Out of Time

There was nothing in this world that I wanted to do more than sit down and watch some TV as I drank a whiskey sour. It had been an exhausting year, an even more exhausting month, and I deserved some relaxation on the last day of the year. But just as I had prepared my drink and was ready to sit down, my cellphone rang. 

I took my phone out of my pocket and saw that it was my boss. I set down my drink, let out a sigh, and answered the phone. 

“Hello?” I said. 

“Hi, Richard. I’m sorry to bother you after you’ve finished work for the day, especially on New Year’s, but there’s an emergency. There’s a computer that needs to be fixed by midnight tonight.”

“And someone else take can’t care of it?”

“You’re the right person for this job.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. 

“You’re on call for emergencies. I wouldn’t be calling you if this wasn’t one. And we don’t have much time,” he said, speaking faster and with a new tightness in his voice. “I’ll send an email with more of the details and then I expect you to head on over there. Send me a text as soon as you head out.”

He hung up. I stared at my phone for a moment, and then pulled up the email app. I impatiently refreshed it a few times in a row. I couldn’t believe he was doing this to me. I considered forgetting about the phone call, sitting down with my drink, but I feared his wrath.

The email arrived with the next refresh. I tapped it open. The email read:

Here’s some more information about the job. Take all of it seriously; you know that I never joke. 

There’s a computer that our company looks over that is starting to break down. This computer runs a program to uphold the dimension of time for our universe. If it’s not fixed by tonight, we will not progress into the new year. 

I have the manual attached below along with the address of where the computer is located. Hurry, you don’t have much time. 

I couldn’t believe it. He must be fucking with me. After all these years, he had decided now to discover a sense of humor. I couldn’t think of what else this would be. Regardless, I took a look at the manual to see what he had put together to keep the joke running. 

Scrolling through its pages, the manual contained diagram upon diagram of the computer, along with a history of how it came to be and the science of how it worked. There was far too much information for it to just be a joke. 

There was something to this. This was real. This was happening.

Despite the shock that threatened to burn up my mind, I acted. I grabbed my coat and headed out the door, sending him a text as soon as I had started the engine. I plugged in the address into my phone and told it to read the directions aloud to me.

The drove took up too much time, and I felt a pang of dismay there wasn’t anyone closer that could have fixed the computer. I drove past the city limits and out into the woods. As I continued, the roads became narrower and more obscure. These were roads that no person would wander upon during their day trip. I took a right turn onto a road barely wide enough for my car. 

At the end of that road, I turned left down a long driveway. In this dark, secluded corner of the woods, a house which looked more like a shack, appeared visible only as a faint outline amongst the trees. The phone chirped that I had arrived at my destination. Doubt hit me once more that this assignment could be real. 

I got out of the car with the bag of tools in hand. With the headlights off and the new moon, I could barely see a few inches in front of me. I used my phone’s flashlight to light my way to the house. 

The manual read to get into the building I had to look for the key that was under a painted red rock a few feet away from the house’s base. I spotted the red rock after searching for a few moments, took the key from underneath it, and opened the door. It protested massively as I pushed my way into the house. 

I found a light switch to the right of me, flipped it on, and saw the interior of the shack. It was sparsely decorated and contained hardly more than a few pieces of cheap wooden furniture. I walked past the entryway and came to a staircase that took me down to a single steel door with a keypad. This better fit my expectations. Referencing the manual, I typed in a 13 digit code and the door opened up into a small room. 

I switched on the light with the cord that dangled from the ceiling. As soon as I saw the computer I shook my head in utter disbelief. 

“You have to be kidding me,” I muttered. 

On a plain wooden desk sat one of the first IBM computers that had ever come out. Or at least that’s what it looked like. I couldn’t believe that such an important machine could look so old.

I sat down on the desk’s accompanying rickety wooden chair and got to work. I clicked the mouse to wake the computer up and saw a clock with the current time, counting upwards. I could tell right away there was something wrong: numbers would glitch and not update immediately every five seconds. It must be functioning well enough to run time currently, but it wouldn’t carry us over to the next year. 

I got up, opened up the back of the computer, and started to work on finding a solution. There were a mess of different parts. The computer contained wires and hardware unfamiliar to any computer I had ever worked on, even the oldest and rarest ones. It would require time for me to just get familiar with the mechanics. But I would make it work. I directed all of my focus at the task in front of me; I had my phone open to the manual and switched back and forth from it to the parts I worked on.   

For the first hour, I couldn’t find any problem with it. The mass of wires made it a challenge to understand what was happening at all. But once I had sorted everything out in a way that made sense to me, I finally found the problem. Two pieces of its hardware had fused together from heat, and gunk had built up over it. It was no wonder it could barely function. I needed to separate the two parts the best that I could and hope that it would run well enough to last tonight.

Two hours remained. I took a couple tools out of my bag and worked on cleaning the device. I was able to clean off the upper layer of dirt and grease on the parts, but as soon I started to try to separate the parts I could tell there was no easy solution. The more I worked upon the machine, the more I realized it was impossible with the amount of time I had. The solution would require days.

I took a step back from the computer. I gripped the desk tightly, feeling the rush of emotions pound into my head. I almost always kept a cool head during the job, but the pressure of this task had caught up to me. I didn’t want to be the one that allowed the world to end. 

I unlocked my phone to call my boss for some help. Yet, there was no cell service. I despised the stupidity of this location and threw my phone back down onto the table. 

I paced the cramped room as I wracked my brain, and wondered why my boss had chosen me for the job. I thought about what made me different from the other employees. It struck me: I had always been known as one of the most creative employees. Perhaps, there was a creative solution that was needed here.

I examined the parts again, and tried to move a different component, hoping that it would somehow help loosen the fused together parts. But that didn’t work and I had nothing but the overwhelming despair once more. I stared into the computer’s brains, trying to come up with a solution as the time melted around me. 

In the final minute, I had given up. I stared at my watch as the moments counted down. I wondered what would happen, but most of all I felt an intense cold wave of failure for not being good enough to solve the problem.

Five, four, three, two, one…

The world didn’t quite end, but it didn’t continue either. A white flash filled my vision and I was left with what I had felt the second before the new year arrived. I was stuck in a state of self-pity for the rest of eternity, and the rest of the world was frozen with whatever they had felt before midnight. That’s all there ever would be.