The Watch (Prologue)

It took 4.5 billion years and the help of massive earth movers, gargantuan trucks and vicious
contraptions that broke, crushed and pulverized, heated, melted, fused and forged, to take
what once had no concept of time, place or of existence, and to transform it into a finite
instrument capable of only one thing. Measuring time.

Metal combined with glass and polished to a high sheen, it was an inanimate object made animate
by a rotor, a series of gears and a mainspring that was imbued with the life force of its wearer, by the
swing of the arm that kept it beating out a constant rhythm, by the warmth of the skin and the thin
film of sweat that formed where it rested and then migrated into its crevices to become part of its
whole. The daily cadence of the wearer transferred to its parts. Seventeen revolutions spent in motion
and seven revolutions spent in a darkened drawer awaiting the return of the vitality that made it part
of something more. It was needed. It served a purpose. It existed to measure the passage of time
against a life's worth of accomplishments.