The Watchmaker's Dilemma

The Beginning

Through the grime-encrusted window, the neon sign running along the street outside the watchmaker's shop cast a cobalt light that plunged the workshop into a sickly blue haze. He stood there, the ticker in his hand was a pure roadmark unimaginable up to now; it was a relic from the future, its gears speaking of absolute spacetime. 

The brass plate on the back, with its series of numbers etched in, seemed to pulsate with a mesmerizing yet disturbing light."She's a real beaut, right?" the pawnbroker had said with a greasy smile, palming the cash in his eyes in a way that made it clear he expected to get paid immediately. 

"When the right collector comes along it's worth quite a bit." 

However, as the watchmaker strained his eyes while looking through the jeweler's monocle, he now realized that he had been cheated; gears were but scrap and the crystal face a fraud. 

The hands, so delicate, lay in protest without a sound behind the lie aiding them to persist in tall degradation as though they were frozen in time or place. 

The front was a hoax too, right down to its delicate hands. About the only factual thing here was the numbers painted on the back while the wheels... yet they each had a life of their own.

He cleared a space on his workbench, where a plenitude of tiny tools lay out before him like a surgical theater. 

The digits taunted him—10-22-45-13-88—as if they were some kind of clue waiting to be ferreted out. 

The metal was cold to the touch, almost alien, and shimmered in a manner that suggested a coating of something centuries ahead of any substance he had ever encountered in his seventy-four years as a tinkerer. 

The digits were becoming more insistent by the second as if trying to convey some sort of urgent warning-- from within the very texture of reality itself.

The watchmaker was a man who followed routine and ordered. Nevertheless, for some reason that he could not fathom but felt on his skin, he was once again setting time. 

The watch worked by no power source that he could see nor was there an obvious means for driving it. But he knew he had to bring it back to life with his own hands. 

His finger was trembling and all the while he offered for close inspection only the tip of his back and thumb at the greatest distance from the back that bore these supernatural letters from some other world. 

The situation reached its ultimate crisis when his communicator rang elsewhere in this deserted city too big to see so many people on landings but hardly any others around. 

Unthinkably sensitive places doomed to impermanence that soon will cover them over again, like clothing or skin grown back before long.

His hand shaking uncontrollably, Yiyun turned the dial so that the time matched the sequence. As soon as it clicked into place, the room filled with a hum that reverberated through the bones of Yiyun and he was already rising from his chair. 

The watch sprang to life. The numbers passed by and the hands started spinning madly through minutes, hours, days, and years, as if in a hurry to proclaim their secret truths. 

Breathlessly he followed along until second hand slipped past noon midnight-and then an even stranger thing happened. 

The watch stopped, gears frozen in place as before, but those same digits remained on the back of it. 

It was as though the watch had discovered a specific point in time, an exact notch within all history from which one could not escape to begin fresh.

The sudden silence seemed to scream.