Time of Lies E-Book

Patrick Hofstetter

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 208

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

Time can be measured. Time can be manipulated. And someone has begun. When a precision-obsessed global watchmaking empire quietly takes control of the worlds most trusted clocks, the shift begins as a whisper, fractions of a second no one notices. No one except Anna Meier, a brilliant engineer whose discovery costs her life. Now her husband, Jonas, follows the trail she left behind: a cracked prototype watch, a string of impossible data, and coordinates pointing deep into the Jura mountains. Each clue pulls him further into a world where seconds decide truth, and whoever defines time controls reality itself. As global systems begin to tremble, markets, aircraft, governments, one name stands at the center: Maison Vallée, led by a man who believes the world must obey the rhythm he chooses. To expose him, Jonas must uncover Annas final equation before the world slips into a new order, one that corrects itself, with or without humanitys consent. In a universe run by precision, the smallest drift becomes a lie. And the truth is running out of time.

Leseprobe

To Nikita, Kateryna, Liliane

Foreword

I was trained as a watchmaker.

It sounds like a profession that understands time, yet all I ever truly learned was how to touch it — not how to command it.

I have long admired the masters of this craft: those who coax precision from silence, who can make steel breathe and seconds behave. Their skill borders on devotion; their patience, on faith.

And yet, in their perfection, there is something that unsettles me — the quiet certainty with which they bend the fragile rhythm of the world to their will.

This book was born from that unease:

from reverence and fear, from the question of what happens when precision begins to dream of purpose.

Time can be measured, but never possessed.

Perhaps that is the oldest error we have yet to correct.

— Patrick Hofstetter

Prologue

Under Bern, the night felt engineered. Air moved in measured strokes through the ducts, the hum of cooling fans held a single pitch, and the floors didn’t creak because someone, once, had paid to make them not creak. In the control room of Maison Vallée, Lukas

Steiner sat with his sleeves rolled, a mug of coffee gone cold at his elbow, and watched the world begin to slip.

It was small at first—numbers twitching where they should have marched. A red flag appeared on the lower edge of his primary monitor: 0.23 seconds slow on the D-Seven distribution channel. He didn’t look away. A quarter of a second in a place like this wasn’t a blemish; it was a fault line.

He ran the cross-check. The U.S. standard held, the European grid held, the backup in Zurich held. Only the Vallée feed out of Bern had drifted. He typed the manual correction sequence. The system returned a line he had never seen on that console: ACCESS DENIED — OVERRIDE LOCKED.

He tried again, careful with each keystroke. Same response. He lifted the internal phone.

“Vallée,” said the voice at once, calm and awake. “Sir, it’s Steiner in Control Three. We’ve got a drift on channel D-Seven. Two-three hundredths slow, stable at four minutes.”

“How far has it propagated?”

“Buffer is holding. I can push a correction.”

“No,” Aerni Vallée said. “Let it run.”

Steiner stared at the red line on his screen as if staring could make it wrong. “With respect, if we let it—”

“Let it run.”

The line went dead. He set the handset down, a little too carefully, and watched the deviation countdown by itself.

0.18. 0.11. 0.04. 0.00. The red line turned green: SYNC RESTORED.

He should have felt relief. What he felt was the cold slide of a thought he didn’t want to finish: the system had corrected itself, by itself, and denied him the ability to help. He opened the event log. The final line stamped itself across the screen in a font he didn’t recognize.

Δ47 — REINITIALIZE — 23:48:05

He searched the registry. Nothing. He checked maintenance notes. Nothing. The overhead lights dipped and returned. On the far wall, an antique Vallée chronometer—polished brass, exhibition-grade movement, unwired—began to tick. The second hand moved with a patience that made his skin tighten.

He printed the log, tore the paper free, folded it, and slid it into his jacket. He lifted the phone again and got static. The ventilation tone shifted fractionally, like an orchestra breathing between movements. On the main display, the stream of data fell away to a single sentence in white on black:

TIME CORRECTS ITSELF.

He didn’t say anything. He stood, keyed the door, and took the long corridor toward the freight elevator, because the long corridor took him past the battery room and the battery room told the truth. The racks behind the wire mesh sat dark and ready. No one had thrown them in. Whatever had happened in Control Three hadn’t been a power event.

The elevator doors opened as he approached. He stepped in, pressed Executive Level, and braced himself for the slight lag the old hydraulic system always gave him. The car moved at once, smooth as breathing. The doors parted onto an empty corridor with carpet too thick to sound like anything. He crossed to the corner office at the end and waited in the doorway until Aerni Vallée glanced over his shoulder and said, “Come in,” as if the invitation were a test.

“Drift corrected,” Steiner said. “System locked me out of the manual, ran its own routine. Code tagged as Delta Forty-Seven.”

Aerni returned his gaze to the window. Bern’s lights looked curated from up here. “And now?”

“Now it’s perfect.”

“Good.”

Steiner held his ground. “Sir, I need to know what Delta Forty-Seven is.”

“You need to get some sleep,” Aerni said without turning. “The system works.”

“The internal phones are down.”

“They’ll be up when we need them.” He turned then, and whatever argument Steiner had prepared lost its footing. “You did your job. Let the program do its job.”

Steiner nodded because that was the next move available to him, stepped back into the elevator, and watched the doors close on a man who looked like he expected the world to arrive on time.

He crossed the lobby past a security guard with a crossword and the habit of making anyone who worked at night feel like a co-conspirator. Outside, the fog swallowed the building by degrees. He pulled his jacket close, felt the folded log under his fingers, and set off toward the bridge. The river carried the city’s reflection like a secret.

Halfway across, he stopped. There was a vibration under his shoes, too low to be sound, too precise to be anything else. He turned and looked at the building he’d left. No alarms. No lights. No sign that anything had ever been out of line. He told himself to go home. He told himself to email the file to himself from his kitchen table. He told himself he would do it before he slept, and that would be the responsible thing to do.

The building woke properly at 00:01. Down in Control Three, the consoles lit up in sequence, the way an audience stands row by row when the lights come up. The single sentence disappeared, replaced by status panels engineered to be boring. The antique clock ticked the second hand onto forty-seven and stopped, with the courtesy of a guest leaving before it became awkward. In the event log, a final line wrote itself without keystrokes.

Δ47: INITIATION COMPLETE.

Aerni stood in the dark a minute longer than he needed to, then walked the quiet corridor to the wall of world clocks. New York, London, Tokyo, Zurich, Geneva. The second hands were obedient, the margins convincing, the whole performance as reassuring as a good lie. He touched the glass over Bern.

Finally, he thought. Not aloud, because there was no one here who deserved to hear it. Finally, the world accepts help.

He took the encrypted call from Tokyo because letting it ring would waste three people’s time. He listened to the question: minor desynchronization, should we inform the regulator? He said, “No anomaly on our end,” and hung up before the man could thank him for the reassurance he had asked to receive. He took a call from Washington and ended it the same way. He could have handed both to an assistant, but there were nights when the world needed to hear certainty from the source.

He walked back to the window. The fog blurred the city into a single soft light. Somewhere in that light a man who built watches by hand was eating soup at his kitchen table. Somewhere a nurse was changing shifts on a floor that never slept. Somewhere a journalist was going to bed with a grief that would end his life as he knew it. Aerni knew some of those stories, because precision collects stories. He told himself that what he did here would make those lives simpler, safer, cleaner.

He told himself the thing that men tell themselves when the cost has already been paid.

Steiner drove the long way home because his feet and hands knew that route better than the shorter one. The dashboard clock took half a second to decide which numbers to display and then chose 00:02 like an adult making a final choice. He didn’t notice the motorbike take his street and keep its distance. He didn’t see the streetlight cycle hold an extra second where it always held an extra second every thousand cycles, because such things are designed not to be noticed. He parked under a tree that had survived too many winters and

carried his weight up three flights that were newer than they looked. In the kitchen, he opened his laptop and the lid stuck a fraction before it let go, which is what old hinges do when the air is damp. He plugged the USB cable into the little port with the little satisfaction of doing something right, and the machine decided to find the wireless network. He told it no. He wanted the wire to carry his thoughts, not the air. He transferred the log file, then printed a copy because he was old enough to believe in paper. The printer fed it out like a ticket to a place you don’t want to go alone.

He lowered himself into the chair by the window, one hand cupped around the paper as if it were a candle he had carried through rain. His apartment looked like what he could afford: a neat table, a few books arranged into authority, a photograph of a woman he had stopped pretending he could call. He read the log again. Δ47 — REINITIALIZE. TIME CORRECTS ITSELF. Δ47: INITIATION COMPLETE. He said the words in his head without letting his lips move. He felt, not for the first time in his life, like a small thing standing too close to something bigger than truth.

He slept badly and woke before his alarm. At eight, he put the printed log in an envelope, addressed it to a private box he used when he didn’t want his name on anything, and dropped it in a yellow street mailbox that squeaked when it closed because some things in

Switzerland are allowed to be imperfect. He bought a coffee that tasted of nothing and walked to work with the same rhythm he always had. A truck delivered crates to the loading dock. A woman in a blue coat passed him with a small dog that dressed better than he did. He filed his badge at the gate and the scanner made the same sound it made yesterday and last week and ten months ago. The guard nodded like a man who measured life in nods.

In the elevator he was alone until the last second, when the doors paused and let in a man he had seen twice, the kind you remember because your instinct doesn’t give you a choice. Not security. Not staff. The man’s shoes were wrong for this much carpet. He said nothing. Steiner made himself meet his own eyes in the reflection and found nothing to report.

Control Three was bright and orderly and smelled faintly of cleaned plastic. The overnight report sat on his console. A note on it in a hand he recognized: “All nominal — AV.” The old clock on the wall had stopped again. He told himself he was grateful to be in a room where antique hearts do not beat.

He ran a diagnostic to calm himself. The channels marched in sequence, the offsets inside tolerance, the reference locks firm. He opened the log. Δ47 entries sat where he had left them, equal parts impossible and ordinary now that they were printed in his kitchen. He started a separate file of his own, the kind you keep in a folder named something innocent, and typed a single line: D-Seven drift, 0.23s, automatic correction, unauthorized lock. Delta 47. Then he stopped, because there is a line between doing your job and making your job a problem.

At ten, his supervisor wandered in with the smile he wore for people he didn’t owe anything to. “All right?”

“All right,” Steiner said.

“You look tired.”

“Phones were down last night.” He didn’t add what the phones had said when they came back. Nothing. Phones don’t talk.

The man nodded and left, and the room took its shape again. For the rest of the morning, the world behaved. Frankfurt opened on time and printed money. London stacked planes over the river and delivered them again.

Bern’s trams clicked through intersections that had clicked through more winters than Steiner had teeth.

The event log hummed its low, confident song.

At noon, the encrypted line on the wall above the clocks flashed a discreet white. Aerni, he thought, and didn’t move to answer because that wasn’t his job. Someone did. The tone of the reply made his hands slow on the keyboard: assurances, confirmations, the language men use to lacquer uncertainty. He pressed deeper into the work because work is the only radiance men like him can trust.

At three, he took a break he didn’t need and stood in the doorway of the server corridor, watching the lights. A technician with a beard too neat to be accidental glanced up from a cart and nodded in the polite way of men who aren’t supposed to know one another. Steiner returned the nod and counted the racks out of habit. He knew how many there were the way a man knows the bones in his hand. He returned to his console and set his coffee down in the ring the last cup had made. It felt like proof that yesterday had actually happened.

He stayed an hour later than his shift required because leaving on time felt like missing a step and he did not enjoy falling. At the gate, the guard said, “Long day?” the way men say it when they want you to feel seen. Steiner said, “Night was longer,” and stepped into air that

smelled like weather about to change. He stopped at the grocery for eggs and a thing in plastic that claimed to be soup. The same dog in the same blue coat looked at him with the same suspicion. He unlocked his door, set the envelope copy on the table next to the printer copy, and opened the laptop.

He had one email from a service he used when he didn’t want to pretend he wasn’t using it: delivery scheduled for 09:17 tomorrow. He closed the laptop and left the room without turning off the light because some illuminations are cheaper than doubt.

Across the city, Aerni stood again at his window, not because he needed to but because he preferred to watch the thing he owned do the thing he wanted. He thought of meetings where men had told him what could not be measured cannot be managed, and how he had learned to disagree by building a machine that measured the thing men called unmeasurable until it could be managed. In markets and in sky corridors and in rooms where clocks had the authority of law, his system sat now like a muscle you can’t see flexing. He poured a finger of something he saved for nights when the world learned to behave and drank half before setting the glass down without a coaster. Rules are for other people.

At midnight, the event log in Control Three took another line with the calm of rain deciding to fall.

Δ47: ROUTINE — VERIFIED.

Steiner woke half a city away with the sudden knowledge that he had forgotten to set his coffee machine and then forgot the knowledge on purpose. Morning would come with or without coffee and with or without him. He closed his eyes. The room held.

The next day did the thing days do: it happened. He went to work and the systems ran and a man from a ministry sent a query that called itself a courtesy and a banker sent a thank-you for a reassurance he had not requested. He received a warm email from an old colleague who had moved into public relations and wrote sentences that landed like cushions: We admire the work you do. He replied with two words: Thank you. He made himself smaller in his chair than he felt.

At lunch he folded the printed log a second time until it was thick enough to be important but small enough to be carried without drama. He thought for a moment about taking it to someone with a press badge and remembered why he didn’t talk to press. He thought about sending it to a personal account at an address that didn’t include his name and remembered that men who do that don’t always get to be men anymore. He put the paper back in his jacket and ate the kind of sandwich people eat when they work near concrete.

He lasted four more days before the second drift arrived. Smaller this time—0.07 seconds—so polite you could have forgiven it. He didn’t. He typed the manual command anyway to see if the world would allow him to feel useful. ACCESS DENIED. The correction ran itself. The lights didn’t flicker. The old clock didn’t tick. The only visible change was the line that appeared gently at the bottom of the log.

Δ47: STABILIZE — 11:04:12

He breathed through his nose and made the smallest decision of his week: he would walk the log to a post office that didn’t know his face and send it to a box that did. He would do it on foot and he would not tell himself he was brave.

At the counter, a woman with practical hands weighed his envelope, stamped it twice, and said, “Morgen.” He said, “Danke,” and wasn’t sure which of them believed the word more.

He slept that night like a man who had misfiled a piece of his life and would have to live with the inefficiency. On the fifth night after the first drift, just before the time the city admits it’s tired, he woke to a different sound: nothing. Not the refrigerator, not the traffic that proves a place breathes, not the rough exhale of a heating system that knows winter is over but refuses to let go. He got out of bed. The digital clock on his stove was blank. He went to the window, lifted the blind with two fingers, and looked at a streetlight that had been on since he was a child. It was off. He stood there in the dark until everything came back at once.

He went to work and the log said what logs say when logs are written by people who have decided what they believe. He took the entirely ordinary elevator to the entirely ordinary lobby and nodded to the guard, who had changed his crossword but not his opinion of the world. He sat at his console and made the system behave because that is what men like him do when the system behaves anyway. At noon, Aerni spoke to a camera that belonged to a broadcaster who owed the firm two favors and explained that stability was the natural state of things when you invested in the right precision.

By then, the world had practiced the moment enough times that it barely remembered the rehearsal.

Frankfurt’s graph smoothed itself. London’s flight paths drew themselves obediently. Geneva’s trains ran with the dignity of men who have always been timely. The only record of that breath the world had held sat on a piece of paper in a private box with a number and no name, stamped twice by a woman with practical hands.

Steiner left the building at six with a small bag of groceries that kept his left hand busy and his right free. He paused at the same bridge, looked down at the same river, and decided for the third time to keep his job. He crossed, turned right, and let the city carry him home along a route he would have chosen even if he had not been thinking about choosing. He unlocked his door and heard the small quiet that tells you nothing is waiting for you. He set the bag down and took the log from his jacket and laid it on the table like a confession. Then he sat in the chair by the window, watched the last of the fog pull away from the streetlight, and told himself that whatever program Aerni had let run would keep running without him.

He was right about that.

Table of Contents

Interlude I – Anna, 23:47

Chapter 1 – The Memory of Light

Chapter 2 – The House of Vallée

Interlude II – Aerni

Chapter 3 – The Equation

Interlude III – Anna’s Notebook

Entry 1 – March 7

Entry 2 – April 2

Entry 3 – May 15

Entry 4 – June 10

Entry 5 – June 22

Chapter 4 – The Briefing

Interlude IV – The Body Remembers

Chapter 5 – The Watchmaker of Biel

Chapter 6 – The Basel Key

Chapter 7 – Fragments of Precision

Chapter 8 – The Ledger

Chapter 9 – The Pursuit

Chapter 10 – The Glass Vault

Chapter 11 – Maison Vallée Boardroom

Chapter 12 – The Train That Arrived Twice

Chapter 13 – The Directive

Chapter 14 – The Room of Mirrors

Chapter 15 – The Vault

Chapter 16 – The House Without Clocks

Chapter 17 – The Report

Chapter 18 – The Leak

Chapter 19 – The Correction Room

Chapter 20 – Collapse Geometry

Chapter 21 – The Return

Chapter 22 – The Measure of Light

Chapter 23 – The Last Aerni

Chapter 24 – The Commission

Chapter 25 – The Truth Restored

Chapter 26 – Epilogue: The Margin of Error

Interlude I – Anna, 23:47

The lab had no windows, only reflections.

Light lived in the glass—repeated, corrected, multiplied until it forgot where it came from.

Anna Meier sat at her workstation with her coat still on, sleeves pushed up, the coffee beside her untouched long enough to go cold. The servers along the wall pulsed a calm blue, like slow breathing. On the central monitor, a string of data flickered once, then steadied.

Δ–17–47. Stable.

She exhaled. The number meant the system was still aligned.

It also meant the world outside would never notice how close it had come to falling out of sync.

She spoke the entry out loud, because the recorder liked sound better than silence.

“Test run complete, cycle 47. Phase drift within tolerance. Correction routine holding at zero point zero three.”

Her own voice, in the smallness of the room, sounded older than it should have.

She tapped the screen. The line of code she had written three months ago—meier_rev47()—flashed green and closed. There was comfort in precision, but lately it felt like prayer: a ritual to convince herself the gods were still listening.

The intercom was dead. The clock on the wall had stopped again. She checked her watch; it said 23:47. Somewhere above her, the night in Bern would be perfectly still. The Maison Vallée tower would be lit like a cathedral, the kind that worships measurement instead of mercy.

She opened her notebook and wrote, in her tidy engineer’s hand:

Drift is never just data. Drift is doubt.

Then she underlined it twice.

A low hum shifted through the floor—the vibration of something heavy switching circuits.

She turned to the secondary console. Access denied.

A message appeared for a fraction of a second:

Δ47 — REINITIALIZE — CONFIRMED.

Her pulse jumped. The command wasn’t hers. It wasn’t supposed to exist outside the sandbox.

She opened the system log. Empty. The network had cleaned its own memory.

For a moment, she let herself do nothing. That was always the hardest part—staying still when the mind wanted to fix what the world had already decided to break.

Finally, she reached for the small silver prototype on her desk, the one she had built from scrap parts and stubbornness. The cracked glass caught the lab light and threw it back at her.

On the back plate, she had engraved it by hand: Δ–17– 47.

The idea had started as a joke between her and Jonas: If we ever lose time, at least we’ll know which second to blame.

She smiled at the memory and then at how far away it already felt.