The First Clues

The First Clues

In the last week of June in the year 2008, I began to notice several things that struck me as somewhat unusual. The nature of these disturbances in my day-to-day life was easily disregarded, yet something inside me knew better than to gloss it all over.

It started with my cellular phone. When scheduling reminders for myself with the calendar function in my Finnish Nokia telephone as I always did, I noticed a few peculiar quirks with each passing day. I wasn’t sure when exactly it began to do this, but my first red flag began waving around the beginning of July, roughly two weeks before I began writing this. I discovered that my phone began consistently reverting back to the date of January 3^rd, 2005.

Over the next several days, my phone ceased showing me any dates before January 3^rd, 2005, and any dates after January 6^th, 2005. These four days seemed to me to be a curious choice by my phone’s software.

This became problematic, because I found myself having to scroll forward towards the correct date, three years and six months later. I found it not only odd, but frustrating how my phone began insisting out of nowhere that the current date was over three years ago. This struck me as strange indeed, but inconvenient more than anything else.

The next thing that changed was even more peculiar. I began to notice a rather alarming deviance whenever I set my phone’s clock alarm each night for 6:00 AM the next morning. My phone had informed me on the clock control screen that the current time zone was set to Abu Dhabi, a city in the United Arab Emirates. Although not quite sure how this happened, I speculated at the time that my old phone was finally kicking the bucket one transistor at a time. My skepticism and tendency to lean on logic was what guided my thoughts at this time, subtly asserting me that this was all just a stroke of bad luck. It was about time I got myself a new phone anyway.

After all, it was a boxy-looking Nokia 6682, worn around the edges from too many clumsy drops. The buttons were eroding, the oil from my fingers finally having rubbed most of the recognition away from the number buttons. Now, after several years of faithful service my phone decided to go mental. Three years ago? Abu Dhabi? What’s next, the battery sprouting legs and escaping from the back panel?

Not exactly. What I discovered soon afterwards was much more disturbing.

Next Chapter -- The First Stages of Research