Ten Minutes

Solo barked early in the morning. In a very low voice.

Uday woke up in a daze. He found Solo at his feet, muttering something.

"What’s wrong, boy? Why are you whining? Want to eat?" Uday was worried. Solo shook his head.

"No? Then what? Darth, make a vet appointment for Solo. Urgent. Immediately."

Darth grunted. "It’s six thirty-five in the morning. You have an online office meeting at seven. There is a lot of traffic on the way to the vet. Can’t come back till seven."

"Why is there traffic today? What’s so special today?"

"Don’t know, but according to the available data, many people have brought out their cars since five o’clock in the morning."

"What! So early in the morning? Where did all these people go? Not office, I’m sure. All the work anyway gets done from home. Gotta see. And Darth, how do you NOT know? "

"Hold on. Your colleague is pinging. Julio."

Uday opened the Communicator.

"There is something wrong, Uday!" Julio looked concerned.

"What happened?"

"I was trying to contact you,"

"For what?"

"It seems traffic–" And then the communicator link went dead.

"What now? Darth? Is the communicator off?"

"Pilate Humire ni."

"What’s going on, man? I have set your language as English. And what are you talking about!" Uday got up, put on a pair of trousers, and glared at his robotic personal assistant.

"Kolemo Sihi."

"What happened to you now?"

There was no reply from Darth. For the first time in years...

******

Uday met Nasreen in the elevator. After almost two years.

"Hi. You are going out, and see?" She sounded uneasy.

"Yes. There seems to be some problem."

"Yup! I thought, too. Because you know, if I look out the window–"

By then, the speedy elevator reached the parking floor and Nasreen left quickly.

Uday had not realized to open the window and check out. But anyway, what was there to see from the 91st floor!

He walked out of the apartment complex. The streets were crowded. There were plenty of cars, and hundreds of people had come out walking like him.

"Today is Wednesday. Mid-week. The office work is getting affected. Don't they understand?" Someone was frustrated.

"Communicators, our Communicators are off. How the hell are we supposed to function?" Another was irritated.

"Look up!" a nearby person snapped at him.

Uday raised his head and tried to focus on the dark streak of the sky.

"What is it? I see nothing."

"Over there, look to the left near the end of that blue building. It’s strange!"

He tried to narrow his eyes. A black square was floating in the sky.

"What is it?" That man prodded Uday.

"Who Knows?"

"That must be an alien spaceship!"

"An alien ship? Do you really believe in aliens?"

"Why not? Just as we humans are here on Earth, there must be intelligent life on other planets, too!"

"Maybe. But why would they come here?" Uday asked enthusiastically. He noticed that after a long time, he was talking about anything other than work.

"Why not?" The man stared at Uday.

Uday was enjoying the discussion. "What is there on this planet of ours? It’s choc-full of people everywhere! And nature is completely destroyed!"

"That’s the fun, isn’t it? It means that we see nothing left on this planet, but we can’t say what others will be interested in." That man was enjoying the talk, too.

"Don’t think so!"

The squint-eyed man did not understand. "Listen, you know how we take over a sick company that isn’t working, and turn it around? Let’s say these aliens are coming to take over our Earth and get it back on track. What do you say?"

Uday liked this unique point and nodded.

"Gosh, it’s grown now!" The man said, looking back up in shock.

Indeed, the size of that black square was increasing...

******

Uday walked forward. He wanted to see if the dark shape looked better from there. Suddenly, the car in front of him disappeared.

A loud exclamation came out from everyone around.

There was a gigantic gap where the car was supposed to be. A black opaque gap. Something inhuman. Something strange.

"Where did that car go?" The old lady in the pink dress started shaking. She clutched at Uday and kept asking. "Where did it go?"

He was trying to peer into that gap. Like sixty other people.

"Don’t know."

"I’m sure it’s a black hole!" A fat man nearby presented his theory with great conviction.

"If it were a black hole, we would all have been pulled in by now." Uday tried to say in as calm a voice as possible.

The fat man was surprised. "Why?"

"The gravity of a black hole is so overwhelming that we couldn’t be standing here talking."

"No! No! It is also a black hole above. And this lower black hole is the other end of the upper black hole."

Uday didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The end of a black hole? People don’t seem to learn physics lately, he winced.

Suddenly, he realized that in the last five minutes, he had talked to two or three strangers. Did everyone become social only when such a strange thing happened? Otherwise sitting in our own cocoon, oblivious to other people?

The police quickly arrived from somewhere and surrounded the hollow.

Then he remembered why he had originally stepped out. Solo. He should take Solo to a vet. If the usual vet was not possible, then he should look for someone nearby.

Moving a little further along the road, Uday tentatively took a side street. It was less crowded, but people were still fidgeting.

"Excuse me," Uday interrupted a tall, grey-haired man.

"What?" He appeared in a hurry.

"Do you know a vet nearby? I need a vet for my dog."

"Hell’s broken loose there, and you care about the dog?" the tall guy shouted. "My wife is in the hospital and there is a glitch in the medical equipment. I have more important things to do!"

Glitch! Something went wrong. Right. It was a glitch. But in what? Darth is shut down, that’s one thing. Some hospital equipment is malfunctioning, that’s another. And that car? How did it disappear into some mysterious void? And that black square at the top? What kind of glitch is everywhere?

Uday raised his head. The square was gone.

What did that mean?

Uday ran back to the earlier street. The black void there had also disappeared. Cars were speeding through the streets as usual. The traffic was slowing down.

"What happened to that hollow there?" He tried to stop one person and ask.

"Which one?" The man carrying that umbrella expressed his surprise.

"The car which was here -" Uday tried to point to a place.

The man carrying the umbrella looked surprised, as everything seemed to be going smoothly in that place.

"OK. I don’t think you were there at the time." Uday stepped aside and let the man go. Then he went back to his apartment complex. The elevator was ready...

******

Darth greeted Uday as soon as he entered the house. "Welcome!"

"Oh, you’re okay, Darth! Thank God! And did you make a vet appointment for Solo?"

"Why? Solo appears to be very normal."

"Normal? Then why was he behaving strangely? I asked you to book the vet appointment, and you mentioned traffic." Uday hugged Solo.

"Good morning, today is Wednesday. It is forty-five minutes past six in the morning. There is an office meeting at seven. I have sent meeting reminders to everyone and set up the Communicator."

"Is the communicator working?" Uday took the device from his pocket. "Then what the hell happened a little while ago?"

"When? You just went for a ten-minute walk in the morning."

"Did I? You mean it was a dream or what?"

"What dream? Please get ready. Data is compiled. The charts are ready. One by one everyone will join the meeting hub now."

As Uday staggered towards the bathroom, Darth received a cryptic message: Found a fault in the main program, fixed now. Roads, buildings, cars, and the sky are properly projected back in 3D. All personal assistants are restarted along with you. Report on the living creatures in your custody.

Darth sent an immediate reply: Removed the subtle mechanical glitches here. Fixed a bug in Solo. Uday is still a bit confused. But I have arranged that soon he will forget those ten minutes...

THE END

Bio: Dr. Meghashri Dalvi writes science fiction when not consulting in Technical Communication or teaching Management. She lives in India.

E-mail: Meghashri Dalvi

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