John Nicholas Datesh

The Last Three Minutes John Nicholas Datesh

A cyber-ghost story, a thriller based on a real, unexplained and unsolved time glitch that haunted the author's own laptop. That time gap was exactly...

Three minutes.

That is how long it took Julian to cook the perfect soft-boiled egg. It was, by then, the only thing his wife Leigh could eat. Leigh even setup an egg-timer app on her laptop, in large part to torture Julian over his poor sense of time. "Ding, Julian!" On that day, he got it just right. A perfect three minute egg, done just as he heard "Ding, Julian."

It took those same three minutes for Leigh to die. Alone. The one thing she dreaded: Dying alone. Julian almost made it with the perfect egg Leigh would never eat. In her last three minutes, she only had her laptop for company. Probably, the last thing she heard was "Ding Julian" while he was a flight of stairs away, getting it right. And so horribly late.

Julian carried on, if not well, for the next months. Without Leigh, without having been there with her. He couldn't bring himself to turn off her laptop. It helped that its egg-timer and Leigh's suicide-by-meds recipe file had disappeared on their own. Good riddance. He heard "Ding, Julian" enough in his sleep, increasingly as the anniversary approached.

Suddenly, Leigh's laptop inexplicably lost time. Three minutes.

Adequately tech-savvy, Julian knew a routine glitch when he saw one. But as he tried one thing after another to restore those minutes, he came up empty. No fix held. Nothing worked. Then, just as suddenly, with a "Ding, Julian," the cursed egg-timer reappeared. Julian was stunned. Once the recipe file reemerged, Julian began to wonder.

When a previously unknown video popped up - her final message - Julian was sure.

Leigh was giving him an another chance to join her for those Last Three Minutes.