Sigmund Deaves: Timepiece

Chapter 1: The Chess Room

Some things just don't make sense. We, as humans, have always found some things completely incomprehensible. Despite this inherent confusion, there have always been certain people who have devoted their short lives to the understanding of these completely incomprehensible subjects. People like Newton, Socrates, Archimedes, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, Darwin, Freud, Hooke, Kepler, Tesla, Mendeleev, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Pascal, Aristotle, Planck, Boyle, Galileo, and Einstein have all exerted a tremendous amount of effort in the pursuit of fitting everything into a neat little package for the layman to gaze upon and be completely dumbfounded. However, despite our very best efforts, some things simply remain out of our grasp. Take physics for example. The human race still does not understand exactly how gravity works even though it is a part of their everyday lives. A pessimistic person might think that the atom should have been forever out of the realm of comprehension for humans while a particularly optimistic person might think that an intimate understanding of faster than light travel and the center of a black hole is right around the corner. These completely incomprehensible concepts are part of our everyday lives but we accept them as fact. They act on their own volition, not waiting for humans to figure them out. So, with all these incomprehensible concepts we accept as part of our daily lives, one would think that adding just one more would not make that much of a difference.

Sometime after the World Wars, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Y2K scare there sat a young sleeping man in a dark room surrounded by desks. The uncombed jet-black hair on his head settled with most of it pointing straight down into the desk. Next to his head and the slowly congealing puddle of drool there lay a pair of thick rimmed glasses. At the sides of the glasses, the two earpieces thinned to give the optical instrument a sleeker look. All parts of the glasses that were not lenses were covered in a black plastic coating, probably to prevent breaking. The sleeping figure wore the dignified all-black suit-and-tie uniform of a preppy private school. Whatever school he went to called for its students to wear jackets during the winter because over his untucked business shirt was a slightly worn all-black suit jacket. The cuffs of the jacket, as well as the legs of the slacks, were folded in due to it being a hand-me-down of a slightly bigger ancestor. Most items on the sleeping student showed a family with conservative tendencies when it came to expensive goods. In fact, everything the young man was wearing was bought at a discount except for the three shiny white pins on his jacket. The first pin was that of a roman numeral for 3. The second was a chess piece king, complete with the cross on top. The third and final pin was the symbol π (approximately 3.14) colored white to juxtapose against the black of the suit jacket it was attached to.

The young man heard a quick rasp at the wooden door to his left and was suddenly awoken from his slumber. He jolted up in surprise at the sound, muttering something about a denial to an accusation which no one actually said and slowly got to his feet while simultaneously placing his glasses on the bridge of his nose. While stepping toward the door he motioned briefly as if he was about to attempt to fix his untucked shirt, askew tie, and unbuttoned jacket before realizing that doing so would simply be too much work. Once the unkempt boy reached the door he jiggled the handle briefly. A thought managed to claw its way to the surface of his groggy subconscious that the door was locked. He turned a dial over the handle once counter-clockwise and the door swung open toward him.

"Mr. President," a voice from the hallway said, "it's time for the Chess Club meeting. Can we come inside?" Outside the door frame, there was a large male student who stood at least two inches above the President. The new student's brownish hair was cut very short in a military-like buzz cut. Student B wore a permanent solemn expression as if he had to take everything seriously.

"Oh, right," the President stepped out of the way so that his rugged compatriot could get through. After the student with a buzz cut walked through the door, ten-or-so more students filtered through the door. One student hit the light switch on their way through, causing the President to wince.