Jeff Bremin was 19 when he left college. It was the ".com" boom of the 90’s. He invented a new technology to support medium scale systems networking, started his own company in his mother’s garage and became a multi-billionaire by the age of 22. Despite his early success, he was really kind of shy, absorbed in his work and content to be that way, despite all of the groupies, would be actresses and professional models who were throwing themselves at him, almost daily.
There were three things in life that Jeff loved: his job, Janet, whom he hired into his original three person company out in the garage, and clocks. He had a fascination for strange and exotic timepieces, which he would travel all over the world to find and collect. This had started when he was only ten years old.
One day, when his parents went out and left him in the hands of a rather negligent babysitter, he decided to take apart his father’s prize grandfather clock to see how it worked. He figured he had time to dismantle it and put it back together before they got home. He didn’t.
Notwithstanding the trouble that both he and the babysitter had to face that day, he never lost his fascination with the inner workings of clocks and the different methods by which movement could be controlled. He would sit for hours trying to synchronize his hundreds of time pieces, entranced by the cacophony of so many chimes exploding, as it were, together, or almost together. His minor failures, in that regard, were among the most profound disappointments of his life.
One day, to assuage his disappointment, he strolled through his newly appointed 35th Floor suite of offices. It was then that he discovered Janet. She had been sitting there faithfully for what seemed like his whole brief life, but he had never before noticed her. There she was, just as she had looked in his mother’s garage, with a facial expression which said that her boss was God’s answer to the ultimate in human evolution. He felt a hollowness within him suddenly filled and overflowing. They began seeing each other, then traveling together all over the world to seek out more and more clocks.
One night, while snuggling with Janet beneath a fluffy blanket on a luxurious sectional, before a roaring fireplace, Jeff was struck with a brilliant idea. He would make a clock, using the latest miniaturized GPS technology, to be a unique kind of traveling time piece. By mapping the world’s time zones, he could travel with a device that told him, not where he was, but WHEN he was in the world. He enthusiastically explained his idea to Janet, whose admiration for her mentor he found surprisingly exciting. She agreed to be his lab assistant.
They worked day and night, and put the components through their unit tests. They devised a sequential algorithm, to move the hour either forward or backward, one hour or half an hour at a time, and a quantum algorithm, to increment or decrement the hour, upon reaching the threshold of each time zone. The combination of algorithms was necessary to cause the clock to function correctly. The system testing in their laboratory went without a hitch. Finally, they were ready to take the clock to the field for Beta testing.
Jeff ordered the Bremin Industries corporate jet to meet them in New York’s Westchester airport at 7:00 am on November 30, 1999. After take off, Jeff unpacked and activated his battery operated traveling clock. It immediately adjusted to Eastern standard time and displayed the correct hour / day / month and year. Janet and Jeff reclined their seats in order to get some rest, while they crossed the country.
Soon they approached Gary, Indiana, at a steady cruising speed and altitude. Jeff and Janet sat up to pay special attention to their traveling clock. Once they had passed into Lake County, Indiana, the clock promptly self-adjusted to Central time and changed the digital display to 1 hour earlier than the time it had displayed just an instant before. The quantum algorithm seemed to be working just fine. The same result was achieved, when the corporate jet passed into Mountain time and, at the border between Utah and Nevada, into the Pacific time zone. With each time zone threshold, the clock’s digital display decremented the time by one hour, to automatically reflect the change of time zone that corresponded to that precise GPS location. When the plane made its approach to the local airport at Burbank, California, Jeff and Janet were more than pleased with the result.
After some well deserved, but relatively low key, celebration in L.A., they embarked for their return flight to New York, this time to test the adjustment of the hours, as they successively passed from Pacific to Mountain to Central and to Eastern time zones. Since their travel took place during the seasonal application of Standard time, versus Daylight Savings time, they were unable to test the forward, then backward jumps they might have experienced had they had the chance to pass through counties that did not observe Daylight Savings time, but there would be more testing to which the clock would, no doubt, later be subjected. They were content to land in Westchester while declaring the testing entirely satisfactory.
Jeff’s next proposal to Janet was more exciting than she had reason to hope for. Jeff proposed a final test of the clock during an end-of-the-year, round-the-world junket passing through every last one of the world’s time zones. They would cap it off with a New Year’s getaway in the warm and blue waters of Tahiti, before returning, triumphantly, to the United States.
They packed light, realizing that they could not prepare for all of the climates they were planning to traverse and hopeful that they could purchase appropriate clothing en route. On December 21st, 1999, they headed for Europe via the northerly route, taking them north of Iceland and close to the Arctic Circle.
They noted that the hours of darkness lingered until 3:00 in the afternoon, and that the physical distance between time zones shortened as the lines began to converge, at the top of the globe. Once off the coast of Galway, the corporate jet made a sharp right turn and headed south, over London, to the heart of Europe.
Janet asked Jeff if they could spend Christmas in Rome, which they did. They visited St. Peter’s Square, under a cold drizzle. From there they crossed the Mediterranean and stopped at a sea side resort in Dubai. They crossed the Indian Ocean and noted that, as they approached the Equator, the hour and half hour time zones covered more and more elapsed miles. Finally, they landed in Bangkok and spent two days exploring Thailand’s wonders.
The couple’s next stop was Sydney, Australia, where the summer days were longer and a good deal warmer than they had previously experienced. Their next stop was Auckland, New Zealand, where they celebrated New Year’s Eve, waiting up long enough to see their clock increment forward by one day, one month. one year, one decade, one century and one millennium to January 1, 2000. At that point, too elated to sleep, they boarded the Bremin Industries company jet, having submitted their flight plan for French Polynesia and the Island of Tahiti.
Jeff and Janet watched the endless expanse of ocean beneath them, until they made out the dim shape of the Island of Tonga. From there, the plane made a large, 90 degree arc, to direct them toward French Polynesia via American Samoa. Before reaching the U.S. Territory, however, something very singular happened.
In reaction to the international date line, the clock suddenly issued instructions to go BACK, one day, one month, one year, one decade, one century and one millennium to December 31, 1999. There was no provision in either operating algorithm to support that requirement. The mechanism took an error path and started a string of calculations to self-diagnose and bring the displays back to the correct day, time, month, year, et cetera.
What neither Jeff nor Janet realized, at the time, was that, in its feverish burst of activity, the clock’s mechanism interfered with the plane’s navigation system and began directing the craft back and forth over the date line and back again, to find the day, month, year, century or millennium it was expecting. The fabric of time, itself, became irreparably distorted, and they rapidly found themselves, in the middle of nowhere, from a temporal standpoint.
All this time, Jeff and Janet were blissfully unaware of any change. Time had indeed slowed to an eternal moment of happiness. No matter how much champagne they drank, their glasses never seemed to empty, and the warm, moist kiss that rewarded their languid efforts to lean into each other, never, ever, came to an end.
The plane never arrived in Tahiti that morning, or any morning. Both the Americans and the French launched coordinated search and rescue missions, over their respective waters, as well as international waters, but to no avail. Bremin Industry’s corporate jet joined a growing list of private and commercial aircraft which have utterly disappeared in various parts of the world and whose ultimate fate remains unknown.
Bremin Industries was bought out by Samsung a year later for billions of dollars, making their surviving stockholders very happy indeed. As for Jeff and Janet, nothing seemed able to curtail their time of happiness together.
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