by Benjamin Parzybok

“at first it was cool i guess, 15 mins extra free time a day, like magic. nap time! But after like 900 crashes i can honestly say this is by far the worst app I have ever used in my entire life bar none” - 1 star, jpornagro

We were having an emergency. One of the time-servers crashed, and the support line was lighting up. And since my boss was on maternity leave, every one of those calls was mine to answer.

The customers made it well known to me they did not have the time to even make the call, for the time-server’s crash meant they were harried, their time squandered.

Technical support is for the patient. For those who wear emotional suits of armor, who can listen to the thirteenth person scream at you and still have an amiable conversation with Amy in marketing about which flavor of sparkling water is the best.

For what it’s worth, it’s grapefruit. I do not say this subjectively, preferring lemon myself. But we are a data-driven firm, and Amy and I discovered that because of how the office assistant stacks the flavors of sparkling water in the bottom of the fridge, they create their own inverse bar chart of desirability. There is never any grapefruit left. The developers drink it. They hoard it. Everybody gives the devs special treatment, for they are the wizards of the arcane; nobody really knows what they do. And if they do it wrong, then things break and I get all these calls. Honestly, they all have the constitutions of tadpoles, no offense to tadpoles. I’d like to see just one of them take a support call without being reduced to ash and tears.

Anyway. Back to my boss, the one on maternity leave. You know her type. Risk taker, bleeding heart, the very flag bearer of inclusivity and diversity. I missed her terribly. If it weren’t for her, I’d still be washing dishes somewhere. My particular quirks are better tolerated the lower on the employment food chain you go.

I was on my twenty-fifth call in the last ninety minutes, and while I have a sweet, consoling baritone, I had begun to bang my pencil down upon my desk with an erratic violence — it’s a mild Tourettes, which manifests under stress and allows me to distill only helping kindness into the phone, while my frustration vents elsewhere. I have drugs and I have techniques. The drugs work great if you hate living and want to feel like dying all the time. The techniques are fine as long as you actually use them and don’t get overwhelmed in a tidal wave of triggers.

I could already see my manifestations weren’t helping the devs who were frantically trying to get the time-server up and running again. The CTO was yelling, and then apologizing, and then yelling again.

“Hello, this is Andrew from customer success, how can I help you today?”

A disruptor, they call us. The CEO is always saying that, how we have disruptive technology. We are disrupting time-space. It’s what the angel funders like to hear.

We sit in an open office floor plan. The devs have their corner (where underneath their desks, a pyramid of hoarded grapefruit sparkling water must lie like dragon’s wealth), the chief technology officer sits right beside me, the CEO across the room near the front door. We’re a small firm of fourteen people, quasi-democratic. I say ‘quasi’, because the CEO asks everyone what their opinion is, and then does things her own way anyway.

Still, I feel my opinions are valued. A startup is comical by nature. With its press of people and their various idiosyncrasies, each of us singing our own solos — mine more quirky than some, sure — which we all hope contribute to the theme. Our souls are as-of-yet un-quashed by the formal protocols of larger companies, but nor are we the haggard, noon-time beer drinkers and pajama-wearers of the freelance class. There’s free sparkling water. There’s cursory cake-laden birthday celebrations. There are dogs in the office.

We provide a service, you pay us every month. Then after a while, the idea is, we’re worth a crazy valuation and we sell for twenty times one year’s revenue and we all buy small islands, et cetera. Or at least the CTO and CEO do. The devs buy mansions up in the west hills. The junior tech support guy? He takes a frantic pre-packaged vacation in Mexico, makes all the wrong choices, and needs his mother to wire him some money, so he can get just a few pharmaceuticals, so that he can make it back through the airport security without getting cuffed and cavity-searched. Just being realistic here.

We sell free time. We plug into your life, mine the extra tiny bits of time out of it, then sell it back to you in one lump. It doesn’t sound that great when I say it that way. We’re still working on our marketing. Essentially, we shave 1/25th off of every second of your day and shift it to a reserve. That gives us a little over fifty-seven minutes and a half. We lose about nine minutes and change to inefficiencies, and take another six for processing, which means when all is said and done, we can sell forty-two minutes of unencumbered time back to you. Free time. Obligation-less time. Time to do whatever you want with. Have coffee with a friend-time, read a book-time, have yourself a wank-time.

CEOs. Parents of small children. The working stiff. Everyone in this goddamn over-worked country wants a little more free time.

• • •

Normally I ate lunch with my boss. But since she was on maternity leave, Bronner, aka Brony, VP of Sales, had taken me under his wing as might a lion humor the antics of a baby duck when his stomach is full. Pretty sure I watched a Tik Tok video like that once.

In the meeting room we’d converted to a lunchroom he was eating an artisanal burger from the joint downstairs and every once in a while I could hear him hm with pleasure. I noticed his nose and cheeks were bright red, and he had a sort of wild look to him.

“Hey Brony, what happened to your nose?”

He laughed and waved his hand. Then laughed again.

“What?” I said.

“Sunburnt.”

“How?”

He shrugged and mumbled, “Hit the slopes.”

Then he looked down the lunch table.

I said, “Oh, really?” And he suddenly didn’t seem to want to talk about it anymore. He stuffed the last few bites of his burger into his mouth, and we left it at that. But after he left, I ate my peanut butter sandwich and my mind puttered away at the mathematics of it. I have a good visual memory. Yesterday when I ate lunch with him, he did not have a burnt nose. And yet, he’d found time to go skiing somehow. It clearly did not add up. I looked up from my sandwich and inspected the others in the lunchroom. The CEO Nell at the end, eating her broccoli and brown rice out of a Tupperware bowl, Peter the office assistant beside her, furiously taking notes, a microwaved burrito on a paper plate in front of him (he was my kin, in theory, the bottom rung, we avoided each other like the plague lest our peon-istic ways rub off on each other), the devs, who sat in their own tight circle of arcanity eating curry. Did they look like people who had a lot of free time on their hands?

When I got back to my desk there were an additional six support emails to answer. And just then we were all collectively notified by email of another 1-star review on our Android app, which I was required to respond to, as part of my job.

“Dear Idle, inc - I had an afternon sex date schedule using your software with my wife and guess what? Work called wondering where the f*** I was five minutes in. Where the f*** were you? My marriage is already on the rocks, obvs this isn’t helping, you deserve to get sewed for false advertising. cancel my subscription NOW.”

Our CTO immediately called an all-hands-on-deck meeting to discuss the new review. App ratings were the bane of our existence.

He was the founder of the company and built the original prototype, a real stroke of genius that. We were all grateful because it was because of him we had a salary, etc. But we all knew the app’s problem: stability. When the CTO monologued on how we just need such and such ‘chrome’ or ‘magic’ added to the app, we would all find ourselves staring, mind-blitzed, at the doodles we’d made on our matching legal pads.

The real issue is that time is a gooey substance, sticky, like honey. And in the same way that honey is subject to the whims of temperature, time is subject to our own perception of it. If we give fifteen minutes of free time to a customer and yet it only feels like three, is that our fault? On the other hand, no one operated under the illusion that our system was free of bugs, glitches, and crashes.

“This is our problem to solve,” the CTO was saying, for maybe the hundredth time in the last six months. “The customer feels cheated in their free time, and the customer is always right.”

But it was during this meeting that I really began to study the lead developer, Joshua. He has a handsome face and sunken eyes that constantly roam, always in motion, as if a laser pointer’s red dot made its erratic way around the room and he was cursed to follow it. What first caught my attention was that he wore a different shirt than what he’d started the day with. But then what I noticed most of all, with some horror: His hair, I began to feel quite certain — though god knows I’m susceptible to bouts of paranoia — hung long and greasy. Had it grown an inch since lunch? And he’d grown a beard.

I wear my emotions like a goddamn feather boa, obscenely and for all the world to see. Upon this realization about my co-worker Joshua, my face began to feel like a pulpy, red tomato atop my neck, my heart quickened, and my right hand found cause to slam my pencil down upon the desk several times in succession.

The CTO finally turned to acknowledge my ongoing performance, the one everyone in the room was so studiously trying not acknowledge. “Please — please Andrew? Can you …?”

I nodded, and right then and there I took my own free time, which I rarely ever used, except to test and verify support complaints. We all had demo accounts of course — we ‘ate our own dog food’. So I took my daily free fifteen minutes, for which I would sacrifice twenty two minutes of the rest of my day. I felt a quick rush, my heart ratcheting up a few beats per min higher before slowing down again, and then I got up and walked around the hallways. I sat outside on the front steps of the building, watched a train amble along the tracks, and did a fair amount of energy-depleting thigh-slaps.

By the time my neurotic fifteen minutes were up, I returned to my departure point as the app instructed and took up position (our software allowed you to take a selfie of your pre-free-time stance so you could re-arrange yourself, if you cared about continuity), to check in on the meeting where I’d left off.

Which is to say, they were in the middle of discussing the review on our Android app, an app which was similar in construction to a nine-story apartment building, constructed by drunken apes, out of saltine crackers.

I glanced around sheepishly, to see if my absence had been noticed.

“Crashes and time irregularities aside, it needs rebranded,” Amy said. “We promise too much. You call it Idle and you have a picture of beaches and everybody thinks it’s a travel-agency or something. How about ‘Bonus time’.”

The CTO grimaced and glanced again at the CEO’s empty chair. Nell would, he knew, stick up for him were she there, but she was not there.

Brony re-shifted in his chair and sighed heavily. He drummed his fingers on the table.

“Yes Brony?” the CTO said.

He shifted again and sighed again, this time with significantly more drama. “Stability. Stability.” He thrust his finger down upon the table with each word. “Under-promise. Over-deliver. Can’t we not just fix it?” He lifted his fingertip from the table and hand-waved in the direction of the devs, and the meaning was clear: the fix was simple and they were all idiots and did he have to do all the goddamn work in the company by himself? “I can’t sell mysterious ‘bonus time’. We have million-dollar business contracts on the line, they want to know exactly how much time they’ve got. It can’t be eighteen minutes one minute and then fourteen the next.”

Joshua cleared his throat and all eyes turned to him.

“As we have discussed,” he said, “the original version was not architected around shared chronological resources. It draws only on a user’s own time, for which we cannot account for the vagaries of chance. You can take all the time you want, but if a traffic jam steals it back, that’s the risk. It’s up to you —” and here he gestured with the subtlest movement of his greasy hair “— to communicate this risk to the user. Version two, which is in alpha, will pool time resources, and will be vastly superior.”

“And when will that come out,” Brony said, “just give me one little fucking hint as to when we might expect that.”

“Software should not be estimated. There are issues, of which you might be well-aware, Bronner. It’ll be ready, when it is ready.”

• • •

The meeting ran late. The CTO got apologetic and emotional. The lead developer and the VP of sales backed off from the cusp of violence. The CEO phoned in at the last moment to ask if she’d missed anything, and could we water the plants before we left the office? She signed off with a cheery: ‘Time is money!’

I was late for my bus.

• • •

That night I sat in front of blue glow of my “comfort tank”, admiring as well as I could the only animal seemingly immune to my various neuroses, though I was skeptical of the amount of comfort fish actually provided, since they seemed bent on suiciding themselves in creative escalation: leaping like long jumpers out of the tank, locking themselves in the pirate’s trunk, taking bites out of the flesh of one another, and the newest casualty, a Black-Skirt Tetra, who managed to somehow spear itself on a plastic cactus I had mistakenly thought might be a homey addition for them. Watching all this, I thought about the current trajectory of my life, which did not at all seem very promising. And I thought about the mystery of time and the newfound revelations about my co-workers.

• • •

The next day I found myself wondering if my boss’s service desk password, which she’d loaned me when she went on leave, might also work for our company Dropbox. It did! I made a note to lecture her on password re-use later, seeing as how I was the only person in the company that seemed to care about software security, but in the meantime I found myself covertly browsing the company’s Dropbox files, just poking around to see if there were any free time anomalies documented. Among the detritus, I found a whole folder of Josh’s travel receipts through South America, and a large quantity of vacation photos of Amy from Marketing, with a man not her husband. Not a one of these dinguses understood how Dropbox syncing worked.

In the end, because I liked Amy, maybe even like-liked her, I deleted the photos as a quiet favor.

Then I found our CTO’s famous whitepaper, the one that had started it all: “Aggregated Analytics on Time Compression and Re-distribution Using Various Computational Models.” A sly glance at his workstation told me he was busy shopping for camping gear on Amazon, so I micro-adjusted my monitor, placed the support queue front and center and made the whitepaper a long column I could read on the side.

The passage I looked for wasn’t hard to find, entitled ‘Inefficiencies’.

“Within each of these mathematical models, there is an inevitable inefficiency. I liken it to the process of opening up a large and complicated paper map — and then later, trying to fold it back into its svelte shape. You have accelerated the entropy of the system. Opening time and re-collapsing it requires time in itself. To do these computations results in 15.9% of ‘time-loss’ (think of it as the heat loss of a combustion engine), and an additional 11% of the time is required by the computation itself in order to work. With tuning and further research, this inherent ‘chronovastum’ — time-waste — might conceivably be reduced.”

Chronovastum. Twenty-six percent loss. We, as I mentioned, are a data-driven firm. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me to compare the original figures in the CTO’s whitepaper with our current internal analytics. One of the devs had long-ago built a dashboard I could call up to check the system, listing everything from paying customers (11,218), to live time-servers running, to the breakdown of the chronovastum. It was, as the white paper stated, exactly 26.9%, or rather, 26.899871%. Surely that little variation couldn’t allow for one of the devs to take a month off work between lunch and the afternoon meeting.

Suspicion seethed in me as I watched my email queue fill up, each new notification an irate customer somewhere, cheated of time. That suspicion continued to coil in my body, manifesting in small, accelerating twitches, until a need for a physical release became unstoppable: it took the form of sitting my bottom down repeatedly and with some violence on my fancy Herman Miller chair. This caused the CTO’s mouse-hand to do a sharp little jog in its trajectory across the screen. It occurred to me he was someone who ought to take a little break. Certainly my presence, with my sharp little acts, was no anxiety-reducer, I was well aware. He seemed bleary-eyed and a little haggard. I felt fairly confident that he was not indulging in the free time I’d caught the others using.

I opened up Slack and asked Brony:

— Me: Got a little free time?

— Brony: Ha ha

— Me: Really though. Where did you get it.

— Brony: …

The three dots signaling an impending response showed, and yet its long delay quite outweighed the one-word reply, which finally arrived as:

— Walk?

I looked across the room where Brony cagily returned my gaze. I nodded subtly, he nodded subtly in return. Then we both stood in synchronicity from our desks and meandered separately out of the office, down the building’s hallway and out onto the street. We made our way between the crumbling warehouses and the posh software firms, around the homeless encampments, dodging traffic and bicyclists and delivery trucks, to the old grocery store, where we had to ask a brown-skinned, shirtless man if we could get through the doorway, if that’d be OK.

Brony knew his name — ‘Half-mad Robert’ — which both surprised me and made me reassess Brony.

“Wait, wait,” Half-mad Robert said, his words mushed by having to work around the one tooth, standing like a solemn obelisk, in his lower jaw. “Got one for you.” He rifled each of the pockets of his soiled slacks until he manifested a well-worked piece of paper. “Ready? This here’s by a guy named Nemerov, poet. ‘Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say,’ — Half-mad looked up to see if we were ready for the punchline — ‘forgetful of the shadow’s speed.’”

“Nice!” Brony said. “Not bad, Half-mad!”

“You get it? You get it? I knew Brony would like it.”

Brony smiled and clapped him on the back and fist-bumped him and then we entered the cool of the store while I tried to work out what had been said and what had been exchanged.

I had a thing for black licorice, which Brony spent half of the walk excoriating, extrapolating to what my love of black licorice might imply about the rest of my life’s choices, including the keeping of fish tanks and the lack of any noticeable female companionship and, and — here he’d gestured vaguely, not wanting to sully his tongue with whatever my weird tics were. I think he was preparing the battlefield, so to speak, for the accusation that I was going to level at him. Namely: That he was stealing free time, both from the company and our customers.

“It is not stealing! Andrew, it’s not, not really. First, there’s product testing, second —”

He didn’t seem to have much to fill in for ‘second’. In front of the bulk containers, three of them which offered different types of black licorice, I took a moment to study Brony: handsome, lean, tanned, his hair neatly trimmed. I imagined he’d probably gone to some lightly religious college, where entrance requirements were minimal as long as you presented well and had the dough to pay. It occurred to me that Brony liked me because I augmented his handsomeness, simply by being next to him. The only ding I might put in his self-confidence was due to my brain, which didn’t count for much in his world. He had, in his mind, taken me on as project, or a pet.

“Where did you get it?”

“OK well first, man, they are tuning the efficiencies. Gotten it down a couple of percent. Good, right? They haven’t updated the stats dashboard yet, right, just making sure it’s going to stick or whatever. I got baked with Joshua and boom, he started feeding me an occasional day now and then. Nothing big.”

“An occasional day!”

“Three days. I’ve taken three days so far, that’s it. That’s like, that’s nothing — but anyway.”

“Compared to what?”

Brony picked out a healthy-looking trail mix for himself. I got five ounces of candy-coated black licorice, of various shapes. On the walk back I devoured them with anxious vigor.

“I just know that a couple of the devs, they got a lot. Listen, this is a secret, right? — I can hook you up. I have a little to spare. Let me get you some. Here.” He came to a full stop in the middle of the train tracks, half a block from our office. He logged into his account, and a moment later my phone signaled I’d received four hours of free time.

I took fifteen minutes straightaway. I wanted to make sure it was valid time. I used it to walk back to the store and get a little more licorice. It was good stuff, the time.

I rejoined Brony where I’d initiated the free time, back at the tracks. I logged off first — conversations with people in realtime when you were on Idle time were jaggy and awkward. Our app leaked a little realtime in so that you could live-book a train ticket or order a meal, but anything longer and you ran into a realtime loop.

When he saw me, I nodded in a secretive, mafia sort of way, just like two dudes doing dirty business together.

He scowled. “You just took some didn’t you. Well anyway, this stuff decays pretty fast, so you might as well.”

I felt fine and emotionally rested. The rest of the day I took bits and bobs here, like I was sampling from a big hors d’oeuvres plate at a posh party. I answered a support email, and immediately afterward took five minutes to browse the web, or wander the building, or eat a candy bar.

I was running late so I pulled another forty-five to get work finished up so I could make the early bus, which left me feeling upbeat and un-harried and not at all like a guy who has half a dozen small neuroses, like invisible fishing lures, the lines of which I drag jangling along behind me. This new me was a calm sort of individual, someone who might hop off the bus three stops early in order to take a leisurely stroll through the park on his way home, and still have time to stop by the aquarium supply, where I bought a small school of Neon Tetras to replenish the previously suicided ones. I could be the type, I thought just then, who finally having arrived home, cooked a gourmet dinner for himself. And so at home I took a couple more hours.

I ate the goat cheese, red pepper, and garlic quiche in front of my fish tank, where the new Neon Tetras were huddled in a corner and not at all integrating with the existing population. It made me apprehensive. When I finally checked my watch, I realized it was only an hour after quitting time and I still had the evening in front of me, and then I felt absurdly lonely and deeply guilty for whoever’s time I’d wasted, who probably needed it much more than I, an all-round despicable person. I’d run myself out of other people’s free time and had only my own, real free-time, i.e. a whole lonely evening to kill, which I accomplished via disciplined television binge-watching.

In the morning, it was annoying not to have any spare time left. I hustled to the bus, missed it, walked in a stomping fury three stops further, and caught the next one. My jaw was sore from clenching. On the bus, I punished my thigh with my knuckles to the distress of the elderly man sitting next to me. Free time, I thought, could change my life. It could make me a better person. It could free some of these fishhooks. In the office, first thing, I cornered Joshua.

I stood on the other side of his mechanized standing desk, just to the right of one of his monitors, so that he glanced at me, and then his gaze roved his way across his desk. Ever seeking, those eyes.

“I didn’t take any.”

It took me a moment. “Ah — no, this isn’t about the damn sparkling water.” I said, louder than I intended. I leaned in close, just over the top of his monitor. “Bronner told me. I want some T.”

“Tea?” He had gone back to his monitor.

I have a baleful glare, I am told. Finally, he let out an exasperated sigh.

“That gives me the creeps Andrew. This is for testing, yes?”

“Sure.”

“I can give you a few hours.”

“No. I want the big time.”

He glanced around and then put his finger over his lips.

“No, you don’t,” he said.

“Am I here? I’m here, aren’t I?”

“How deep you really want to go?” He whispered, staring with a zagging, heavy-lidded gaze.

I shrugged. “How deep … does it go?”

“I can spare you a few hours here or there, even a day. We pull it off of processing, we regain some of it in computation. Sometimes our members don’t use all their time.”

“But how —?”

“Anything more … if you want lots of time, there are complications.” He shrugged.

“OK,” I said. “What kind of complications?”

“Well —” he held his hand outstretched toward me suddenly. “Go ahead, touch it.”

Against every natural sane impulse, I gripped his offered hand in a shake. I found it startlingly cold and fish-like, weirdly limp.

“Something to do with pulse rate,” he said. “Haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Huh … OK.” I released his fishy hand, and it dropped back to the desk. I wiped my own hand on my pants.

“And maybe … moral complications?”

“Like what?”

He shrugged. “You can guess. Either you want it or you don’t.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Deep time,” he said.

I returned to my desk and watched as the support queue grew. I thought about the trajectory of my life. I fancied myself a good person. I wanted people to get what they paid for. While I had trouble fitting in with any definite community, or, OK, any community at all, I believed in racial justice and climate change and that we should ameliorate the wealth gap and be kind to people and stuff. There was something about Joshua’s query that made me believe I could potentially embark onto a different path, and I needed time to consider it.

“Worst app ever. All I wanted was an extra fifteen minutes a day. Instead, my heart raced like a terrified horse and I couldn’t ever be certain I even got any extra time.”

“I CAN”T LOG IN!!! I TRIED TEN TIMES AND GUESS WHAT I KNOW MY OWN PASSWORD OK? YOUR WRONG. I AM SO SICK OF THIS I”M DONE.”

I returned to Joshua’s desk and gave him a serious nod, and one or three hard slaps against my thigh, for good measure. All my muscles felt like rubber bands, wrapped taut around the heads of porcelain dolls.

“Bro,” he said and then looked behind me. “Brony.”

I turned to find Bronner staring back at us from his laptop. Joshua gave a curt nod in my direction, and Bronner — I thought conspiratorially — returned it. I felt thrilled.

I met Brony in the hallway.

“Come on little buddy,” he said. “First of all, no more black licorice. Slim up a little maybe. Posture. This is the beginning of the new you. I want to show you something.” He walked us out of the building and stopped at his SUV, from which he pulled a very handsome banjo. He proceeded to play a surprisingly good rendition of Stairway to Heaven on it; he closed his eyes in order to nod with emotion.

“What?” I said. “What the fuck is happening?” I said. “When did you learn that?”

“Yesterday, little buddy.”

It was a stupid question. Do not ask when. There is no when. How long did it take to master Stairway to Heaven on a new instrument? A week? Four weeks?

“Little hard to play with cold fingers, though,” he said. Then he — preposterously — strapped the banjo onto his back like a troubadour hero in a Western movie and we began to walk the streets toward the store, but before we got there, we spotted Half-mad Robert.

“Half-mad!” Brony said. “How’s it going, man?”

Half-mad Robert had positioned himself in a sliver of sunlight which emphasized the griminess of his lean body. His tight, black hair was matted on one side. He stared at us with reddened eyes over a foul beard.

“I forget your name.”

“Bronner. Call me Brony. Hey I can’t thank you enough, it’s going OK?”

“Bronner,” he whispered. He made a weak fist of his right hand and tapped it against his heart.

“It’s going, yeah?” Bronner said. “What can I get you, man.”

“Hungry.”

Bronner turned to me. “We’ve got to take good care of Half-mad,” he said. “Run to the store Andrew, grab us — what do you want, man?”

Half-mad’s voice rasped out in breathless, unintelligible wisps.

“How about a bratwurst, hey? You a sauerkraut man? Mustard?”

Half-mad nodded.

“You got that Andrew? The cart outside the store has them. No time to lose. Grab him a Coke. You like Coke, Half-mad? Better yet, six-pack of beer?”

Half-mad Robert rested his chin on his chest. I hustled away, jogging between two empty warehouses toward the grocery store. I arrived winded, unused to such exertion. I ordered a Bratwurst with the works, feeling fairly confused as to what I was doing. Were we treating a rapidly ailing man or performing a kindness? Then I hustled with my burdens back to the scene. I arrived just as Brony was handing Half-mad a couple of twenties, but Half-mad seemed only roughly aware he was taking the money. I unpacked the food and placed an open beer in Half-mad’s hand. Brony played him Stairway to Heaven.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Brony.

“You all good Half-mad? We’re going to hit it now. Thanks again.”

There was no answer from Half-mad Robert and so we proceeded back toward the store.

“What do you think?” Bronner said.

“I am trying not to think what I am thinking.”

“It’s not a big deal, man. Half-mad is fine. He’s got time to spare — overflowing with it. And he hates it, right? All he wants to do is get through it, he’s killing time.” Bronner put his hand on my elbow to steer me, and I could feel the cold, slipperyness of it against my flesh. “The thing is, if you want deep time? This new version, man. That’s why we’re out here.”

He didn’t say anything more, but I understood: I would have to find a few people willing to donate their time to me. I looked up from the intersection and saw all the people around us now in a different light. An Uber driver revved past us in a black Honda, followed by an Amazon delivery truck. They had no free time. Kitty-corner from us a well-coiffed man — the kind of coif and slickness I associate with real estate agents — unlocked the door of a dingy retail space for an elaborately hip woman. Something fancy would go in there, it was easy to see. Across the street, three people lay half-propped against the wall in sleeping bags, an accoutrement of street gear laid out in chaos before them.

“What about that lady there.”

He pointed to a woman in her mid-fifties, pushing a cart impossibly laden with black plastic bags, children’s toys, stuffed animals, a house plant, clothes, a foot stool, umbrellas, a bedroll, blankets, and a tent, all of it tied down in a complex web of bungie cords. “There you go, buddy. Go get her.”

“Bronner —”

He had my elbow again, steering me toward her. She looked up and watched us approach, her face an impassive mask. The way her lower jaw worried at something, I suspected she was missing a few teeth.

“Hey there,” Bronner said. “Afternoon to you.”

She frowned and turned back to pushing her cart. I could feel our weirdly solicitous approach. Bronner was undeterred and steered me after her while I gritted my teeth so as not to take the emotion out on my thigh.

“Hey hey, we have a little offer for you.”

She stopped completely and turned to face us. The stench of her was strong, and her eyes spoke of the never-ending shams and tricks and underhanded dealings society had waged against her, of which we were undoubtedly another.

She smiled suddenly, showing an uncomfortable darkness in her teeth. “I have an offer for you,” she said, and pulled a teddy bear from her cart. Though after a moment of inspecting it dangling from her fingers I was no longer sure what animal it might represent.

“Thanks,” Bronner said. “I’m good, actually. But — do you ever feel like time is a burden?”

She swung the stuffed animal back into her cart and moved her mouth through a few facades of cynicism.

“Well, we have a solution for you. Not only that, we’ll pay you for it. You don’t have to do anything. We’ll take your time, and pay you twenty bucks a week. It’s an incredible deal.” Bronner opened his wallet and pulled two twenties from it. “You have a Gchip, right?”

“You’ll all pay me, if I do what?”

He turned to me, “Get your phone out, dummy.”

Bronner launched into an eloquent monologue on the subject of time as an enemy, at the conclusion of which he brandished the forty dollars again. I felt the persuasive pull of it, just to watch his handsome mouth work each nimble syllable.

When she finally assented, the forty dollars tucked away on her person, I opened up our testing app and began to log her details. Francis Kashlosky, DOB (1964-07-04) — born only a week away from my mother, I noticed. Address (N/A). It asked for her thumbprints and a retinal scan for biometric tracking, which I ran through rather cursorily, feeling shakily thrilled and in a dead hurry to get it over with, this dirty little bit. Then there was the little plastic cup, the size of a one-serving coffee creamer, in which we asked for a little of her saliva. And finally, OAuth permissions to plug into her Gchip. She consented to it all; a history of institutions, with their rigorous, non-sensical demands, had softened her up for us.

“Now you should know,” Bronner said, “you might feel just a little increase in your heart rate — go ahead buddy, finish account creation — there, you feel that darling?”

She held one hand to her chest, and I focused on the dirty nails and the blue veins.

“Oh,” she grinned, her face flushed.

“That’s totally normal. The days will go by for you much quicker now, I imagine that’ll be nice, hey? This is a great service. You tell your friends, OK?”

As we walked away, Brony put his arm around me like a big brother. “Welcome to the club, little buddy. You’re going to get eight, ten hours from her every day, no problem. Get a couple more on the line, and you’re going to have all the sweet time you want. You know what I’m thinking? My great aunt is in a retirement community. They have all the fucking time. They’re awash in free time and want nothing to do with it. Tell me I’m a genius.”

When we’d finished, I had seven ‘time-hosts’ on the line, the other six were all from a single retirement home, where Brony worked the table like a magician while I stood in the background trying to figure out how to hold my arms so I didn’t feel like an asshole. He’d collected many more, including his great aunt. No wonder he was VP of sales.

“Know what Joshua calls us? Leeches. Time leeches.”

“That doesn’t at all make me feel better, Brony.”

“Don’t be worried about them! We’re providing a service. They’re getting paid. It’s noble, little buddy — don’t do the thigh slap thing, OK? That unnerves me.”

I didn’t use any time at all for the first few days. Just watched it accrue, which it did at an amazing rate. A couple of days in, I had a whole week stored up. By the end of that week, I had already accrued more than my vacation allotment for the year. I well knew the market rate for this time. I was sitting on a heap of wealth.

Still, I progressed through the week laden with anxiety, clacking my mouse and slapping my thigh and pacing and sighing my fellow employees to distraction, unable to stop myself. Bronner grew disgusted with my not taking advantage.

It wasn’t until the following Monday morning, the stereotypical dreaded Monday, that I finally tapped into it.

I could go on a trip. I could learn a new skill. I could do anything.

I bought a Greyhound bus ticket for the coast, and once there ate an enormous quantity of fish and chips and sat on the beach and watched children construct sandcastles and the seagulls do acrobatics in the air while trying to suppress the immense self-loathing I had for myself. After about six hours of crushing loneliness against the backdrop of an enormous, brilliant sunset, and the incessant lull of the crashing waves, I made the decision to take the bus back home.

Once there I sat in front of my fish tank and talked to my fish; I had no idea if they were in realtime or in leeched time. They provided comfort for a while. And then I booted up my gaming console.

It was an adventure game I’d never gotten far in. I finished it, according to clock in the app, about twenty-eight hours later. My legs were unbelievably cramped and my back hurt and my hands and feet were cold. When the thrill of having beaten the game was over, I sat silent in my small kitchen and listened to the hollow buzz of the night, my senses frayed from the bender, and considered if I should exit leech and go to work.

Instead I took down my bottle of cheap gin and poured myself half a coffee cup full. It tasted terrible, but I finished it and refreshed my cup. Sometime later I observed, at a great, blurry distance, that I’d finished off the bottle. Then I slept — a waste of leech-time, I know, since the body rarely gets tired in leech — and woke with a terrible hangover. I was not cut out for this. I thought grimly about calling Brony to see if I could learn some banjo maybe or whatever he was doing. But finally, I opened my laptop and took a look at the support tickets, and because there was an obvious direction there, the sweet balm of occupation, I fell into them. They were all done before I remembered that I was still on Idle time. I logged out and went to work.

I stumbled in dead-tired and haggard, my hands and feet cold and slippery, where it was just now Monday morning still. Amy smiled at me and asked how my weekend was. Brony gave me a series of encoded winks. Joshua let his glance slide over me without change, and then back to his computer.

It seemed to me that everywhere I looked I saw decay, for were we not all addicted to our own product? Or perhaps I was just guilty and so every action I observed became twisted by my own perception — how the CEO hung staring into the refrigerator for an impossibly long time, how programmers giggled incessantly over what no one could quite decipher, how next to me the CTO faced his screen with his eyes closed until I grew worried that he would open them and I would find the eyes missing entirely, only empty, black holes.

At lunch I walked to the store. When I saw Francis Kashlosky slumped against her cart I made a wide circle around her.

I bought black licorice and a Coke. Every footfall felt weighted, as if the gravity of the planet had grown while I was in free time; each foot underwent a violent effort to separate from the ground, each return a decisive, impacting thud.

I was fine for a few days. Other than the terrible accrual of free time in my account, all was normal. I helped our customers. I caught the bus in a timely manner. The fish … did fish business. The omnipresent anxiety was always there.

Upon the advice of the internet, I purchased for myself a dog’s chew toy and cut it into small, bite-sized pieces, and attacked these with a gnashing ferocity whenever my body found the need to awkwardly express itself to the room of easily agitated fellow colleagues. Still, with each passing day I found myself less-fine, for time seemed meaningless without purpose.

I convinced myself that I had gone about it all wrong. I needed a quest. I needed some meaning to insert into my ‘one wild and precious life’. Or rather, wild and precious lives.

And so, I booked a ticket to Stonehenge, which I read was used to track the stars in their time-bound arcs across the sky. I landed in England, feeling at once confident and purposeful, and a little cold, and also like a thief who has made off with the souls of his fellow villagers. In a word, I was a mess. I ate pasties and spent a full day at the site and drank Irish beer and wandered the old beaches of Cornwall until I could hardly feel the pulse in my wrist. I looked blue to myself in the mirror and I kept prattling away at my own self-image; a leech, a sucker of life, an icon of chronovastum.

I called my mom for reassurance.

“Andrew? Is that you, Andrew?”

“Mom. I’m so glad to talk to you. I’m in London! I —” I could feel that if I continued I was going to start to weep. “How are you?”

“Andrew? Is that you, Andrew?”

“Mom?”

“Andrew? Is that you, Andrew?”

I felt a chill go through me then. I opened up the app and attempted to leave Idle time, but I was nowhere near where I’d initiated and the app refused. I heard my mother repeat again, and again, stuck in her realtime loop, and so I hung up and lay unmoving on my hotel bed for an obscene amount of free time.

• • •

A week or some days later, the next day at work, or an hour later, I no longer knew, but later, on lunch break, I found Francis. She sat hunched against her cart, her face red, her eyes closed, a sheen of sweat across her forehead. Cradled in her lap she held a grimy-looking polar bear.

“Francis,” I said.

She did not reply, and so I touched her hand. She grabbed hold of it and held it to her head.

“Feels nice,” she whispered, her forehead hot against my hand.

Impulsively I reached across my other hand and laced it through hers, and together I imagined we made a sort of loop, a yin and yang of hot and cold, leech and host. The new software, it was killer, it would be killer. A true disruption. It felt comfortable just then to be there with her. The whole world would sign up, to drive or be driven, the givers, the takers, everyone plugged in. I knew it would not be long, I suspected, before I myself hosted. People like me, well. Look at me. What am I for?

Beneath my cold hands I could feel her delicate, dwindling pulse.