TYLER HAYES — PERSONAL NOTES Cedar County Regional 911 Dispatch Kept on personal phone, not county property

Shift notes, general

Been at this job four months now. Nobody tells you how much of it is just sitting. People think dispatch is nonstop chaos, screaming into headsets, but most nights it's two, three calls an hour, tops, and in between you're doing sudoku on your phone under the desk or listening to Helen complain about her knee.

Console's got six monitors, one of which just shows the clock, big red digits, synced off the county server which is synced off GPS, which Victor's told me a hundred times is about as accurate a clock as exists on planet earth. I believe him. I don't think about it much. Why would you think about a clock.

Coffee machine in the break room's broken again. Third time this month. Somebody keeps not descaling it and I'm getting tired of being the one who does.

The night it happened — first pass, written the next morning, hands still a little off

Quiet Tuesday, nothing on the board since a fender bender around eight. I was doing the crossword. Helen was two consoles over eating crackers loud enough that I could hear them over my headset static.

Clock jumped.

Not glitched, not flickered — jumped. One second it said 11:47, next time I glanced at it, it said 11:56. Nine minutes gone between two blinks. I actually laughed at first, thought I'd just spaced out longer than I realized, you do that sometimes on a slow night, but Helen was already up out of her chair looking at her own monitor with this face on her I hadn't seen her make before.

"Did your clock just—" she started.

"Yeah."

"Okay," she said, and sat back down, and didn't say anything else about it for a while, which honestly bothered me more than if she'd freaked out.

IT ticket got filed. Victor came down around one in the morning, grumbling about being pulled out of bed for what he assumed was a software hiccup. Pulled the logs. Logs showed 11:47 straight through to 11:48, normal, one second at a time, no jump anywhere in the recorded data.

"So the clock's wrong," I said.

"The clock's not wrong," Victor said, not really looking at me, looking at his laptop. "The clock's GPS-synced. It doesn't get things wrong, that's the whole point of it. If the display jumped and the log didn't, that means the log is what's lying."

I didn't have anything to say to that. Went back to my crossword. Didn't finish it.

Two nights later

Helen brought donuts, said sorry for being weird the other night. I said she wasn't weird, she was just quiet, and she said quiet was her being weird, and I let it go because I didn't really want to push on it at one in the morning with a donut in my hand.

Pulled the recorded call log for that missing window anyway, out of boredom more than anything. 11:47 to 11:56.

There's two calls logged in there. Which shouldn't be possible, since according to Victor the log never actually skipped anything, the nine minutes exist in the data even if the display didn't show them ticking by. Two calls, both under fifteen seconds, both marked ABANDONED — CALLER DISCONNECT, no audio attached, no case number generated, nothing routed to anyone.

I asked Helen if abandoned calls always look like that.

"Sometimes," she said, not looking up from her donut. "People butt-dial. Kids play with phones."

"Two in nine minutes with no audio at all? Not even background noise?"

She didn't answer that one. Ate her donut.

A week after, I finally asked her straight

Slow night again, most of them are. I just asked her, point blank, has this happened before.

She was quiet long enough I thought she wasn't going to answer, and then she said, "Third time since I've worked here. Eleven years."

"And?"

"And what."

"And what happens. After."

She got up, refilled her coffee even though it was already half full, which is a thing she does when she doesn't want to be looking at you while she talks.

"First time it happened I was maybe two years in," she said, back to me, pouring coffee she didn't need. "Same thing. Clock jumps. Couple minutes, not nine that time, six I think. I pulled the log same as you did, curious, bored, whatever. There was a call in there. Address on Route 9, out past the mill. No audio, but the address came through clean, like a normal call would, like someone had actually dialed it in and given the info and then the call just — closed."

"You send someone out?"

"I shouldn't have," she said, and now she did turn around, and her face was doing something I still think about. "I didn't know any better. I was new. I dispatched a car to the address, because that's the job, that's what you do when an address comes through even a weird call. Twenty minutes later there's an actual accident at that exact address. Kid ran a stop sign, hit a truck, walked away fine, truck driver didn't. My unit was already halfway there because of the ghost call. Beat the real call in by four minutes."

"That's good though," I said. "That's fast response."

"There was no accident yet when the ghost call came in, Tyler." She said my name like she needed me to actually hear this part. "The accident happened after. It happened at 11:53. The call came in at 11:49."

I didn't say anything for a while. Neither did she.

"Second time," she said, "I didn't send anyone. Just sat on it, didn't know what else to do, figured if I ignore it maybe nothing happens. Nothing happened. No accident, no incident report, nothing on the news, nothing. Just a weird abandoned call that went nowhere because I didn't act on it."

"So don't act on it," I said. "Simple."

"That's what I thought too," she said, and didn't finish the sentence, and went back to her console, and I got the sense there was a third time in there she hadn't told me about yet, and I didn't push it, because it was almost three in the morning and I was tired and some part of me didn't actually want the rest of it yet.

Victor, later, when I finally cornered him about the hardware

Turns out the county never fully replaced the old analog switching gear when they went digital back in whenever, the nineties I think he said, they just built the new system on top of it because ripping the old stuff out would've cost more than the county wanted to spend. Victor showed me a rack in the server closet that's older than I am, dust thick enough to write your name in it, and said as far as he can tell that's where the loop originates, though he was real careful with the word "loop," like he didn't love using it.

"It's not haunted," he said, like I'd accused him of something. "It's old infrastructure nobody fully understands anymore because the guy who built it retired in 2003 and didn't leave documentation."

"Okay, but the calls."

"I don't know about the calls," he said. "I know about switches and relays. I can tell you the clock desyncs on a nine-year rough interval, give or take, based on what old maintenance logs I could dig up, going back to the eighties. I can't tell you why there's a phone call sitting in the buffer when it does. I've got theories. None of them are ones I want to say out loud in a server closet at one in the morning, so let's just fix the sync and go home."

He didn't fix the sync. Nobody's ever fixed the sync, apparently. It just goes back to normal on its own, every time, and the county's never spent the money to actually dig into why, because on paper it's a nine-minute clock glitch nobody outside this building has ever noticed or cared about.

The night it happened again — the second time this cycle, which Helen says has never happened before, two jumps this close together

Board was empty. Sergeant Nash had come by earlier, which she does maybe once a month, mostly to remind us the county's watching the metrics, mostly to make everyone slightly more nervous for an hour and then leave.

Clock jumped again around two a.m. Six days after the first one. Helen went pale in a way I hadn't seen, said this had never happened twice so close, not in eleven years, and I could tell she genuinely didn't know what that meant either, which somehow was worse than if she'd had an answer.

I pulled the log without really deciding to. One call this time, not two. Fifteen seconds, no audio, address attached.

My address.

Not a street I recognized as someone else's. Mine. The apartment I've lived in for four months, the one with the coffee machine of my own that also doesn't work right, and the call had come in tagged as a welfare check, caller unknown, and it just sat there in the log like any other line of data, like it wasn't anything.

I looked at the time stamp a long while before I said anything to Helen.

11:51.

I still had five minutes left on the clock before it would catch back up to real time.

I don't know what I would've done with more warning than that, honestly. I don't think there is a version of tonight where I have a plan. I called Sergeant Nash's cell instead of dispatching a unit to myself, which felt like the only thing that made any sense, and she picked up on the second ring sounding like she'd been expecting the call for longer than tonight, and the first thing she said, before I even got a full sentence out, was:

"Don't send anyone. Whatever the address is. Just don't send anyone."

I told her the address was mine.

She was quiet a second.

"Then go home," she said. "Right now. Don't finish your shift. Helen can cover the board."

I'm sitting in the parking lot writing this instead of driving, because my hands aren't doing what I want them to do yet. The clock in my truck says 11:56. It matches the console clock inside, finally, caught back up, everything normal again, nine minutes gone the way it always goes, quietly, like it was never anything at all.

I don't know if I'm going to go home tonight or just sit here until the sun comes up.

Have you ever had a piece of technology give you information it shouldn't have had yet? Tell me in the comments.💬💬 I read every single one.

This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people, dispatch systems, or events is purely coincidental and created for entertainment purposes only.

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