2:17

  Written by: Quincy Blakely

  CHAPTER 2: Society

  January 22rd, 2026

  10:13:42 a.m.

  I lied in bed for hours, shocked, maybe almost mortified at my revelation, wondering exactly what this means from a logical standpoint. Would I never physically age? Will my mental growth be halted too? I’d imagine I wouldn’t have to go to school, since it doesn’t matter anymore anyway. But after hours of lying there, thinking about possibilities of what could happen and what I should do, but I finally came to a conclusion to just, do it.

  I walk through the city streets. I imagine people are at work and at school right now, so I wouldn’t imagine finding anyone that could help me out here, but I decide to try anyway. I look around. The city streets are littered with filth, and the sky is a depressing grey, just like yesterday, and just like how it’s been the past 2 days. Or...I suppose I can’t say past now. More like present. The streets are near empty, the occasional bum passing by every now and then, but I try my best to not make eye contact. But, then I see someone holding up a sign, standing by a street light. They don’t look poor, they honestly look pretty middle class. Maybe a protester or something? There’s so much to protest about these days anyhow. I walk up to her, trying to nonchalantly peep her and the sign.

  She’s a short girl, maybe 5’1. She has long, messy, shoulder length black hair, along with dark brown eyes. Something about her expression portrays something of sadness or emptiness. Nothing unusual about her character or the situation, except maybe the fact I might be pretty openly eyeballing her. But, I look up at her sign.

  “Anyone getting a weird sense of Deja Vu? It feels as if the 22nd has happened multiple times by now.”

  I stop in my tracks. So there is others. I had disregarded that other guy, for some reason, but this girl, she knows too. I stare up at her sign, in a daze. She pokes me in the chest.

  “Earth to random street dude~ Something catch your eye?”

  I look back down at her and respond. “Y-yeah, the sign, what else...?”

  She sighs as she starts to put the sign down on the ground. “No need to be rude. So you went through it too, or are you just confused? If you’re just confused, then move along, cuz’ I’m sick of trying to explain to people and getting called a nutjob.”

  “N-no, I get it. I was awake then. It was like, a super trippy dream, but it was real, and it hurt like hell too.”

  “Yeah totally! I thought I had finally lost my mind or somethin’...”

  “Yeah, but...isn’t your sign kind of, I don’t know...vague? Aren’t you trying to like spread awareness of what’s happening?”

  She sighs, as if I said something stupid, making me feel even more awkward than I normally do. “No dummy. Didn’t I tell you I didn’t wanna’ have to explain this to anyone? Only the TRULY intelligent folk need to hear what I speak.”

  “This is about intelligence? I thought it was about finding people who know what’s going on?”

  “So why’d you ask that other question if you clearly understand what I’m doing?”

  And awkward silence falls on us both.

  The girl sighs, once again. It seems I’m a very exhausting person. “A boy like you skipping school, huh? It feels like if someone like you were to skip, you’d be hiding in your room now, not being outside trying at this pathetic attempt at conversation~ What’s your name? Let’s start there, awkward boy.”

  “Aaron.”

  “Fitting name. I’m Hikari. So, what my plan was here, is that I could attract people who had experienced the same thing as I had, then we could brainstorm on what to do. How to raise awareness or more simply, figure out what it is and stop it.” As she speaks, she swings and spins around on the light post in a circle. She looks all fun and playful or whatever, but her face is a lot more neutral if anything.

  “Cool plan. Unlucky for you though, I’m not that smart or creative.”

  “Well it looks like you’re gonna’ have to put that crappy brain to use, because who else is gonna’ help if you don’t? So pull your head outta’ your ass and let’s get to brainstorming.” She says, slowing her spinning.

  “O-okay...”

  We both stand there for a moment, not entirely sure what the other person is thinking, or if they’re thinking at all. Then, my stomach lets out a loud grumbling sound.

  “I think better over food...”

  “Listen, Aaron, ya’ little freeloader, if you’re hungry, you should’ve eaten before coming outside. I’m not gonna coddle you...

  Her stomach, convieniently rumbles.

  “I’m a big fan of Denny’s.” I say with a slight smirk.

  “Jackass...”

  We walk in silence. I take in the state of our surroundings at the moment. Everything’s still the same.

  Something that intrigues me though is the state of the weather and more...important factors of day to day life. Will the weather always stay the same? Because even though I don’t look up much,

  If I were to decide to look up,

  I’d see a sky that’s as depressing as life.

  We head into the Denny’s. It’s average as ever, but that’s what I enjoy about it. I could wake up, roll out of bed, and go straight to Denny’s, but just because it’s Denny’s, I don’t feel like I’d be judged. It’s comforting. Me and Hikari sit at a booth. We sit in silence for a moment. Not an awkward silence, but the kind of silence you can only have when you’re comfortable with someone.

  “Who thinks of their favorite restaurant and comes up with Denny’s?” Hikari says with a cocky smirk.

  “It’s consistent.”

  “Yeah. Consistently average.”

  “It’s comfortable.” I say as I look around. Everyone in here looks just normal, like this is just any other day. Even if there’s only like 10 people in here including us, it makes me wonder what the criteria is of knowing about the resets or not.

  I say quietly, “Notice...how no one else looks… off?”

  Hikari rests her chin in her palm. “They’re not aware. Or if they are, they’re really good at pretendin’.”

  “Absolutely not. You look like someone just told you your girlfriend cheated on you.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “What’s the difference? Either way, you’ve got no chicks.”

  I stifle a smirk. It feels strange. Having something akin to fun on the edge of something this huge. Something cosmic and wrong.

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  She taps the table lightly. “So. Let’s actually talk about it.”

  “About the reset?”

  “Yeah. Let’s use our crappy brains.”

  I exhale. “Okay. From what I experienced… it’s not just déjà vu. It’s not a feeling. It’s literal repetition.”

  She nods slowly. “And it happened sometime at midnight. Maybe exactly midnight?”

  My chest tightens. “No. It was 2:17. 2:17am.”

  2:17am.

  The moment where everything shatters and folds in on itself like paper being crumpled by something unseen. The moment where I remember pain. Pressure. Like my body being crushed and stretched at the same time. Like reality rebooting and dragging me through the restart process. Like...being impaled by sharp stone.

  “It hurts,” I mutter.

  Her playful expression fades. “Yeah.”

  For a second, we’re not joking anymore.

  “It’s like…” I struggle for the right word. “Like the world ends. But only for us.”

  “Or,” she says carefully, “the world doesn’t end. It just… reloads.”

  “Or maybe it’s like an alternate reality loop? I watched an anime like that.”

  “Geek. But sure.”

  The waitress approaches. She tiredly asks for our orders. I get my usual Grand Slam, and Hikari just gets a coffee. She walks away and we sit in silence for a minute.

  I stare at my fork. “So what are the rules?”

  “Rules?”

  “If we’re in a loop, there have to be rules.”

  She hums in thought. “Okay. Rule one: The date is always January 22nd, 2026. Have you woke up at the same time everyday?”

  I freeze. “Yeah.”

  “Same.”

  That detail settles heavy in my stomach.

  “Rule two,” she continues, cutting into her pancakes, “Only certain people retain memories.”

  “Do we know that?”

  “Well, have you seen anyone else reactin’?”

  I think about it. The bus driver from last loop. The teachers at school. The people at school. They move like clockwork. Scripted.

  “No,” I admit.

  “Exactly. So either we’re special…” She pauses. “Or we’re broken.”

  I swallow. “Broken how?”

  “What if this isn’t the world resettin’?” she says, lowering her voice. “What if it’s us?”

  The words hang there.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if we died,” she says plainly. “And this is… I don’t know. A limbo state. A mental reconstruction. Our brains replaying the last stable memory before somethin’ happened.”

  My grip tightens around my fork. “I don’t remember dying.”

  “Maybe our memories were wiped.”

  We eat in silence for a moment.

  “So if it’s not death?” I ask.

  “Then it’s something bigger.”

  “Like what?”

  She shrugs. “A glitch in time. A time anomaly. A simulation error.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Simulation?”

  She leans forward, eyes sharpening slightly. “Think about it. The weather hasn’t changed. The clouds are in the same pattern. The same people probably say the same things at the same time unless we interfere. It’s like background characters running pre-written code.”

  I think back to the teacher announcing the math test, saying the exact same thing she said yesterday.

  “That would mean,” I say slowly, “that something caused the system to get stuck.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And we’re the only ones not being wiped.”

  “Or we are being wiped,” she counters. “Just not completely.”

  I stare at her. “Why us?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question, Aaron.”

  The waitress comes back with my food and her coffee. I sit up in the booth as I grab my fork and start to eat my eggs. The vinyl seat squeaks beneath me. I eat in silence for a moment while she drinks her iced coffee.

  “If this keeps going,” I say soon enough, “do we age?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then what happens to our minds?”

  She pauses mid-sip. “That’s what scares me.”

  I feel it too. That creeping thought.

  If the world stays the same, but we keep remembering…

  Eventually we’ll have years of memory inside a single day.

  “I don’t want to outgrow the world. I’ll feel even more disconnected than I do now.” I mutter, not even sure why my mouth spoke, when my brain knows those are words I should keep to myself.

  Hikari looks at me differently then. Less teasing. More human.

  “You won’t,” she says quietly. “Not alone, at least.”

  My mind won’t buy it. Words of encouragement like these always feel more comfortable to me being written off as lies or false promises. This is no more than serious business.

  After a minute, she straightens up again. “Okay. Enough spiralin’. Let’s talk strategy.”

  “Strategy.”

  “If we’re not the only ones, then vague protest signs aren’t enough.”

  I nod. “Your ‘TRULY intelligent folk’ method might be flawed.”

  She glares. “Watch it.”

  “I’m just saying— if someone else is aware, they’re probably confused. Scared. Like I was. Like you were.”

  She sighs. “So we need something specific enough to trigger recognition.”

  “Yeah. Something only someone who’s experienced the reset would understand.”

  She snaps her fingers. “Midnight pain.”

  I blink. “That sounds like a band name.”

  “Focus.” She points at me. “What if we put up flyers that say something like: ‘Do you remember what happens at 2:17 a.m.?’”

  “Most people would just think it’s a horror marketing stunt.”

  “True.”

  I think for a second. “What about something precise? ‘January 22nd won’t end.’”

  Her eyes widen slightly.

  “That’s good,” she admits. “Simple. Direct. If someone reads that and feels something…”

  “They’ll know.”

  She grins faintly. “See? Crappy brain working.”

  “Don’t talk down to me. But...I just thought of something.”

  “What?”

  “What about the people who were asleep when 2:17 came? Did they experience it?

  Silence befalls us.

  “That might just be our criteria, Aaron! Only crazy people or insomniacs stay up at that time. It’s probably pretty unlikely to find them out that much!”

  “I have insomnia, so it’s not like there’s a 0% chance or whatever like how you make it sound.”

  Hikari falls silent.

  “Oh. I thought you were just weird. Now I feel awkward.”

  “Why would anyone willingly stay up that late on a school night? You’re the weird one Hikari.”

  “A-anyway! We could test the poster thingy,” she continues. “Write it somewhere public. See if anyone approaches us.”

  “And if no one does?”

  She shrugs. “Well if people who were awake at that time are just at home then it’s just us.”

  The idea settles between us. Heavy. I don’t like it.

  “Maybe they’ll eventually realize what’s going on, get out of their houses and look around. A giant thing like this is pretty hard to miss if you were there,” I say.

  “...what if it’s location based?”

  My stomach drops. “What?”

  “What if it’s just this city?” she says. “Or even just a radius around something.”

  “Like what?”

  She looks out the window. At the grey sky. The unmoving clouds. “I don’t know yet,” she says. “But loops don’t just happen for no reason.”

  “Then what causes them?”

  She meets my eyes. “Something broken,” she says. “Or something trying very, very hard to fix itself.”

  For a moment, the diner feels smaller. The air thicker. Midnight feels closer than it should. And for the first time since waking up, I’m not just scared of the reset.

  I’m scared of what might happen if it ever stops.

  I’m scared of what will be born.