The Watch That Time Forgot

 

There are things in this world that shouldn’t be evil, but are. A child’s doll with button eyes that seem to follow you across a room. A carnival that appears overnight in an empty field. A perfectly ordinary digital watch that costs nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents.

The Casio F-91W looked innocent enough when it first crawled out of some factory in 1989, blinking its dead digital eye at a world that didn’t know what was coming. Just another timepiece, you might think. Just another cheap piece of plastic and circuitry that would tick away the minutes until your own personal apocalypse.

You’d be wrong.

Ryusuke Moriai—now there was a name that would come back to haunt him—was shuttled off to a ten-day training camp with the Japanese Self-Defense Forces on his first day at Casio. Maybe that’s where the darkness first seeped in, like water through a cracked foundation. Maybe that’s where the watch learned its first lessons in violence.

“I didn’t do any watch-related activities,” Moriai would later recall, and Jesus, if that wasn’t the understatement of the century. Because what he created wasn’t just a watch. It was a harbinger. A digital prophet of doom wrapped in a plastic case that could survive being run over by a Mack truck.

The thing was tough—tougher than a two-dollar steak and twice as hard to kill. Water couldn’t drown it. Hammering couldn’t break it. You could boil the damn thing and it would keep on ticking, like some mechanical cockroach that would outlive us all. Maybe that should have been the first warning sign.

But warnings are like smoke detectors in a Stephen King novel—they only work until the batteries die.

The Singapore military took a shine to it first, handing them out to soldiers like communion wafers. Standard issue, they called it. Right alongside the boots and the backpacks and the rifles that would later teach other people’s children the weight of bullets.

For a while, it seemed harmless enough. Seven-year battery life. Water resistant. A little alarm that would chirp at you like a mechanical cricket. What could go wrong?

Everything, as it turned out.

The first real taste of darkness came in 2001, when Osama bin Laden—and Christ, even typing that name makes the air in the room feel colder—posed for a propaganda photo wearing nothing but robes, a turban, and a nineteen-dollar digital watch. It was the only branded item the man ever wore publicly, like he was endorsing death itself.

And maybe he was.

Because after that, the Casio F-91W became something else entirely. Not a timepiece, but a timer. Not a keeper of hours, but a counter of heartbeats. The watch that counted down to zero, and when it reached zero, people died.

In Manila, 1995, Abdul Hakim Ali Hashim—whose real name was as fake as everything else about him—was mixing chemicals in an apartment when fate decided to light a match. The fire that followed wasn’t an accident; it was a revelation. When Officer Aida Fariscal searched the smoking ruins, she found the usual suspects: batteries, wires, and that goddamn watch. The unholy trinity of urban terrorism.

Hashim was planning to kill the Pope. The Pope, for Christ’s sake. As if the world needed any more proof that some people’s moral compasses don’t just point south—they point straight down to hell.

But it got worse. It always gets worse.

Ramzi Yousef—and there’s another name that should be carved on a tombstone—had already proven the watch’s killing potential a year earlier. Philippine Airlines flight something-or-other, seat 434. One Japanese tourist who probably spent his last moments wondering why his vacation had suddenly turned into a Michael Bay movie. The bomb wasn’t big enough to bring down the plane, but it was big enough to kill. And that was all that mattered to Ramzi.

The same Ramzi who would later be connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The same Ramzi who now sits in a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, probably still checking his wrist for the time out of habit, even though time doesn’t matter much when you’re never getting out.

Throughout the 1990s, while the rest of us were worried about Y2K and whether Ross and Rachel would ever get back together, the Casio F-91W was being distributed in training camps across Afghanistan and Pakistan like some twisted version of a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy. Except instead of learning to be happy, recruits learned to optimize alarm functions and countdown timers. They learned to marry nine-volt batteries to homemade explosives. They learned to turn time itself into a weapon.

The U.S. government noticed, eventually. They always do, usually about five minutes after it’s too late to matter. A study found that over fifty Al-Qaeda suspects detained at Guantanamo Bay were wearing either the F-91W or its digital cousin, the A-159W. Fifty people, all wearing the same nineteen-dollar death machine on their wrists.

Coincidence? In a Stephen King story, there are no coincidences. Only patterns waiting to be recognized by people smart enough or unlucky enough to see them.

Ahmed Ressam—the “Millennium Bomber,” because apparently even terrorists need branding these days—was caught at the Canadian border with four bombs, each one triggered by a Casio F-91W. He was planning to light up Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve, because nothing says “Happy New Year” like mass murder.

Bangkok, 2015. The Erawan Shrine bombing. When the smoke cleared and the body bags were filled, investigators found the usual calling cards: explosive materials, wires, and four Casio F-91W watches. Four of them. As if one wasn’t enough to make the point.

But here’s the thing that makes this whole story even more twisted than a Maine back road: it wasn’t just the bad guys wearing these watches. CIA operatives loved them too. John R. Seeger, twenty-two years with the Company, called it one of his favorite pieces of gear. American soldiers wore them. Intelligence officers wore them. Hell, even Barack Obama wore one during his 2008 presidential campaign, probably never knowing that he was strapping the same device to his wrist that had been used to kill innocent people on three continents.

The watch had become something beyond good and evil. It had become utility. Pure, amoral utility. It didn’t care who wore it or what they planned to do with it. It just kept ticking, counting down the seconds until whatever fresh hell was coming next.

At Guantanamo, detainees complained about the watch’s sinister reputation. One Turkish citizen, Salih Uyar, had the audacity to point out the obvious: “If wearing this watch is a crime, then your own military personnel are guilty too. Does that make them terrorists as well?”

It was a good question. Maybe the best question. Because what do you call a tool that can be used equally well by saints and sinners, by heroes and monsters, by the people trying to save the world and the people trying to burn it down?

You call it what it is: perfect.

The Casio F-91W wasn’t evil because it wanted to be. It was evil because it was too good at what it did. Too reliable. Too durable. Too cheap. It could survive being run over by a car, hammered flat, boiled alive. Some soldiers even injected oil into the case to make it even tougher, like they were giving it steroids.

It was the digital equivalent of a Kalashnikov rifle or a Toyota pickup truck—simple, effective, and completely indifferent to the moral weight of its purpose. The kind of thing that works so well it becomes legendary, and legends have a way of outliving their creators.

So the next time you see someone wearing a cheap digital watch, remember this story. Remember that sometimes the most ordinary things carry the most extraordinary darkness. Remember that evil doesn’t always announce itself with fanfare and special effects.

Sometimes it just sits on your wrist, counting down the seconds, waiting for its moment to remind you that in this world, time isn’t just money.

Sometimes, time is murder.

And it only costs nineteen ninety-five.