There’d been plenty of things in the User world for Quorra to suddenly get accustomed to. For example: the entire concept of nature. Another one: music that wasn’t the thrumming, body-snatching vibration of EDM. Yet another: whatever children are. (Sam and Flynn had both been too uncomfortable to tell her how they originate. She’d had to find out On Line. She will never recover.)
But what was—is—the most jarring was time.
Not the idea of time. Time exists on the Grid—or what’s left of it, anyway. Flynn had told her that the time that exists on the Grid passes more quickly than the time that exists in the User world, and she’d watched him age over cycles and cycles and cycles and cycles and cycles. And she knows that she perceives time the same way Users do: linear, moving ever-forward, unceasing until it isn’t.
And time had been strictly regimented on the Grid, too. The result of being created by someone who only knows time as regimented, using a system that uses time as regimented. Sam’s schedule—work, meetings, dealing with investors, taking Marv out for walkies—and the way Users’ entertainment, leisure, understanding of time depends on regimentation is familiar. The board’s expecting me at six A.M. on the dot. The show doesn’t start till eight. It’s five o’clock somewhere! It’s just like shifts in repair garages, or when Clu would make an appearance in the city square, or when the next Games were meant to begin.
No—the part of time in the User world that is so uncomfortable, so strange, is how visible its passage is. The sun rises, sets. The moon shines before disappearing below the horizon again. Leaves change color, then fall. And people—all of them—grow. Change. And die.
Time is more urgent. It “flies.” Someone can “run out” of it. Someone can try to “make up” for it when they “lose” it, but it’s all just fear. Don’t waste time. Use your time wisely. Buy this product and slather it on your face so people won’t know just how much time you’ve used already. None of this had been a concern on the Grid. No one aged, not like that. Death came from something else, not mind and body simply shutting down after spending too much time existing. Even Kevin Flynn succumbed because of Someone Else. There was always time, it seemed.
Even now, when she looks at Sam, she can see gray glinting through his brown hair. When she looks in the mirror, she notices a new crinkle at the corner of her eye. Seasons pass, over and over again, and the calendars and clocks march forward. She’d never had to consider her own mortality beyond staying safe, staying hidden. Now it’s an inevitability. A simple, universal, unavoidable truth.
(Sam calls this an “existential crisis.” It’s one of the few times he lets her share his bed. But it’s a comfort, she thinks, to know that he’s beside her. To know that this truth is universal. To know that he understands.)