Prologue: The Day Without Time
ON MARCH 14th, at exactly 1:59 in the afternoon, the world stopped.
Flags snapping happily in the breeze now hung impossibly still like crumpled paper. Lightning stretched from ground to cloud like a rope of light. Airplanes hung suspended in the skies, untroubled by gravity.
People froze into curious living mannequins. A thousand million conversations stopped in mid-sentence, half a thousand million mouths still full of words.
There was no roar of planes or cars or computers or phones or televisions. The everyday frantic din, the warp and woof of the world was muffled as if with some cosmic cotton.
On March 14th at exactly 1:59 in the afternoon, the world stopped. That is to say, except for a fewpeople …