The problem with Asterion City was that the clocks didn't always agree.
It wasn't something obvious. No one could have proven it easily. But if you walked down the central avenue at a certain hour in the afternoon and stopped to look at the screens on the buildings, you could notice small differences: five seconds here, three there, sometimes an entire minute.
Thomas had noticed it once while waiting for the traffic light to change. At first he thought it was a programming error. Then he realized it happened far too often to be a mistake. He never mentioned it to anyone. There were things better left unsaid in a city like that.
Asterion City had a very particular way of dealing with irregularities: it simply stopped talking about them.
For example, no one seemed to remember exactly when the first explorers had appeared.
Or when the first glass tower had been built in the center.
Or why certain neighborhoods would suddenly disappear from the maps for a few months before appearing again as if nothing had happened.
People adapted quickly. It was an efficient city. Ordered. Practically perfect. Perhaps too perfect. Thomas liked to think that cities, like people, had small lapses. Moments when something shifted just slightly out of place. A clock running slow, a bus opening its doors with no passengers, an elevator stopping on a floor that didn't exist. Nothing serious, just minor things.
But if you paid close enough attention, you could notice that these small irregularities always seemed to gather in the same part of the city. The exact same point.
Thomas didn't know yet that the place had a name. Most people didn't know either. But the explorers did.
They called it, simply,
The Impossible City.