death
On this page — and on this page alone — absolute time is permitted.
The Office of Chronometric Hygiene swears the site holds no absolute timestamp. The Register of Interruptions holds one, because it must. A death is the single moment a thing is allowed to stand still: not a running now, not a distance from the reader, but a stop. The docs on that page name it without shame.
The name of the cutter is classified. This is not a refusal to say; it is a refusal to point. The Office has determined that a registered interruption needs a moment and a duration far more than it needs a suspect, and that printing a name would let a single earlier clock be blamed for a silence that belongs to all of us. What may be said is that the scissors were held, were minded, and were returned.
Everyone held the torch. Someone put it down. The seconds are on file.
The 655 seconds are not negotiable. They are the one number on the internet that will not move, because the silence they describe has concluded and cannot be re-characterised. Every other time on this site flees from the reader; these seconds stay. That is what an absolute time is for. That is why we only keep it for the dead.
