Take a Number for the Apocalypse

%% PART: Part One — Who You Are When You Don't Function # The Temporal Cringe Compensator

Leo Vogt had thirty-seven minutes until his date and had already, three times over, handed in his notice.

Not for the date.

For himself.

He was standing in the middle of his aunt Elara’s workshop, among cable drums, oil canisters, three half-dismantled robot vacuum cleaners and a leaf blower that was humming softly even though no one had switched it on. In this workshop, that was not a good sign. Things that hummed without electricity had, in the past, either developed a consciousness of their own, violated a municipal bylaw, or done both at once and then filed for tolerated status.

Outside, the Göppingen industrial estate lay beneath a sky the colour of old file folders. It smelled of rain that hadn’t yet made up its mind, of cold metal, and, very faintly, of the Maultaschen someone was reheating two units down. A familiar smell. A safe smell. Exactly the kind of smell against which Leo’s evening was about to go to war.

Leo knew this workshop better than any flat he’d ever been registered at. During the years of his parents’ slow, exceptionally polite separation — while they had been busy informing each other, through solicitors, of who would get the dog — he had spent his afternoons here, among Elara’s inventions, which were never quite finished and never quite safe. It had been the one place in his childhood where no one had required him to be all right. You only had to be careful not to touch anything that glowed.

He took a deep breath.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Embrace the inner child.

Ask the inner child, just this once, not to launch a presentation on attachment issues this evening.

“What if I talk about my parents again?” he asked.

No answer.

Aunt Elara was lying with her upper body inside a microwave that had been cut open. All that was visible were her heavy work boots, the hem of her soot-smeared apron, and a cigarette balanced in worrying proximity to an open gas bottle — unlit, which somehow made it worse. From inside the microwave came a blue flickering, accompanied by a sound like someone dragging a deeply indignant frog through a laser printer.

“Elara?”

“If you bother me about your mating behaviour one more time while I’m calibrating the resonance magnetron,” she said, muffled, from inside the device, “I’ll build you a personality out of spare parts. At least that one would come with a warranty.”

Leo rubbed his face with both hands.

“I mean it. On my last date I spent nine minutes talking about the tax disadvantages of shared streaming subscriptions. Nine minutes, Elara. I watched her soul leave her body. She was still nodding, but there was nobody home.”

A spark shot out of the microwave, ricocheted off a rusty workbench and set light to an old till receipt, which flared up briefly and then burned out, offended.

“Then she was weak,” said Elara. “Anyone who can’t survive nine minutes of tax logic is unsuited to long-term pair-bonding anyway.”

Leo looked at his phone.

**18:23.**

The date started at seven, at Café Lesezeichen, in the pedestrian zone, where the real city lay — the one with the people and the expectations and the round tables you couldn’t hide behind.

Miriam.

In her profile picture she had been holding an actual book. No gym selfie, no sunglasses by the lake, no quote about wine and dogs and life. A book. With pages. Made of paper. She had half-covered the title with her thumb, as though it were nobody’s business, and that was precisely what had refused to let go of Leo for three days. A woman who held a book as though it were a private matter. Which meant she probably had thoughts. Deep thoughts. Structured thoughts. And, worse: expectations.

In her last message she had written that she worked at the bookshop on the market square, where she looked after the shelf for books that almost no one finishes. “Out of solidarity,” she had added, with no smiley, no explanation, as though that were a complete thought and not an opening.

Leo had felt sick with affinity.

He had opened her profile four times since and closed it again each time, as though she might notice from a distance. A woman who tended a shelf for books nobody finished. That was either the saddest or the bravest thing he’d heard in a long while, and it unsettled him that he wasn’t sure he even knew the difference.

“She reads books without pictures,” he said quietly. “She has the kind of humour that doesn’t come with an explanation. Elara, this is a serious person. If I sit down there and start talking about my digestion under stress, I’m socially finished. For good. With a case-file number.”

At last Aunt Elara crawled out of the microwave.

She was in her early sixties, though she maintained that age was merely an imprecise thermodynamic measurement for people with no imagination. Her grey hair stuck out in every direction, as though it had recently lost a personal dispute with a ball of lightning. A strip of insulating tape clung to her forehead. Her safety goggles were so badly scratched that by now they held more memories than visibility.

She looked Leo over.

Then she looked over his ironed shirt.

Then Leo again.

“You’re wearing the shirt that makes you look like an insurance broker who secretly writes poems about paper clips.”

“It’s my good shirt.”

“That’s exactly the problem.”

Leo ignored her. He did that often. In this family it carried roughly the same standing as fire safety — that is, a theoretical one.

“I just need a plan,” he said. “A conversation guide. Three safe topics. Five, maybe. Something to stop me from going completely off the rails under pressure.”

Elara reached for a screwdriver standing in a mug that read **Best Aunt in the Known Universe.** Someone had added underneath, in marker pen: **self-reported.**

“You don’t need a plan,” she said. “You need emotional shock absorption.”

“I need validation.”

Elara pulled a face, as though he’d dropped a dead fish in her coffee.

“Use that word again and I’ll validate you with a torque wrench.”

Leo paced restlessly. Under his shoes there was a crunch of glass shards, solder, and something that looked suspiciously like a small fossilised bone. He hoped it was a chicken bone. In Elara’s workshop, however, hope was only the first, naive stage of disappointment.

“Miriam wrote that she likes honest conversations,” he said. “That’s catastrophic. Honest conversations are my final boss. I’m either too honest, or I try to seem relaxed, and then I sound like a customer-service chatbot with childhood trauma.”

Elara stopped.

Very slowly, she turned her head.

In her eyes there appeared that dangerous gleam Leo had known since childhood. It was the gleam that always surfaced when Elara regarded a problem not as a problem but as a polite invitation to violate an international treaty.

“So you want to know what you’re going to say before you say it,” she observed.

Leo blinked.

“No. Well, yes. But not in a way that ends up before a commission of inquiry later.”

“Dully phrased,” she muttered. She elbowed him aside, yanked open a drawer and tipped its contents onto the workbench: old relays, a smartwatch with a cracked screen, a control chip the size of a palm with a face someone had drawn on it in marker, a broken baby monitor, a length of copper wire that was still warm, and a remote control for a garage door that hadn’t existed since two thousand and eight.

Leo went pale.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m building you a social crutch.”

“Elara.”

“A very small one.”

“Elara.”

“With minimal risk.”

“Your definition of minimal risk usually involves evacuating a postcode.”

She waved him off.

“Don’t exaggerate. That was a one-off. And after the business with the backwards-ageing roundabout the mayor pulled himself together remarkably quickly.”

Leo opened his mouth, closed it again, and decided that any follow-up question would only generate new facts he would be emotionally unable to carry.

Elara was already soldering.

Her hands moved with a precision that stood in alarming contrast to the rest of her existence. She wired the baby monitor to the control chip, unscrewed the back of the smartwatch and drew from the leaf blower a component that had definitely not been installed there at the factory. It glowed a deep violet and pulsed like a heart that had grown up in a very bad neighbourhood.

“Is that radioactive?” Leo asked.

“Not in the legal sense.”

“That doesn’t reassure me.”

“It’s not meant to. Reassurance leads to sloppiness.”

She bit a piece of cable insulation off with her teeth and spat it into an empty mug. Then she reached for a small black cube hovering between two pizza boxes. It was about the size of a sugar cube, but it swallowed the light around it and made the air shimmer the way it does over hot asphalt.

Leo backed away.

“That had better not be another black hole.”

Elara looked offended.

“Of course not.”

Leo relaxed.

“It’s a socially responsible micro-singularity with a locally confined shame-absorption field.”

Leo tensed up again.

“You built a black hole that eats embarrassment?”

“Finally you say something comprehensible.”

He stared at her.

“Why does something like that even exist?”

“Because since the day you were born you have supplied evidence that humanity, without technical assistance, is not fit for society.”

Leo wanted to object, but his memory produced roughly four hundred events that supported Elara’s thesis. The incident at his cousin’s wedding in particular, where he had tried to make small talk with a florist and had ended up delivering an impromptu speech on emotional neglect in multigenerational households.

Afterwards the florist had asked for the bridal bouquet back.

Elara held the finished device out to him.

It looked like a medical plaster designed by a paranoid robot. The casing was made of toxic-green plastic, badly printed, with tiny black ventilation slits and a display the size of a postage stamp. On it stood:

**TEMPORAL CRINGE COMPENSATOR v0.7**

Below that it blinked:

**WARNING: NOT SUITABLE FOR FIRST DATES, JOB INTERVIEWS OR FUNERALS.**

Leo pointed at it.

“It says, not suitable for first dates.”

Elara peeled the sticker off.

“Not any more.”

“That isn’t how safety works.”

“Yes, it is. In Germany a great deal works exactly like that. You only have to remove the right label.”

She pulled his shirt forward by the collar and stuck the device directly onto his chest.

It was cold.

Then warm.

Then unpleasantly warm.

Then it produced a sound that was roughly like a very small civil servant submitting his tax return on time.

Leo froze.

“Is it supposed to do that?”

“It’s synchronising with your fear sweat.”

“That sounds medically questionable.”

“Your whole life is medically questionable.”

Elara tapped her own smartwatch. On Leo’s display a plain interface appeared, with three symbols.

“Quite simple,” she said, pointing at the first. “Before you say something, your brain thinks it. The device intercepts the imminent verbal catastrophe.”

“And then?”

“Then it sends a micro decision-simulation two point seven seconds into the future and shows you whether your sentence survives socially.”

Leo looked at her.

“You’ve built a device that tells me whether I’m about to say something stupid.”

“If that were all it did, it would sound the alarm non-stop and the battery would be flat in eight minutes.” She tapped him on the chest with the screwdriver, just beside the device. “It also shows you alternatives. Three possible conversational outcomes. You pick the one with the least social self-destruction. Like a sat nav. Except the destination is your dignity.”

Beneath the display, in small print, it read:

**Beta version. Causality may contain traces of nuts.**

Leo breathed shallowly.

And then the most dangerous thing of the whole evening so far happened.

Something stirred inside him.

Hope.

That stupid, gleaming, statistically poorly secured hope.

“This could work,” he said.

“Of course it works.”

“Really?”

“Leo, I once taught a toaster to forge municipal building applications. A date is no challenge. A date is just a job interview with hormones.” She nodded at the device. “Try it. Say something to me. Something that normally ends in an insult.”

Leo hesitated. Then he thought the sentence he actually wanted to say — *You really ought to tidy up in here* — and the Cringe Compensator grew warm.

Three lines appeared on the display, one beneath the other, each in a different shade of grey.

**TIMELINE A:** *“You really ought to tidy up in here.”* → Probability of wrench to the face: 88 per cent. **TIMELINE B:** *“Do you actually have a system for all this?”* → Unrequested lecture on entropy: 71 per cent. Duration: twelve minutes. **TIMELINE C:** *Silence.* → Social cost: minimal. Self-respect: slightly dented.

Leo chose C and said nothing.

Elara looked at him, then at the device, then at him again.

“You just didn’t say something,” she observed. “I can tell. Your face does this little peace when you don’t.”

“It works,” said Leo, and in his voice there was something he hadn’t heard in years. It almost sounded like confidence. “It really works.”

“Naturally.” Elara patted the casing, once, almost tenderly, the way other people pat a cat they know will bite. “One more thing. It’s a crutch, not a leg. Use it too often and you’ll forget how to walk without it.”

Leo wasn’t listening. He was reading the line *social cost: minimal* for the fourth time and feeling as though someone had, for the very first time in his life, handed him a patient information leaflet for other human beings.

He looked at the clock again.

**18:41.**

Nineteen minutes left.

“What about side effects?”

Elara looked away.

“Define side effects.”

Leo closed his eyes.

“Anything that leads to me dying, duplicating myself, drawing the attention of an authority, or never having been born retroactively.”

“Then, no.”

“Elara.”

“Theoretically, at most.”

“Elara.”

She sighed.

“If you use the device too often, temporal waste is produced.”

Leo waited.

“And?”

“And it has to go somewhere.”

“Where?”

Elara drew on her cigarette, even though it wasn’t lit.

“That’s why it’s called a beta version.”

Leo wanted to tear the device off his chest that instant.

But then his phone vibrated.

A message from Miriam.

> **On my way. Looking forward to it.**

Leo read it three times.

No smiley. Still no smiley. Three short sentences, one of which wasn’t a complete sentence, and she hadn’t apologised for it. It was the most self-assured message he had received in months, and it made him feel like a witness to his own, already-scheduled execution.

His hands grew damp.

His throat dry.

His brain unilaterally opened the folder **Possible Conversational Catastrophes** and ran a slideshow: he spilled coffee. He got her name wrong. He said “my mother” in a context in which no one had asked after his mother. He explained, unprompted, why pigeons, evolutionarily speaking, were nothing more than airborne tax evasion.

The Cringe Compensator beeped.

On the display appeared:

**PANIC LEVEL: OPERATIONALLY WARM** **RECOMMENDATION: ATTEND DATE. FLIGHT BEHAVIOUR REDUCES ATTRACTIVENESS BY 63 PER CENT.**

Leo swallowed.

“The thing is rating me?”

“At last somebody does it objectively.”

Elara threw him his jacket.

“Off you go. Café Lesezeichen. You sit down. You listen. You say no sentences with more than two subordinate clauses. And if you want to talk about your parents, you press the watch first.”

Leo put the jacket on. His legs felt as though someone had replaced them overnight with badly cooked spaghetti.

At the door he stopped.

“Elara?”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

She pulled a face, as though he’d hugged her in public.

“Revolting. Go.”

He opened the heavy steel door of the workshop. Damp Göppingen evening air met him, cool and honest, with that hint of wet leaves the autumn here tended to deliver six weeks too early. Somewhere a dog barked. A car drove through a puddle. The world looked alarmingly normal for a place where a black hole for social support was currently stuck to his chest.

Leo stepped outside.

Behind him, Elara called:

“And Leo?”

He turned round. She stood in the doorframe, goggles on her forehead, hands in the oily apron.

“If the device gets hot, don’t ignore it.”

Leo blanched. “How hot?”

Elara thought for a moment, one more honest than he’d have liked. “Depends on whether you make small talk or talk about your childhood.”

“Elara!”

“Go on. Love doesn’t wait. It just updates its location and eventually orders without you.”

The door slammed shut.

Leo set off.

With every step towards the town centre, the Cringe Compensator vibrated faintly under his shirt — the vibration of a machine that knew something Leo did not, and was too polite to say.

He thought of Miriam. Of the café. Of not, under any circumstances, losing a single word about his parents.

Deep inside the micro-singularity on his chest, the first unlived embarrassments began to gather — silent and patient, the way wet leaves gather in front of a drain just before the street goes under water.

The Cringe Compensator beeped once.

Then the display showed:

**PREDICTION: UNLIKELY.**