Clickable Time

 

Seoul had begun to look like a document.
The wall clock’s “07:42” came underlined; the subway board’s “Arrives in 3 min” showed a tooltip on hover. Receipts, crosswalk signals, the casual “just a sec” from someone’s mouth—every time became a link. People tapped with a fingertip or a glance and were carried to the place of that time. No one looked surprised.

I worked night shift at the Mapo Bridge Emotion Customs, moonlighting as an unbadged Link Safety Officer. The rules were simple:

1. You may click a time only if you said it or heard it.
2. To click someone else’s time, you need shared time—a group approval.
3. Clicking now is forbidden. If you shake “now,” the city gets seasick.

The first call came at 4:10 a.m. A report that 00:00 was hovering over the railing. Midnight links usually opened on New Year’s; a midsummer midnight meant somebody’s cut edge.

I leaned into the wind. On the river skin, a thin 00:00 glowed. The frame was paper-thin; in the center a small mote blinked. Someone’s bookmark.
Instead of the manual I pulled a leaf from my pocket—one from the Translation Plant—and dampened it with my tongue. When I brushed the link, the veins whispered,
“He clicked ‘now’ and got thrown out.”
Who?

Footsteps behind me. A woman in a gray coat, fist clenched around wet paper, stared at the same ripple.
“I clicked the wrong thing,” she said.
“What did you click?”
“My son’s live interview time on the news. ‘Tonight at 00:00.’ I thought that meant it was now.”

I could see slender links sprout in the air around her words: 23:58, 23:59, 00:00. Her finger hovered over the sharpest link—00:00—but rule 3 cut across us. Now is unclickable.

“We can still go to your son’s time,” I said. “I don’t have the authority alone, but we can open shared time.”

We began a small rite on the bridge. The Bell of Shared Time hangs in Seoul Station’s ceiling, but after the latest Shamanic OS update, you can open a seven-minute pop-up anywhere. I toggled “Shared Time—7 min” on my phone. A blank circle bloomed; she placed her palm over mine.

The link dilated. The frame of 00:00 rippled outward and unrolled the previous night of the river. We stepped. Our ankles felt damp, but our shoes stayed dry. Not space, exactly—a sentence we were crossing.

Beneath the bridge, last night’s city was quiet. She parted her lips.
“My son was a reporter and I… I always waited for interviews to start. Today I pressed first.”
“Right now we’re in yesterday,” I said.
“Then… yesterday’s now?”

We’d made the same joke. She smiled at last. The link steadied. Far off, headlights rolled like beads along the road. Between them, a small alert rose: Ancestral Rites Streaming.
Exit Advertiser—riverside lesson, 23:55.
I left it on. This city pins time with relationships. A soft stray kindness turns into a sign.

“Where is your son’s 00:00 anchored?”
“A tiny study room in Jeong-dong. He started the live from there.”
To reach it we had to hop by minutes. We clicked 23:58, then 23:59, and just before midnight we held our breath and tapped together. The shared circle closed; a small room’s air wrapped us.

No one was inside. The laptop screen was frozen on ‘Starting now’. The city was literal: now is forbidden; the screen’s “now” was also unclickable.
She unfolded a chair and sat. Her eyes pinned a minute number in the corner: 00:00:13.
“If I click that…?”
“You can. It’s thirteen seconds ago, not now.”

She touched the number. The air swelled by thirteen seconds. The brush of a coat sleeve, shoe rubber meeting mat without sound, the faint move of a trackpad. Then he was there—not on the screen, but in the room’s air, like a scent arriving late.

He didn’t see us. He almost pressed “Start now,” then paused and breathed twice.
“Just a second,” he said.

As the words hung there, “Just a second” gained an underline. These days anything could turn link.
She tapped it. The room slowed. He looked up at the ceiling as if to anchor himself, opened the contact with his mother’s name, and closed it again. That was all. The second ended. He went live. We stayed thirteen silent seconds longer and stepped out.

Back on the bridge, something had attached itself to her face. Not “now,” but “here, at last.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“I only followed the rules.”
“Could we break just one more?”
“Which one?”
“Is there a way to open now without clicking it?”

I hesitated. Rule 3 prevents nausea. But I knew about a hidden white button in the Personal Clock Repair shop under Seoul Station: a patch that flips Stay into Open. The watchmaker had shown me before release.

“Set shared time to zero minutes,” I said.
“Zero-minute shared time?”
“Instead of enlarging an overlap, you stretch the instant before overlap so thin it becomes a corridor. Then ‘now’ isn’t a target; it’s a passage.”

We brought up the circle again. This time I broke the “7” and chose “0.” No circle appeared; the air stretched clear. She lifted her hand.

“Now.”

Nothing was pressed, but we both knew. Now happens when we say it together.

She smiled, quietly.
“Then I’ll click thirteen seconds of not yet every day. Practice,” she said.
“Good practice.”
“And you? Where do you spend your clicks?”
Instead of an answer I showed her a card from my pocket—a sliver from the Shadow Printer. It had caught the moment I moved slowly in that Jeong-dong room. My hand was in the image, small, labeled Transit Narrator (provisional).
“I spend them on the gap between people and devices,” I said.

She pressed the shadow with a fingertip, amused.
“Then click one more thing for me.”
“What?”
“Our tomorrow.”

Our tomorrow. The phrase underlined itself. Our became the anchor; tomorrow unfolded like a map. Calendar numbers floated over the river like glass bridges. We clicked nothing and simply walked across. A non-clicking click. Motion without seasickness.

On the far bank a paper poster on the railing fluttered.
Closing-Out Sale on Labor.
Relationships Begin.
The son must have printed new ones. She peeled one carefully and tucked it into her bag.

That afternoon I was called to Seoul Station. The Bell of Shared Time had broken. Thousands of personal clocks under the dome were bouncing too hard, unable to reference each other. I glanced at the watchmaker.

“You allowed zero-minute mode,” he said.
“I did.”
“No nausea?”
“None. But it required a confession.”

He smiled.
“Here’s mine: the real way to open ‘now’ isn’t a button. It’s speaking together. The city’s been learning that for a while.”
“Why tell me only now?”
“Because people remember what they press themselves.”

That night I planted a seed from the Translation Plant on my windowsill. On the soil I wrote the line we’d learned:

You can’t click now.
But you can open it.

And at dawn the next day, 00:00 rose over the river again. This time no one got seasick. We didn’t steal anyone’s midnight. We stepped from each of our midnights into each other’s now. Time turned into a sentence, the sentence into a link, and the link—finally—into the way people call each other.