The Ticking Clock
By
Andrija Popovic
(C) 2017 Andrija Popovic
4:19 AM Eastern Time.
Every morning, an hour and a half before his alarm was set to go off, he awoke. His eyes snapped open. He took a deep breath, almost gasping. Reaching out, he touched his snoring wife’s form to one side, and his snoring cat’s from to the other.
You have time. Just go back to sleep. He would tell himself this lie every time. But his mind would never fall back into torpor. He was awake. The ticking clock inside him said it was time to walk about, to rise. The rest of his body obeyed, despite his mind’s dearest wishes.
After the fifth night, his wife said: “You need to see a specialist.”
So he visited the body shop and had his specialist crack him open. As he lay back, brain case exposed, the specialist peered at a tiny bit of grey matter held between two foreceps. “Well, that’s your problem right there.”
“What?”
“Damn biological clock was never set to auto-update for daylight savings time. Gonna have to reprogram it and get it synced again. That’ll probably be another nine-hundred or so.”
Goddamned highway robbery, he thought. The specialist took the grey matter away and tinkered with it, quietly, in the background. Another two thousand down the tubes. Still, what was the value of a good night’s sleep?
4:19 AM Eastern Time. His mental clock did not go off. He did not wake up suddenly.
He woke up slowly, and really had to pee. Son of a bitch…
Biomechanoid Blues 