2  Needle number 1,875

Carly Smith slots into the space at the end of the back row. The packed lecture hall quietens and Luca Cangemi introduces himself. His voice carries a slight accent. She recognises him as the author of that best-selling science book. The last time she attended a talk like this was probably twenty years ago, before she got pregnant and dropped out.

“A trick of the mind, sleight of hand, misdirection, that’s all it is,” he says.

It’s so quiet, Carly wonders if she should hold her breath. Some of the students take notes and underline things.

“You notice how time passes, and that as you get older, you gain experience. Well, in today’s lecture, you’ll learn that you’ve spent your whole life looking in the wrong direction, while the universe performs the illusion of time.”

It’s nice for Carly to do something for herself. Her son, Shaun, doesn’t know she’s snuck in to learn along with him. There are no checks at the door. Anyone can walk in and expand their mind.

“At school, you were told there are sixty minutes in an hour, a leap year has an extra day, and that a stopwatch can capture a millisecond. But time is much harder to pin down than you think. One theory is that time is merely a dimension that moves while everything else stands still. Some believe it guides us through space from event to event, and this forms our reality. My lecture, for example, will not be over in an hour. It exists in eternity as an event. You just happen to be experiencing it now.”

Carly listens, enraptured.

“Presentists believe there is only the now. Eternalists argue that to reveal our full reality would be too much for us and the order of our cosmos would shatter.”

Eternalism. Powerful stuff. This is why she came to the lecture. While she listens, time halts and Carly gains control of her life, one event at a time. She’s not just a student’s mother who works in a factory. She is more than that.

Mechanical sounds echo through the factory, and Carly sits at her workstation threading needles. Click, clack, click, clack. This is what she does, thousands of times a day, literally attaching suture thread to surgical hooks. She clocks in, sits down, and four years go by before she can even ask about getting a pay rise.

Megan and Shaun, now teenagers, need bus money and new trainers and reheatable dinners and phone credit, but they’ll have to make do with the bare minimum until Carly’s next payday. One addiction is replaced by another, so the money always goes. Last time it was joining fees for a multi-level-marketing company. Boxes of cosmetics and nutritional supplements still clog the hall and lounge.

During her break, she talks about that talent show on TV and wrings her hands in want of a cigarette. The room is a windowless office with melamine furniture and a machine that charges for instant coffee. Even the breaks last forever.

At the latest how-to-win-at-life seminar, Carly spent two hundred pounds learning how to take control of time (as if rehab hadn’t taught her that). The guy sold everyone on his technique, but was less specific about how to earn money or find happiness.

After fifteen long minutes, Carly goes back to her workstation and attaches a needle: number 1,875. It’s amazing that this is the needle that will change everything, not the one that delivered that first hit or the one that gave her Hep C. Machines click and whirr over the sound of radio advertisements. The clamp goes down and the metal hook crimps the green plastic thread, but the electrical counter remains the same: 1,875. And again, for the next one. Is she daydreaming or was the motivational speaker right? This moment, like any, could be the memory of a future her. He claimed that linear time does not exist. The event of needle number 1,875 exists. The tiny pinprick scars on her thumb and index finger exist. And the track marks. It all happens simultaneously and stays there frozen for eternity.

What if Carly could catch the memories from future versions of herself, more successful ones who found love, or run their own company? She could follow the thread back to this present moment.

She looks around the factory floor and sees more individual moments – the new girl swearing at a machine that will be jammed for eternity, the steam hiss of finished items forever sterilised – these are the events through which time flows. Number 1,875 was the needle that punctured time, so Carly can understand she’ll always be an addict and will always be clean. She’ll always be poor and always be rich. In the next moment, her life will split into a million different pathways and she will experience them all.

Carly Smith sits at her workstation, threading needles.

Time elapsed: nil / infinity