One Second Before Death
If she'd known this would happen, would she still have chosen to get the Lifespan Ring implanted? Wendy Wang glanced at the customer information on her screen: Trevor Cruz, twenty-nine years old, time balance: three hours and twenty-one minutes. This man had been making a scene for nearly twenty minutes over a one-second deduction.
She could understand, to a point—terminal patients were bound to behave unreasonably sometimes—but his time was precious. Was hers not? Did her time deserve to be spent being cursed at and accused?
More than once, Wendy had wanted to quit this job. As a front-line clerk—especially at a grassroots community service station like hers—she was hectored by customers almost daily. But once she factored in rent and living expenses, the courage to resign evaporated.
"And another thing—why can't I see this latest deduction on my phone? If that's not fraud, what is? I want you to pull up all my past records. I'm going to go through them one by one today and figure out exactly how much time you've stolen from me!"
"Sir, if you want records of all past deductions, you'll need to apply at the main city branch. This is just a community service station—I don't have that level of access."
"Are you kidding me? Look at how much time I have left, and you're telling me to go to the main branch? You want me to die on the road?"
"I don't mean any such thing, sir, it's just that I really don't..." The argument dragged on for another ten-odd minutes until Wendy repeatedly insisted she lacked the authority to give him what he wanted. Finally, the man named Trevor Cruz left, still muttering curses.
Before he'd even made it out the door, Wendy couldn't hold back anymore and burst into tears at her desk. She was the only clerk at this branch and never dared argue with difficult customers for fear of provoking them, so all the frustration just built up inside. In two years on the job, she'd lost count of how many times she'd cried.
"What's wrong?" Wendy looked up through her tears and saw Old He—the tech who handled routine data maintenance—wiping her face and saying, "I'm fine."
"Another customer making trouble? Sounded like a real handful."
"A terminal patient. Claimed he was overcharged by one second. It was nothing, really." The tears had mostly stopped. She chatted with Old He for a while—he was one of the few people, besides herself, who came by the station regularly.
Once he headed into the server room for his routine check, she let out a long breath and checked the clock—three more hours until her shift ended. What a slog. She couldn't vent to her coworkers or her parents, but at least she had her boyfriend.
The thought of him put a smile on her face. They'd met online—when Wendy was debating whether to get the Lifespan Ring implanted, she'd joined a discussion group, and Leo Liu was in it.
That's right—like her, he didn't have a Lifespan Ring. Not by choice, though. He had a bracelet allergy—a condition that affected roughly one in ten million people—with no known cure. But whatever the reason, their shared circumstances had brought them together quickly.
His allergy meant Leo could only handle logistics and warehouse duties at the police department, but Wendy didn't mind. Perhaps freed from the tyranny of time, their love felt all the purer.
They'd arranged to grab dinner tonight, and he'd pick her up after work. If only time would move a little faster, Wendy thought, stretching and leaning back in her chair.
6
The bank door swung open suddenly, and Anton Tong nearly collided with the person coming in.
"Hey, watch where you're going!" The man shoved him back a few steps hard enough to press him against the glass door.
"Sorry, sorry." Anton's stream of apologies defused the situation, and the man hurried on.
Anton wasn't usually so meek—but today, he needed everything to go according to plan. No complications.
He stepped inside the service station and saw Little Wen slumped over the counter, her shoulders heaving. She'd clearly been wronged again.
"What's wrong?" Anton walked over. Little Wen had wiped her tears, but her eyes were still red. "Another customer making trouble? Sounded like a real handful."
"A terminal patient. Claimed he was overcharged by one second. It was nothing, really."
Anton was about to set his bag down when those words stopped him cold. A month ago, he'd heard another bank clerk report a customer complaining about an unexplained one-second deduction. Once a dam cracked, the breach only widened—and secrets were no different.
Since that day, he'd been methodically preparing his exit. And now, for the first time, he'd encountered someone who'd discovered they'd been shortchanged. Would the man keep investigating? Would he go to the main branch for full records? Would he uncover the truth?
A few days earlier, the thought would have terrified him. But not anymore. This was the last bank he needed to close out. In a few hours, he'd be on a plane with a new identity, headed for a new life.
"People like that—you shouldn't let it get to you." He offered a few words of comfort, then took out his tools and went to check the machine. "Checking the machine" sounded complicated to a layperson, but it was straightforward: connect it to a specialized program, let it run an automated update and diagnostic. If no anomalies appeared, there was nothing else to do.
This was work he'd been doing for over twenty years. Employee number 0871—his low-level ID in the maintenance department—had been with him just as long and never changed. In the early years, he'd thought about climbing the ladder, especially when his mother's illness strained their finances. If he could become maintenance supervisor, things would be much better.
He had the seniority and the skill. But younger people kept getting promoted ahead of him. He'd probably be a low-level technician for the rest of his life.
But you have to survive, and survival costs money. You had to find a way, didn't you? It was hard to say exactly when Anton's "way" first occurred to him, but once the idea took hold, he knew he had to act on it, no matter the risk or cost.
As mentioned, he was a capable man. Writing a program to siphon a little time from designated accounts wasn't difficult for him. And after twenty-plus years in this field, he knew every procedure and every system vulnerability. The only question was: what pattern should he follow, and how much should he take each time?
After weighing his options, Anton decided to exclude certain special accounts, then transfer exactly one second from each regular account into a transit account.
Choosing the smallest unit of time had two advantages: it was so minuscule that no one would notice, or care about losing one second.
Second, even if someone did notice, he had a ready excuse. The bank charged a one-second service fee every year. As long as the customer didn't insist on pulling their full annual records, that explanation would suffice.
But to be safe, he programmed the transfer and the bank's annual fee to occur at least six months apart—small community branches only had access to six months of records.
Stealing a mere one second from each account might sound laughably small. But don't forget: the number of people worldwide using the Lifespan Ring had already reached 1.15 billion.
While cross-border time-network sharing remained a logistical tangle among nations, the 53 bank branches Anton maintained alone served a combined customer base of 230 million.
Even after his program excluded certain accounts, the annual time transferred to his transit account exceeded two billion seconds—more than 26,000 days, or at least seventy years.