The Pause

If you could live between seconds, would you ever give them back?

By: Gary Seven

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Time-freeze devices let workers pause the world to finish tasks. A janitor gets trapped cleaning a world stuck in endless pause.

In a future where time is currency, every citizen wears a PauseBand—a device that freezes the world, letting them steal hours, days, even weeks to work, play, or hide. The rich use it for leisure; the poor for survival.

Luis, a weary janitor drowning in debt, spends his nights cleaning skyscrapers while the world hangs frozen around him. But when his band malfunctions, time never starts again—and he finds himself trapped in a silent city where raindrops hover mid-air, birds hang forever in flight, and millions of people stand motionless, unaware.

At first, the still world is hauntingly beautiful. Then Luis discovers he’s not alone. Others are trapped too—some desperate, some violent, and one who calls himself The Warden of Time.

As Luis descends deeper into fractured layers of paused reality, he must decide: cling to the frozen safety of a broken world, or risk everything to rejoin the relentless flow of time.

A chilling, Black Mirror–style thriller, The Pause asks: If you could live between seconds, would you ever give them back?