by Adam Nemett
Mathias Blue—also known by his alter ego, Ultraviolet—is the brain behind the now-ubiquitous concept of “chronostrictesis,” or time devaluation. While skeptics still exist within the scientific, religious, and mainstream communities, the theory has gained a considerable foothold with the youth demographic; and as we feel the rapid shortening of days grow all but undeniable, Ultraviolet’s theories have shed their hokum label and now verge on prophecy. Academic papers emerge on a daily basis, crediting chronostrictesis with everything from California’s seismic spike to the retreat of the Larsen B ice shelf.
I ask if the USV’s flash mobs serve to spread Mathias’s gospel of chronostrictesis far and wide. The goal, he tells me, “is not to spread science but rather to transcend it. We’re fighting the end of time by preparing to subvert the countdown.” The main target of this student’s ire, therefore, is not an evil dean, as one might find in a cheesy college movie, nor is it an imperialist government or military authority. Blue’s enemy is nebulous. His rhetoric is impassioned, if a bit juvenile and condescending.
He laments how “busy” we are forced to make ourselves, just to keep pace with the quickening of life. “You’re a writer,” he says. “Look up synonyms for ‘busy.’ They’re all positive words. Then look up the antonyms.” Indeed I do, fiddling with my iPhone. According to Roget’s, synonyms include “active,” “diligent,” “engaged,” “full,” “lively.” And the antonyms of “busy”? I find terms like “empty,” “idle,” “purposeless,” “unfulfilled.”
The Time Crisis does call into question our current higher education system, as well as our progression through life beyond college. Students are trained to play the game. Considering the current job market, crushing student loan debt, and increased natural disasters, the “game” may have less of a point these days. Maybe the USV’s mission is to overthrow the existing educational paradigm and institute a more practical, trade-oriented curriculum and, generally, a more deliberate mode of being in the world—characterized by calm and silence, yet still active, still engaged.
The question remains, what methods of effective protest are left to the modern student radical? Does the War on Terror demand a nonviolent approach? Does the phenomenon of chronostrictesis require quick and decisive action? I can hear the rally cry now:
What do we want?!
SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION!!
When do we want it?!
TIME IS AN ILLUSION!!
But the USV doesn’t go in much for marches. This isn’t your grandpa’s rebellion. Sure, they have their communiqués and samizdat literature (in the form of Tales of the USV comic books). But the methods employed by the USV are more affected, kitschy, and, at times, disruptive (isn’t that a central goal of all protest?). I get my first taste of it right there in the basement. I’m halfway through a question when I hear a gong sound reverberate through The Egg. Blue halts in his tracks and says, “Stop.”
I turn and find him frozen like a statue. I try to join him, but when I adjust myself into a similar statue pose he yells at me, “No, don’t prepare to stop! Just stop!” I’m taken aback. But then Mathias affects a charming smile and says, “Pretend I’m painting you.” I am uncomfortable. I can’t help but feel self-conscious, and a bit excited, when I meet his young eyes.
This is the Seventh-Minute Stop: a chime rings—tonggg!—and all movement ceases. For sixty seconds all bodies shut down, stiffen, and hold a statuesque gesture. During this minute you can hear breathing. You can watch the world neutralize and reset. Eye contact is discouraged. This is quiet time. Alone time. Six minutes on, one minute off, 6:1, a ratio as natural and ancient as the week of creation itself. And, yes, my initial thoughts cycle through all the action items on my to-do list—all the things I should be dealing with instead of standing in a basement with a conceited Peter Pan. My mind wanders…
Blue is not an atypical modern college student, I think. In some ways, he is no different from many affluent white members of the young intelligentsia. He strikes me as driven, capable, spoiled, and hopelessly disillusioned. And his restlessness has roots.
As a boy, Mathias was an acolyte in the Episcopal church and went to the prestigious Deerfield Academy boarding school, where he excelled in academics and athletics alike. As a sophomore he was captain of the school debate team and varsity wrestling state champion (182 lb. weight class). “They didn’t have a boxing team,” he said to me almost apologetically. And he was the star of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program.
That’s one history. It aptly describes the mild-mannered front cultivated by this boy wonder. But like most superheroes, there exists a shadowy origin story, universally known by USVers: his father, Colonel Nathan Blue (ret.), directs the heavily expensed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a think tank for the next generation of warfare, IT, and other innovations heralding the future of the future.
Mathias described his relationship with his parents as “embattled” (they couldn’t be reached for comment). At age eleven, Mathias’s twin brother, Edison, was killed in a freak accident during a summer storm, crushed by a falling tree. As I stand in this basement thinking of the forces that conspired to create this young man, my mind oddly starts to relax. My body follows. My eyes blur, and suddenly I can make out other statuesque figures frozen in the shadows. I hadn’t noticed them before this moment. I can see they are in costume. When the tonggg chimes again, one of them lies on the ground by my feet and tells me, “It’s time to fly.”
They lift me into the air, my arms outstretched like Supergirl. Soon we are in their garage and I’m placed in the back of a van, which should be horrifying but somehow feels safe. Here, I get a look at the so-called League of Nine USV superheroes: several scantily clad ladies and armor-bodied boys. There’s Peacemaker, Sergeant Drill, It Girl, SuperVisor!, a techno kid straight out of Japanese anime films, and a short one in a three-piece suit.
As they systematically undress Mathias and help him into his superhero garb, I realize Mathias is not an altogether likable person. He is arrogant, like a Bruce Wayne playboy mixed with a less worldly version of Brando’s Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. But as he begins his transformation into Ultraviolet—a modified straitjacket, purple body paint, colored contact lenses—something childlike takes him over.
He whips around the van with Mad Hatter energy. There is something invincible about him. I ask if he’s afraid of going to prison. After all, the school administration and federal law enforcement agencies alike have labeled the USV a “threat to the safety of our children and community.” Some have lost their place in school and now face the very real possibility of going to jail and losing their personal freedoms as well.
Cap’n Cunt is undoubtedly the female leader, the Bonnie to Mathias’s Clyde. She answers: “They think we’re dangerous because they think we have nothing to lose. And in some ways they’re right. We don’t believe the future exists. So why waste time fearing its consequences?” The boy in the three-piece suit (Business-Man) continues: “But in some ways, this means we have everything to lose. The present is now much more precious.”
So despite their ostentatiousness, the point of the USV is not to have the coolest outfit. The point is to evolve. When I ask if they have Marxist sympathies—as did many of their 1960s forebears—Business-Man takes offense: “We believe in utopian communities of mutual aid, so people call us communists or socialists, but really we’re acting out of pure self-interest. Capitalist corporate cogs, they’re the ones dressing the same and acting the same and doing the same work for the good of the larger unit. Look at us! Each costume represents something personal and entrepreneurial. This is ‘super-individualism.’ Print that, if you like.”
“Actually, no, don’t call it that!” yells Ultraviolet. “That’s a term that’ll get demonized. Call it like flibberflibbergaboobieism. I can spell that if you want [he spells it]. And the name of our movement is [makes a noise like
a donkey and a spaceship]. Print that. Any other term and I’ll sue for libel.”
I can’t tell if I’m witnessing a collective nervous breakdown—overachievers cracking under lifelong pressure—or whether this is over-achieving taken to its logical, final step of saviorhood. Either way, these are overachievers on the edge. I ask if they’ve considered violent forms of protest, something besides civil disobedience. Ultraviolet says he’s “an equal opportunity nutjob,” and so long as the protest is effective, it’s fair game. The looks on the faces around Ultraviolet belie this comment.
If this sounds like moral flexibility, it is. Despite its pacifist rhetoric the USV has become increasingly bold. Early pranks—including the famous nude homecoming bonfire resulting in twenty-four arrests—have evolved into disruption, disorder, and destruction. Just before spring break, the USV defaced the campus registrar’s office, pouring duck blood on ERA recruiting paperwork. During a corporate employer’s info session, the USV locked the doors of the career services building, caulking them tight, and flooding the lobby with a fire hose. Corporate HR reps and the few attendees were evacuated with only minor injuries.
The water theme continues as we exit the van and arrive at the Institute for Advanced Study near the Princeton campus, where more than two hundred students are lined up in the Institute Woods to be dosed by Ultraviolet’s psychedelic drug and set adrift in the Stony Brook.
This is the Big Bang. Experiencing this ceremonial vision is the core prerequisite for joining the USV. I admit, I’m not up for it: my fear of losing control is, to a shameful degree, more powerful than my commitment to investigative journalism. I observe from a nearby rock and wonder what I’m missing.
A female initiate explains to me that DMT “supercharges the undergraduate experience. In five minutes, you see your path forward. You see what the Buddhists call your ‘right livelihood.’” I ask her what’s the point of finding your purpose in the world if the world will soon be gone.
“At the end,” she says, “I need to know I’m still a good person. If I die, I want to die good. If I live, I want to live good. Survival of the fittest and dystopian hellscapes only happen if we lose our humanity. But if we stay good through the dark neck of time? We evolve the species. For the better.”
I watch Ultraviolet deliver his medicine. Midlevel initiates are stationed in the current, guiding each body gently down the stream. Students float finally to Cap’n Cunt, the soothsayer who witnesses and validates their experience with vague yet interpretable visions of each one’s superhero persona and its villainous shadow. The recruits are then fitted with blank masks and wrapped in purple “evolution capes.” On the Stony Brook shore, they come to, baptized, ready to do some good.
Toward the end of this ritual, I ask Mathias what he sees as the USV’s ultimate endgame. He answers quickly: “The purification of the world.” The reply unnerves me. Specifically that word: “purification.” But before I can follow up, a different word comes dancing into my brain.
“‘Stopped’!” I scream. “That’s the antonym of ‘busy.’ To be busy versus to be stopped!”
“No,” Mathias says. “Someone asks if you’re busy for lunch. You say, ‘No, I’m not busy. I’m free.’”
Correspondent Nina Samaras is the author of the forthcoming Time in a Bottle: Notes on the New Famine.
ii.
There’s tilapia swimming in the tank below. Seeds in the grow bed above. Bacteria convert fish waste into nitrates, and a solar-powered pump brings that nutrient-rich water to the grow bed. Plant roots feast and filter, purifying the water to cycle back to the fish below. They’d start small but expand fast. A good system could yield leafy greens and herbs for now—tomatoes, broccoli, and other fruiting plants once it’s more established—plus plenty of pounds of fish meat.
This was Aquaponics 101, taught by a superhero called Owl Qween.
Clocks were becoming less reliable, but when the sun was in the sky, the USV went to school. David branded these breakout classes Savage Innovation Training Sessions (SITS). They were less formal than he made it sound. Members could drop into workshops on power generation, food production, paramedic training, chemical and herbal medicines, cordage and textiles, basic machine and engine repair, welding, scavenging, hunting, candle/soap/deodorant-making.
Commodity nouns became learnable verbs.
For instance, there was gathering and then there was scavenging. Scavenging was collecting what’s been abandoned or taking what’s locked up. Don’t call it looting, that dog-whistle word meaning black or brown people are trying to survive. Scavenging was a different course of study from the one focused on edible plants, dumpster diving, and repurposing everyday household items. That one was Gathering 101, taught by superheroes named Foragette and Todd Everything.
Nobody was an expert, really. They were in college, and most had logged way more time considering nineteenth-century romanticism and student loan debt as opposed to trade skills. So practical and physical coursework was a focus for many, but cultural enrichment and spiritual practices still had their place. The world was getting tougher, and the USV had to match this turmoil with the kind of soft fortitude found only in the mystic’s toolkit. Meditation 101, for instance, taught by a superhero named Janelle Monáe.
There was only one structured meal per day at The Egg, and even that was fairly improvised. A kind of potluck, plus whatever the cooking team in Fred’s House could produce in mass quantities—usually pasta, pemmican, or something granola-based. Any other eating was DIY, catch as catch can.
The meal was relaxed and social—“Hey, I’m Lola Rolla. Majoring in power. Minoring in food. Nice to meet you!”—but every seventh minute, the chime rang out through Woosamonsa Court, a basic doorbell from Lowe’s that Fu/Golden Echo put on a timer and wired to their new indoor/outdoor speaker array, added some reverb. Soon, the regularly scheduled chime became a powerfully resonant TONGGG that rang out religiously, calling them to a halting silent stillness every seven minutes, like a constant Sabbath waiting at the end of every six minutes of action.
They called it the Seventh-Minute Stop. And it became one of their few key rules: when you hear the tonggg, freeze in place. Don’t talk. Don’t move. Experience the moment.
It could break the proverbial flow, but it also defined the higher order of their movement.
— Ø —
David waited out the latest tonggg, finished his business, and dropped The Atlantic piece about the USV beside the toilet. He liked the Time magazine article better. It was more balanced and inclusive, he felt, focusing on the entire movement rather than only its figurehead. The Atlantic barely even mentioned SITS. On the cover above the headline “The Last Saviors?” was a Cap’n Cunt illustration taken from the splash page of Tales from the USV #9, an homage to The Last Supper with the League of Nine seated in their superhero garb around Ultraviolet.
Haley’s illustrative style had grown more painterly, less campy, depicting a world of chiaroscuro contrasts and brooding close-ups that made them all look increasingly heroic. She’d handed over the comic work to her underlings and now either focused on the costuming vision of the USV or obscured herself with the black eye of a video lens. Mostly fly-on-the-wall documentary stuff. None of that wave-at-the-camera crap.
Somewhere along their collective journey, the spiritual partnership forged between Mathias and Haley (their Big Bang depths in the hospital swimming pool) had expanded to an emotional and intellectual connection (his artistic mentorship vis-à-vis her costume design and video work) and inevitably completed the cycle into physical union (they began fucking, reasonably loudly).
Haley still wasn’t talking to David. When they’d cross paths she’d puff out her cheeks awkwardly and pretend to fiddle with her camera and pass by as quickly as possible. Rowboats in the morning. David made half-assed apology attempts. She offered equally half-assed acceptances. They both understood: the USV was now bigger than their petty personal issues. But she wasn’t ready to
forgive him. And, you know, ever since she’d started up with Mathias, David wasn’t particularly ready to forgive her, either. So they shelved their respective love and hate.
They went back downstairs and did their jobs.
In the rare moments David was forced to resurface onto the main floor of The Egg, he felt like he’d stepped out of a cave and into a carnival. Once, popping upstairs to make a Hot Pocket, David bumped into an unfamiliar Gigantor. He wore athletic shoulder pads and wielded a lacrosse stick. As David pressed Start on the microwave, the guy whispered, “You’re Business-Man, right?”
“Yup,” said David.
“I thought you’d be taller.”
David sighed. “Are you supposed to be Casey Jones? Like from the Ninja Turtles?”
“I’m LAX Luthor,” he said with a practiced sneer. “I was a pretty decent midfielder but I’m done with sports. Now, I’m a USV defender. This is exactly what I should be doing right now.”
“Looks like you’re aping Peacemaker’s costume.” David scanned the living room. There were at least two dozen unfamiliar people in various stages of outfitting. He spotted a guy in a blazer and dyed red hair holding court. Seeing obvious echoes of his own Business-Man costuming, David became incensed at the blabbermouth, whom he knew to be named “the Red Ruminator,” a neoliberal politics major whose superpower was filibustering (for his thesis he aimed to infiltrate Congress and pull a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, though David was unclear of his legislative cause).
Behind him, cooking ramen on the woodstove, was “the Flop,” a Harlequin-y girl covered in playing cards (she was an online poker champ, her thesis on game theory and war tactics, but her real value was generating gambling revenue for the USV kitty).