It always did this. Time after time and time after time. Well, it was time. That was problem really. Dr Karz Flembold took his hand out of his pocket and poked it out of the temporal bubble; he saw a second immediately tick past on the clock face of his Casio.

He whipped his hand back in, feeling the sting of the present like a burn on the skin of his fingers. The watch immediately froze again. 15:04:21. It always was. But yet, he knew, time was still there. He had seen the world around him crumble and fall away, yet the temporal bubble remained. Powered by the power source within it that itself did not age either, it would last forever.

If forever means anything when there was no time. And yet there was meaning because Dr Flembold knew there was. He had assumed he would lose consciousness and have the bubble collapsed to regain his faculties. But he remained awake - though he was sometimes not sure. It could just be a trick of his watch. There was time to work it out though.