I'm looking for a short story I read a while ago. It's a placed in the indeterminate future, and a traveler from one civilization is bargaining for an artifact from the past (current time) and is considering a clock. All the characters stay up to see the time jump: a remnant of when people created an hour of time (daylight saving) and were then destroyed. Any help would be appreciated! Edit: I read it online within the last year for sure, and probably within six months. Edit: as a commenter mentioned it was formatted as a blog post,which probably makes it much harder to find.
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4About how long is "a while"? Any memory of what sort of publication you read this in - online, magazine, collection of one author's work, anthology of several authors' work?– Politank-ZCommented Oct 30, 2015 at 22:41
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Did you read it in an anthology? A magazine? Online?– heptapodCommented Oct 30, 2015 at 23:41
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I've definitely read this story -- in fact, I thought this question had to be a duplicate. The version I read was online, possibly formatted as a blog post, but I don't know for sure that it was the original.– DavidCommented Oct 31, 2015 at 0:43
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That's right! It was a blog post!– JeremyCommented Oct 31, 2015 at 2:09
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1Yeah, there was no time-travel involved; it was set long after civilization had collapsed, and the clock was a mysterious object whose purpose was unknown. IIRC it came into the possession of a tribe who treated it as a quasi-religious object and were awestruck when it skipped an hour. Or possibly when it failed to do so as expected. The details are hazy...– DavidCommented Oct 31, 2015 at 4:38
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1 Answer
I found it: "The Witching Hour" by Scott Alexander.
“They created a single hour,” said Fin. “Of the nine thousand hours in a year, all but one were made by the gods, but one was made by Man. What stopped them from creating more, from creating an infinite number of hours, from becoming immortal by arresting the progression of Time? We will never know. But it is my belief that when they saw what men had done, the gods stopped them before they could do worse. Meical, I believe that is how the Lost World ended. A last ditch effort by the gods to save Time itself from the hubris of Man.”
