Victor was rolled up in his bed dreaming of a world only he knew when the alarm clock screamed. His hand instinctively Swung towards the clock and turned it off. His eyes fluttered before gaining consciousness of the world he's in. He sat up. Face? Not so different than a regular guy waking up for a 9 to 5. He was neither young nor old. He looked outside his window, at the sun.
"8:35 to 8:45", he whispered to himself before looking at the only clock in his room. It was 8:59
Disappointed, sucking his teeth Victor got off bed.
Victor Rhys who's currently unemployed, was an anthropologist, forensic officer and a former professional psychiatrist. He was exceptional in mathematics and patterns
There were forty-seven clocks in Victor Rhys' apartment, excluding the one in his bedroom. None of them told the same time.
Some ticked fast, some slow, some stuttered. One was shaped like a cat with eyes that swung left to right, its tail doubling as a pendulum. Another was just a cracked wristwatch nailed to the wall beside the bathroom mirror. They filled the space with an overlapping chaos of rhythm. Victor liked the noise. It drowned the noise of the outside world, the energetic city crowded with organisms known as "Humans".
The apartment sat on the sixth floor of an pretty old building in the middle of the city.
Outside: sirens, hawkers, exhaust, the endless mating cries of urban life.
But inside?: silence broken only by the clocks and the occasional scratch of Victor's pen.
He wrote in a black leather-bound diary. Across its pages were his daily entries logs— observations, behavioral summaries, judgments, personal perspective.
He went out for a walk, an usual path which he would take. A walk through the shopping street.
"Whaddupp Victor!!", a shopkeeper greeted.
Victor waved at him with a smile on his face.
He walked a few more minutes and met Christo, an homeless guy who lives under a tree.
"Gu'day Victor", said the homeless man
"Morning Christo", Said Victor offering him some pennies.
This happens regularly, Victor would walk until he sees Christo under the tree, lend him some money and walk back to his apartment. Christo and the tree were like a checkpoint for him.
He came back to his room, sat on the desk, opened his diary and started writing.
He wrote everything he noticed today when he went for the walk except the shopkeeper and Christo, because they would greet him regularly. And the things he noticed was not something which everyone would notice. Infact, no one except him would notice. He wrote his step count, to and fro. He wrote the number of new people he saw along the street and many more
"January 12th : I had to walk 3574 steps in my path, less than usual. Only 5 new people, two were undoubtedly foreigners, must be vloggers, they had a camera. The kid with the dog didn't wear his expensive watch today. There was nothing interesting in today's walk, as usual. And I guess I made a better smiling face today"
He called them "micro-archives." They were not for publication. Not for work. Not for anyone.
As he worked as an psychiatrist for the court, he interviewed defendants, victims, witnesses, anyone the court suspected unstable or questionable. His job was to interpret the shadows behind their eyes and pull the truth from the darkness.
But this notebook was different. This was his own scripture. His own personal records. Not for anyone
He closed the notebook and looked out the window. The glass was filthy, the world beyond faded in fog. Across the street, a man pissed into a drain while scrolling on his phone. Further down, two women argued over a barking dog. A teenager with a mobile in his hand screamed into a headset at something no one else could see.
Victor whispered to himself, "A planet of echoes."
He didn't hate individuals, not really. He hated what they became together. The collective fog not just a particle. The mimicry, the endless repetition of failure disguised as innovation. He had once believed this was cynicism. Now he understood it as diagnosis, a mathematical problem. He sees humans and human life as a mathematical problem which could be solved. He has a seperate diary in which he'd do all the math. He was a strong believer in Pythagoreanism. Infact, he had calculated how many clock ticks can be heard in his house for a full day, each and every one of them, even the ones which are off beat. As he was looking outside, he saw an old man trying to cross the road. It caught Victor's attention. He murmured "if I'm right...." ,he paused as he saw a car coming at full speed towards the crossing. Just about when the car hit the old guy, Victor closed the blinds. "1 less in 8 billion", he said. Victor started doing his calculations again to understand "The purpose of being human",so that he could try to cope up with the society and understand humans. But as time passed, he gets that feeling again. That he was wrong. That's when he flips all the pages of the calculation book and sees yet again, that all the calculations gave unique different solutions. Of course , he had the same variables. What happened? Is he wrong? Or is the world around him constantly changes itself? even the certainty that a person could be understood with math begun to crack.
Something in him had shifted. . A thought lurking under his skin. He had started asking himself the unthinkable:
"What if it's not them? What if it's me? I can try to see them differently, not just as humans"
The clocks ticked. The cat's eyes danced. And Victor, archivist of failure, returned to his desk. Took a pen and a paper and scribbled in it in a language only he can understand
After a long moment, he regained his mind back.
"No, I can't be wrong", he chuckles
"My math can never be wrong. It's them.. they are changing the math inside them so that it's not constant. All the solutions I got till now are the different states of their human life, a single point in a line."
According to all his researches he understood that people tend to like something when they understand it. So he decided —
Starting Tomorrow, he would begin the experiment.
Starting Tomorrow, he would try to forgive the world.