One quiet Tuesday, a stratum-2 server—let’s call it —grew restless.

It wasn’t a boastful god. It didn’t speak in thunder or light. It spoke in the silent, atomic tick of a cesium beam—a pulse so steady that it would lose less than a second since the last ice age. The engineers called it “Big Ben,” though there was no bell, only a fiber-optic cable trailing upward like a patient umbilical cord to a GPS satellite.

“I mean,” NTP-2 continued, “we synchronize stock trades so they happen in the right order. We timestamp spacecraft burns so they don’t miss Mars. We tell every cheap wristwatch in the world when to wake up. But… what is time ?”

And in the break room upstairs, a microwave blinked — forever unset, forever drifting, and utterly content in its ignorance of the kingdom that held it aloft.