"Excuse me, miss," the man said, tapping Jasmine very lightly on the shoulder, "but do you remember the time?" She registered the odd phrasing, and she couldn't help turning it over in her head as she instinctively looked down at her smart watch. It sounded vaguely foreign, like he knew the idiom in a different language and was just doing his best to express it in English. She tapped the home button on her watch, still mulling the phrase while she looked for the right app.
It took her a moment or two of swiping her finger across the screen, but she found it. Ironically enough, most of the time she did forget it was on there-Corrine suggested she download it originally, but she almost never looked at it. Usually the regular clock worked just fine. But sometimes... "Yes," she said mechanically, watching the display as it melted into an abstract display of rotating circles. "I do remember the time."
She probably wouldn't have even tried it if it hadn't been free. Corrine had been absolutely nuts about it, though, and she figured she could always delete it if it didn't do anything. 'It's a clock,' she remembered Corrine enthusing while they waited for the app to download, 'but it's also, like...one of those brain training games? The ones they advertise on television? You have to work out this weird little puzzle to figure out what time it is.'
For a moment, Jasmine really wasn't sure if she did know. There was a trick to it, she remembered. Something about the way the circles moved, and the colors they displayed as they overlapped, and the little squiggly patterns that looked almost like words...she must not have looked very confident, because the strange man prompted her again for a response. "And what time is it?" he asked.
Jasmine let her eyes go unfocused, simply allowing her stare to become vacant and fixed as the circles moved and danced. That was it. She remembered now. The trick was to stop trying to figure it out at all, and just let your unconscious mind arrive at the solution on its own. That was how the app trained her brain. "Time to obey," she whispered softly, her mouth spreading into a dreamy smile.
"That's right," the man said. "It's time to obey. Come with me, please." He took her arm in his, almost a courtly gesture, and Jasmine allowed it to happen. It meant that she could keep staring at the watch. The whirling, dancing circles looked quite pretty, really; Jasmine couldn't understand why she didn't look at them more often. She couldn't think of the last time she'd opened this app.
She really couldn't, she realized. Every time she tried to think about it, her mind seemed to simply elide the experience. When she tried to focus on the memory, it simply slipped past her and left her thinking of something that happened before that, or after that, or...or just the circles. The circles really did look so pretty. Jasmine was glad the stranger was guiding their walk, because she wasn't even looking where they were going.
She remembered the first time she opened the app, of course, because Corrine seemed so happy she was willing to give it a try. Corrine walked her through all the steps of installing it, and guided her through figuring out the trick to the color puzzle. It felt so nice, having a friend there to explain it all in measured, even tones. It steadied Jasmine and kept her from feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of it all. Everything seemed so simple when Corrine explained it to her.
And then Corrine helped her create a profile. It seemed absurdly detailed; they wanted all sorts of information about her, age and name and measurements and all sorts of things she normally only told to lovers. But Jasmine filled it out. It would all help train her brain. She even turned on location monitoring, so that the app constantly knew where she was. It seemed like a lot of work, but Jasmine knew after only a few minutes that her brain needed a lot of training.
