Borrowing Minutes From Oblivion

Synkronis existed in a unique curve in the fabric of the universe, the space between the end of one universe and the beginning of another. It was not the sort of place you wanted to go, but it also wasn't somewhere you ended up accidentally. No sane person really wanted to find the exact moment before the world is consumed by oblivion, but that was exactly what Synkronis was, and it had a thriving population living in the second before total destruction.

It had started, Vaelis knew, as an attempt to fix everything, to reverse the destruction and set the world to right again so it could keep turning away until its next scheduled apocalyptic event. It hadn't even been the first of its kind, as history told them of Eden, of Babel, of Uruk, Buyan, Olympus, Hawaiki, Tripura, Rocabarraigh, and Shangri-La. There had been other moments when the world hovered on the brink of destruction, and then something changed. In the space of a single moment stretched to infinity, something happened, and an ordinary place became extraordinary because it was where something new began.

Some of the citizens of Synkronis believed in that assurance, that something would suddenly shift and provide them with answers if they waited long enough for it. Others began to doubt the probability of rescue and put more work into trying to figure out how to fix the world themselves. Still others were resigned to their fate and the inevitability of the world shattering apart around them.

Vaelis had been born in Synkronis and still didn't know what she believed. Life had given her no answers, only the endless questions and the constant awareness of impending doom that filled the atmosphere like the smell of smoke in the distance. She took every moment she could get from the slow creep of nothingness, all too aware that her very existence was unnatural and fleeting. Running did nothing, but the act of moving in a world trapped in a single moment settled something inside her enough that she could breathe. Becoming a messenger seemed only natural in the grand scheme of things.

"Didya hear what the Clockers are sayin'?" her boss asked as she shuffled the packages she was supposed to deliver into her satchel. "They're sayin' they mighta figured it out."

"They always say that, Quinn," Vaelis muttered. "What makes this time different from the last thousand times?"

"This time, they said the clock started moving again."

Vaelis froze. "The Clock? The countdown?"

"Yup!"

"And they think that's a good thing?"

"Well, if the Clock's movin', it means everythin' else is too, right?"

"Quinn," Vaelis said, carefully laying her hands flat on the counter so she didn't hit something or launch herself at his face, "the Clock is just a countdown to the end. If it hits zero, there is nothing else."

Quinn scoffed. "You don't remember what it was like before. It's not an end, it's just what's next!"

"Well, 'next' has nothing to do with any of us, because we aren't going to be there to see it!" She swept the last of the packages into her bag, swung it over her shoulder, and left before the conversation could turn into a full-blown argument.

Quinn liked to lord it over everyone that he remembered when the world was still turning and time still ticking. He'd been living in Synkronis before it was called Synkronis and acted like that was so much better than people like Vaelis, whose life was simultaneously microseconds and decades long.

"Don't listen to Quinn; he's a fucking idiot."

Vaelis turned to look at her fellow messenger, Tay, who had his bag hanging empty over his shoulder as he returned from his route. "I know that."

"Yeah, but it's more than that," Tay said, leaning against the wall. "The Clockers say that the clock is moving, but I just looked at it. It ticks forward one second, then back. That's not moving. That's just a loop. As if we weren't already in one of those."

"This isn't a loop. Most of us wouldn't exist if this was a loop."

Tay shrugged. "Call it whatever you want, the effect is the same. We're going nowhere fast."

"You say that like we have anywhere to go," Vaelis muttered bitterly. "We live and die at the end of the world, and that's it."

"Not if the Tracers have something to say about it."

"If you've been listening to the Tracers, it's no wonder you think it's a loop. They do whatever they can not to focus on the here and now, as though they don't exist here at all."

Tay scoffed, turning away. "Come talk to me when you're actually willing to listen about the future. At least I believe there can be one."

"That may work for you, but I was never very good at blind faith."

Vaelis started towards the Clock-tower at the center of Synkronis. Mounted at the very top of it was the Clock, but the Clockers who worked on the upper floors had decided to build up around it so no one would see whether it was working or not. She remembered being young and watching those walls go up, feeling both scared and relieved not to see the countdown anymore. It wasn't moving then, and she wouldn't have been able to do anything if it had been, but having that decision taken out of her hands was the kindest thing any Clocker had ever done for her. Of course, when the other response she tended to get was 'get out of here so I can continue my work', it wasn't as big of an achievement as it seemed.

Clockers, Tracers, and Sloths all had different ways of dealing with Synkronis and everything it represented. The Clockers were actively trying to fix the world as it was. They tended to be the older guard, the ones who remembered what everything was like before and were therefore desperate to get it back. The Tracers had only known Synkronis as it was, and they were trying to track down whatever thread of time would lead them into something better, whether that was back in time to the world the Clockers remembered, or forward into whatever world came after.

Sloths, on the other hand, did not care. The Clock was a countdown timer that they were waiting to finish, and they had already decided they weren't going to do anything about it. They thrived on the fact that nothing truly changed all that much, and money meant next to nothing in the face of destruction. They mocked the effort of those who tried to achieve something normal and lamented about the fact that nothing had happened yet.

Vaelis did not consider herself a Sloth. Nor was she a Clocker or a Tracer. In her own mind, she was a spark. Not a big or important one, just a tiny bit of fire that escaped containment just to burn out for lack of fuel. She knew what the end would be, but she was still trying for something, and she couldn't even say what that was.

Like a ghost, she drifted through the Clock-tower, dropping off packages at the same doors she normally delivered to, winding her way up to the higher levels where she could see the Clock for herself.

Tay was right. It did look like the Clock was looping. But contrary to what Quinn had implied, she didn't think that was a good thing. The Clockers who normally worked on that level were acting like the Clock didn't actually exist, doing whatever they needed to avoid looking at it. She even watched one of them shield their eyes from it, so they didn't have to see the way it glitched over and over again.

For the first time, Vaelis considered that this might actually be the end of the line for Synkronis. That everyone might have failed in what they were trying to do and succeeded only in setting themselves that much closer to destruction. The weight of the realization settled on her shoulders, like getting caught beneath the drainage slope when the wastewater was released. She was just a spark, just as doomed as she'd always felt, stuck staring at the end she had no hope of changing.

But instead of helpless, the feeling made her angry. She had lived her whole life in Synkronis, and between the Tracers, the Clockers, and the Sloths doing whatever they wanted, she was going to die in it too at this rate. What was worse, she was going to die having done nothing in the grand scheme of things. She had survived, and that was all that could be said of her.

Her bag was empty, but no one stopped her as she made her way down the catwalk to the actual mechanism of the Clock, her steps in time with the tick-click-tick-click of glitching time. All it did was reinforce how insignificant she was to them, how her only use was in how she let herself be used.

Vaelis looked around at the Clockers desperately focusing on their self-assigned tasks to the point of ignorance of anything around them. There were equations half-erased scrawled across as many surfaces as they could reach, there were some Clockers having quiet or loud debates about ideas she would never be able to fully understand. There were tools sitting abandoned on a table beside the Clock mechanism that rattled gently with each tick-click.

She stole the heaviest gear wrench she found.

For how shrouded in secrecy it was, the Clock was not at all difficult to access. The mechanism was larger and more impressive than she'd been expecting as gears and chains moved around her. Inside, it didn't follow the tick-click heard on the outside. It was a constant grind and release instead, with metal sliding against metal until the weight behind the motion backed off. But, unlike what she'd been expecting, it was not some mystical thing. It was ordinary and it was broken, and she hated how much of her life had been wasted in fear of this machine.

Supposedly, there was something in this Clock that halted time, keeping them hovering on the edge of oblivion long enough to make the impossible manifest in their favor, but she couldn’t see anything strange or unusual about it.

Vaelis wandered down to where the grinding was loudest and found a set of gears driven by weight. But as the weight swung, the chains holding it attempted to advance the gear, only to grind to a halt as they got caught in the teeth. She watched it happen several more times, the same way each time, before she decided to do something about it.

The weights needed to be dealt with first before she'd be able to shift the chain, so she climbed down the ladder to the platform below to see if she could detach them. Fortunately enough, there was a catch mechanism for holding the weights while giving slack to the chain above, and activating it was as easy as pulling a lever. The grinding stopped immediately.

Knowing she only had a few moments before someone wondered about the moving clock that had suddenly stopped again, Vaelis climbed back up to the mechanism that had been catching and pulled up enough chain to try and untangle it. She dropped it a couple of times trying to fix it but eventually managed to thread the chain back into place enough that it wouldn't catch in the same way again.

As she released the weights, a steady metallic clicking sound filled the space, echoing against the walls. It was louder when she was standing over the gears and chains she had untangled, shifting constantly forward.

The Clockers had wanted the clock to move. The Tracers wanted a future. The Sloths didn't want to work for whatever came next.

Vaelis picked up the gear wrench, debating with herself whether or not to follow through on the idle thought of smashing the Clock that had led her to examine it.

She set it back down and made her way out of the mechanism, past all of the Clockers still ignoring the tick-tick-tick of their favorite obsession. They either didn't notice the difference, or they were ignoring it even harder to avoid thinking about what came next.

Before she left the upper levels, Vaelis turned back to look at the clock. At least a minute had passed, so she knew she would be able to see proof of her effort.

Vaelis had considered herself a spark, doomed to burn out. She had forgotten that sparks did not always fizzle.

The Clock, the countdown that had ruled her entire existence with the looming promise of oblivion, was moving in reverse. Time was the only thing they had been certain of before, hanging eternally frozen as all of Synkronis tried to fight fate while searching for miracles. Halting the Clock was the only miracle they'd found. And now she'd set it running again.

Running in reverse.

Vaelis had forgotten that sometimes sparks became a flame.