Story

You owe minutes.

Before Earth

On Tiktik’s home planet, the currency is time. You do not earn dollars or credits — you earn minutes. You do not spend them, either. You burn them. A meal costs twelve. A night’s sleep, four-hundred-and-twenty. A friendship, more than anyone likes to admit.

Wasting minutes is not a social failing. It is a crime.

The fall

Tiktik was a minor courier — a collector of small debts. His ship was a two-seater, his route was predictable, and his math was, by his own admission, usually correct. He took one wrong turn through a fold in the current, and when the stars rearranged themselves he was over a wide blue planet he had never seen.

Earth

The first thing he noticed was the waste. Not garbage. Not pollution. Time.

Millions of minutes, every hour, everywhere — poured out by people who didn’t realize what they held. A thirty-eight-minute commute followed by thirty-eight minutes of staring at the same ceiling. Four hours lost to an app that never remembered his name. An entire Saturday spent “resting” but never quite resting.

He opened his wrist-clock and started collecting.

The bargain

He will not take minutes you’re using. He will not take minutes you value. He will only take the minutes you were going to lose anyway. He calls this salvage. You might call it rent.

The miscalculations

Tiktik’s math is usually right. Not always. When it’s wrong, the universe has ways of telling everyone. A room goes cold. A clock face flickers. A small purple figure sighs audibly from somewhere you can’t see. Then — correction required.

What comes next

Every episode is a minute he touched. Sometimes a quiet one. Sometimes a loud one. He doesn’t explain himself. He doesn’t have to. You’ll see him when you’re not paying attention. You might not mind.