The Transference

At this hour, 3:56am, Anchor Rock is a sleeping place when seen from above. The clouds have been caught about the peaks and are still settling into the valleys below, pooling as gentle mist in the lush glens and meadows. A mourning dove – early bird in every sense of the term – and its hollow coo are the only real sound to break the stillness of the air.

There are but a few lights on in the far-flung farmhouses, the lamps of those who have early rising folded into their core. Even so, it’s early for them, too. The gates are not yet creaking, cows not yet lowing as they are led out to pasture – even the roosters have not yet seen fit to grace the world with their crows that herald the hours-away dawn. Anchor Rock sleeps.

3:57am. A wind blows through the tops of the trees, setting their leaves rustling and whispering – whispering of change.

And then lights turn on. Almost every house is full of clamor, almost every building full of movement. Doors are opened and shut, names are cried aloud, and Anchor Rock is awake all at once. But the wind passes right through the treetops, off away and on to other lands. As the town below comes to frantic, moving life, still the mourning dove coos.

On Wednesday 2 May, 2024, at 3:57 local time, the Transference occurs. Its effects are widespread – just how much so is somewhat difficult to gauge, though. When half the adults in the world are suddenly displaced, as if trading places with another person at complete random, the lightning speed of modern global communications must inevitably pause. Systems slowly crash, networks grind to a halt as those who maintain and moderate them are no longer present to do so. The big-picture effects of this event are immense in large part because they are unprecedented.

This story, however, is not about large-scale and long-term consequences.

This is a story about the transfers, who find themselves one moment in lives they know well (for better or for worse), and a heartbeat later in a place so deeply unfamiliar to everything and anything they have ever known. This is a story about the transfers, hours after their lives are overturned in the midst of what should have been an ordinary day.

This is a story about the locals, who find themselves surrounded one moment by faces they might have known all their lives and a blink of an eye later by utter strangers. This is a story about the locals, hours after their lives are upended by the abrupt disappearance of some and arrival of many others.

This is the story of Anchor Rock.