Read Before Midnight

M Mehran

Against her better judgment, she clicked. The message contained only one line:

For your information: At midnight, everything changes.

She laughed nervously, certain it was spam. Still, she left her laptop open as the clock ticked closer to twelve.

At 12:00 sharp, her apartment lights flickered, her phone died, and the city outside her window went silent. No cars. No hum of traffic. Nothing.

Then, a second email appeared.

FYI: Time has stopped. You are one of the few awake.



Nora stumbled to her window. Below, people stood frozen mid-step. A man with a coffee cup remained suspended, the liquid hanging impossibly in the air. A woman held her phone mid-swipe, her face motionless.

The city had become a photograph.

Her chest tightened. “This isn’t real,” she whispered.

Her laptop pinged.

FYI: It’s real. And you have work to do.



Over the next hour, instructions kept arriving.

FYI: Go to the library. Check the third shelf from the bottom.

Heart pounding, Nora obeyed. The library, usually buzzing with students and night owls, was eerily silent. She found the shelf. A leather-bound journal sat there, embossed with the same three letters: FYI.

She opened it and gasped. Inside were pages describing her life—moments no one else could know. Her first crush in middle school. The fight with her sister that still haunted her. The night she almost gave up on her art degree.

The handwriting shifted halfway through, becoming sharp and hurried:

“Nora, for your information, the world is caught in a loop. Midnight resets everything. You and a handful of others have been chosen to break it. Trust the messages. They’re from me—your future self.”



Her future self.

The journal included instructions: find others, guide them, piece together the truth.

The next morning—or what passed for it in this timeless void—Nora received another email.

FYI: Someone waits for you at the fountain.

At the city fountain, she found a man about her age, standing with a bewildered look. He held a slip of paper that read the same three letters.

“You too?” he asked.

They compared notes. His name was Lucas. He’d gotten his first email a week earlier.

Together, they followed the trail—emails, hidden journals, cryptic graffiti scrawled on subway walls. Each clue pulled them closer to an answer: the loop was created by a machine, a secret government experiment gone wrong. Every midnight, the device reset reality.

But here was the twist: in every loop, people like Nora and Lucas remembered more. Their future selves had been leaving breadcrumbs.



Weeks—or maybe months, it was impossible to tell—passed as they hunted for the machine. Along the way, they met others: a nurse who carried a journal marked FYI, a teenager who swore she’d solved half the puzzle already. They formed a ragtag group of wanderers in a still world, each piecing together fragments of their own future notes.

And then came the warning.

FYI: One of you will betray the rest.

The message rattled them. Trust frayed. Nora caught Lucas watching her too closely. The nurse whispered that the teenager knew too much. Fear gnawed at their fragile alliance.

Still, they pressed on.



At last, deep beneath an abandoned laboratory, they found it: a colossal machine, its gears frozen mid-turn, its wires humming faintly despite the stillness of time.

A final email flashed across Nora’s screen.

FYI: To break the loop, one of you must stay behind.

Silence fell. They looked at one another, realization sinking in. To shut it down meant someone had to merge with the machine—caught in endless reset, forgotten by the waking world.

The nurse shook her head. “Not me.”

The teenager whispered, “I can’t.”

Lucas’s jaw tightened. “We wouldn’t even be here without you, Nora. Don’t.”

But as she stared at the machine, Nora remembered every note, every breadcrumb. Future versions of herself had left the trail. Maybe she had always been meant to be here.

Maybe she had always been the one.

She smiled faintly. “FYI,” she said, “I think it’s me.”



The last thing she saw was Lucas’s face, torn between grief and admiration, as the machine roared to life around her.

Midnight struck. The world shuddered.

And then—movement. Cars honking. Phones buzzing. Life flowing again, as if nothing had happened.



When Lucas woke the next morning, time restored, his phone buzzed with a new email.

FYI: Don’t forget me. – N.

He didn’t. Not ever.

Because some sacrifices don’t vanish, even when time does.