Markets slumped today following investor panic across broad index funds related to retail, mining, and recycling. Mass sell offs began at 3:23 pm, Eastern Standard Time, when St. Luke’s hospital confirmed the death of one Clark F. Harrison, colloquially known as ‘The Clock Man,’ or ‘The Greatest Enigma the World Has Ever Seen.’ Experts believe today’s market crash will continue into the following three days, whereupon it will briefly peak as retail investors expect Mr. Harrison to rise from the dead, and, instead of bringing grace and forgiveness to the world, bring green numbers to their portfolios. After his remaining dead, it is expected that markets will continue on a downward slope for at least the next month, and then once again correct upwards as the world’s industries retool themselves to be productive.
Yes, today was a bad day for the world and investing in general. The existence of Mr. Harrison is said to have accounted for a full two percent of metal extraction worldwide, and a full one hundred percent of anomalous material creation.
I would assume that everyone knows about Mr. Harrison. After all, it is not every day that the world finds itself enriched by something so strange. But this slump was to be expected. At the age of seventy-three and with critical levels of hypertension and artery clogging, most of the world’s industries have put into place contingency plans in the case of the miraculous man’s demise. Congress has once again been discussing mining the various near Earth asteroids which are rich in all the elements Mr. Harrison’s being willed into existence. Honestly, if we think about it a little, we can think of Mr. Harrison and his shell company Harrsion Ltd as crutches humanity’s economy was using to get through its ups and downs. With his inevitable demise, and our growing need, perhaps innovation will once more hit the market and we’ll experience returns unlike those we have seen for most of lives (at least all of my life, though I am nowhere near as old as Mr. Harrison was).
So I have hope for a long term bull run after this initial slope. But…
But it would do us all a lot of good to just remind ourselves how weird this entire thing is, right? I mean, Clark was just a guy. You know, like a person. A torso, a head, some legs. He wore clothing, ate food. And besides being a little entrepreneurial, he had very few virtues to speak of. Crass, rude, unbearably sexist… and he earned vast sums of wealth, propped up entire industries by a quirk of his existence that not one single soul understands to this day. Why, I think half the population expects that the clocks will still marvelously appear below the grave we shove his corpse into. They think that their investments won’t sour, and yet…
Yet it reminds me how nonsensical all of this is. I mean, we were literally hedging on divine power here. Sure, sure, there was a lot of calculus that went into it whenever Harrison Ltd got off the ground. It was a fairly ingenious move to get the guy to start taking his sleep in little micro bursts. It was even more ingenious to build the series of floorboard warehouses outside of Fresno that they’d cycle the man through. But those weren’t Mr. Harrison’s ideas. No, they were the ideas of someone who wasn’t afflicted by spontaneuosly appearing clocks. They were the thoughts of someone who saw the man as a walking stack of cash, and made sure, through decades of filthy, stupid aggrandizement, that he would not, and could not ever be anything besides that.
But it was never the people. The people never concerned me. It never really concerned anyone who really had an eye on the thing. Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad that I spent the majority of my first few paychecks out of college to invest in the fledgling Harrison Ltd, but, you know… you know it was too weird, right? To have just hundreds, thousands upon millions of clocks just… EXIST, right? Right? I’m not the crazy one here, am I? Even though such a thing became integral to our society, even if clock disassembler became a mainstream profession, the weirdness rots through the entire tree.
What was the cause? Of any of it, right? I mean…
We’re talking about an astronomical amount of clocks. By the time of his death, it will have been well over 158 billion. That’s almost twenty clocks for every person walking around this earth today. That’s a number so big we can’t even comprehend it, not really. But we can think about everyone getting twenty clocks, right? We can picture their rooms and see their shelves just completely lined with the time-telling instruments. Many of us have seen the gigantic garbage heaps they keep in Sierra Leone, full to the brim and above with the rotten husks of clocks that nobody cared to purchase. There were so many clocks just materialized out of thin air that astronomers noted a slight change in the orbit patterns of many celestial objects in the solar system. The entire earth got heavier. Enough for us to notice. Ridiculous.
And all these things? Just whisked out of the air. They ran all kinds of tests on it. Of course they did. The whole scenario was freaky enough that it would make you wet your pants if you scratched the surface. Mass, as we understand it, does not materialize out of thin air. And, even if it did, it would not materialize in any one spot with any perceivable regularity, let alone in a repeating form. All we knew. Just shattered every time Mr. Harrison closed his eyes to sleep.
I wonder if they’ll dissect his corpse. Which party will win, eh? The ones who think it paramount that we attempt to use his body to service the economy, or those who are afraid of the dark? Probably the former. They’ll try all sorts of ways to get his corpse walking. Just to get him to open his eyes and close them once again. They’ll think that they can trick whatever force it was that chained itself to him, make it think that he’s falling asleep once more. Just to get those clocks. Just to find that delicious copper, that magnificent zinc. They’ll try electricity, cloning, and even the mythical rites of zombification. And who knows? Maybe it’ll work. Maybe the market will recover fully, and this thing that is unexplained will forever remain as such. Why should I be particularly scared about it anyway? After all, behind every question lies another question. We can measure space down to the smallest possible length, and then we can ask, say, why is the Planck length that size? And then we can simply ask why to the next explanation. Then the next. Then the next. And never find the end.
But even still… I’m scared. Yes, I am partially scared because a good deal of my retirement savings has been temporarily wiped out by the passing of a man I never knew. I’m stressed. I’ll be missing a couple of weekends here and there to pick up a side gig or three. At least for a little bit. And yet…
And yet, here it was. Here it is. This thing. This thing that gave our economy the equivalent of a stout drink of coffee. And this thing which ruined, completely ruined a man’s life, stilted our ingenuity, trashed several African countries, increased global wealth inequality, and engendered a stout fear of ticking noises in millions of people… this is the thing that we trusted our livelihoods in, that we will continue to keep trusting because we can think of no easier way.
It did ruin his life. Completely. I was uncharitable in my previous characterization of the man. Of course he was a crab. Of course he was full of spite. For the entire second half of his life, he was permanently drugged, slipping in and out of sleep with the regularity of, well, the ticking of a clock. Even that would have made existence a waking nightmare. Imagine never being awake for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Sure, sure, during those fifteen minutes you effectively have whatever you want. The world’s best steak? Sure. Dozens of supermodels throwing themselves at your treasure? Of course. Songs and poems written about your greatness? Well, if you’re a nerd, sure. Anything and everything can be bought with wealth of that scope. But not peace.
Mr. Harrison was a slave. Of course, in official terms, he was not. He was the owner, after all, of the company of the same name. The company that would create said warehouses with enough space in the ‘floorboards’ to store millions of mysteriously appearing clocks. He was entitled to wealth, and, it would seem to the unintelligent, power. With the billions of dollars held under his name, he could have hired entire mercenary companies to do his bidding. And yet, even though he was the one with the money, the guns he would have trained on the rest of the world to exact vengeance for his obscene life were instead levied against him.
Well, they never were physically aimed at him. But we all know the truth. Mr. Harrison, though one of the wealthiest men in the world, could not stop the path his life had placed him if he had tried. Because money, of course, is ludicrous. I mean, come on. The man just died and the market’s crashed. Has the world lost any resources? No. Of course not. The amount of mass on the planet has simply stopped increasing. The present is the same. Copper and zinc may be found another way, if, indeed, we need to ever find them at all. And even though thousands of people will have to retrain into different jobs, they might find themselves richer for the…
Okay, yeah, that is nonsense. But come on. We all know what I mean when I say that Mr. Harrison was a slave. Although the money was in his name, it was not his will, his mind, or even his body that ran the company. It was the company that did that. There were people there, yes, but there was no human decision. Not really. The money made the decisions for itself. If it was more profitable that Mr. Harrison be shuttled around by high speed rail to his next sleep location, then dagnabbit he was going to be shot around on high speed rail, whether he wanted to leave Fresno or not. If he ever wanted to leave the warehouse network for, say… I dunno, like Thanksgiving or something, we all know that he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. He would make less money by that. And the money was it. It was it. It was it.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
One wonders whether the force that attached itself to Mr. Harrison will seek out a new host. So many questions. They can never be answered. What was special about Mr. Harrison to this inexplicable other? What was special about him sleeping? Why clocks? Why, why, why?
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I don’t expect any of you will know. But I hate it. I hate the entire dynamic. I hate that we allowed it to be as such. It almost feels… sacrilegious. But I’m not sure what God we were offending by the enterprise.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
We were offending ourselves. Each and every other person on the planet. Our families, our friends, our ancestors, and the people who are to come.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The clock I see is going to get smashed, I’ll tell you that.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
