I dropped in to The Stopped Clock to have a beer and catch up on the latest gossip. You never know who will drop into that place, or whether you last saw them before or after the current visit, so most conversational gambits are tentative things in that peculiar bar. Besides, I like to play the game next to the counter. Faded lettering on the top says only AUTOPONG, and it's not really a pinball machine or a video game. I have no idea what its vintage is, and if Edgar says he's not telling. It doesn't take conventional coinage, but I've learned to stick two quarters together with a bit of tape before dropping them into the slot, and then the lights come on and strange things happen. I don’t so much play the game as observe it.I had gotten to level 5, or perhaps had lost, and I was only half listening to the conversation at the bar. Retro Retro had gotten indignant and had risen to his feet."I know it's impossible! That's not what I asked!" he half-whined, his voice not quite slurring but definitely a little mushy around the edges. "I'm not asking you posers a question in temporal mechanics! This is a....a philosophical discussion.""All right, calm down," growled Edgar quietly, pointing to the sign over the bar that read TAKE IT OUTSIDE AND ELSEWHEN. It hung, slightly lopsided, next to the other sign that read ALL COMPLAINTS WILL BE DEALT WITH TOMORROW. Nobody was ever quite sure whether to take that last one as a joke or as a threat."I'm not making fun of you, I simply don't understand the question!" complained Sir Attaccus, sweating under his bowler hat. "I comprehend that you ask whether there is one time in history that you could go back to, and dwell in forever. But are you enquiring whether you should be frozen in that moment, or living that moment actively for eternity?""That's an empty distinction," muttered Bobby Saturday, five empty beer bottles in front of him."I assure you it is not!" retorted Sir Attaccus hotly. "One is an infinitesimal point and the other more of a spliced segment! The distinction is indistinct only to the undistinguishing!""Big talk for a character whose time machine has a pennyfarthing wheel built into it," smirked Bobby. Edgar was forced to further suppress the clamor. Time machine design is a serious business for those who use them instead of relying on the door of the bar; more than one fight has started out in the parking lot.Retro Retro pressed on his temples. "That's....argh." He tried again."Let's say you can choose which way you want to answer," said Retro Retro. "Frozen moment or bubble in time, any size, any volume – pick a moment in time. I'm not interested in the parametrics, I just want to know what you'd choose and how." The bar fell silent.“Well, I’ll take a stab,” drawled Bobby Saturday, standing up and flipping up the collar of his leather jacket. “I’d pick the party during the grand opening of the Great Pyramid at Giza.”“Those Egyptians sure knew how to have a good time,” admired Bobby. “Twenty years they were at it, and by the time it was done, they were determined to let loose a little steam. First they had games. There were two crews, each with a 100,000 men in it, and they played a giant game that was something like capture the flag crossed with tackle football. The winning crew got to fly a pennon from the pyramid’s capstone for the rest of the closing ceremonies.”“Then there was the beer,” continued Bobby. “During the pyramids construction the Egyptians basically invented beer to keep their crews from going batshit crazy. They made jugs and jugs of it for the closing ceremonies – beautiful, smooth, creamy stuff, too light to weigh you down, but strong enough to put you out of your right mind and keep you there. They stored it in watertight jugs suspended in the Nile so it would be cold, and if you spilled any on the ground, you had to buy the next jug.” There was a sympathetic moan from some of the listeners, who could and would crisscross the time/space continuum looking for a free drink.“They played music. Not hired bands; it seemed like everybody knew how to play a flute, or a stringed instrument, or drums. Spontaneous drum circles and jam sessions would break out, numbering in the hundreds or even thousands, of people playing their fool heads off,” recalled Bobby. “A melody would be picked up, echoed across the valley, played in counterpoint over there, and bounced back until a kind of continuous round was set up – a wall of noise that shook the temples and kept the crocodiles from wanting to approach within a mile.”“I don’t think I need to go into details about the sex,” said Bobby Saturday, immediately ducking a thrown paper cup and waving down a half dozen protests with varying degrees of crudeness. “You can imagine it for yourself, a valley of a million sweaty people of both sexes, tired of working and ready for a good time, all playing grab-ass in the shadow of a snow-white mountain of geometric exactness that they themselves had erected as a monument to eternity. And if that doesn’t get your juices flowing, you’re either dead or your soul is.” And Bobby Saturday sat back down, cracked another beer and downed it. Several bar patrons patted him on the back.“Sounds....distinctly declasse’,” trumpeted Sir Attaccus. “Now, for my part, something a little more ambitious. I should choose to freeze the universe at a few picoseconds before the Heat Death of the Universe.”“Imagine,” breathed the tweed-clad Englishman, sketching his meerschaum pipe in the air for dramatic effect, “Imagine that you are removed at a safe distance, and the collapsing universe is a great ball of not-quite-gas that fills half the sky. It incandesces, faintly blue, as it silently falls toward the point of uttermost oblivion. But its core – the central mass where the zero-point will come to accrete – burns a fiery red in the visual spectrum.”“Then,” continued Sir Attaccus breathlessly, “the not-quite-bubble, more-than-cloud reaches some critical diameter or density, and fingers of reddish energy reach up from the central nub. Like red lightning, bolts of plasma streak from the center core to lick the perimeter, dancing across the sky. And for just a moment, the collapsing universe looks like a great eye, bloodshot from an aeternity of dissipated living, staring into the void.”“And then, just the very slightest bit later,” added Attaccus, “bubbles appear – little black pockmarks, effervescing out of the collapsing universe. They’re just little dapples towards the center, but they expand as they reach the outer limits until their boil away at the surface, creating a choppy black froth that breaks the clean line of the event horizon. And you realize, as you watch them, that you’re watching black holes form as matter compresses beyond the straining point, and yet these are the *least* dense thing you can see, just the universe’s last-gasp attempt to free some of its energy from the inevitable collapse to the null point, hovering only a scrap of a second away. Ladies and gentlemen, the beauty that is the last moments of the universe.” And with that, Sir Attaccus bowed and doffed his bowler.“Sounds like some lousy physics to me,” stage-whispered Bobby Saturday behind his hand.“Well that’s what it looked like!” hissed Sir Attaccus, clenching his umbrella in fists of rage. Edgar had to step in once again, cutting through the general crowd noise with an air horn.I nudged Retro Retro in his smiley-face teeshirt. “Hey,” I said. “You started this mess. What’s your answer? If you could pick just one time – one point in time at all – what would you pick?”Retro Retro nodded and half-smiled, staring down into his drink. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me straight in the eye.“I’d pick 1.7 seconds before my own death,” he said.It was a strange answer. For a moment, nobody in The Stopped Clock had anything to say to that.“Hey,” Edgar said. “You know we don’t do units of time in this....”“ONE POINT SEVEN SECONDS,” bellowed Retro Retro, still staring straight at me. He slowly swivelled his stool around to face the rest of the bar, all now too gobsmacked to speak, move or, in the case of the guy in the restroom, pee. Retro Retro pulled off his ANTARES TRUCKING ballcap, smoothed back his hair, and fastidiously replaced the cap. “And I’ll tell you why.”“I’ve been around, you know,” started Retro Retro. “I know things like how long you’ve been time-travelling are pretty subjective, but I’m kind of a veteran. I’ve watched all of my ancestors being born, all the way back to something hairy and the size of a housecat. I’ve seen the end of the universe – and Attaccus, it was actually kind of foggy and boring. And Saturday, during that pyramid party I was sitting in the King’s chamber on top of Khufu’s sarcophagus making time with two of his wives. So don’t get all poetical and tour-guidey with me.” Both Sir Attaccus and Bobby Saturday looked sour but said nothing.“And I’ve seen a lot of death, too,” mused Retro Retro. “I watched myself die, and that was pretty humbling. And then I went back, saved myself, and waited until I died again. And I watched that, and the next recursion, and so on and so on for thousands of times. Watching me die is pretty boring now. I’ve started watching the rest of you die recently; that’s a bit more fun.” He shared a wink with me that only I could see; the other bar patrons shifted uneasily.“But the one thing I’ve noticed,” said Retro Retro, “is that no matter who dies, or when, or how, the same thing always happens. At the very last moment their eyes widen, and they look surprised. It’s one of the big mysteries of the universe. What are dying people seeing or experiencing? I’ve always wanted to know. And I’ve got a theory.”“You see,” pressed Retro Retro, “I’ve been gathering data on this phenomenon. Running time trials. Connecting people to biometrics. And I’ve found something interesting. The phenomenon always happens 1.7 seconds before they flatline. Exactly 1.7 seconds before the last bit of life ebbs from a body, their eyes do the surprised trick. Why? I think I know why.”“Life is a square wave,” said Retro Retro. “You’re either alive or you’re dead. There’s no in between. Not even for really sick people. You’re either alive – L=1 – or you’re dead – L=0. It’s like a cliff; one moment you’re up here; next moment you’re down here. DOOOOOOOOOT.”“Ah, but nature hates right angles,” explained Retro Retro. “You can’t find a good square wave in the natural world. Everything happens in arcs and sinusoids and organic curves. Life’s no different from an electronic square wave. It’s a discontinuity, and the world hates those. Look at a square wave on an oscilloscope, and you’ll see it spike before and after the drop. The world doesn’t know how to deal with a sharp edge, so it wiggles around up top, drops off, and then wiggles around on the bottom, and it hopes nobody noticed what happened in between.”“Life,” concluded Retro Retro,” is a square wave with discontinuous edges at front and back. I want to ride that spike – that moment where I’ve got more life than L=1 – for all eternity. That’s worth being frozen looking surprised.”Retro Retro fell silent. “Twice a day,” I said, clinking my beer bottle on top of his glass.“TWICE A DAY,” echoed the bar solemnly, amid some quiet toasting.“I suppose you could do it at the beginning too,” mused Sir Attaccus.“Yeah,” sneered Bobby Saturday, “I’d like to see Attaccuss as a frozen surprised baby.”And then Edgar had to step in again.