The Watch of Ages

During the Trojan War King Priam finds an object that does not belong, the rest is history

In the shadow of Troy’s towering walls, circa 1200 BCE, the dust of battle settled over a ravaged plain. Among the fallen, a warrior’s corpse lay unnoticed, clad in strange, shimmering armor unlike the bronze of the Achaeans or Trojans. On his wrist gleamed an anomaly: a sleek, obsidian band, no wider than a finger, pulsing faintly with a light no fire could mimic. King Priam, scavenging the field for spoils, knelt beside the body. His fingers brushed the band, and it hummed softly, detaching itself as if alive. This was no mere trinket—it was a relic from a distant future, a smartwatch from the year 2528 CE.


The device was a marvel of a lost age. By 2528, computers had transcended the crude inefficiencies of the 21st century. Each computation consumed a fraction of a watt, so power-efficient that entire server clusters rivaling the might of 2025’s military supercomputers ran on less energy than a household lamp. Miniaturization had reached its zenith: this watch, no larger than a coin, housed processing power equal to the Pentagon’s might in 2025. Its surface was coated with photoreceptors, microscopic marvels that doubled as cameras and solar cells, sipping sunlight to fuel its operations indefinitely. Within its quantum memory lay the sum of human knowledge—every book, song, and video in the public domain before August 21, 2528, when a new, enigmatic system had reset the world’s digital order.


How it arrived in Troy was a mystery. Perhaps a time traveler’s misstep, or a cosmic jest. Priam, unaware of its origins, carried the watch to his palace, intrigued by its glow. The war raged on, but in stolen moments, he studied the device. It was dormant, its screen dark, until one night, under a flickering oil lamp, he pressed a hidden ridge. The watch vibrated, its surface igniting with a holographic display. Words in an unknown tongue appeared, but the device, sensing a new user, shifted to a mode as intuitive as thought itself. Images danced—glyphs, then pictographs, then a voice, soft and guiding, speaking in a proto-Greek it had deduced from Priam’s muttered prayers.


“Welcome, new user,” it said, projecting a face that mimicked Priam’s own. “I am your guide. What do you seek?”


Priam, trembling yet enthralled, asked for wisdom. The watch obliged. It showed him star charts, explaining the heavens’ motions with a precision that shamed the priests’ auguries. It played music—lutes and choirs from eras unborn—that stirred his soul. It displayed texts: Euclid’s geometry, Aristotle’s logic, treatises on levers and pulleys, all centuries premature. Videos of ships sailing iron seas, of cities touching the sky, filled Priam with awe. The photoreceptors, ever active, recorded Troy’s own battles, teaching Priam tactics through simulations drawn from millennia of warfare.


He kept the watch secret, sharing it only with his son, Hector, and his daughter, Cassandra. Night after night, they learned. Hector grasped engineering, sketching machines to lift stone. Cassandra, gifted with vision, devoured art and poetry, her prophecies now laced with metaphors from Shakespeare and Sappho. The watch’s power never waned, its photoreceptors drinking sunlight by day, sustaining its vast archive. Priam’s family, once bound to myth, began to see the world through the lens of science and reason.


Years after Troy’s fall, the watch’s legacy endured. Priam’s descendants, scattered but enlightened, passed down its teachings. One, a craftsman in Antikythera, built a mechanism—a bronze wonder of gears and dials, inspired by the watch’s celestial models. By 100 BCE, the Antikythera mechanism was born, a primitive echo of the watch’s knowledge, predicting stars and tides with uncanny accuracy. The watch itself was lost, buried in some forgotten tomb, its photoreceptors dimmed but its impact eternal.


The Trojan War, a clash of gods and heroes, had birthed a spark of science. The watch, a relic from 2528, had seeded the future, its lessons whispering through time, from Priam’s hands to the gears of history.