Money and Time

June 2nd, 2022

For most of my recent life, the light of my autopilot-driving van has been the sun I have woken up to every morning. In these long years, with every passing day, I step out of my shrunken house on a table inside the van and see the light’s brightness, and I wonder if I have yet reached the vault. This very vault that I have laid my life down for is the reason, with each hour that goes by, I have not seen my daughter, who is seven years old and waiting at home. I imagine her bounding up the steps to our home, showing her mother her new books, doing homework at the counter, counting the numbers between one to a million or the days until I return, none knows the difference from where I live. And who is to say that a future-criminal deserves such devastating isolation? Seeking an early retirement, I am aiming to pass through a shortcut around years of finding success in society. Me, Rob Castle, twenty-seven, a man who has never committed a crime in his life, about to do one now. Or in one hundred years, give or take, less is it possible to tell as the ticks of my watch get louder. I wake softly, every day, to the sound of a humming engine, that which I feel beneath my feet even as I eat my daily pancakes, soft and fluffy, maple syrup or none, no fruits except for two slices of a banana on top. I check my watch and know that my wife is about to go to work. I take a look around my world. I am the size of an ant, with a house the size of a tissue box, all packed neatly inside the back of this van.

December 25th, 2023

Has it really been over a year since I touched this? Very well. I’m trying not to write too many entries because I could very well be here for a hundred years. It should be around Christmas now, back home, if my clocks are in sync and my calendar-tracking is correct. So, Merry Christmas. I suppose I should explain my situation. A few years ago, I invented this technology that can shrink anything infinitely. There is always empty space in between atoms. With enough shrinking on a person, one could easily slip in that empty space to cross any barrier in the world. Along with the advantage of being tiny enough to not be detected comes the one that lets me pass any vault of any bank to get any money. Hence the plan. As of now, I am in a millimetre-tall van that is automatically driving itself as fast as possible across secure halls in a bank, toward a vault filled with money I intend to take, guarded by three doors and three locks I will shrink small enough to go through. However, all of this has its costs. Let’s say, if you were an ant, crossing the same amount of distance as this tinier creature would take longer compared to, let’s say, a human. I have done all the calculations. Best case scenario, I strike a balance between turning my millimetre-tall van bigger and smaller to cover the distance which will only take around two years of my life. Worst case scenario, I need to avoid detection bad enough all the time that I have to get smaller, and it will take my entire life to reach the inside of the vault. I could be an old man by then. Days, months, or years. All passing at the same rate in the normal world, but in my tiny one it’ll feel like ages. And so I’ve prepared a lifetime’s worth of food in my van. All shrunk to fit inside it. Ready for when I need to enlarge it.

March 6th, 2032

Bad news. I’m not going to reach the first lock of the vault on schedule. I’ve noticed, from looking out the window of my basically already-microscopic van--yes, I had to shrink it further over the years--that they’ve installed some new state-of-the-art laser detection systems in the hallway. The lowest lasers can detect something even a micrometer off the ground, so I’ll have to shrink further to make sure my van isn’t that high so I don’t get caught. This is bad. I expected perhaps a few delays, but this first one hits me harder than I thought it would. I have no choice but to sacrifice a few more years. I’m going to miss my daughter’s graduation from high school. Oh well. As soon as I grab the money from the vault and get out, it’ll all be worth it. She won’t have to work a single day in her life.

September 27th, 2040

Haven’t been here in a while. I see the last entry was eight years ago. I’m losing track of how old I am. Forty-four? Forty-five? Anyway, I never fully explained my plan. I guess I’ll do that now. Winzenried Bank of Switzerland, for as long as international banks have existed, is the most secure and protected bank in the world. The best of the twenty-first century, or even in the history of mankind. So much so that investors could not resist donating to make the facility even stronger, practically unbreachable, and rich clients all over the world trust it with all their assets--and their hearts. To steal money from it is virtually unthinkable, for it has some of the most advanced security software systems of any nation--funded by America, China, Russia, and all of that sort--and its hired personnel of cybersecurity-specialists are beaten by none other. In all its supposed greatness I have wondered if such an achievement, of an unbeatable, secure bank, is merely just a result of man’s collective hubris. You can say I took it as a challenge to achieve a successful heist on this specific bank. A sort of hubris war, you can think of it as, I suppose. I don’t care how anyone sees it. I am not a pompous, vindictive, or ambitious man seeking to prove my self-worth and genius, I simply want my money.

August 18th, 2045

I can’t believe it. A few vehicle malfunctions, wrong calculations, and upgrades to the bank’s security systems have forced me to sacrifice a few more years and postpone my return to my daughter. My original plan has gone to waste. My daughter must be around thirty-something years old now. Perhaps she’s already married. The thought of missing her wedding fills me with a heartache beyond anything I’ve known. Does she resent me for my absence at her side in the aisle? Who knows how long I’ll have to be infinitesimally tiny to stay undercover. One mistake, the guards will catch me, and my entire plan will go to waste, I’ll never get that money. This is the start of my nightmare. If I keep this going I’ll never get to see my daughter.

November 12th, 2056

The days pass by, one by one. I always look at my watch and know my wife is going to work or my daughter is walking home and the years of her life are being washed away from the shores of mine. The waves get bigger and bigger, ever increasing each time I have no choice but to shrink further. So much time has passed I have fears that my wife has moved on, found someone else, not willing to be stuck in the past, or my daughter already has children with childhoods I’ll never get to be a part of. If I want to see them I’ll have to abort the mission and all the distance my van has covered, all my progress, and I can’t do that. I already feel the grey beard growing on my face. All this for money. It’s funny, the time we spend for money, I find. Endless mornings of waking up just to have something we don’t have yet, of a future where we can relax with a huge amount of it. And funnier I find that, before I went on this trip, after I had told this plan to my best friend, he had asked me, “What do you want the money for?” I asked him what he meant. He said, “It’s understandable if you have some sort of desperate reason. Is your mother sick with extreme medical expenses to pay? Are you in debt? A ransom for some hostage? I want to know why you are risking decades of your life away for this kind of money.” I remember sort of staring at him blankly, unsure of what to say. I settled with, “I don’t know.” He said, “You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know? You’re going to possibly waste your life for this money on an ‘I don’t know?’” I said, “I don’t know, okay? I just want it. It’s money, after all.” The mood changed around us for the rest of the night at the bar.

January 30th, 2079

The third and final vault lock is approaching. I feel the effects of my age upon me, like stones on my shoulders. Saggy skin and weak bones. Thank God I didn’t bring a mirror in my van so I’d never be tempted to see what I looked like now. I grow older every day but not any richer until the final. I grow weary too but not enough to erase the satisfaction of my future riches. I can only imagine the outside world, that of the van’s surroundings, in my head. I am in a tiny vehicle, rumbling on, a lifetime’s worth of gas and food and parts for repair if the van ever gets broken stored inside, on a floor of the inside of a secure bank, probably ducking under lethal, invisible lasers and avoiding the detection of infrared cameras and radars that would know of a tardigrade’s breath inside the vault before the expert guards do. An almost-complete fraction of the way there. Years passing by even with the van at full speed, crossing Sahara Deserts and Amazon Rainforests of space that a man of normal size could bound in one step, one second. He’d be back home in time for dinner with his family, meanwhile I’ll have to tell my daughter I won’t be there for her children’s weddings, either. Time is a funny thing. An amusing little fella that does not care about our feelings and is as indifferent to people as a capitalist snob is to his labourers in a foreign country. 

On some days I get tired. I want to abort the mission and inflate the van to normal size, get detected, end my future. Go to jail, and my daughter will come visit me. If she still loves me. On other days I realize this money is worth more than anything else in the world. Most people get to have a life where they witness their daughters grow up, but only so few feel the luxury of mansions, Ferraris, Rolexes, and a cruise every week. And to that, I toast. For the good life, I say, on those nights I drink, alone, as the van continues on its journey to pass an ever-increasing distance I must cover in an ever-increasing amount of time. For the good life.

April 8th, 2082

I’m here. I’m finally here. I’m inside the vault, undetected. It’s impossible to fathom how much time has passed. I don’t know my age at all, I never planned to keep any clocks or calendars to go on this far. I could calculate it with my birthday, but my mind is too tired to remember my birthday, even more so to do simple math. Today I felt my beard after leaving my house and saw that it was long, scruffy, and grey. I noticed that I could not remember my daughter’s face anymore, or my wife’s, that I had forgotten to keep a picture of them with me when I started this mission years ago. Stupid me. The first thing I would do then, I decided, after I grab the money and finally leave the vault, is find them. That was all that occupied my mind as I shrunk the cash in the vault and stored it in bags in my van, a job which took all my strength and energy to do. Not as spry I once was, for it took me a forever to do so, and that is a term I don’t use lightly after having spent a forever to get here. I thought to myself that I’d be the richest old man at the nursing home once I got out, then I laughed, and then I went dead silent at the more-than-likely possibility of ending up at a nursing home. I no longer long for Ferraris and Rolexes. I do still long for cruises, but now I have learned that I long them because I want to do them with my wife and daughter. That cannot happen now. I must be prepared for the scenario that they could be long gone. The world I know is sixty years in the past. I am old and would not survive a cruise. My daughter very likely has her own family now, resenting me for leaving her alone for all these years. I would not be surprised if my wife really had left me for someone else, someone not as foolish as me, someone that would not have left them all these years to make us rich, to search for a future that would be too far in the future yet stuck in the past, to have wasted his life and its worth for cash he will not be able to use.

Yet, what is it so that makes me still yearn for the filled sacks of paper in the back of my van? That makes, perhaps I should say, most men of the world yearn for it? This sweet, invaluable treasure that would grant us the power to have anything we want in life, yet none at all. This essence of luxury that would give us an inherent sense of happiness, but not one and the same as the one we receive from our daughters back home. If time was a watch, I’d turn back its hands. If money was a plague, I’d search for the cure. But all of this has me troubled so, in all my years of a nothingness life, of a nothing but less result, that with all this time, and now with all this money, would I only learn the truth; and that truth being, as it was for many the face of the earth, of a devil of deceit that calls on us in the name of greed, that the cure for this plague was at home, in her youthful smile that exists now only as a memory, that of which is worth more than anything else in the world.

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