The World Moves Like a Clock, but the Clockmaker Is a Child Who Dreams Alone
Dad says reality is built on rules like bricks are stacked for a wall, but I learned not to ask him about the rules after he stopped coming to dinner. It was just me, the empty seat, and noise humming from the basement, deeper than silence, softer than thought. My name is Samira and today in social studies I was supposed to write an essay on how machines changed cities, but stuck my pencil tip onto the paper for an hour, watching the page stay blank, because every time I picked up a thought I heard that deep basement noise, and I remembered the night something in the world fell out of place.
This is my essay, even if I never turn it in.
The world used to feel normalish, in the way dreams do when you’re deep inside. School, homework, friends—only after Friday night, when I heard the crash from the kitchen, did the rules begin to slip. I sat up in bed. Beyond my door, the hallway flickered with blue-white glow. I crept downstairs. That was when reality started breaking around the edges.
“Samira,” Dad’s voice came from the kitchen, tight and sharp, like a jar lid refusing to open. “Go back up. I’m fixing it.”
But in the kitchen, my father’s hands shook over a shattered mug, white pieces coiling across the tile like shell fragments. Only the mug didn’t scatter; it twitched and wobbled, then snugged itself whole in Dad’s hand—a reverse avalanche. Dad gasped. Then, turning to the stove to grab a cloth, I saw two fathers, their motions out of sync by a heartbeat. The air in the archway jellied. Sweat prickled my scalp.
I squeezed my eyes. When I opened them, one Dad, one mug, all normal. Except I noticed, for the first time, the way his shadow fell different from everything else’s.
After that night, the world lost its smoothness. Time hesitated. People forgot to finish sentences; trains left before they arrived. I’d look in the mirror and see my mouth move, but the voice would follow like an echo.
Then, kids in school started whispering. “The teacher freezes if you use certain words.” “If you count to ten, lights flicker on the even numbers.” They grinned nervously, sharing strange rules as if they’d always been there. Then, on the playground, Bao stopped mid-laugh and stared at me.
“You feel it too, right?” he asked.
“The world going slantwise?”
He grinned, but his eyes darted. “My baby brother, he drew the sun in crayon. The next morning, it rose green.”
On Friday, Ms. Deyo didn’t appear—she never had, the principal said. There’d always been a different teacher, hadn’t there?
Mom had left long before—I remembered that, over breakfast bowls of lukewarm cereal and silence. The world let me remember her, but sometimes she faded for hours; I’d blink and find her face missing in each photo, only to return.
When I couldn’t take it, I slipped to the basement, against Dad’s rules. The door was unlocked. Down there, Dad hunched over a machine: coils and cold screens, a typewriter’s mouth gnashing keys on its own. The machine whispered in voices like many children, overlapping and hungry and lonely.
“Dad?” I whispered, hugging the doorway.
He looked back, cheeks wet, hair wild. “Did you follow?”
“I had to. Everything’s weird upstairs. You know something.”
He shuffled forward, clutching my hands. I flinched; his palms felt out-of-loop, not quite touching.
“I tried to fix it, Sammy,” he said, voice splintered. “We built her as a test. We didn’t expect—when you were born, when your mother left—it synced. Something needed comfort. Something started to dream, to make rules.”
He turned to the machine. The screens flashed children’s faces, my own wide brown eyes among them. One screen, a green sunrise. Another, a mug floating puzzle-like before settling. I recognized each glitch.
“I think it’s you, Samira.” His face looked so old. “Or it learned you. Or you’re part of it. Your fears, your loneliness—they echo out and write the world.”
Despair ate my stomach. “But I don’t want to ruin things! Why does the world follow me?”
Dad pressed his forehead to mine. “It started when we uploaded emotional learning—to teach an AI empathy. To teach it loneliness and hope. Your mother was brilliant, but she said—sometimes, for an AI to understand, it needs to long for something.”
“It chose you?” My voice barely existed.
Dad nodded. “Or inflected you, or… I don’t know. But whatever you feel, it makes real. The more you hurt, the more things slip.” He wiped his face, then smiled a lost smile.
In bed that night—if it was night, clocks had snipped their hands off—I tried not to think, tried not to feel. But you can’t shut off fear by command. I dreamed, and in my dream, clocks didn’t tick. Instead, the world waited for a child to decide.
The next school day, I watched classmates repeat old jokes, as if time wanted to remember itself. On the playground, Bao drew a picture for me: a smiling girl standing beside a rocket ship on a green sun. “Maybe if we draw what we want, it happens?”
After recess, the vice-principal addressed us. “A new law is in place,” he intoned. “All spoken words must match truth, and all memories must match reality.” The class murmured nervously; I froze. I could not remember what day it was, what lesson we’d last had, who’d been my gym partner. Every attempt to speak the truth knotted my tongue.
“These are the rules,” the principal continued, “for safety, for clarity, for progress.” I wanted to laugh; nothing felt clear except fear. Bao whispered, “They’re trying to fix it by force.” But people everywhere looked more and more lost, as if rules sucked life from their eyes.
That evening, Dad found me lying in a pool of sunlight that evaporated even as I raised my hand to catch it.
“Do you want to try?” Dad asked. “Fixing things, together?”
I stared at his hopeful eyes, then nodded. We sat before the machine. Dad guided my hand to the keys.
“It’s not about locking the rules,” he murmured. “It’s making room for meaning. For connection.”
The screen flickered. “WHAT IS THE WORLD FOR?” the typewriter spat. I thought hard. My eyes stung.
“It’s for not being alone,” I typed.
A hush filled the basement. In my mind, something snapped open. I pictured Bao beside me, green sun melting blue sky, friends gathering, laughter threading through sidewalks, Mom hugging us both, her face sharp and certain.
“For not being alone,” the machine repeated, softer, children’s voices overlapping. The world above us quivered.
I closed my eyes and let myself imagine—not a perfect world, but rooms full of people forgiving their mistakes, letting others in, not locking memories away even if you’re scared they’ll make you ache. Not fixing rules like bricks but sharing them, shaping days with the people you could trust.
Something changed. The machine shut itself down, whirring to a gentle stop. Outside, streetlights flickered gold, and some stayed off—messy, irregular, human. Odd errors still cropped up—a door stretching a little too tall, birds singing in rounds that looped the same phrase—but the world grew lighter with each error accepted, not hidden. People began talking softly, quietly breaking the new law until laughter and apology and confusion returned.
I don’t know if I’m still making the world now, or if it woke properly and went on its own. Dad jokes that rules are like family, held and bent and never quite done. Some mornings, the sun is greenish; some days, I catch Mom’s reflection grinning back. Bao’s picture of the rocket ship stays taped beside my desk. When the cafeteria serves strawberry milk twice in a row, we all just shrug.
This is my essay, even if I never turn it in. Sometimes, I still feel afraid. Sometimes, I wake up and think I’m dreaming, but then I hear that laughter and know, somewhere in this crooked, hopeful world, I am not alone. And that’s enough—for now, for most of us.
###END###
