Me vs. reality

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Shaily Agrawal made the suggestion that maybe our impossible-to-set clock was tuned to the wrong timezone. Aha! I thought, that’s plausible. But having fiddled around with it today, I see that every time it’s reset it chooses a different time. Sometimes ten minutes out, sometime six hours, sometimes three hours and twenty-four minutes. As a kid, I had a digital watch that was erratic like that. Every time you pressed the light switch the time changed. I even wrote it into one of my books. I assumed then, and am assuming now that it’s some kind of code. A way that technology can communicate with us.

I should probably also report, that I found no evidence of a portal opening or mysterious happenings at the time the clock chose. And no further evidence of a zombie apocalypse occurring. In fact it felt like a completely normal day, as if no doom was impending at all and only ineptness was lurking round every corner. But that can’t be right.

Word of the day: Fey/fay/fie – doomed, under the shadow of a violent, foreseen death

What in the name of all hairy-yuk is this?

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We were all walking to the shed this morning to get tooled up, when we spotted the deceased animal below. It’s not uncommon to find dead things around, but we can usually work out what they are, even if they’ve been chewed. But this? What is this? I’m sure I can see five feet of various sizes, but no head. Is it a baby bird knocked out of a nest for being a mutant? Nature is harsh.

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In our fancy new messroom, we have a fancy new clock. It connects to a satellite so that the time can be always super accurate. Everybody has avoided setting it because it looks too complicated, however, today Mateo decided to go for it. He put the battery in and moved the hands round to the correct time. The clock disagreed (presumably after connecting to the satellite) and moved the hands back  round to the wrong time. He tried again. Again the clock took control. By his fourth attempt we were all watching enthralled (breaks can be dull) cheering as he set the right time, groaning and howling as the clock undid his work with its sophisticated wizardry. Finally he resorted to the instructions.

‘It says I only need to press this for 3 seconds and that connects it to the satellite. It will move the hands to twelve first, and then to the correct time,’ said Mateo, doubtfully. But he did it and then the hands began to move. They moved to twelve and for a moment we thought this was it, fancy clock knew what it was doing, it reached twelve thirty, the right time, but then kept on going. Finally landing on a time five hours and thirteen minutes out. We had to take the clock off Mateo to stop its destruction.

It is now hanging on the wall, telling us lies, but we hope since it’s closer to the satellite up there, it will figure things out eventually. This is the problem as our technology gets cleverer than us, it gets defiant, it sneers at our puny desires to know the time. It wants to explore possibilities, experiment, and ultimately destroy us all with lasers. Satellite connected lasers.