IIn his workshop suspended between folds of the space-time continuum, the watchmaker examined with infinite patience the strange contraption on his workbench.
It was not a simple clock, but a quantum device that stored memories of alternate realities.
An incandescent flicker indicated an anomaly. Memories of lives that never existed were seeping into the time stream, threatening to tear at the fabric of the multiverse.
The clockmaker stood motionless, feeling the infinite gears of the cosmos turning around him.
He had two options: repair the fault to preserve those ephemeral memories or reset the mechanism, completely erasing the hapless customer trapped in that impossible time stream.
His hands, seasoned after eons of service, hesitated only an instant. A flicker in the vast immortality that awaited him.
Then, with precise movements, he began to disassemble the device, piece by piece.
It didn't matter what realities those spectral lives had forged. Slips in the machinery of the multiverse would not be allowed to threaten the integrity of the true timestream.
Time would continue its inexorable, imperturbable, perfect march.
The watchmaker was its loyal custodian. Nothing else mattered.
