********
Marek Vale had always believed that if the world were to end one day, he would at least be wearing pants.
He was wrong.
At exactly eleven fifty-eight in the evening, two minutes before the end of the year, Marek was sitting inside a university laboratory with his cargo pants lowered below his knees.
Beneath him was a toilet worth more than everything his family owned.
The machine had a polished white surface, several medical sensors, two mechanical arms that Marek had been told would not touch him under any circumstances, and a small screen attached to the wall in front of him.
The screen displayed a cheerful green message.
[ANALYSIS IN PROGRESS]
[PLEASE REMAIN SEATED]
Marek stared at it for several seconds.
"You have been saying that for nine minutes."
The machine did not respond.
Apparently, its engineers had given it a voice but had not considered allowing it to respond to complaints.
Marek still did not understand why.
A soft mechanical sound came from somewhere beneath him.
He looked down. The machine had collected the sample nearly ten minutes earlier. Marek had already completed the most humiliating part of the experiment. Now, he was simply trapped on the toilet while it took an unreasonable amount of time to examine what he had left behind.
He looked back at the screen.
[ESTIMATED TIME REMAINING: THREE MINUTES]
"Your estimate said three minutes five minutes ago," Marek complained.
A calm female voice came from the speaker beside his head. "Please remain relaxed."
"I am sitting on a machine with four cameras pointed at me."
"The cameras are not recording visible images."
"That does not make it better."
Outside the testing room, someone laughed.
The walls were not soundproof.
Marek turned his head toward the closed door. "Professor Halden, I can hear you."
The laughter immediately stopped. A moment later, Professor Halden coughed, and his voice came through the intercom. "We... we are not laughing at you, Marek."
"You clearly are."
"We are laughing at the situation."
"I am the situation..."
There was another short silence.
"That is technically correct," the professor admitted, coughing once more.
Marek closed his eyes.
He had agreed to the test because the university offered eight hundred credits to every student willing to provide what the consent form had called a fresh gastrointestinal sample.
Eight hundred credits was not a small amount of money for a student.
His phone screen had already been broken for nearly two months. The crack had started at its upper-right corner before slowly spreading across the display. Eventually, it looked like a spider trapped beneath the glass and spent its final moments trying to escape.
The phone still worked...
Well, mostly.
Unfortunately, the damage had affected both the keyboard and the autocorrect. Completely unrelated words sometimes replaced normal ones, usually in the most embarrassing way possible.
The previous week, Marek had attempted to message Professor Halden.
His phone sent: "The patient reported unusual p*nis pressure during the examination."
Marek noticed the mistake only after Professor Halden replied, "Please clarify what examination you are performing."
He immediately corrected himself: "Pelvic pressure. My phone changed it."
He stopped using his phone for academic conversations after that.
When he agreed to the diagnostic test, the arrangement had seemed simple.
Sit on the prototype.
Provide the sample.
Wait for the machine to finish its analysis.
Receive eight hundred credits.
Nobody had mentioned that the machine would lock the door after he entered. The mechanical arms had also been conveniently left out of the explanation. Neither had anyone warned him that half the research team would be standing outside, listening to everything he said.
The wall screen changed.
[ESTIMATED HYDRATION STATUS: WITHIN NORMAL RANGE]
[PRELIMINARY MICROBIAL DIVERSITY: ABOVE REFERENCE RANGE]
[TRACE DNA FROM WASTEWATER-DERIVED BACTERIAL ISOLATE DETECTED]
Marek frowned. "Wastewater-derived?"
Professor Halden answered through the intercom. "Probably from your environmental toxicology practicum."
"I wore protective equipment," he reasoned.
"You handled the wastewater-storage freezer and then ate lunch without washing your hands."
"The cafeteria was full."
"That does not turn the storage room for samples into a cafeteria."
Professor Halden sighed in the manner of someone who had already regretted starting the argument.
Marek did not see the problem. The cultures had been sealed, and he had worn gloves while handling them.
He had removed the gloves before eating.
Besides, he had only eaten there once.
Well... twice, if the afternoon coffee counted.
Leaning his head against the wall behind him, he looked at the digital date displayed in the upper-right corner of the screen.
December 31.
The final day of a leap year1.
Day 366.
In less than two minutes, the date would change to January 1.
He should have been home.
His mother had night duty at the hospital laundry department, but his younger sister Mara was waiting for him at their apartment. She had sent him seven messages reminding him to buy fried noodles on the way back.
The last message read: "Do not forget again."
It was the same message over and over again.
Mara was fourteen years old and had already developed the ability to repeat herself until other people obeyed her. If supernatural powers ever became real, Marek suspected hers would not be very different from her current personality.
The clock on the screen reached eleven fifty-nine.
[ESTIMATED TIME REMAINING: ONE MINUTE]
"Finally."
"Please avoid speaking during the final stage of analysis."
Marek stopped trying to argue with it.
He was tired.
His morning had begun with a toxicology examination. After that, he had spent four hours cataloguing water samples collected from an industrial canal. One of the containers had been labelled incorrectly, another had leaked into the transport case, and a classmate had attempted to smell a sample despite being told three times not to do it.
The result? That classmate had vomited.
Marek had cleaned the table.
That was usually how his days went. Other people created problems. Marek either cleaned them, treated them, labelled them properly, or prevented them from becoming worse.
He was not complaining.
He simply wished problems would occasionally appear during normal working hours.
The digital clock changed.
11:59:57.
11:59:58.
11:59:59.
Marek waited for the screen to display January 1.
Instead, everything stopped.
The air conditioner fell silent. The vibration beneath the toilet stopped a moment later.
The lights remained on, but their pale white glow no longer looked natural. They slowly became violet, spreading across the room without any visible source.
The clock remained frozen at midnight.
Marek stared at the screen.
The numbers changed.
Not the time.
But the date.
[DAY 367.]
A leap year is a calendar year containing 366 days instead of 365, with an extra day added to the end of February (February 29) to keep the calendar synchronized with the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.