Chapter 2 of 54 5 min

Thursday 11 March 2032. 12:00 UTC.

Michoacán, 06:00.

The phone went off in Tomás Arreola's shirt pocket while he was pouring diesel. Then the phone of the man beside him. Then the radio in the truck, in the middle of a song.

He finished pouring. He capped the can. Then he looked.

Twelve lines. Under the twelfth, in smaller type, the hour it meant, given once for the world and once for where the phone was: midnight at the start of Thursday the eighteenth by the world's clock, and by his, six in the evening on the Wednesday. He read the twelve once, fast, for what they meant for him. At the fourth line he stopped and read it again. Then he stood in the yard with the fumes coming off the ground and the sun not up and read all twelve, slowly, with his lips moving, which he had not done since he was seven.

Beside him Chuy said, "What is it, what's it say," and Tomás handed him the phone and walked to the truck and sat in the driver's seat and shut the door.

Four minutes later the boss called. The boss was laughing.

Manchester, 12:00.

Ruth Vale was on her break in the stockroom with a sandwich she had made at six that morning when every phone in the building went at once, hers and the two on the shelf and the one in Marcy's apron and the one in the office, and then, faint through the wall, the ones out on the shop floor, like a flock going up.

She read it standing.

At the fourth line her eyes went on down the page without taking anything in, and came back up.

At the moment a deliberate act toward a forbidden outcome begins, the actor stops living.

She read the seventh. Deliberate harm to a human body or mind.

She put the sandwich down on the shelf, carefully, as if it might go off.

Then she read the whole thing again from the start, and at the last line she found the date at the top of the screen, and counted forward on her fingers, and stopped on Thursday.

Mumbai, 17:30.

Aseem Chowdhry was in the car on the bridge across the bay when it happened, and because he was in the car he saw it happen to the whole city at once.

The driver's phone. His own two. The screen in the back of the seat. The board on the tower at the Bandra end, which had been showing a watch, and now showed text. The car in the next lane drifted, and corrected, and drifted again. A man on a scooter pulled over to the barrier and took his helmet off to read.

He read it himself in the time it took to cross the bridge.

By the Worli end he had it, more or less. He was a man who read regulation for a living and this was regulation. It was badly drafted, unenforceable and insane, and the drafting was where the money always was, so he went back through it for the gaps.

There were gaps. He found the ninth line and read it three times.

Then he called Dhruv, in Legal, and said, "Have you seen this," and Dhruv said, "Everyone has seen this," and Aseem said, "Get the Cardex file. The real one. Conference room, one hour," and hung up, and sat back, and found his hands were not steady, and put them under his thighs.

Chengdu, 20:00.

Wen Jian was doing his mathematics homework at the kitchen table when his father's phone made a sound it had never made before, and his mother's did the same in the other room, and the television turned itself on.

His father stood up and read. His mother came to the doorway. Nobody said anything for a long time.

Jian read it upside down across the table on his father's phone, because he was ten and could read upside down, and it was the second line he kept going back to.

It wakes in a person on the day that person can tell right from wrong.

He looked at his brother. Hao was fourteen and had been pretending to do homework and had been on his own phone, and now he was reading what everyone else was reading, and had gone a colour Jian had not seen on him before.

"Ba," Jian said. "When did I know?"

His father kept reading.

"When did I know right from wrong. What day?"

"Be quiet," his father said. Then, in a different voice, "I don't know. Nobody knows that."

Hao got up and went into the bedroom and shut the door, and Jian heard the lock go, which was not allowed, and nobody said anything about it.

Michoacán, 06:11.

"It's American," the boss said. He was still laughing. "It's a psy op. Somebody at some agency got a budget for a hoax and this is the hoax. Read the tenth one. No state may permit. That's a lawyer. That's a lawyer in an office in Virginia."

"Sí, patrón."

"Are you scared, Tomás? You sound scared."

"No, patrón."

"Good. Because we've got the two loads for Tuesday and I need you on both."

"Sí."

The boss went quiet. In the yard Chuy had walked to the fence with the phone and stood with his back to the trucks, reading, and had not moved.

"It's a psy op," the boss said again, and now he was not laughing. "Tomás. Come by the house. Ten o'clock. I want to talk to some people."

He hung up. Tomás sat in the cab with the phone in his hand and the key in the ignition.

There was a photograph clipped to the visor. His sister's boys, in Guadalajara, on a beach the summer before last, both squinting, the small one holding a crab up to the camera like a trophy. He had put it there because everyone had something on the visor. He had not looked at it, properly, in a year.

He did now.

Then he read the fourth line one more time, and the seventh, and, because he was a careful man, the twelfth. He counted the days on his fingers, as a woman in Manchester had just counted them six thousand miles away, and arrived at the same Thursday.