spent reading the plan was stolen and used in the future, so the model never got read. Thus the business never came to be, and promptly vanished in a logical, physical, and temporal loophole.

Some of you may still have receipts stuffed between the pages of an old Stephen King tome, or folded in your unorganized wallets. Receipts that bear proudly the name of the bookstore that never made it. Time to Read. The brilliant idea that was stolen, and promptly disappeared, never to be heard from again. It was there one minute, and gone the next. Some people were actually inside some of the stores when they suddenly ceased to exist. Well those people survived, but where a bookshelf had stood only a moment before, upon which sat hundreds of potential buys, now stood dust on the cement of the old buildings. And in some cases, where it was a freestanding building, built specifically to be that bookstore, the customers were even more shocked to look up from their empty hands (which had been holding a book only a second before) to see they were no longer standing in a row between bookshelves, but rather on tall green grass. Or the parking lot of a Chili’s. It was truly an event to witness.

I’ve often taken my Time to Read receipt out of my file and gazed at it. It has faded a little over the years, but it still bears that pretty red logo as gloriously as it had when I first received it. I’m not quite sure why the receipts and bookmarks survived. It seems that when the buildings vanished, so would have all of which had been used therein. But by some paradox, here it sits on my desk, staring back at me as I write this review of the only bookstore to ever sell me the only thing I thought went with a book better than a bookmark – and consequently, something I’ve not had enough of since they went out of business.

Time.

Of course, the three books I bought there are no longer on my shelves. I did notice their state of absence shortly after I heard the news of the stores going away. I ran in to have a look at my shelves and noticed a small gap between “Mostly Harmless” and “Long Dark Teatime of the Soul”, and another slightly thicker gap between two of my John J Nance books. I have since replaced the three books with copies I found at Half Price Books, or Barnes and Noble – I can’t remember, as it wasn’t near as important to me as the copies I had gotten from Time to Read. But that’s okay. A lot of things I had in my childhood that were very important to me have gone on to better places. That is not to say I don’t miss them, but I have come to accept that they are gone. After all, there’s always a price to pay for stealing something. And there is an old adage that comes to mind – I hate to hit you with clichés, but God knows it’s true – when I remember the great bookstore: Time is money.

I’ve not often had an experience like I did the first time I bought an hour from Time to Read. I bought only one hour, and tentatively sat on my favorite reading recliner at home. I was a little nervous about using it at first – I think most of us were. But I was excited at the same time. I knew that no sooner did I sit down and insert the card would I be removing the card, and with the reading of another book under my belt. I will miss the Time to Read bookstore, just as I miss the time I bought from it. Those are hours that can never be replaced, just as I’m sure my great-grandfather misses those hours I indirectly stole from him that I might read my fiction. I just hope he wasn’t reading the Bible at the time.