Ast climbed into the back, his hand rummaged around under the drivers seat but found nothing other than the feeling of dust and faded receipts from a decade or more prior, the illumination of his phone confirmed it. He patted his pockets for the eighth time since leaving work and felt no keys but knew he must of had them to enter his car. He decided to give up and opened the driver's door to lock it from the inside where he found them sitting on his front seat, "cunt fuck" he said to himself in a calm tone, the same he would use if answering an unrecognised telephone number.

None of the lights down the path to his apartment building had been working for over three years but if someone had of asked him he would have guessed they were last working a year ago, he wondered if he cared, he wondered if he should care, he wondered if anyone cared. He had never met the building owner and only spoken to them twice over the phone in the past nine years that he had been here. Surely other people spoke to him though, why don't they tell him to replace the bulbs? he thought as he entered the code on the outer door and wondered the point of it, any number of people might know this pin and each apartment has their own lock anyway, perhaps the buttons can read and record fingerprints he unsuccessfully tried to think of another explanation as he stepped inside the shared hallway. The sparse pink and teal LEDs lit the hallway just enough to see the outlines of the barren walls, his apartment was the rear unit on the left. As he walked down the hallway he fixated his gaze blankly at the door to a room ahead of him, he had never known what the room was for, in one of his relatively wilder moments he had tried to open it only to find it locked. He had thought about this room every time he returned home but never had any interesting ideas about it, he now assumed it was just a storage closet for the building owner, likely containing bulbs & tools and other unexciting things but he would still think about it everytime he came home and wonder the same unresolved ideas again and again.

His door was on the teal side labelled with a B, he held his palm up to the scanner and the lock clicked open first try for once, he wondered how it worked, almost a decade ago he had spent a good half day researching the chip before accepting it for his job and at that time had felt like he adequately understood the technology behind it but by now almost the entirety of that understanding had faded, the knowledge providing no material advantages to his life during the time he had remembered it. He still remembered that it had a unique frequency and wondered if people could brute force every frequency and get inside, he had forgotten how many unique frequencies there were and had no clue how quickly somebody could try a new one, he decided he should set it to require a physical key too, I'll look into it later he thought to himself.

The door shut on its own behind him but he pushed it the final step out of habit and paranoia, he checked his relatively outdated phone for the third time since he left his car thinking he may have missed a beep for a message but all it said was 8:52pm, a piece of knowledge that was completely unimportant to him, however what was important was that there were still no messages from her. He thought about her as he moved to his bedroom instinctively grabbing a bottle on the way, he wondered why she hadn't messaged, perhaps she was asleep, perhaps she hated him. He imagined a fantasy to explain her silence where he had killed her and she was in the trunk of his car waiting to be disposed of, he imagined her begging for a way to revert the clock in her final moments and how he would take pride in having such conviction to follow it through, how it made him feel so real, he imagined how he would have to carry her inside and how difficult it might be to hide her, he imagined the best blanket to wrap her up in and the best time to do it and how he would dispose of her body. He felt shame for this, less so the thought of killing her but more so shame for his need to create complex delusions to escape from the reality that his day day to day struggles were of perfectly ordinary circumstances, he felt shame for not living up to his younger self's belief that he would be able to confidently accept reality and all its horrors by his age. He settled with the conclusion that she hadn't messaged him because she was testing to see if he liked her enough to message a 3rd time without a return response. He decided she was worth this test and that he would message her, he thought of an interesting story from his day to tell her but decided against it, I cant try too hard he thought and decided a simple "Hi" should do it, enough to pass her test but only just enough so she doesn't feel too rewarded by what he considered to be disgusting manipulation, hoping it would make her less likely to do it again. A thought subconsciously crossed his mind without him even noticing it but it caused him to change his behaviour regardless, he recalled an online discussion that he had read years prior where a stranger was wanting relationship advice and the top response said something along the lines of 'messaging 2 times is the limit, if they don't respond after that then they aren't interested'. On an intellectual level he knew situations weren't as black and white as these kids half his age on the internet made them out to be but on the subconscious level where this thought was occurring he was more accepting of such rules, feeling like it must be something he agreed with if it was meaningful enough to remember. He decided against messaging her without really knowing why, he threw his phone down on his bed aggressively but it didn't ease his rage over the perceived unrequited passion he felt then sat down at his computer.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

The screen told him that it was the 11th of November 2031, a fact unwelcome to him for no real reason other than it being unsolicited, he could have recalled the date if he was tested but it wasn't something at the forefront of his consciousness and he preferred to keep it that way believing it would leave more brain power available for what he considered actually mattered. With no idea of what he was going to do in his few short hours of freedom he decided that he may as well find a way to alter this welcome screen to hide this unsolicited information. This was pre-emptive action for a theoretical future self, thinking that one day he may want to lose all track of time. He tried to think of possible life situations that he could be in where he would hate to see the date, what sort of mentality would he have to reach. He imagined being terminally ill, in complete denial of reality and wanting to hide from any and all objective facts, he imagined having his heart broken so badly that simply seeing a date reminded him that he was now existing in a time after her or maybe just dates popping up from time to time that had some significance in his previous relationship, he imagined being so old and full of regret that he couldn't deal with the shame of how he let it come to this date.

These scenarios all seemed somewhat plausible to him and therefore worthy of avoiding which strengthened his conviction to remedy this for the sake of a hypothetical future self. Opening his web browser took a little longer than expected and he was met with a familiar but distant home page, a home page filled with more unsolicited facts about the world, previously he had altered this homepage to be more simplistic but every few months it would revert after an update. This became a more pressing issue needing to be resolved and he quickly forgot about the date on the welcome screen, deciding he would look for an alternative browser that wouldn't be constantly telling him things, the level of possible influence this homepage gave the creators of the browser over his life was less acceptable to him than the level of influence a date could have over him. His eyes inadvertently glanced over this homescreen and he saw a news article saying the USA was testing a new form of nuclear weapon, called a 1to11 bomb, these numbers were significant to his past and thus caught his eye. He briefly read over the one paragraph summary, he didn't fully understand it but it seemed to him that instead of fuel being ignited itself, each unit of reactant the bomb contained would disperse and strip eleven units of hydrogen isotopes in the atmosphere before igniting thus creating a roughly elevenfold increase from previous destructive capabilities, 'a monumental step towards establishing a peaceful world order' the website called it but he didn't see who they were quoting, whether it was the author or someone accepted as important. War is peace was a line that crossed his mind and provided him with a sense of smug satisfaction as if he was the only one who could see through the doublespeak due to his self perceived enlightenment from having read a couple of generic novels in his youth.

He thought about the significance of this development, war had been escalating for as long as he had remembered and now this, he thought about the consequences but then realised how much he had been manipulated into thinking about this and refused to think about it any longer despite his personal interest in the topic. He wondered if his browser had been paid to do an update right now in order to make sure as many people saw this news and started thinking about what seemed to be an ever looming nuclear war, he became convinced it was intentional and got mad that people were selling his attention without his consent. He looked up the creator of his browser and found connections to all sorts of conglomerates and renewed his conviction to find an alternative.

He spent the next two hours researching browsers in silence and reading discussions about them between people before settling on one called Zenith, overall Zenith was no better than his current browser but it provided customisation of its home page which solved his issue, in the end he spent his whole night of freedom on nothing of note except finding a way to shield himself from possible facts or opinions in the future. The alcohol was now doing its job and had made him sleepy and at peace enough to head to bed, he checked his phone for the 20th time that hour, it was coincidentally 10:59pm, he thought about telling her about this coincidence, of the bomb, how the name meant a lot to him and how he happened to check the time at 10:59 right before bed but he ended up just having an imaginary conversation with her instead. This continued sporadically into the early hours, just as he would relax and would be approaching sleep he would think of something new he had to tell imaginary her about his day and his views on the world. It was 00:57 the last time he checked his phone.