The Slow-Ticking Moon - Part 1 by Owen Townend

 

It was Monday midnight when the moon revealed its new face. Apparently everyone in the world wasn’t looking in the time it took for a giant analogue clock to appear on the light side of the satellite.

          Other news was eclipsed for the rest of the night and, when daylight came, journalists spent the next few hours quizzing lunar experts on if this was a stunt, who perpetrated it, how they managed such a feat and for what purpose. No organisation or creative collective laid genuine claim to the Moon Clock event. All anyone knew was that neither the big nor little hand had moved from twelve o’clock since the big reveal.

          While some nations lost sight of the spectacle due to amassments of cloud and smog, the remaining clear-sighted countries confirmed that the moon still had a clock on its face. They also announced that the hands had now moved to the time five to ten. No-one knew why.

          Some claimed that the moon had asserted itself to their particular time zone but everyone else baulked at the egotistical and ludicrous suggestion. Was the Moon Clock displaying random times on Earth to the whole planet or in fact simply demonstrating its understanding of time? Could a celestial body even be so suddenly intelligent? And if humans hadn’t projected the clock face themselves, if it had somehow been built on the moon and set from there, then precisely whose understanding of time was being shown? There were no numbers up there, only notches.

          The media brought out the same experts again, who gave even less enlightening answers. All nations of the world reported heavy gatherings of cloud blocking sight of the Moon Clock and the world was forced to wait until the next night dispelled this suspicious haze. When it did, the whole of humanity looked on the time of half past three and despaired.

          This clock reading made no sense. While experts were in the process of confirming that the clock was no glitching hologram, a whisper crossed the world about the end of days. Perhaps this was like the Doomsday Clock, counting down the minutes to midnight and ultimate devastation. This mysterious Moon Clock with it’s unpredictable time shifts defied temporal logic, almost as if it was alien in origin. Some fatalistic stargazers posited that extra-terrestrial intelligence might be trying to give fair warning of a fast-approaching apocalypse, but failed to realise that their measurement of time didn’t make sense to the poor saps on Earth.

          The media did nothing to play down this panic, though experts tried their best to do so through regular appearances. The way they saw it, there was just as much potential harmlessness in this confusing Moon Clock as there was potential harm. It was the rare privilege of the empirically-minded to be so dispassionate. Of course, the rest of humanity did not share this belief.

Part 2 on 29th July