杏吧原创

Chicago

Even in war, there is one thing that nations still agree on: the time, or to
be precise, Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). This global standard, the
successor to Greenwich Mean Time, steers the world鈥檚 clocks and silently
regulates our lives. UTC is actually an average, accurate to better than a
second over three million years, which is created from 230 atomic clocks
worldwide. Since 1972, labs around the globe have been sending their times to
Paris, where a team of professional clock-watchers working at the International
Office of Weights and Measures (BIPM) combines them into UTC.

All over the planet, navigators and pilots keep their ships and planes on
course by tuning in to UTC signals beamed down from a string of satellites. In
Europe and the US, national laboratories broadcast local versions of UTC via
low-frequency, long-range radio signals to keep clocks in homes, offices and
railway stations advancing in lockstep. These do more than just tell you what
time to get up. Lose control of the clocks, and you may not simply be late for
work. Just imagine:

Reuters, 10 August 1998, 16:24 GMT: Rebel groups calling themselves the
Temporal Liberation Front stormed national laboratories around the globe today,
seizing control of the atomic clocks that tick off official time. Britain鈥檚
National Physical Laboratory in southwest London fell early when a band of
bearded, sandal-clad octogenarians who were being given a guided tour pulled an
impressive selection of firearms from their loose-fitting robes. 鈥淭hey looked
like a gang of prophets,鈥� said one physicist. 鈥淚 was giving them a brief history
of time, and then all of a sudden here鈥檚 Nostradamus with an Uzi.鈥� Several key
physicists are thought to be being held captive.

National metrological centres which house caesium timepieces in the US,
Germany, France and Italy were also taken by surprise. Experts in the US say
their clocks have multiple power backups, but little defence against sabotage.
鈥淲e鈥檙e physicists,鈥� said one National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) employee, 鈥渘ot the military.鈥� He added that a secretary at the front desk
was supposed to announce all visitors.

CNN newsflash, 10 August 1998, 18:00 GMT: We鈥檙e here outside Falcon Air Force
Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado, home to the Global Positioning System (GPS)
command centre, which has just been captured by a group calling themselves the
Temporal Liberation Front. Officials suspect they may want to sabotage the GPS,
which is coordinated from inside this base. From our science desk, Gary Rosen
explains:

鈥淭he US military started flying GPS satellites around the Earth in 1978. Each
one contains a clock that is synchronised with a master clock held at Falcon
AFB. Every GPS satellite transmits a radio signal, giving its position along
with the exact time that the signal was sent. Receivers on the ground listen for
the signal and compares the time at which they were sent. From the difference,
GPS receivers can work out how far away they are from the satellites. Since at
least four GPS satellites are in sight at any moment, a hand-held receiver can
tell your location to within a few metres. It also lets you tell the time to
better than a thousandth of a second. Receivers now cost only a few hundred
dollars, and they鈥檙e used by everyone from sailors and pilots to drivers and
hikers. Russia has a similar system called Glonass, which the rebels took
earlier this morning.鈥�

Thanks Gary. Next on CNN鈥擥PS tractors that drive themselves, and a new
GPS-based navigation system for the blind.鈥�

Associated Press, Colorado Springs, 10 August 1998, 19:20 GMT: Moments ago a
man calling himself Achronos and claiming to be the leader of the Temporal
Liberation Front emerged from the GPS Master Control Station inside the Falcon
AFB to address the media. 鈥淭ime is a human construction,鈥� he said, 鈥測et it has
enslaved us. The finer we chop the second, the larger it looms. You fret over
kids on crack, but our true addiction is time.鈥�

Surrounded by a sea of reporters, Achronos promised to deliver humanity from
the shackles of time. 鈥淐ast off your watches, and be free!鈥� he cried, throwing
his own into the crowd. 鈥淏ring me the watches of every man, woman and child or
we wreck the clocks. You have,鈥� he said, looking down at his now empty wrist,
鈥渨ell . . . um . . . an hour to comply . . . or thereabouts.鈥� Government
officials are taking the threat seriously.

BBC World Service, 10 August 1998, 23:35 GMT: Power blackouts have blanketed
much of the Western world in the past hour, stranding people in lifts and
leaving dazed clubbers on silent dance floors across Europe鈥檚 cities. The
authorities who run the grids that distribute power across Europe and the US are
saying it could be days before they recover. Adam Pinkus, the president of the
American Power Company, says: 鈥淎chronos鈥檚 gang are very clever. Every part of
the grid must run to the same time, to less than a microsecond. The system uses
alternating current: the voltage goes up then down, 60 times a second here in
the US or 50 times a second over in Europe. If my generator鈥檚 voltage is up,
when someone else鈥檚 is down, power flows their way. And power suppliers
synchronise their current鈥檚 frequency to GPS time.

鈥淚f the GPS time pulses had stopped dead, or jumped a large amount, like a
whole minute, then our system would have noticed something was wrong and shut
down. But by tweaking the time just a little and inching the clocks about, the
TLF has wreaked havoc. The grid got out of phase and the voltage was higher in
one place than another. We had thousands of megawatts flowing the wrong way and
it blew every circuit breaker. What鈥檚 worse is that our diagnostic system that
locates the faults relies on timing information to triangulate. So right now we
don鈥檛 have that either.鈥�

Hospitals and other essential services switched to backup generators, but on
Wall Street dealers gave up and sent employees home. Third World countries with
older technology seem to have been spared the catastrophe.

The Daily Dispatch (Normal, Illinois) 13 August 1998: Mary Rose was
just throwing away the rotten food from her refrigerator when it came on again,
ending the longest nationwide power blackout in recent history. 鈥淚 was so
excited, I ran to the phone to call my Mom,鈥� she says. But when the 30-year-old
schoolteacher picked up the receiver she was met with a cold silence鈥攁
silence the Temporal Liberation Front is claiming credit for. 鈥淚 keep reaching
instinctively for the phone, and forgetting it鈥檚 out,鈥� Rose says, absentmindedly
waving a wilting celery stalk.

These days, most phone companies transmit calls in digitised form, chopping
up the voice data into tiny packets. They rely on GPS to give them a timing
standard accurate to within less than a millionth of a second. This, according
to one phone company representative who asked to remain nameless, was at the
root of the problem: 鈥淎chronos must have goosed up the speed of the GPS clocks,鈥�
he explains. 鈥淢ost phone companies are completely dependent on those clocks, so
they started sending stuff too fast down the phone line and it just overflowed
the buffers.鈥� In most cases, he says, the result was just a pop or a crackle on
the line, what the industry calls, a 鈥渟lip鈥�. He adds: 鈥淲e had bits of
conversation that were just falling out onto the floor, so to speak.鈥� These
slips have also jumbled fax transmissions and brought Internet traffic to a
standstill.

Most phone carriers were quick to slap on a technological sticking plaster,
switching the network to backup clocks. But without a master clock, they say
鈥渢iming islands鈥� will develop as clocks in different networks drift away from
each other, further degrading the system. 鈥淲e鈥檙e going to need a global reboot
when this thing is over,鈥� one technician said.

Cellular phone networks were also hit today, with users in many parts of the
US getting cut off as their calls were passed from one cellular receiving
station to another. In these networks, each cell station relies on a GPS
receiver for timing. 鈥淐ellphones have little clocks in them, and when they try
to communicate with a base station it has to be listening at the right time,鈥�
says Lee McClain a technical consultant. 鈥淚f we鈥檙e off,鈥� she adds, 鈥渨e start
dropping calls pretty quickly.鈥�

The New York Times, 14 August 1998: With what is coming to be known
as 鈥淭he Little Dark Age鈥� past, commuters in Los Angeles have been getting a
quick, hard lesson in the subtler twists of timekeeping. On their way in to work
yesterday, drivers found that traffic lights didn鈥檛 seem to be cooperating. The
signals, which are usually synchronised in the morning to speed traffic heading
downtown were instead on the evening schedule. 鈥淚 just hit red light after red
light,鈥� said one executive who had abandoned her car to recover with a Martini
breakfast.

Across town, Alex Blumberg, director of Traffic and Lighting for LA County,
had taken his phone off the hook. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not my fault,鈥� he pleaded. 鈥淲e had to
have some way to tell the lights which schedule to be on.鈥� So they installed
tiny radio receivers into the 500 traffic-light control boxes located around the
city. The receivers tune in to the NIST鈥檚 60-kilohertz broadcast which announces
the time from its atomic clocks. 鈥淣ormally it鈥檚 good to a millisecond,鈥� he says,
staring out of the window at a city in gridlock, 鈥渙nly now it seems to be off by
6 hours.鈥� Blumberg has dispatched a battalion of technicians to reset the lights
by hand.

The Guardian, London, 14 August 1998: 鈥淚t鈥檚 rather warm for
January,鈥� exclaimed a middle-aged man, pointing at a large clock above a crowded
Hamburg street. The digital display, which usually keeps time to the second, now
proclaimed it was the winter of 1863.

In a country that prides itself on accurate timekeeping, the Temporal
Liberation Front is causing trouble by rewinding the nation鈥檚 clocks from the
time of Kohl to that of Bismarck, and duping some banks into printing cheques
that appear to date from the last century.

Clocks that synchronise themselves have become part of everyday life in
Germany. Several times a day, they tune in to station DCF-77, which emits time
signals synchronised to the local version of UTC. Industry analysts say that
more than 6 million of these clocks and watches were sold in Europe last year.
The American market is smaller, but growing.

The benefits of radio clocks are many, according to their manufacturers. They
always show the right time, adjusting automatically when the clock shifts
forwards an hour in spring and back again in the autumn, as well as for leap
years and even leap seconds. Some models have no buttons at all because, their
manufacturers boast, they never need to be set. Never, that is, until now.

鈥淚f time is money, I ought to be raking it in,鈥� said one bank executive,
staring down at a wristwatch advancing at 20 times the normal speed, in a vain
attempt to align itself with yet another wrong time standard. 鈥淏ut at the moment
I鈥檇 happily trade some cash for a watch with some springs.鈥�

La Repubblica, Rome, 15 August 1998: Clocks are spinning in many
parts of the country today, following the terrorist takeover of the National
Electrotechnical Institute (IEN) in Turin earlier this week. The dozen
physicists who usually maintain the clocks were too upset to contemplate what
havoc the time guerrillas might wreak with their delicate instruments, residing
in underground, vibration-controlled vaults.

Asked what the effect of the shutdown of their time broadcasts might be
having on the life of the nation, they said they had no idea. 鈥淲e used to joke
that the only way to tell who was using them was by shutting them off and
waiting for the phone to ring,鈥� one said. 鈥淏ut now the phones are on the blink
迟辞辞.鈥�

Drivers arriving in Milan on the A1 highway from Rome were surprised to note
that, according to their computer-printed toll receipts, they had made the
500-kilometre trip in under an hour. 鈥淚 had better not get a speeding ticket,鈥�
said one perplexed lawyer, who pointed out that the receipts were often used to
catch speeding motorists.

Reuters, 17 August 1998, 13:00 (GMT-approximate): Taking advantage of a rare
lapse in the defences of the TLF, an FBI force has just recaptured the GPS
Master Control Station in Colorado. An officer close to the event said the
rebels had not synchronised their watches, and were caught when Monday morning鈥檚
guards failed to turn up on time. 鈥淔oiled by their own ideology,鈥� he mused
鈥淭hat鈥檚 always the way.鈥�

The Washington Post, 7 October 1998: Following a speedy trial, Judge
Aton Redalgo鈥攊nspired to a rare moment of creative
punishment鈥攕entenced members of the Temporal Liberation Front today to
9.46 x 10⁸ seconds exactly in solitary confinement.

杏吧原创s at the BIPM in Paris discussed plans today to bring together any
atomic clocks that had been spared the week-long assault, and try again to put
world time back together. 鈥淒on鈥檛 ask me what time it is,鈥� said a senior BIPM
official. 鈥淚 gave up wearing a watch long ago.鈥�