The Time Collector

The first time he woke up at half-past two in the morning, he thought it was just a coincidence. Outside the window, the city slumbered in a thin halo of light, neon signs like dying stars flickering their last weary colors. He glanced at the digital clock on the bedside table; the red numerals "02:30" were like a brand, clearly seared onto his retinas. Thirsty, he thought, then got up for a glass of water, lay back down, and quickly fell asleep again.

The second time happened two days later. Same time, same numerals, same feeling—a peculiar clarity not born of physical need, but utterly inexplicable. This time, he wasn't thirsty, just stared blankly at the ceiling. There were faint water stains left by the air conditioning pipes, like a blurry map leading somewhere he could never reach. He started to feel something was amiss, but drowsiness soon surged back like a tide, sweeping him away.

The third time, the fourth... When he opened his eyes precisely at 2:30 AM for the fifth time in a week, fear began to coil around his heart like vines. This was no longer coincidence, but a pattern, a law he couldn't understand, let alone control. The "02:30" on the digital clock was no longer just the time; it had become a symbol, a judge, or a cold warning. He tried many methods: drinking milk before bed, listening to soothing music, even taking sleeping pills. But no matter when he fell asleep, no matter how potent the medication, he would always wake at that exact moment, as if an irremovable alarm clock had been implanted inside him, its precision appalling.

His life began to crumble around this point in time. During the day, he wandered the office like a phantom, the words on documents twisting and distorting, colleagues' conversations sounding as if through thick glass. His fatigue wasn't physical, but stemmed from the depths of his soul, from the anticipatory dread of the inevitable 2:30 AM. He sought help from a doctor, who casually diagnosed him with "neurasthenia" and "excessive stress," prescribing some useless pills. He wanted to confide in friends, but the words died on his lips; he found he couldn't describe the absurdity—"I always wake up at 2:30 AM." It sounded so mundane, almost ridiculous. Who would believe that behind it lay a force capable of destroying a person?

He began to observe. If escape was impossible, then face it. Waking again at 2:30 AM, he no longer tried to fall back asleep but sat up, quietly observing the room. Everything was the same as during the day, yet somehow completely different. The furniture's shadows were stretched and distorted in the faint light, as if possessing lives of their own. An indescribable stillness filled the air—not peace, but a vast silence holding its breath. He walked to the window and looked down at the sleeping city. The streets were empty, only streetlights futilely illuminating the void.

It was then he noticed some minute anomalies. A window in the building opposite, always lit with the same faint yellow glow whenever he woke, like an ever-open eye. And the trash can downstairs, never seen during the day, always appeared in the same spot at this time, its bin unreasonably clean. At first, he dismissed them as coincidence, hallucinations born of fatigue and fear. But as his observations accumulated, these details became clearer, pointing towards something with an undeniable sense of direction.

He began to suspect that 2:30 AM was not a random point in time, but the moment some kind of "event" occurred. But what event? Who was manipulating all this? He felt like a lab rat placed in a vast, invisible experimental apparatus, and the red "02:30" was the signal for the experiment to begin.

One night, he decided to resist. He didn't sleep, keeping his eyes open, waiting. He sat in the darkness, heart pounding violently, as if trying to escape its rib cage. The moment the clock ticked from "02:29" to "02:30," he felt a slight dizziness, as if the air in the room had been momentarily vacuumed out. He stared intently at the door, hoping to see or hear something. But nothing happened. Absolute silence.

However, when he woke the next morning to find himself lying in bed, sunlight already filtering through the curtains, he knew he had failed again. He had lost the memory of the time between 2:30 AM and morning, as if that period had been precisely excised. What made his blood run cold was discovering something on his bedside table—a small, smooth, black metal disc, cold to the touch, bearing no markings. Where had it come from?

He started searching online, trying to find similar cases or records of temporal anomalies. He trawled through countless forums, blogs, even obscure websites dedicated to mysticism and fringe science. He read theories about time rifts, parallel universes, even alien observers. Among them, an anonymous post caught his attention. The poster claimed to be an "observer of time fragments" and described a phenomenon called "Time Collection"—certain unknown entities, for incomprehensible reasons, "collect" specific fragments of time from countless individuals at specific moments, much like collecting butterfly specimens. For the individuals, these collected fragments might manifest as a sudden inexplicable awakening, a brief lapse in attention, or a period of blank memory.

This absurd theory, however, struck him like a key, instantly unlocking the tightly shut door of fear in his heart. He was the specimen. 2:30 AM was the moment he was "collected." That black metal disc, perhaps a tool accidentally left behind during the collection? Or, was it a marker?

He no longer tried to resist, nor did he seek help anymore. He accepted this reality, just as he accepted the inevitability of death. He became a person living in two worlds. By day, he remained the exhausted, taciturn employee, striving to maintain the facade of a normal life. But deep down, he knew he belonged to 2:30 AM. At that moment, he was no longer just himself, but one item in a vast, cold, unimaginable collection.

Sometimes, waking at 2:30 AM, he would pick up the black disc, rubbing it between his fingers. He imagined countless others like him, waking from their sleep at the same instant, staring blankly into the darkness. They might be in different cities, different countries, speaking different languages, but at this precise moment, they were all touched by an invisible force, cataloged in the same mysterious archive.

This thought brought no comfort, only a deeper loneliness and absurdity. He was like the man dreaming he was a butterfly in Borges' writing, or K in Kafka's Castle, always approaching, yet never arriving at the truth. The meaning of his existence, it seemed, was simply to wake up at 2:30 AM, to become a collector's item for the Time Collector.

The city still sleeps every night, the neon lights still flicker. And he will continue to wake punctually every morning at half-past two, awaiting that brief, extracted moment, like a dutiful specimen in a museum no one could understand, silently displaying the unsolvable riddle of his own existence. The red numerals "02:30" are no longer a mark of time, but the code of his fate, the entrance to an infinitely looping maze.