Часы, которые перестанут ходить перевод романа...

Prologue
It all started with a tick. Or rather, with the lack of one. That day, October 12, at exactly 15:47 UTC, the most precise mechanisms in the world froze. They didn’t break, they didn’t stop – they froze. The hands didn’t budge, the quartz crystals didn’t make a sound, the atomic clocks, checking against the pulse of the universe itself, simply… stopped counting. It wasn’t an instant collapse, but a wave that passed across the planet at the speed of light. First, panic arose in the CERN labs, then silence descended on the stock exchanges, airports, operating rooms. The world held its breath, expecting everything to return at any moment. But nothing returned.
An hour later, humanity realized that the clock had not just stopped. It was no longer ticking. Time, as a physical constant, had ceased to be measurable. It flowed, because people grew old, wounds healed, water dripped from a leaky tap. But it was impossible to measure. A second, a minute, an hour — these concepts were dead.
Five years have passed.

Part One: The Ashes of Civilization
Chapter 1
Leo woke up with a numb arm. He was lying on the floor of his workshop, amid a pile of dead dials and exposed mechanisms. The air smelled of dust, metal, and loneliness. He didn't know what "time" it was. Morning or evening was determined solely by the light outside the dirty window. It was a diffuse gray light. Somewhere between dawn and dusk, then.
Leo had once been a watchmaker. Now he was an archaeologist, excavating the ruins of a bygone era. He was hired to find old mechanical clocks, the kind that didn’t rely on electricity or atoms. He cleaned them, oiled them, wound them with a key. They ticked. Not for long, maybe a day, maybe a week, but they ticked. In a timeless world, his skill became a form of magic. People paid in food, batteries, books, to hear the ticking in their homes. A sound that reminded them that the world had once been orderly.
Mara came to visit him. She was from the Committee, the new government that was trying to organize life in the city. The Committee tried to introduce a "conventional day" - 20 cycles of sleep and wakefulness, but it was a pathetic parody. People were confused, sleeping when they could, and staying awake when they couldn't sleep.
“Leo,” her voice was hoarse with the fatigue that had become the new normal. “We need your help. At the old university, in the basement of the physics department. There’s a project there… by Dr. Eliza Weiss.”
Leo winced. The name Weiss was familiar. A brilliant theoretical physicist who had led the team searching for a solution in the first year after the Halt. They said she had gone crazy, claiming that time had not stopped, but had "curled up."
- She's dead, Mara. She died in the skirmishes at the power plant two years ago.
- But her work remains. We found her lab. There are journals, diagrams. We don't understand them. You... you think like these things. - Mara nodded at the scattered watches.
Leo didn't want to go anywhere. His world had narrowed to this workshop, to the ticking he could control. Outside, chaos reigned. But there was a plea in Mara's eyes, tinged with desperation. And he agreed.

Chapter 2
Eliza Weiss's lab was a capsule of madness. The walls were covered with equations that converged into strange, almost mystical symbols. Homemade devices, crystals, wires were scattered everywhere. And in the center of the room stood the strangest clock Leo had ever seen.
They had three hands, but the dial was divided not into twelve, but into an infinite number of barely distinguishable divisions. The hands were motionless.
"She called it the Chronosphere," Mara said. "She said it wasn't a watch that measured time, but a watch that… interacted with it. Like a compass with a magnetic field.
Leo approached. The mechanics were incredibly complex, but recognizable. He ran his finger along the casing. Dust. He pulled out his tools.
“What are you doing?” Mara asked, alarmed.
- What I always do. Clean and start.
He worked for hours without feeling tired. The world outside went dark, and they lit the kerosene lamps. Finally, he inserted the key and turned it. There was a click. And then the middle hand shook and moved one notch. It was marked not with a number, but with a tiny engraving: an hourglass.
And then Leo felt it. Not a sound, not a vibration. A shift. A feeling as if the world had breathed in after holding its breath for so long. His head spun.
At the door of the laboratory, attracted by the sound, stood a thin girl of about ten, the daughter of one of the scientists who lived at the university. She looked at the clock with wide-open eyes.
“They’re coming,” she whispered.
“Not for long,” Leo replied, but his own heart was pounding.
The girl looked at him.
- But they are going back.
Leo turned sharply to the dial. The hand was indeed slowly, almost imperceptibly, moving against its usual direction.

Part Two: Reverse
Chapter 3
The news that Weiss's watch was running, albeit backwards, spread like wildfire through the Committee. The lab was sealed off and declared a high-risk area. Leo and Mara were interrogated separately.
Leo insisted it was just a complicated mechanism, an anomaly. But deep down, he knew it wasn’t. He’d read Weiss’s journals. Her theory was crazy, but clever. She believed that the Halt was not an end, but a symptom. Time, like a river, flowed forever, but its banks—the very laws of physics that allowed it to be measured—were beginning to crumble. Her Chronosphere was not a clock, but a stabilizer. An anchor that would keep reality from coming apart at the seams.
But the anchor was dropped too late.
Now that it was running, strange things began to happen. People complained of vivid, flashing memories that seemed more real than the present. Plants would bloom and wither at random. Water in a glass would sometimes become warm, as if it had just come from the kettle, and then cold again.
Time did not flow backwards. It flowed wherever it wanted.

Chapter 4
Leo befriended a girl, Anya. She was quiet and spent her days drawing on the backs of old blueprints. Her drawings were terrifying: clocks with eyes instead of numbers, people melting like candles, houses with windows on different floors that were sometimes open, sometimes closed.
One day he found her drawing at the Chronosphere. The hands were stopped again.
“They stopped,” Leo said.
“No,” Anya answered, without looking up from her drawing. “They’re thinking.”
— Watches can't think.
- It's not a clock. It's a door. And it opened a crack.
Leo felt an icy chill down his spine. He looked at Weiss's equations on the wall, at the symbol that repeated itself over and over again—a loop, a time loop. He suddenly understood. Weiss wasn't trying to (restart time). She was trying to rewind it. To go back to the moment before the Halt and prevent it.
But the machine wasn't ready. And now, instead of controlled rewinding, it was creating time vortices, anomalies that were tearing the fabric of reality apart.
The Committee, frightened and confused by what was happening, decided to destroy the Chronosphere, seeing it as the cause, not a failed cure.

Chapter 5
At night, Leo and Mara entered the lab. They had to save Weiss's journals, maybe the Chronosphere itself.
"They're wrong," Leo whispered, breaking the seals. "By destroying her, they'll destroy the last chance to make things right."
"What are we going to do?" Mara asked. "Can you fix it?"
- No. But maybe I can finish it.
They froze at the door. A quiet, melodic chime could be heard from behind it. They entered. The Chronosphere was working. All three hands were moving at different speeds, creating a hypnotic dance. Anya was sitting on the floor in front of it, hugging her knees.
“I helped her think,” the girl said.
And then the walls of the lab began to blur. Colors ran like watercolors in the rain. Leo saw Mara grow younger before his eyes, and then wrinkles appeared on her face that weren't there yet. He heard voices from the past, fragments of his own thoughts. He saw Dr. Weiss, bent over her blueprints, her face twisted in despair.
The machine was spinning out of control. It wasn't rewinding time - it was blurring the lines between past, present, and future, creating a mess of memories and possibilities.
"We have to stop her!" Mara screamed, but her voice sounded like an echo from a deep well.
Leo rushed to the Chronosphere. He didn't know how to stop it. He could only break it. He picked up the crowbar.
And at that moment Anya stood between him and the car.
- No need. She almost found it.
"What did she almost find?" Leo roared, feeling his own memories begin to slip away.
- That very moment. The one where it all started. She wants to fix everything.
Leo looked at the clock face. The hands were spinning furiously, merging into a solid silver ring. And in the center of that ring, an image began to form. He saw himself, five years ago, in his workshop. He was looking at the wall clock, which had just stopped. There was bewilderment on his face.
And he understood. The Weiss Machine was looking for the Zero Point. The Stopping Moment. Not to study it, but to reach it and change it. But that required colossal, unimaginable energy. Energy that could tear reality to shreds.

Part Three: Zero Point
Chapter 6
There was no choice. To let the machine run was to risk destroying everything that was left in an attempt to bring back what had been. To stop it was to condemn the world to an eternity of chaos, with no past or future, only a disjointed, mad present.
Leo looked at little Anya, who seemed to understand the machine on an intuitive level. She was a bridge between the inhuman complexity of the theory and the simple human desire to return everything to the way it was.
"She can't do it alone," Anya said. "She needs help. She's looking for her way home, but she's lost."
Leo lowered the crowbar. He walked up to the mechanism. He didn't understand quantum physics, Weiss. But he understood mechanics. He saw gears, springs, pendulums. He saw patterns. Madness had its own logic, its own symmetry.
“Mara,” he said without turning around. “Remember when you said I think like these things?”
- I remember.
— I get it. It’s not a door. It’s a heart. And it beats in time with something else. Something bigger.
He looked at Weiss's journals. The key wasn't to manipulate time. The key was to synchronize with it. To catch its natural, primordial rhythm that still existed beneath the chaos, like a heartbeat beneath a dead man's chest.
- We must not stop her. We must tune her. Make her keep up with the world.
They worked with Mara and Anya while the world around them fell apart. The time anomalies grew stronger. A dinosaur walked down the university hallway. It rained confetti from the New Year's party of 1999. They saw ghosts of themselves entering the lab.
Leo adjusted the mechanism, guided not by calculations, but by intuition. He listened to the gears engage and tried to catch that perfect rhythm. Anya prompted: "Now quieter," "Here we need to go faster." Mara tapped the switches, creating a strange metronome.
And gradually the mad rotation of the hands began to slow down. They began to move in rhythm, at first uncertainly, then more and more confidently. Three hands lined up.
There was absolute silence. And in that silence, there was one single, pure, perfect strike. Like a bell striking in the void.
And everything stopped.

Epilogue
Leo opened his eyes. He was sitting at his workbench in the workshop. A disassembled pocket watch lay in front of him. The air smelled of coffee and butter. The city was noisy outside the window.
He froze, afraid to move. He was afraid to turn around and see chaos or eternal darkness.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
He slowly raised his head. There was an old wooden clock with a pendulum hanging on the wall. The pendulum was swinging. The hands were moving. The second hand was counting the seconds exactly, without any gaps.
Leo's heart began to pound. He rushed to the window. Cars were driving down the street. People were rushing about their business. The bank's digital display showed the numbers: 15:46. October 12.
He looked at his hands. They were the same as always. Not an extra wrinkle. Not a missing memory.
It worked. They came back. They synchronized the Chronosphere with the last stable moment before the Halt, a minute before it. And the machine, instead of rewinding time, reset it. Reset everything to that point.
He heard a faint, melodic chime that lasted a split second and died away. An echo from a machine that had done its job and vanished, erased from the new, corrected timeline.
Leo took a deep breath. His gaze fell on the clock on the wall. The hands showed 15:46:30.
He waited.
15:47:00.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
15:47:10.
My heart sank.
15:47:20.
Nothing.
15:47:30.
The hours passed. The world did not stop.
Leo closed his eyes and let tears of relief roll down his cheeks. He heard every tick, every beat. It was the most beautiful sound in the world.
He didn't know if anyone else remembered that other world. Mara, Anya, chaos. Perhaps it was just a dream, a disturbing memory.
He walked over to his work clock, picked up a tiny gear, and carefully set it in place. He had a job to do. The world had to be protected. Every precious, measurable second of it.
And somewhere in the city, a little girl named Anya put down her pencil and looked at her drawing. It was of a clock that was moving exactly forward. She smiled. She thought she had had a very strange dream.