The Apocalypse?

...This quickie comes from me being really, really tired and dragging all day.

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At first, Deliah was sure it was her imagination. The days were all the same; that’s how a person could tell time, because time did not change and days were the same length each time, twenty-four hours in a day and all that.

But then things got a little strange. Deliah passed it off as a dying battery when her watch’s second hand seemed to hitch every few seconds. She got the battery changed and didn’t think of it again until she noticed the clock in her office. It didn’t hitch so much as it paused as it ticked off the seconds. It ran on electricity. Deliah made a complaint to the office manager and the clock was replaced. The replacement did the same thing.

Next, the strangeness affected the timers that ran the cable television stations. A half-hour program would end and then, for a minute or two, blank tapes ran before the next program came on. But, as each day passed, the blank spaces grew longer and longer. Battery and electric clocks continued to slow down.

And then the atomic clocks went bad. The government tried to keep it quiet, tried to say it was merely an unforeseen quirk of the clock’s prolonged exposure to radioactive subatomic particles. So they built new clocks, and set them up in a grand televised special, broadcast live over every channel during one of the now-half-hour long gaps. The new clocks didn’t work right either. It was then that the nation decided to panic. Deliah sat on her couch in shock. Then, she picked up the remote and clicked through until she finally found one station that was, blissfully, clock-free. She sat in the darkness with the blank screen.

The scientists, after weeks and months of study, determined that time was, in fact, slowing down. World leaders all advised their people to try to keep going as normally as possible. Deliah found it impossible to ignore that a day, once twenty-four hours, was now taking up thirty-six. She found it interminable that she now spent twelve hours in the office each day. Her shower took forty-five minutes to complete each morning. Her commute warped from a ten minute walk to fifteen. She supposed there was an upside: sleeping and coffee breaks and really good movies all lasted longer now.

To cope with this, businesses switched from an hourly pay rate to a “pay for the day” scale: Deliah’s paycheck covered eight Old Hours’ worth of money, despite each ‘hour’ now being half again as lengthy. It was bullcrap, but if they kept going by Old Hours, they’d all go broke and everyone would be unemployed.

The only people with real job security were the scientists working on a solution to the problem. For months, they labored on it. Periodic news coverage showed the state of things to be grim, but there was always a new theory to test, new equations to solve.

Finally, after nearly a year--and Deliah was no longer sure exactly how long that year had been--the world leaders again appeared on television during one of the blank spots. It was time, they said, to face facts. The days were getting longer and longer, and they would never stop growing. There would come a time, not too far in the future, where the day would literally never end. At least, not for humans. At this time, the scientists explained, the day would stretch out so long that, by the time it ended, all the humans would be dead. The Last Day, it was cleverly coined. And they expected that Last Day to come…well…next Thursday.

Rioting broke out across the globe. Desperate, the humans tried to start a wave of babies to stretch out further than this strange ripple of slow time. But it didn’t work, because, no matter how strange it was, it was less than a week until Thursday, and babies take nine months. It simply wasn’t possible. Time was relentless and inexorable. Things calmed down in the interim and humans tried their best to go about like normal.

And then, the Last Day came. Deliah got dressed for work as always. A thought occurred to her. she stopped herself at the door. She took off her business suit and stepped out of her shoes. She put her pajamas back on and crawled into bed. And then, for the first time in her life, Deliah called in sick.


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Wouldn't calling in sick really be the best way to deal with it? I know this was hasty and rushed (irony factor!) but I think I kind of got the concept across. I'm too sleepy to do any more with it tonight, at least.

~Later