Mind's Time

Dariush Mohammadi jolted awake to a harsh buzzing. Three sharp screeches like a strangled goose, reverberated through the room, paused, and screeched again. He slapped an unsteady night table until he landed on a rectangular plastic box, causing the sound to cease.

The dim crimson light from the segment clock brought the room into focus, illuminating his figure under a thick comforter in a soft unfamiliar bed. The numbers on the clock spelled out “5:30” with a red dot next to a white etched “AM”.

His mind raced. He didn’t remember getting drunk and falling in bed with a stranger, nor did the scent of the room didn’t suggest a sexual encounter. He peeked over his shoulder to glimpse if a shadow lay in the bed next to him. The corner of the blanket remained undisturbed and tucked under the opposite pillow.

The antique clock offered no clues where he was or how he’d gotten there. The plastic buttons and faux wood case conjured memories of old movies his grandfather watched. The last thing he remembered, he was searching for his daughter, but he couldn’t recall where he’d been, or how he lost her.  

“Lights?” he called to the room but nothing happened. Whoever owned the clock didn’t have a home with voice control either. He stood up and felt along the wall for an old-fashioned light switch. Finding one filled the room with incandescent light and plunged him back in time. An old ceiling fan rotated, in slow circles at first, until its blades blurred and churned the air. Generic art hung askew next to cracks in the dingy walls. 

A paper photograph hung in an intricate gold frame. A relief of vines bordered a faded picture, depicting a happy family, squinting at the noonday sun. A light-skinned man with a mustache and bushy black eyebrows stood in contrast to a beautiful woman in traditional Persian clothing next to him. Sophisticated gold patterns printed on her green headscarf matched the pattern on the frame. She rested her hands on the shoulders of a small girl in light pink shorts. Darish squinted, trying to remember who they were.

The clock blared. “6:38”. The world melted around him in a dream and he appeared in his familiar office cubicle, holding the device in his hand.

“Hey-yo, Dariush!” a coworker, Bill, called out in a nasal voice.

He almost dropped the clock in surprise.

Bill’s laughter jiggled his large body bounced like an exuberant marionette whose puppeteer shook his strings. His stained polo, Big Gulp coffee, and thick glasses, were a caricature of his info-tech position.

“Whoa there, buddy! Didn’t mean to scare you!”

“Hi Bill, you have an uncanny ability to sneak up on people.”

“That I do, that I do!” Bill chuckled. “How was your weekend?”

Was it Monday? Darish couldn’t be sure, but he played along.

“Oh you know, the usual stuff,” he said, “Spent some time with the family, did some shopping.”

“That’s great! I did some D&D myself! A blood-demon trapped the party but nothing a well-placed magic missiles couldn’t cure! Pew! Pew!” Bill cast the spell in the air with his hands.

“Bill, you look exactly like someone who plays D&D,” Dariush mused.

The round man guffawed and playfully punched Dariush’s arm. “Good one, my friend! Good one! You should come play some time. You could be a mysterious Persian mage!”

“I thought the point of D&D was fantasy? I might want to be an out-of-touch American asshole.”

Bill either ignored the veiled insult or failed to understand it.

“Sure thing, be whatever you want! But bring that cute wife of yours,” he winked. “That would liven up the party.”

Visions of the woman in the green dress from the picture flashed through Dariush’s mind along with a feeling of warmth. Why couldn’t he remember his wife clearly? Was he the man in the photo? Was that what he looked like?

He snapped back to the present, folding his arms and frowning at Bill. “Thanks for the invite, Bill. I’ll keep that in mind.”

The larger man winked, making finger guns in Dariush's direction as he turned.

“Hey, Bill, wait a minute. Did you see who left this clock here?” Dariush said, holding up the device.

Bill’s normal jovial expression faded. “That’s your clock. You’ve had it for as long as I remember.”

Dariush stared at the clock. “10:30 AM”

“Hey, man, are you okay?”

Dariush blinked, and the clock read “10:33”. How did three minutes pass in an instant?

“Yeah. Of course, it’s mine. The time is acting weird,” he replied.

Bill shrugged and waddled down the row of cubicles.

A distant boom echoed outside the window and rumbled through the city like an unending roll of thunder. The building shook, and the lights flickered, leaving the room dark, save for the bloodshot numbers on the clock.

Three screeches and a pause.

Cold rain soaked his hair. Sounds of anguish blended with the clock’s cry. Thick acrid smoke and the smell of death choked his lungs. People crawled over piles of smoldering rubble, in a gray and ruined world, searching for lost friends. Some sat, zombie-like, too injured or shocked to move. Others wept in the shattered street over mangled bodies.

He silenced the alarm again, desperate to decipher a way to mute it for good. Was this devastation an earthquake? A bomb? A sick dread formed in his stomach. He’d lived this disaster before and an unseen force hid the knowledge at the boundary of his memory. A miracle placed him alive and unharmed in the street rather than falling from ten stories up.

“Maryam?” he heard himself scream his daughter’s name through the fog.

“Daddy, I’m here!” a small child’s voice called. In the murky air, he couldn’t see her.

He clambered over a pile of twisted rebar and concrete, scraping his hands and knees on the sharp stones. Somehow the clock remained in his grasp, banging against the chunks of cement as he climbed.

“I’m coming, sweetheart! Are you trapped? Where are you?”

“I’m here, Daddy!” the voice called, quieter and moving away from him.

“Stay where you are, Daddy’s coming!” he said, reaching the top of the pile and peering over it.

A deep throbbing hum filled the air, echoing off the buildings and reverberating his chest. The ever-present fighting that happened to souls far away was here and happening to him. The invaders’ ruined his city and now their malevolent machines would piece it together in their image.

“Daddy, I’m scared!” Maryam’s voice called over the horrible racket.

“I’m coming to get you!”

He slid down the other side of the rubble pile and the gnarled metal snagged his pants. They tore as he ripped them free to run toward the diminishing voice of his child.

“Daddy, where are you?” she called.

“I’m coming,” he sobbed. With each step the sinking realization that he could not reach her in time. 

Three screeches and a pause. “3:47 PM”

An explosion splintered the smog. Dariush fell, clutching his head.

The ringing in his ears subsided. He stood, clenching the clock in a white hospital ward. Doctors and nurses in blue scrubs rushed around him, unaware of his presence.

He grabbed a passing nurse by the arm and spun her to face him. Her blue eyes filled with alarm behind a surgical mask. “Have they brought a little girl here? Have you seen my daughter?”

She shook herself free and pointed down a hall behind him. “Check intake.”

Dariush rushed around the corner. A little girl in a white shirt and pink shorts peeked from a room at the far end. She waved at him and disappeared through the doorway.

“Maryam?” he shrieked, sprinting after her.

Three screeches and a pause. “7:12 PM”

The hall warped and expanded to boundless length. Hours passed as he ran past countless rooms until he slid through the door. 

Maryam lay in a hospital bed. Streaks of blood matted her long black hair. A nurse placed a sheet over her cold, broken body and a doctor with sad eyes shook his head and frowned at him. Dariush collapsed to his knees.

“No! Not again,” he wept.

Three screeches and a pause. “9:33 PM”.

Two researchers entered a dusty storage room. Wooden crates lined gray metal shelves that stretched from the floor to the ceiling.

“Here we are,” the senior researcher said, retrieving a crate from eye level. “Lot number 2399 dash C.”

The severe woman pried the wooden lid, revealing slender black rectangles, etched with gold contacts on one side. She reached inside and palmed a random specimen.

“I haven’t seen physical media in a long time,” the younger tech commented.

“Stored minds. Fragments mostly. Easier to ship this stuff than try to transmit it over the network. It sucks, but someone’s gotta catalog it and reconnect it all.”

She slid a random specimen into a beige device with a receptacle. A small green LED sprang to life and on the opposite wall, a screen displayed location and a timestamp in red lettering.

“Welcome to your first day, cadet. You’ll go through each of the stored memories, enter some notes about what you see, and then submit it all. Eject the memory core and then dispose of it in the recycle bin over there.”

She retreated to a desk while the younger man gestured at the screen. A tan man with a dark mustache fumbled around a bedroom, dressing and going to work. He interacted with a coworker before leaving his desk for a break. Bombs fell, incinerating the office behind him. The man ran, searching for his lost wife and daughter.

“Holy hell,” the cadet mumbled. “Are they all like this?”

The senior researcher looked up from her electronic notepad and watched for a moment. “Most of ‘em. They’re the last things these poor saps remembered while dying. You’ll get used to the trauma. This seems like one of the tamer ones.”

“You don’t suppose they feel it when I run them do you?”

The woman shrugged. “Don’t know. Does it matter? We bombed them for a reason. No one there was innocent.”

The cadet’s eyes burned but he chose not to retort, instead reaching for the recorder device to eject the memory core.

“Wait. Run it a few times. Make sure you have all the details. If Cent-Com doesn’t have enough notes, they’ll send it back to us.”

The cadet sighed and restarted the stream.

Dariush Mohammadi jolted awake to a harsh buzzing that reverberated through the room. Three sharp screeches like a strangled goose, then a pause. “5:30 AM”