A story I heard from my master.
0. The Matter of Time
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, forty, one, two..." Kanako, my master in the occult, is counting the movement of the second hand on the alarm clock placed on the desk. I am watching her closely. The moment the clock hands point to midnight, my master stops counting the seconds, looks up, and asks me, "Well?" "No, it didn't skip anywhere." When I answer, my master wails, "Nnyaaaah!" and falls flat on her tatami mat. "I don't get it!" she says, kicking her legs in the air. Her thighs, visible from her hot pants, make my heart race, and I don't know where to look. I was called to my master's room at night to help out with some "experiment," but I have no idea what she's trying to accomplish. "What is this even about?" "It's, like, a rumor. An urban legend, folklore!" "And what kind of rumor?" My master lifts her legs, uses the momentum to lower them, and sits back up. "It's a rumor that the twenty-four hours in this city are one second shorter than the twenty-four hours outside." "Huh?" What is she talking about? I have no idea what that means. "It seems to be a pretty famous rumor among science students doing experiments at our university. Didn't you know?" "Of course not. What is that supposed to mean? If it's one second shorter, wouldn't they get out of sync? I mean, being one second shorter per day means one minute in sixty days, right? Six minutes in a year. Which means from New Year's Eve to the next New Year's Eve, it gets shorter by six minutes, so the year would change at 23:54 on December 31st?" "That's why it's strange, because that doesn't happen." "I don't get it." "Listen. In this city, a day is one second shorter, yet the time doesn't go out of sync with the outside world. What do you think that means?" "It means that one second being shorter is just your imagination!" I say this in exasperation, but my master shakes her head. "Actually, it seems various phenomena happen that can only be explained by it being one second shorter. I've asked university alumni and professors, and people have been whispering about this rumor for decades. There's even a rumor that a pharmaceutical company in the city deliberately adjusts their experiments under the premise that it's one second shorter." I make an exaggerated gesture of skepticism, flicking my thumb off my eyebrow. "Do you know why leap years happen?" "Well, that's because the Earth actually takes a little longer than 365 days to go around the sun, right? It gets out of sync, so every four years they add a day to make it 366 days." "A tropical year is about 365.24219 days. If it were 365.25 days, adding a day every four years would match it up, but it's actually a bit shorter than that. In the Gregorian calendar, years divisible by 4 are leap years, but years divisible by 100 are common years, and years divisible by 400 are leap years again. That's how they adjust it." "Oh, so the year 2000 was divisible by 100 and also by 400, so it was an exception to the exception and ended up being a leap year." "Well, in Japan, they apparently decide it based on different calculations using the imperial calendar... Anyway, I'm getting off track. The point is, if leap years adjust for discrepancies in days, there is something called a leap second that adjusts for discrepancies in seconds." "I've never even heard of a leap second." "It really exists. In terms of seconds, a day is 60 seconds by 60 minutes by 24 hours, which is 86,400 seconds. However, it actually takes the Earth just a little bit longer than that to make one rotation. In fact, the Earth's rotational speed isn't constant; it usually takes one to two seconds, and up to three seconds longer sometimes, than a flat 24 hours in a year. To adjust for this discrepancy, a leap second is added on June 30th or December 31st. Actually, we didn't have a leap second last year, but this year it seems a second called 59 minutes and 60 seconds is going to be added right after 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds on June 30th." "Huh. That's the end of this month, isn't it? I had no idea." "The problem is, even if a second is added to the day by this leap second, people living normal lives can't physically feel it." "Hmm... Well, I suppose so. It's an academic thing, or just a theory on paper." "What if, similarly, a negative leap second is introduced into this city once a day?" "Huh? Who? And how?" "Normally, how do you set your clock?" "With TV displays, or if you want to be precise, by listening to the time signal on the phone." "Then, if you could freely tamper with TV and NTT time signals, introducing a negative leap second would be possible." "What kind of conspiracy theory is that?" "If that were the case, though, if the time on the clocks in this city became one second shorter every day, it would create a one-second discrepancy each day with the clocks outside the city. Just like you calculated earlier, six minutes a year. But in reality, that's not happening. What does this mean?" "That's why I'm telling you that this 'one second shorter' thing is just your imagination." The conversation loops back to the beginning. "If it's not just our imagination, then there are two possibilities. First, while the second hand on the outside clocks moves 86,400 times a day, the second hand on the city's clocks only moves 83,399 times." "What is that supposed to mean, is spacetime warped or something? But wouldn't the clock end up being off by a second anyway?" "That's right. Spacetime is warped somewhere. And what if, out of those 86,399 times, one of them advances by two seconds' worth?" "Is that the 'experiment' we just did?" My master had assigned me the role of watching her count the clock's second hand earlier. She told me to watch closely to see if a second skipped anywhere. "Yeah, I thought the timing of midnight would be suspicious, but nothing happened after all." "Well, of course not. Such bizarre phenomena don't just happen." The moment I said that, I caught a glimpse of a chilling, dark light deep within the eyes of the master I was locking gazes with, and a shudder ran through me. That's right. During the year I had spent with this master, I had repeatedly experienced bizarre phenomena that had no business happening. "That leaves the second possibility." My master stared into my eyes, holding up her index finger. "The second hand on the city's clocks moves 86,400 times, just like the clocks outside, but each time it moves 1/86,400th of a second faster. If it does that, no clock discrepancy occurs." "Does that mean time is moving just a little bit faster?" "Yes. A day really is one second shorter." That's ridiculous. No matter how you look at it. The face I tried to use to laugh this off stiffened. "Where do you suppose that short second disappears to?" I finally managed to ask with a hint of sarcasm, but somehow I started to frighten myself. "Who knows? Somewhere..." My master said with an amused, upturned glance. "Maybe it's being saved in a bank account or something." Back then, no matter how absurd the words coming from my master's mouth were, they felt like magic to me. No matter how preposterous they sounded. No, the more preposterous they were, the more they charmed me, like magic. In the end, that probably just meant I was a strange guy who loved such things. This bizarre exchange had nothing to do with what happened afterward. But curiosity like that is always trying to kill cats and guys like me. The end of that month when I talked with my master about the mystery of time. Two days before June 30th, when the leap second was to be introduced—in other words, on June 28th—I prepared myself for death.
To be continued in "The Twins 1/4"
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