Horror Stories

When Gods Blink

On the 25th March, at 14:57GMT, the world stopped for 27 minutes and 54 seconds. No one noticed at first. Those that eventually did were ordered to keep quiet.

There was no sudden jolt, no collapsing into unconsciousness, no transition into utter darkness and back again. Nothing.

For everyone, time had appeared to pass as normal, one second moving uneventfully into the next. Birds flew, people talked, the wind and the rain blew and fell respectively - nothing had occurred to indicate that anything untoward or unexpected had happened to the inhabitants of the Earth. Only those who looked beyond our planet and its ring of constantly chattering satellites now found that the rest of the universe told a different story.

NASA and related space agencies noticed first. Signals to ongoing missions beyond those in orbit around the Earth were all off by almost 30 minutes. Frantic investigation revealed that the same time discrepancy was occurring for all incoming signals. Naturally they came to the conclusion that the problem must therefore lay not with these external elements, but with the computers on Earth. But this led to a bigger question - one computer glitch was possible, but all of the various space agency's computers across the globe showing the same failure at exactly the same time? Naturally, a virus or a sophisticated global hacking attack was the next obvious answer. An international team to investigate such a large, well-coordinated cyber-attack was being discussed when the first calls of alarm came in from confused and concerned astronomers, and the true significance of what had actually happened became known.

Using data retrieved from telescopic arrays at Jodrell Bank, Palo Alto, Mount Pleasant and others across the world, confirmed against existing stellar records and computational models of the local galaxy and beyond, it became apparent that for twenty seven minutes and fifty four seconds the Earth had somehow been out of sync with the rest of known time and space. In essence, the world as we knew it had winked out of existence during this period, and then returned as if nothing had happened.

For all intents and purposes during that short window of time, we had ceased to be.

The international investigation team was repurposed, a blank cheque written, giving it its pick of resources and the best minds in their fields, all to investigate this one event and all sworn to the utmost secrecy. None of them needed to be told the panic that would ensue if this information became public before a suitable, and hopefully reassuring, reason could be given for the event. Those that couldn't keep silent were quickly and quietly silenced themselves.

Despite the various project names assigned to the sub teams, those involved began referring to the event in a half joking manner as '...the day God blinked.' In casual conversation between project members this was eventually shortened even further to just 'the blink.'

After six rings, Ben finally answered the door.

"Mark! What are you doing here?"

"You invited me, remember?"

"Did I?! How odd! Well, I probably had a reason at the time. It's still good to see you anyway. Come on in!"

I'd known Ben since childhood. We attended the same schools for a while, before his crazily high IQ led him onto a fast track of higher education and beyond. We kept in touch though; his parents were sensible enough to realize he needed some grounding in the real world, and encouraged our friendship with the usual sleepovers and camping trips. Their smarts lay in forcing Ben not to let his social skills atrophy completely like a lot of very intelligent kids were wont to do. As a result, whilst he was frequently side tracked and forgetful, he still functioned in normal society with a degree of success.

After our respective schooling had finished we both moved into the IT industry, although at vastly different levels. For myself, I now worked in tech support, mostly maintaining insurance systems for a range of small independent companies. Boring, but it paid well and allowed me to travel. He, on the other hand, was self-employed and preferred working from his 'Apartment of Solitude' as he called it, referring to himself as a 'Consulting Technician' (he'd gotten the idea from watching re-runs of 'Sherlock'). His work was a lot more varied and advanced, and whilst he never openly admitted to hacking, he certainly had enough technical knowledge and experience to have been employed in the past by such names as Google, Microsoft and IBM when they needed someone to test the all new, unshakable security they'd just put in place, or track down those that had subsequently been able to breach their all new, unshakable security. He preferred the latter work he told me; it added the 'thrill of the chase', plus it usually paid better.