Four Minutes

Four Minutes

Lydia was holding a knife—the good one, German steel, wedding gift from a marriage that lasted eighteen months—spreading aioli on sprouted grain bread when her phone lit up with the notification.

SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE: Universal System Reboot in 4:00 minutes. Please save all work and ensure consciousness continuity protocols are in place. For questions, contact your local Reality Administrator.

She looked at the phone. Looked at the sandwich. Looked back at the phone.

11:56 PM. Tuesday.

Four minutes.

The universe was rebooting in four minutes and she had an unfinished sandwich and seventeen sectors of North American subconscious dreamscapes that probably—almost certainly, statistically speaking—had not properly filed their pre-reboot continuity protocols because nobody ever did, because the system was designed by people who had clearly never had to use the system, which was basically the operational philosophy of everything.

She was a Level 7 Reality Administrator, which meant she was responsible for things going wrong but had no authority to prevent things from going wrong, which was just—

Four minutes.

Right.

She grabbed her laptop and opened the admin portal while taking a bite of sandwich, immediately regretting it because the tomato did that thing where it slid out the back and now there was aioli on her wrist and she had—

Three minutes, thirty-eight seconds.

The portal loaded with all the urgency of geological formation. Lydia had filed six separate tickets requesting faster servers. Steven from Infrastructure had marked them all "acknowledged" and then proceeded to acknowledge nothing further, which she respected in a certain way—the purity of his commitment to non-responsiveness was almost admirable.

When the dashboard finally materialized, seventeen amber warnings blinked across her sectors.

Not red. Red would mean crisis. Red would mean she could claim overtime.

Amber meant: probably fine, definitely your fault if it isn't.

She clicked into Sector 7-J (Nebraska, eastern Wyoming, a sliver of South Dakota that nobody wanted to claim). Three hundred twenty thousand souls currently in REM state, and according to the readout, their consciousness continuity protocols were at 73% completion.

The threshold for safe reboot was 95%.

Three minutes, nine seconds.

Lydia's left eye twitched. It had been twitching since the last quarterly review where Carol from Upper Management—who had never actually administered anything except her own calendar—suggested that maybe if Lydia was "more proactive" about "synergizing stakeholder engagement," these last-minute situations wouldn't arise.

Lydia had smiled and nodded and said she'd take that feedback into consideration, which was professional code for "I have considered your feedback and found it useless, but we both have to pretend this conversation was productive."

She opened a mass notification window and typed: URGENT: All souls in Sector 7-J must complete continuity protocols in next 180 seconds or risk consciousness fragmentation upon reboot. This is not a drill. (This is technically a drill that became real because you ignored the email I sent last Tuesday. And the one before that. And the—)

She deleted the last part. Replaced it with: Please prioritize accordingly.

Hit send.

Two minutes, forty-one seconds.

Her phone buzzed. Text from Josh, Level 6 Admin covering the Eastern seaboard: did you get the notification

yes Josh i got the notification everyone got the notification it's a system-wide event

should i be worried

do you have any sectors below 95%

...maybe

then yes Josh you should be worried

what happens if

Lydia stopped reading. There wasn't time for Josh's anxiety spiral. Josh was a nice guy who asked good questions at extremely inopportune moments. Once, during a timeline collapse incident, he'd asked if anyone wanted to get drinks after, like they weren't currently preventing three million people from waking up in the wrong decade.

Two minutes, eighteen seconds.

The completion rate in Sector 7-J climbed to 79%. Then 81%. Then stalled.

There was always a stall. There was always someone—usually multiple someones—who either didn't see the notification (because they'd muted system alerts to focus on dream-state productivity metrics, which, sure, priorities) or saw it and thought "I'll do it in a minute" with the sublime confidence of someone who had never experienced the consequences of their own procrastination.

Lydia had experienced those consequences. Last reboot, Sector 11-C (most of Oregon and parts of Washington) had gone into the restart at 89% completion. Nothing catastrophic happened. Just sixteen thousand people who woke up the next morning absolutely convinced they were someone else, which created a paperwork nightmare that Lydia was technically still resolving. Form 17-B, Subsection 4, Paragraph (c): Unauthorized Identity Transfers Resulting From Negligent Administrative Oversight.

Her fault, obviously. Never mind that she'd sent four reminder emails. Never mind that the auto-escalation protocol she'd proposed had been rejected as "potentially disruptive to user experience."

One minute, fifty-three seconds.

The rate hit 87%.

Lydia refreshed. 89%.

Close. So close.

She opened the emergency override menu, which required three separate password confirmations and a digital signature acknowledging that any use of emergency powers would be reviewed by a committee that had never met but definitely existed somewhere in the bureaucratic architecture.

There was a button labeled: FORCE COMPLIANCE.

Beneath it, in smaller text: May result in minor existential discomfort. Use only when absolutely necessary. Definitions of "absolutely necessary" available in Handbook Section 29-J, pending final revision.

One minute, twenty-seven seconds.

Section 29-J had been "pending final revision" since before Lydia was hired. She'd checked once. The draft was 847 pages long and used the phrase "paradigm of consciousness continuity vis-à-vis stakeholder expectations" sixteen times.

Ninety-one percent.

One minute, fourteen seconds.

Ninety-three percent.

She could wait. Should wait. Protocol said wait.

Protocol also said reboots happened at reasonable hours after adequate preparation time, but here they were at 11:59 PM on a Tuesday because someone in Planning had apparently just discovered quarterly maintenance schedules and decided to implement them with the zealous efficiency of someone who had never actually maintained anything.

Fifty-nine seconds.

Ninety-four percent.

Her cursor hovered over FORCE COMPLIANCE.

Ninety-four point three percent.

Forty-seven seconds.

Lydia thought about the paperwork. Thought about Carol from Upper Management. Thought about Josh's inevitable follow-up questions. Thought about the seventeen other sectors she hadn't even checked yet because she'd been too busy making a sandwich, which wasn't actually her fault because she was entitled to a dinner break, except "entitled" and "realistically able to take" were two different things and everyone knew it.

Ninety-four point seven percent.

Thirty-one seconds.

She clicked FORCE COMPLIANCE.

The screen went white, then displayed: Protocol Override Engaged. All consciousness streams in Sector 7-J forced into continuity compliance. Expect follow-up documentation requirements within 5-7 business cycles.

Twenty-three seconds.

Of course there would be documentation requirements. There were always documentation requirements. She'd probably spend her next four work sessions filling out forms explaining why she'd had to use the emergency override that existed specifically for emergencies like this one.

She checked the other sixteen sectors. All green. Someone in California was on top of their shit, apparently. Whoever administered the West Coast night shift, Lydia owed them a drink.

Ten seconds.

She saved her work, closed her laptop, and picked up her sandwich. The aioli had absorbed into the bread in that way that was either disgusting or perfect depending on your perspective.

Three seconds.

The lights flickered. Or didn't flicker. It was hard to tell if lights flickered when the entire operational framework of reality was—

REBOOT COMPLETE. Thank you for your patience. Reality resuming normal operations.

The notification vanished. The clock read 12:00 AM. Wednesday.

Lydia took a bite of her sandwich.

The tomato stayed put this time.

Small victories.

Her phone buzzed. Email from Carol: Morning! Quick sync about last night's override usage? Want to make sure we're all aligned on best practices going forward!

Lydia put the phone face-down on the counter.

She had four hours before her next shift started.

Four hours to sleep, shower, and prepare for whatever fresh bureaucratic nightmare awaited in a universe that rebooted on Tuesdays at midnight because some committee somewhere had decided that was fine, actually, and anyone who disagreed clearly wasn't being proactive enough about synergizing their stakeholder engagement.

Lydia finished her sandwich.

Sent Josh a text: we survived

His reply came immediately: barely

barely counts

She went to bed.

The universe hummed along, stable and maintained, held together by people like Lydia who kept things running despite—never because of—the system designed to help them do it.

Somewhere, probably, Carol was already drafting a meeting agenda.

But that was tomorrow's problem.

Tonight, Lydia had successfully prevented consciousness fragmentation across three hundred twenty thousand souls, completed her mandatory override documentation (or would, eventually), and made a pretty decent sandwich.