There was a time when people would say that love was the most powerful force in the universe. Then, in the mid-17th century, it was discovered that, in fact, space and time are the most powerful forces in the Universe.
This discovery was accredited to Newton (most likely erroneously), in a breakthrough experiment in which he discovered that the time it took to reach his mistress in London would steadily increase in proportion to the distance between them, and that a person’s appearance starts to degenerate as their age approaches infinity. Theories regarding love’s power had also long been based on a sort of theology that was at that time being put into serious question.
Since then mankind has abandoned its centuries long goal of overcoming love, and turned towards the defeat of time and space. Though advances have been recorded over the past few hundred years – space flight, the telephone, image replication – the first true breakthrough was made by a Polish scientist who, using mathematics that have now been completely lost, managed to bend time and space between lovers, virtually eliminating the tyranny of physics.
He secluded himself for many years working on this invention, with the first signs of his success showing up in early 1992, when his girlfriend in France reported regular dreams of them lying in bed together doing nothing for a long time. Unfortunately after thorough study and peer review, a panel of leading scientists came to the conclusion that these were actually only dreams, and not science in the least, and eventually the woman left him for a man who worked at the Sorbonne.
The scientist found other girlfriends though, and tried talking to them, sex with them, taking them out to eat, even singing to him, from his home in Poland. They were all quite entertained but following the general prejudices of the scientific community assumed that these dates outside of time and space were just dreams, and left him because he spent too much time with his work.
With each date though he got closer to perfecting the science of time and space distortion. Until finally he met Isabelle, a nice woman who liked listening to him talk about mathematics, and he was finally able to persuade her that she was not dreaming, but rather living outside of time.
From then on they spent more and more of their time together, often delaying the progress of time for days. And though some might assume that a timeless world would get boring, they found countless things to enjoy themselves with. They would spend what seemed like hours talking about math and sculpture, discussing theology, and telling stories about the people they saw frozen on the streets.
Over the years they spent less and less of their free moments with other people, until one day, quietly, they ceased to exist, having been completely erased from the world of physics. The only memory left of them is a picture they took together a few days after they met. That too is quickly fading.