Clockwork

Miss Hamilton, the daughter of the owner of a tobacco shop on Amber Street, dipped the tip of her pen into the inkwell. Her hand hesitated above the blank sheet of paper—she couldn't decide what to write. She glanced around the room, searching for something that could inspire her.

She saw nothing interesting: the room was exactly the same as always. Miss Hamilton carefully examined the familiar surroundings, already knowing where her gaze would land next. Her eyes lingered much longer on the clock. Miss Hamilton studied it attentively as if noticing it for the first time. It had a beautiful golden rim around the dial with silver Roman numerals, though they were of no use: something had broken in the clock long ago, and the hands no longer moved. Nevertheless, Mr. Hamilton, her father, continued to regularly insert the key into the back of the clock and turn it several times. The stillness of the hands gave his daughter the very idea she had been seeking.

What if this clock kept ticking forever, she thought. What if it was the immovable element, the unshakable prime mover around which the entire world revolved? Years would rush by like a mountain stream, epoch after epoch would pass, countless generations of people would blur together in the memories of their descendants, and eventually, humanity would vanish from the face of the Earth. Sooner or later, the Earth itself would disappear, followed by the entire universe. And yet, this clock would float in the void, marking the passage of time, though time would no longer exist. Did it ever? Perhaps this antique clock with the golden rim around the dial was time itself?

Miss Hamilton liked this idea.

Then another thought came to her. It wasn't as cosmic as the first, but the daughter of the tobacco shop owner liked it just as much.

Miss Hamilton smiled. She imagined that exactly one hundred years from now, another woman would be sitting in front of this clock, thinking the same thoughts. She would live in an entirely different world, one so unimaginable that it would be impossible for Miss Hamilton to picture.

Thus, Miss Hamilton decided to create this world. Confidently, she scratched out the title of her work with her pen and, leaning back in her chair with satisfaction, looked it over thoughtfully.

The Journey Through September 22, 2009—that was the title of the yet unwritten work by the daughter of the tobacco shop owner on Amber Street.

Sabine Kuiper was editing the freshly typed text. With regret, she discarded a beautiful but overly bulky and pretentious phrase that linked the invisible threads controlling the universe to the clockwork gears of Miss Hamilton's clock. Even the personality of Miss Hamilton gave Kuiper strange feelings. She couldn't quite create a convincing psychological portrait of the tobacconist's daughter musing on metaphysics. Yet, this seemingly contradictory image oddly attracted her, and she was reluctant to abandon it altogether.

The idea itself—writing about a person who a hundred years ago imagined the time in which you now live—came to Kuiper by accident. She had been waiting for a bus, clocking the cars pass by, and thinking how, just a century ago, such speeds would have seemed like pure science fiction to anyone. Suddenly, it struck her: back then, science fiction was practically in its infancy, and any idea that popped into a writer's head could boldly be considered new, sometimes even prophetic. After all, H.G. Wells had predicted world wars and the future transformation of the Sun into a red giant.

Sabine smiled. She was clearly in a better position than Miss Hamilton. She knew exactly what the world had become by September 22, 2009, while the daughter of a British tobacconist had to blindly guess, hoping that one of her attempts would be accurate. Meanwhile, discovering what the world had been like a hundred years ago posed no difficulty at all—encyclopedias, novels, and even the internet were at her fingertips. Clearly, Miss Hamilton had had a much harder time.