Content Warnings: suicide, murder, death
I’m not sure exactly how long it’s been April 11th. We had a guy in charge of keeping track until we realised he was just making it up whenever someone asked. It’s been April 11th for a very long time.
And unless we can change it tonight, tomorrow’s date will still be April 11th.
Shit, I’m skipping to the end. Sorry. I’m not sure I’ve got the attention span for this, but there’s still half an hour until midnight and I need the distraction. You’re the only family I have on-world and no matter what happens when that reactor blows — whether it’s death, insanity or erasure from existence — I want you to know what happened here. To me and Ramis’ Pillar.
I’m sorry that you’ll have to tell Mum and Dad back on Earth, mainly because it will be a challenge getting them to understand what happened; they barely understand jump gate travel as it is.
I’ll try to keep this as chronological as I can. It’s hard to keep history linear when it’s more vertical, stacking up on itself, never moving forward. But I’ll try.
Ramis’ Pillar is stuck in a time loop. To you and the other colonists of Ramis V in Shiptown, Blue Lake, Verdant Hill and Wealthrock, it’s your first April 11th. For us, April 11th restarts every midnight, putting us right back where we started the day with only our memories and the knowledge of our temporal prison. There’s no escaping it; no matter how far we run, we’ll still be yanked back at midnight.
It took four loops for the Town to notice the day was repeating. I think that says plenty about how exciting life was before the loop. Don’t get me wrong, Ramis V is a nice enough planet, everything the recruiters said to us it would be: rolling green hills and soft winds blowing waves across the grass sea. But that’s it — just nice. And we know what ‘just nice’ means, don’t we?
I think it was the three minutes and twenty-two seconds of rain arriving at exactly quarter past two four days in a row that tipped the Town off to what was happening. An over-dramatic hysteria followed when it clicked for us and words like ‘gas leaks’ and ‘divine retribution’ were thrown around like a grenade in Danger Ball.
Ah, sorry — that’s a loop game. Be glad you never have to play, it’s very messy. Although if you did, I’d kick your ass at it.
Once the Town had mostly calmed down and understood what was happening, it soon splintered into groups. We tried to stay together initially, but there were too many ideas, too many opinions on what this all meant. Looking back, those first few loops set the tone for the later ones: the world changed, and we regressed to tribal instincts without a second thought. At least we didn’t turn to genocide immediately.
One group, mostly arrogant office managers and nervous politicians, tried to continue like everything was normal, as if pretending it wasn’t happening would fix it all. This pissed a lot of people off and they soon stopped out of fear of a mob’s wake-up call.
Another group, more practical than the rest, tried to explain what was happening to the other colonies, hoping they’d be able to help us. Unsurprisingly, colonial officials panic when half a colony insists that they’re stuck in a repeating day. After the fifth loop spent in a colonial quarantine, we learnt it was better not to mention it to the Un-Loopers — that’s you and everyone outside the loop.
The biggest group, by far, was the one that looked up time loops in the colony’s media archives. There’s plenty of old films on there about reliving days until you learn some great cosmic lesson. Obviously, we copied that. It worked in the movies, why wouldn’t it work for us?
There were a LOT of grand gestures in those first loops: acts of charity that meant nothing in a repeating world, declarations of love that soured the following loop, sworn oaths to be better in the quarter past two rain. Even I’m guilty: I must have called and apologised to you a hundred times for decapitating your Action Beast when we were seven. You won’t remember any of those apologies but, for what it’s worth, I am sorry about Action Beast.
It was a shame it stopped once we realised it was a dead end.
We were all so innocent then, fresh to a playground we didn’t understand the rules of. There’s a lot from the loops I’d like to forget, but those first few loops were probably the best.
Pretty much everything after the death of the secretary can be wiped from my mind.
Oh, before I go any further, can you do me a favour and give Mum and Dad a more sanitised version of this whole mess? There’s stuff coming up I’d rather they not know, especially if the worst happens at midnight. I’m not sure how you would summarise any of this, so good luck. Maybe it’ll be best if you just tell them I had a really bad time and leave it at that.
Where was I? Ah, Miranda’s death.
This was many April 11ths after the start. No-one had broken the loop yet, but the Town was still going through the motions, moving beyond faking personal growth to any suggested stupid idea. For a few loops, the Town was obsessed with a pattern that a teen called Crice Yourner claimed he could see. He had people rushing around trying to solve some sort of metaphysical puzzle. Turns out, he was just getting high on fuel salts every loop. The only pattern he saw was gullible written across all our foreheads.
I don’t think the Town has ever forgiven him for that.
The Town’s enthusiasm ran out before the stupid ideas did and, as every human does when they feel hopeless and dejected, we turned to booze. Except, because the world resets at midnight, our alcohol never ran out. More importantly, we were never hungover.
Essentially: the party never stopped.
Except for Miranda Evans, an office assistant who, whilst trying to impress her crush with some inventive dancing that involved a handstand, fell from a rooftop party and pancaked into the tarmac street. Dead on impact.
But when the next loop started, there was no memorial for Miranda: she was alive in her bed, the same as she was every loop. Apart from the haunting memory of dying, she was fine.
The Town realised then that death meant nothing to us: we were temporary immortals. Really, we should have worked it out sooner. In our defence, the whole time loop thing was hard enough for us to wrap our heads around and we’d been drunk for a while.
Things got much worse from there.
People started to experiment with death, like when you used to smoke weed behind the shed. We’d all heard a lot about it and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Drowning, self-immolation and a slit throat are my top three worst deaths. My favourite was an explosive charge on my chest. Like a warm hug.
The experiments, naturally, went further than suicide. Death didn’t matter, so why would murdering someone? People were hesitant at first, reluctant to go that much further. But we weren’t hurting anyone really. At most, it was an inconvenience to be killed. When people saw that, no-one could resist. Deep down, we all wanted to know what it was like.
Don’t worry, I don’t have a top three best kills, although I’m sure I know a few people who could give you their top ten and the stories for each. Doing it with a gun is the easiest.
The problem was that, like with our drinking, we didn’t know when to stop. The Town became a daily battle royale. What was at first inconvenient became frustrating. You couldn’t make it to lunch without some dickhead sniping you from the comms tower or becoming the sudden loser of a game of Danger Ball as you walked down the street.
We formed gangs for protection. One of the biggest was the Coppers, peacekeeping officers who insisted they weren’t a gang. But if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and uses its private arsenal of military-grade equipment to extort control of the town square, then it’s probably a duck. My personal favourite though was Mothers Against Crime, a vigilante neighbourhood watch who executed people they thought were a bad influence on their kids.
Oh, side note on the topic of kids: they had their own gang. Parents were good at first, but when everyone is partying and blowing their own heads off for shits and giggles, you don’t want to be the one stuck babysitting. The kids were left to do their own thing — what’s the worst that could happen to them in a time loop? They ran rampant, high on sugar (they tried alcohol and thought it was yucky) and killing indiscriminately from the back of stolen trucks. They called themselves the Loop Rats, but everyone else called them the Little Shits.
The gangs only made the fighting worse. Rather than one-on-one scuffles, it was now more like pitched battles in the street as they fought over who’d control the pub for that loop. But it didn’t last forever. I want to say that the Town saw the wrongs of their actions, that people saw the impact they left on each other. Really though, I think everyone just got a bit bored of the anarchy.
It was a weird time after that. I think we might have accidentally made a utopia? We dismantled capitalism for one. There’s no need for money when everything resets at the end of the day.
Surprisingly, art flourished. Despite all new art being wiped from existence at the stroke of midnight, it only inspired the Town’s artists. They called it ‘Quick Art’. Created in a day, the art would be gone on the next loop, but the memory of it would remain and people spoke about it like a badge of honour. Fame through remembrance.
The one that stuck with me was the Great Eye. It had been painted in black ink on the side of the fusion generator’s concrete bunker, made up of thousands of small infinity symbols. The artist had spent the entire loop painting each symbol individually and only a few of us were there before midnight to see him unveil it. When he pulled back the curtain, the Great Eye stared down at me and it felt like the loop itself was watching me. I stared back, trying to work out how it saw us. I’m still wondering now.
Fifteen minutes to midnight. Sorry, I’m lingering. You would too.
Things, admittedly, got weirder later. Drugs were big for a while, but in a chill mellow way rather than to party. A musty cloud covered the town for a good few loops and I’m sure I got so high it carried over between days.
Then, there was…we…uh…hmmm…this is one of the bits I don’t want Mum and Dad knowing. For one loop, the Town got to know each other very well, communally and…intimately. For people who’d been killing each other regularly a short while before, it was this loop that made it difficult to meet eyes with someone on the street.
These loops should have felt normal. Better than that, they should have felt perfect. Really though, they were just nice. There was an underlying weirdness to them that stopped anyone from settling, from making it permanent. We all knew that nothing would ever be quite right here.
It didn’t take much to shatter the utopia.
A husband went missing, gone for an entire loop. We joked that he just wanted some time away from his wife, but they scoured the town and there was no sign of him. On the next loop, he was back in his bed, completely unaware of his missing day. It was like he had blinked entirely out of existence for a single loop.
The story spread quickly and the Town clung to it like a thread in a maze. It was an anomaly in the loop, which meant that it wasn’t infallible. And if it wasn’t infallible, then the loop could be broken.
The peace we’d found was forgotten. No-one cared anymore about Quick Art or loving your neighbour. We wanted out of the loop and out of Ramis’ Pillar. We wanted to live any other day than April 11th.
More desperate to escape than ever, the Town did everything to make another anomaly. The husband was studied and an account of the loop before he disappeared was taken from everyone, then recreated to see if it could be done again.
When that didn’t work, people tried to force an anomaly based on the logic that the husband must have done something so unexpected that the loop didn’t know how to handle it. Randomness ruled. The Town acted like morons, trying to do the (predictably) unexpected like talking backwards all loop or pretending to be a dog. A lot of people committed suicide mid-conversation too, hoping it would catch the Loop unaware. All of it was annoying and ineffective — no-one skipped again.
Somewhere in the randomness, the Church of the Eternal Loop was found. Maybe it had started as an attempt to cause an anomaly, but it quickly grew beyond that. The Church revered the loop, worshipping it as a force of the universe, thinking Ramis’ Pillar as chosen to learn its divine lessons.
The Church grew quickly, sucking in more and more of the Town like a black hole of prayers and sore knees. I joined. I’d like to say it was because I genuinely believed in a higher power, that I believed the loop was the worst divine blessing ever granted, but really I felt empty. It felt good to follow, to be a part of something.
When most of the Town had joined the Church, High Priest Antold Aller declared a new mission: the education of those who didn’t loop, the Un-Loopers. It was our mission to make them loop and to teach them the loop’s divine lessons. However, just like escaping, no-one had any idea how to bring someone into the loop.
Attempts to usher them into the loop ranged from bringing them to town for the midnight reset to wafting incense and saying Latin prayers we all knew were gibberish but believed anyway. None of it worked and, unsurprisingly, we started killing the Un-Loopers.
The High Priest said pain would be their path to ascension. If they died enough, they would start looping with us. He formed us into Enlightenment Squads and sent us on our merry way each day towards a different colony, armed to the teeth and with a righteous glint in our eyes. In hindsight, it’s absolute madness, but at the time it made some sort of weird sense. And we weren’t doing them any harm. The Un-Loopers would come back the next day, alive and with no memory of their death the day before.
We thought of it as a victimless act.
It was smart on Aller’s part really: us against the world. Focus the Town (and our slightly violent nature) externally and we’d stop fighting internally long enough for him to enjoy the power and benefits of the High Priest robes. No Un-Loopers were ever pulled into the loop and I don’t think Aller expected them to. It was just another way to keep us busy.
And because I know you’re thinking it: no, I never killed you. This place has fucked me up, but not that badly. To be honest, I avoided you once I realised I was never escaping Ramis’ Pillar. I’ve seen your day and it’s a good one, one you’ve had a million times. My day has got nothing but worse with every loop. I couldn’t stand to see yours again.
I have missed you.
You’d be right to think we’re monsters. Ask anyone here and they’ll tell you the same. I think it, too. You haven’t seen the worst of what I’ve done, but I remember it. Memories are all we have here, and they last longer than anything. We could have — should have — stopped killing the Un-Loopers, but it gave a meaning to the loop we hadn’t realised we were looking for.
Others were braver than me. When we started killing the Un-Loopers, some of Ramis’ Pillar drew a line. They tried to protect the Un-Loopers in a peaceful blockade of the roads out of town, but were flattened into the concrete. I was on one of the trucks going out and we didn’t even slow. We laughed. Everyone would be back the next loop anyway.
Ramis’ Resistance didn’t give up. They grew in numbers, violence and effectiveness until they were too much of a problem to just kill. We started to imprison them at the start of each loop so we could murder Un-Loopers uninterrupted. Prison was more punishment than death, slowly wearing down the Resistance’s spirit.
I visited the prison, the Grain Hold, once. It was makeshift, an empty grain silo that a team from the Church built a heavy gate onto at the start of every loop. Due to a bombing of the administration hall earlier that morning, the Church was short-handed and I was assigned to stand guard with a broad man named Berter. I had been given a gun, but the prisoners were docile. Many had been in there for a while, captured every loop, and had given up on escaping. Every possible escape had been done and subsequently solved by the Church on the next loop, so what was the point of trying?
After an hour of standing silently by the gate (Berter wasn’t one for conversation), there was a knock at the gate from inside. I turned and saw Miranda Evans, office assistant legend of the loop, looking out at me from between the bars. I’d met her briefly a few times before and she looked the same as always: freckled face and shiny brown hair — the loop is great if you had a good hair day on the first April 11th. But her eyes were dull and lifeless, her pupils hollowed into pits.
“What do you need?” I asked.
“For you to shoot me,” she said with a voice that sounded a century old.
“Why? We’ll only just get you again tomorrow.”
“And I want you to shoot me then too,” she said. “And every following loop for eternity if you have to.”
“Quiet,” warned Berter.
“Why?” I asked.
She didn’t respond, but we both already knew the answer. It was in everyone’s eyes: prisoners’, soldiers’, Berter’s, mine. We had lived lifetimes in a day and we were all so very tired of trying to pretend we weren’t.
I saw the Great Eye of the Loop then, watching me silently from the gate of the Grain Hold. I looked away from it, but it must have seen me for what I was: a fucking idiot.
Berter barked at Miranda to back away from the bars. I shot him in the head then freed the prisoners, for whatever good it did them until the next loop. Miranda went with them, becoming one with the crowd. I didn’t see her again.
Then I shot myself in the head.
And that’s how I left the Church. Maybe a good one for Mum and Dad there. It’s always a relief to know your son isn’t entirely a dick.
It feels good to get that all out, even if it is to a microphone. I can never make up for what I did in the Church, but I’m glad it stopped there. For a while after, I even felt human again. It faded though, faster that I’d have liked.
Ramis’ Resistance grew big enough that they couldn’t be imprisoned anymore. The Church even had to stop killing the Un-Loopers to focus on the Resistance, still with a zero percent conversion rate of new loopers.
War began in Ramis’ Pillar. And when soldiers never die, it was always going to be a long one.
It played out in skirmishes. We could have had an all-out battle every day; however, both sides realised that to win, you had to crush the opposition spiritually, not physically. Groups of us were rotated out, ensuring we never fought more than three days in a row. It became like the shift work we did as teenagers back on Earth in that damp corner shop — a few days on, a few days off. The Church’s soldiers were better mannered than most customers.
Wartime was a different, livelier, existence to what we had done before, but it was still just as shit. We were constantly exhausted, despite waking every loop with a full night’s sleep we hadn’t had since the first loop. That’s what the loop does: it wipes away scars, tears, and blood, but the memories persevere, dragging our spirits down. There were no more nightmares as no-one slept anymore — one loop follows the next in a blink of an eye — but they still found a way of haunting us, layering horrors onto our reality, like loops piling on top of each other. I saw the Great Eye of the Loop plenty then, watching me from every wall as I killed the Church’s soldiers. I ignored it, hoping I’d become invisible to it. I didn’t want it to see me.
We were all empty inside, nothing but husks full of bad memories. Sometimes, I forgot who we were fighting or why. Just that I had to fight, to keep going, and if I didn’t, the loop would win.
Loop after loop after loop.
Until, for the first time, a skirmish grew into an all-out battle. Our generals must have gotten bored with the long game they were playing and decided instead, like all strategy gamers, to throw everything at the wall to see what would happen.
Everyone who could fight was fighting. We should have been exhausted, but there was a manic energy in the air. It filled every street, demolishing buildings into rubble, and lines became blurred between the Church and the Resistance. The battle became a massacre. Everyone for themselves.
And then, damaged by the battle, the fusion generator exploded and took half of the Town with it in a blinking flash.
I was on the edge of the explosion. The searing heat burned my flesh but left me on my knees, still breathing, squinting up through the smoke at the late afternoon sun. The world flickered, but it wasn’t my eyes — it was the town, shuddering in and out of existence like a failing hologram.
The loop ended at 5:43pm.
The loop ended early.
I started the next loop in the same bed I woke up in every day, certain that I could still feel the heat of my burnt back that had now never been touched by fusion fire. I stumbled from my flat, ready to continue fighting, but stopped short on the pavement outside. My street, as untouched as my back was, was empty. There was no-one.
I made my way to the administration hall and found others. All in all, there were probably only about two hundred of us left, all survivors of the explosion. Everyone else, the ones caught in the blast, were gone. They hadn’t looped. But, just like the loop-skipping husband, we knew all we had to do was wait for the next loop and they’d be back.
That day was the longest loop. I spent it walking the streets until my feet were raw, ignoring everyone else like a vegan zombie. Some took the quick way: a bullet to the head and they’d know if everyone else came back. Others tried to stop them, warn them about the risk that they might not come back at all. I think it persuaded them even more. I can’t say I wasn’t tempted.
It was the quietest loop too. Our dividing lines had gone with the rest of the Town. Feuds were forgotten and we became one Town again. Maybe there was still some of that tribal thought at play: those of us who were gone and those of us who remained, but at least we didn’t kill anyone because of it.
The Church dissolved away, like waking from a collective fever dream. If you’d asked Anton Aller whether he was still High Priest, he would have given you a bemused smile and told you he was just a humble Star Migrants rep.
The rest of Ramis’ Pillar came back the next loop, unaware of their missing day, and immediately reaching for the closest weapon. It took a while to convince them that the war was over. Once they understood, their shoulders slumped, the fire of battle going out inside and leaving them as vacant husks.
Then we explained that they had skipped a loop. It was another anomaly and this time, we knew what had caused it. Hope sparked, brighter than the battle fire had been. People celebrated, in a normal way as well — no victory killings or dangerous, life-threatening stunts. We were more human than we’d been for a long time.
A vote was called by the man who had once been the mayor. In the greatest act of democracy I’ve ever seen, the Town agreed that the fusion generator had to be blown again and this time, it had to take us all. A hard reset of Ramis’ Pillar.
That was yesterday.
Today, what we’re optimistically thinking of as our last loop, has been one of the better ones. It’s weird, but I think all our best loops were when we were trying to escape. We’ve been extra careful: all Un-Loopers whose paths usually bring them to town have been turned away and we’ve all been very careful not to die in case it’s permanent. I’d forgotten how fragile we are.
It’s uncertain and risky, but it’s a way out. In an ideal world, we’ll all wake up on April 12th. In a less ideal world, it will kill us all. You might think that sounds like we’re giving up, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. I like to see it more as a leap of faith. Sometimes you need a big change to get yourself out of a shitty situation, like a career change or a divorce. Ours just happens to be mass suicide.
You need to understand: we can’t loop again. We need this to work. We weren’t meant to live standing still.
We could have made Ramis’ Pillar into heaven, but all it became was hell.
I’ll miss that quarter past two rain though.
There’re only a few minutes to midnight now. They’re leaving it damn close. I can’t do this whole message again if we loop. Surely it doesn’t take that long to overload a fusion reactor?
Oh, there we go. I don’t think the mic will pick it up, but I can hear a whining. They must be doing something right.
Please, let this work.
In case of the worst, I hope this recording reaches you. You were an alright brother and I’ve missed you, but I’m glad you didn’t have to live this. When we left Earth last year, the first time away from home, everyone said we’d have great lives on Ramis V. I think I’ve lived five lifetimes in Ramis’ Pillar and they were all shit. Don’t let that happen to you. Live every day like it’s April 12th.
One minute to midnight.
…
Ah, there it is. Woah, that’s bright — I should have brought my sunglasses. I can see it out of the window: a small sun where the fusion reactor used to be. The dawn of tomorrow.
The Great Eye is watching me, giving me one last look, and I’m staring back at it, knowing exactly what it sees.
Henry Sanders-Wright has had stories published in All World’s Wayfarer, Planet Scumm and The Colored Lens. In between making thrilling production timelines, sending edge-of-your-seat emails and (sometimes!) writing, Henry enjoys letting London drain his lifeforce and being mediocre at archery. He dwells on the cyber hellscapes under irregularhenry or at sanders-wright.co.uk.
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