The house
Kitchen regulator11:47
Hallway clock11:47
Both pendulums continue moving, but neither display advances.
Case 001 · Playable Demo
The Missing Minute
At 11:54 PM, every clock in Bellwether House began showing an earlier time. One guest remembers what happened between those two moments. They refuse to say why.
11:47 · STOPPED
Evidence room · I
Time disagrees with itself.
The house clocks are mechanically linked. The two personal devices are not. Establish exactly what was taken before looking for who took it.
The witnesses
Courier's phone11:54
Astronomer's watch11:54
Neither device was connected to the house mechanism.
Compare the frozen house clocks with the independent devices.
Evidence room · II
The message arrived from tomorrow.
A strip of paper emerged from the dead fax machine. Its five letters make no sense as written. The number you recovered in the clock room may also be the key.
VYIPA
RECEIVED 12:01 AM
Below the message, written by hand: “The sky remembers where we aimed it.”
Use the missing number as a Caesar shift: move every letter seven places backward. V becomes O.
Final interview
Three stories. One contradiction.
The decoded word names a destination, not a person. Compare the final mechanical record with each account, then choose whose story cannot be true.
The tracking ledger
The telescope left its fixed-star program at 11:47 and entered manual tracking. At 11:54, it returned to the same star.
Compare each alibi with an independent record. One statement is contradicted by Exhibit D.
7
Case solved
Mara borrowed seven minutes from tomorrow.
The object above Bellwether House was not a star. It was tomorrow, briefly visible in orbit. Mara stopped the linked clocks at 11:47 and used the brass box as a temporal anchor, creating seven unrecorded minutes in which to observe it.
- ClocksTwo time records disagreed.
- Seven minutesThe gap became the cipher key.
- OrbitThe fax named the telescope’s target.
- MaraThe tracking ledger broke her alibi.
The fax arrived after midnight because those minutes had to come from somewhere. At dawn, every clock advanced from 5:53 directly to 6:00. The debt was repaid.
The house remembers · The case is closed