The colony's town hall had never seen a Wednesday this contentious. Three hundred colonists crammed into a space meant for fifty, the overflow watching through windows and climbing on shoulders. The question on everyone's lips: What do you do with a time-eating alien that's slowly starving to death in your backyard?
"Kill it," Roger Steinman slammed his fist on the podium. "Seven months of Wednesdays only! My daughter doesn't even remember what Tuesday feels like!"
"It's not malicious," Dr. Vega countered. "It's a refugee, displaced from its native timeline. We don't execute refugees for being hungry."
"We do when they're eating our lives!"
The crowd erupted. Jack stood off to the side with his shadow (which was doodling temporal equations on the wall) and watched democracy try to function at Wednesday speed. Mayor Chen banged her gavel with the desperation of someone who'd moderated this debate across multiple nonexistent timelines.
"Order! We vote in ten minutes! Anyone else—"
"I have a solution," Jack said.
The room turned. Three hundred exhausted faces, living life in fast-forward, all focused on the Ranger who'd shown up less than twenty-four hours ago. His shadow waved cheerfully.
"You've been here one Wednesday," Steinman scoffed. "What could you possibly—"
"Redundant moments," Jack interrupted. "That's what we feed it."
Silence. Then confused murmuring. Yuki raised her hand. "What's a dundant moment?"
"Re-dun-dant," Jack smiled. "Think about your normal day—back when you had seven of them. How much time do you spend waiting? Loading screens. Red lights. Awkward elevator silences. The third time someone tells the same story. The five seconds between ordering coffee and receiving it. Moments that exist but don't matter."
Understanding dawned on several faces. Maria's temporal tattoos shifted, calculating. "You're suggesting we feed it time that nobody needs?"
"Every human experiences roughly 2.7 hours of truly redundant time daily," ARIA chimed in. "Moments so insignificant they're forgotten instantly. Multiply by a colony of three hundred..."
"That's 810 hours of feeding per day," Dr. Vega finished. "More than enough to sustain a chronovore."
The debate shifted. How would they extract redundant moments? Could the Chronophage learn to identify them? What constituted "redundant" anyway?
"My mother-in-law's stories," someone suggested.
"Loading screens for sure."
"That pause when you forget why you entered a room."
"DMV waiting rooms!"
Jack let them plan, his shadow already sketching temporal collection devices. The vote was unanimous—Operation Redundancy would commence immediately.
Six hours later, Jack stood in the modified mining complex watching his terrible idea take shape. The colonists had built temporal collectors—devices that identified and extracted moments nobody would miss. The Chronophage waited at the center, weak but curious.
"Okay," Jack addressed the creature that existed in too many tenses. "We're going to teach you to fish instead of stealing our whole ocean. Redundant moments only. Small bites. Sustainable feeding."
The Chronophage listened in its way, creating absence-words that meant understanding. Yuki translated, having somehow become fluent in temporal silence. "It says it'll try. It's very grateful. Also, it likes your shadow."
Indeed, Jack's shadow was performing what could only be described as interpretive dance, teaching the Chronophage to identify different flavors of time. Waiting-time tasted different from joy-time, apparently.
"Activating collectors," Dr. Vega announced.
The machines hummed to life. Immediately, redundant moments began flowing—the collective unconscious waiting of three hundred people, distilled into pure temporal energy. The Chronophage sipped cautiously.
Then eagerly.
Then ravenously.
"Uh," Yuki said. "It says redundant time tastes amazing. Like... temporal junk food?"
That's when things went sideways.
The Chronophage, starved for so long, gorged itself. But redundant moments were connected to other moments. Pull too hard on waiting-in-line and suddenly the whole line ceased to exist. Extract too many awkward pauses and conversations collapsed into incomprehensible speed-speech.
"It's eating too much!" Maria shouted as her tattoos began calculating faster than physics allowed. "It's creating temporal cavitation!"
Around town, reality hiccupped. Coffee appeared in hands before being ordered. Stories ended before they began. A couple got married, divorced, and remarried in the span of saying "I do." Children arrived at school before leaving home.
"SHUT IT DOWN!" Jack yelled, but it was too late.
The Chronophage had discovered the temporal equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet. And like anyone who'd been starving, it couldn't stop. Wednesday began accelerating, trying to contain all the moments that no longer had redundancy to space them out.
Jack's shadow grabbed him, pointing urgently at the town. Through the window, he could see the impossible—Wednesday was becoming all seven days at once. Monday's work anxiety crashed into Friday's relief. Sunday's rest tangled with Thursday's ambitions. The colonists weren't living one day a week anymore.
They were living every day.
At the same time.
Forever.
"Oh no," Jack said, watching a colonist simultaneously wake up, work, eat lunch, attend a wedding, sleep, and file taxes. "This is the opposite of helpful."
The Chronophage, drunk on redundant time, began to hiccup.
Each hiccup deleted a random moment from existence. Somewhere, someone's first kiss unraveled. A lottery win became a loss. A perfect sandwich retroactively became mediocre.
"If we survive this," Mayor Chen said, existing in seventeen emotional states simultaneously, "I'm banning all temporal solutions forever."
Jack looked at his shadow, which shrugged apologetically. Yuki tugged his sleeve—or would tug it, or had tugged it, time was getting confusing.
"Mister? I think we broke Wednesday."
Understatement of the week.
All seven days of it happening at once.