The Five-Second Gap

Even the best logging systems sometimes missed a few seconds here and there. It took almost a month for people to realize that no digital system on the planet had any records for the five-second period beginning on 4:38:33 AM, Jan 7, 2023.

The explanation of a deep and subtle bug in a decades-old library in the depths of the dependency stack was embarrassingly plausible for most people. An explanation that would satisfy the rest was hauntingly hard to find. As a positive side effect, the robustness of logging systems and their monitoring was improved to almost the level it had been said to be before "the gap."

Even so, the next gap, longer than the previous one, took more time to find. This spawned more (and more public) theories. As a sign of the times, perhaps, more people believed this proved the Simulation Hypothesis than assumed it had been done by aliens. Very few people thought it a repeat of Joshua stopping the sun - which, after all, had been the universal time standard of those times.

The theories never died, yet no gap was ever found again. We had become better at erasing those parts of our history and memories we could not bear to have recorded, and if this gave us an intimate understanding for the gaps in the historical record academics had wrongly blamed our ancestors' untidiness for, this understanding was lost in every one of our collective acts of forgetfulness.