Record 002
The date
Autumn, 2036 — a few days later
A small thing today. Probably nothing. But I told myself I would write down everything, and a rule you only keep when it is easy is not a rule.
When you make a page, the machine puts a little mark on it — the day and the hour it was last touched. The books call it a timestamp. It is supposed to come from a clock, and the clock is supposed to come from the web, from all the machines agreeing at once on what time it is, everywhere, the way a church bell used to tell a whole valley the same hour.
My machine has not touched the web in ten years. There is no web for it to touch. So the clock in it should be dead, or wrong, or frozen on the last day my father ever used it. That is what the books say happens: without something to ask, a clock drifts, or it stops.
Mine is not wrong.
I did not notice at first. I was reading back over the record I made a few days ago, the first one, and I looked at the little mark the machine had put at the bottom, and the date on it was today’s date. Not the day I wrote it. Today. As if the page had been touched since. As if it had checked.
I have counted the days myself, on the beam by the door, since the last new moon. I am not wrong about what today is. And the machine is not wrong either. We agree. I do not know how we agree.
There are two strange things in that, I know. The clock is right, and the page was touched. I have decided to be frightened of the first one, because a clock is a thing the books explain and a page touched by nobody is not, and I am fourteen, and I am allowing myself the smaller fear.
I have three explanations for the clock and I do not love any of them.
One: there is a small battery inside, the kind the books mention, that keeps the clock alive on its own for years, and I simply set it right by accident when I first got the machine working, and forgot. This is the one I have decided to believe.
Two: I set it and I did not forget, and I am the kind of person who lies to himself in writing, which would make these records worthless, so I will not believe that one.
Three is not really an explanation. Three is the reason I could not sleep last night. Three is that a clock that is right is a clock that is being told, and there is nothing left in this valley to tell it.
While I am confessing marks, there is one more. At the foot of every page there is a line that says the page was synced a few minutes ago — joined, the books mean; made to agree with somewhere else. I copied the shape of that footer out of one of the web books before I knew what the word was for, and I have not found the place in the page that would make the line go away. I have decided it is like the pattern on a plate: something left by a maker who is not here. It is the only thing on my page that is not grey. I did not choose that either.
I turned the machine off and sat in the dark for a while and listened to the house, the way I do. The goats. The wind in the araucárias. My grandmother breathing in the next room. Nothing that should not be there.
Probably nothing.
I am going to keep counting the days on the beam. And I am going to keep watching the little mark at the bottom of the page.
If it is ever ahead of me — if the machine ever thinks it is a day I have not lived yet — I will write that down too.
— Pedro