Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 23 - World Clock

1980s broadcast news studio

The thin black man, Dr. Adrian Parsons, couldn’t stop shuffling his hands. He nervously interlocked his long, bony fingers and then stretched them out again. They were like foreign objects he couldn’t stop touching. He stroked the knuckles on the top of each hand.

“Dr. Parsons,” the man across the desk said to him.

“Yes, sorry.”

Peter. His name was Peter. Peter had neatly parted brown hair and wore a crisp navy suit and a sharp red tie. Compared to everyone else, Peter was surprisingly kempt and collected. Unlike Dr. Parsons, Peter was completely at home in front of the three cameras currently pointed at them both.

They were in a television studio, but every few minutes Dr. Parsons wondered if he was dreaming. He faintly remembered men in dark suits showing up at his apartment door, ushering him to his bedroom, and standing in the doorway as he dressed in his rumpled suit and tie. Dr. Parsons didn’t argue with them as it somehow felt perfectly normal to have men appear so suddenly at his door. It was as if he’d done this kind of thing before. He also didn’t protest when, once he was dressed, they swept him down the stairs and out into a waiting car where they rushed him to his office which he hadn’t been to in nearly forty years. He then sat in conference rooms and looked at reports that were placed in front of him when suddenly those same men in dark suits ushered him out the doors again and whisked him twenty blocks away to the ABC News offices near Times Square.

Now he was under bright lights with three cameras pointed at where he and the interviewer — Peter — faced each other with a desk between them. Dr. Parsons kept rubbing his hands together.

“Sorry,” Dr. Parsons said again.

“You served as the Undersecretary of Commerce for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.”

“Yes,” Dr. Parsons answered, nodding. “From 1975 until the early nineties.”

Under the bright, hot lights shining down on them, Dr. Parsons found it difficult to stop nodding once he started. He pulled at his collar as if its narrow size was also unfamiliar and new.

“This must be even more confusing to you, then,” Peter said, “with your oversight of the atomic clock.”

“I’m sure it’s confusing for us all,” Dr. Parsons said.

“And again, for people just tuning in, to repeat what we’ve learned last few hours — and will continue to do so as more information pours in — we’ve all experienced some sort of global time shift.”

Peter paused and waited for Dr. Parsons to respond.

“Yes,” Dr. Parsons said again. “So it seems. Though I still don’t see how this is possible.”

“And that’s the primary concern at the moment,” Peter said as he turned back to the camera, speaking to the world. “Again, you may be experiencing varying levels of confusion. That’s apparently normal and temporary. You may see a younger version of yourself in the mirror.  You may not be able to locate your loved ones, particularly anyone who was younger than thirty.”

“Wait,” Dr. Parsons said as if having a sudden realization. “What’s that?”

“And temporary short-term memory loss has also been reported,” Peter said, ignoring Dr. Parsons’s confusion. “But it seems to clear up within a few hours for most.”

Dr. Parsons shook his head and stretched out his fingers again. He suddenly felt as if a blanket had just been slipped off of his brain. He opened his eyes wide and looked at Peter.

“I apologize, Peter,” he said with sudden clarity. “I think I just had a minor blackout again.”

“For me, I felt that for the first hour or two, I was muddled and stuck,” Peter said. He said those two words very deliberately — muddled and stuck — as he now spoke to Dr. Parsons like an old friend rather than someone he was interviewing on national television. “Like murky water suddenly stirred.”

“Exactly,” Dr. Parsons said in a voice quiet and frail.  “Murky water. That’s a good description of it.”

Photo by Kier in Sight on Unsplash

“But some people,” Peter continued, “more than a scattering sample of the population, regained cognizance immediately without any confusion at all.”

“Except for the time differential,” Dr. Parsons said. “That happened to us all without exception.”

“Explain that.”   

“Well, as you said, to the best of our knowledge, most of the world’s population have found themselves in a cloudy state, somewhat discombobulated, at least at first. But the commonality amongst everyone is that within a few hours, if not immediately, most regain and retain their long and short-term memories from before the event.”

“Though there has been some…slippage…back and forth, it seems, between full clarity and confusion for a brief period.”

“Yes,” Dr. Parsons said. “As I think I just did a moment ago.”

“So don’t be alarmed if that happens,” Peter announced to the camera. “It’s critical we retain calm as much as possible. So let’s look at, not conspiracy theory, but the most pervasive scientific theory at the moment. Have we in fact shifted time, as it appears to be the case?”

“Well, unbelievable as it may seem,” Dr. Parsons said, “is that it does in fact look like we’ve had a global time shift affecting the entire world.”

“We’ve all traveled in time,” Peter said. “The entire world’s population?”

“From what we can tell.”

“A shift backward,” Peter said.

“Apparently, yes. From what we can see based on the atomic clock, the entire world has somehow gone back in time. Though some people are missing.”

“And others, well, have returned.”

“I can’t speak on that point,” Dr. Parsons said and looked at his hands again.

“And from the perspective of the National Institute of Standards and Time, this is a scientifically confirmable theory?”

“To an extent,” said Dr. Parsons.  “But there’s so much more we simply don’t know. We could never have planned for this contingency. How could we have? Who plans for time displacement or time travel or whatever it is that’s happened? To me, one of the most perplexing things is that the NIST-F1 atomic clock which was used since 1999 has gone missing.”

“And that’s the most accurate world clock?”

“It was,” Dr. Parsons said proudly.  “It has an accuracy of about one second in 20 million years, meaning it’s incredibly accurate.  But what mystifies us is that in its place we have found its predecessor, the NBS-6, which in its time — no pun intended — served as the primary standard in advanced cesium beam devices used to measure time.  But its accuracy measures only at neither gaining nor losing one second in 300,000 years.”

“Break this down in layman’s terms for us.”

“In layman’s terms, according to the atomic clock we have on hand now — the NBS-6 — we once again live in a world approximately forty years prior to where we all were when we woke up yesterday morning.”

“You can confirm this.”

“Not exactly, but that’s our best understanding based on what the NIST clock is telling us, yes,” Dr. Parsons said. “The NIST clock is giving us a confirmable date and time of when this anomaly occurred. Or rather, when this anomaly has sent us.”

“July 11, 1986.”

“At the time of the event, that would be correct, Peter.  Yes.”  The doctor looked down at his watch.  “But now it’s the middle of the night, early morning here on the east coast.  So now it’s July 12.”

“1986.”

“So it seems.”

“1986,” Peter repeated again. "And those of us who died after 1986 are somehow back. Because, why, exactly?”

“I’m asking the same question about myself, Peter.”

The network news anchor leaned across the desk, setting the stack of notecards in his hands face down.

“And do we have any idea how this happened?” Peter asked.

“Unfortunately, Peter, we have no idea at all.” 

Photo by Saketh Garuda on Unsplash