Slept Through Thursday (Part 1)

Photo Credit: Sarko (Flickr.com)

Slept Through Thursday is a serial novel. Click here for more chapters!

I woke up around 4 AM. This really bothered me, because I’d crawled into bed around 2:30 AM. But I felt well-rested. I wondered if that time I’d spent napping at work had translated into some sort of sleep efficiency. “It must have,” I said to myself as I got out of bed and climbed down the ladder leading up to my bunk. Honestly, I felt like I’d been sleeping for hours.

My roommate was gone. That didn’t surprise me. His classes were all on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so his weekend began on Wednesday night. He’d been gone when I went to bed, too. I never knew where he went on the weekends, and I wasn’t about to jinx his frequent absences by asking too many questions. I just assumed he went camping. That was good enough for me; I enjoyed having a part-time roommate.

The dorm hallway was pretty quiet, but then, this was the one time of day in which it usually was. The bars closed at 1 AM, and most of the guys got back around 2:30. We had a few who would pull all-nighters in the lounge or who would stay up playing video games, and then a few more who liked to get up at 6AM and head down to the cafeteria the moment it opened.

I only knew this because I was one of the guys who tended to be up during odd hours of the night. Earlier in the year, I’d developed a 11-day week for myself that shortened my days to around 15 hours each and which left me with three extra hours on day 11 to do whatever I wanted to do with myself. That day started at 5:43 on Thursday morning. My three extra hours came between 9:00 PM and midnight. But now, since I was up at 4:00 AM with nothing to do, it was like I’d added a couple of extra hours to my free time.

As I stopped in the bathroom and emptied my bladder, I reflected on how lucky I really was. Most of the people I knew were slaves to the 24-hour day. When I tried to explain my 15.72 hour-day to them, most got annoyed and said that it was too much math. I’d show them the watch I’d built to help me keep track of which day it was in conventional time (using the analog hands) and Chance-time (using my digital readout). “Stop being an idiot, Chance,” they’d tell me. And often, I’d get a lecture about how when I got out of college, I’d have to live on a 24-hour day just like everyone else.

I passed by the sinks on my way back to my room and took a look at myself in the mirror as I washed my hands and face. My face actually had what I’d often heard described as a 5 o’clock shadow on it. I grinned at the irony of this — 5 AM was coming up, after all — but I was also troubled by it. I’d never had to shave more than once every week, and I’d just shaved on Day 2 — sometime on Friday night on the conventional calendar. I should have had a couple of days in Chance-time left. Was my body starting to age rapidly now that I was 21 years old?

“That’s what you get for being an Underdweller,” I grumbled. Underdweller — the name we’d proudly inherited for living in the dorm basement. It was all guys. The floors above us were all co-ed, but the girls didn’t want to live in the basement, even if we had the best access to the laundry rooms and the cafeteria, and even if we could escape out our windows if someone was waiting for us outside the door. It seemed like an ideal situation to me.

Still grumbling, I skulked out of the bathroom and back into my dorm room, where I grabbed a soda out of my mini-fridge and plopped down at my computer to check up on the world online. For whatever reason the, Internet was down. I grumbled again. It’d been out a few times over the last month, mainly due to one of the guys who used to live on the floor flooding the traffic with his botnet as a prank to another guy who still lived here. It meant they’d shut the whole floor down until the botnet attack was over. It’d been funny the first couple of times, and it could potentially be funny again once it’d happened too often. But right now, it was firmly in the realm of annoying.

I thought about playing some video games, or maybe (I grinned at the thought) studying, but I decided instead to wander upstairs to the courtyard to see if I could bum a smoke off someone. I’d never actually smoked before; it was on my bucket list of things to try. A friend of mine who did smoke had told me how he’d started just to be social, and how he never paid for cigarettes now. He’d just find some lonely-looking smoker, bum a smoke and then keep them company while they got their fix. “The secret to smoking is not to do it too often,” he said. “That way, you don’t get very addicted, and it’s a lot easier for you to quit when you want to.”

It sounded like sage advice to me. And besides, this particular friend had used smoking to develop an entire network of smoking buddies on campus — male and female. He’d even hooked up with a few of the girls. It was amazing how you could get people to trust you and like you just because you both shared a common vice.

Unfortunately, there was no one in the courtyard, nor did there seem to be anyone anywhere upstairs. That was sort of strange. Normally, there was at least one person walking around doing something, even if it was just something dull like visiting the poor sap who had to sit at the front desk or watching the foreign news on the giant TV in the lounge. The place seemed completely deserted.

The free campus paper was already out on the rack, so I checked to make sure it was Thursday’s and picked up a copy. It seemed like there were a lot fewer papers on the rack then normal, but it occurred to me that maybe they were just trying to cut costs. The paper had been getting thin lately and – bastion of journalism that it already was – the stories had been getting increasingly more sensational and crazy. It was like watching an old uncle actually go crazy during an attempt to pretend he was crazy just so he could get some more meds. I never missed an issue, especially now that the Student Senate had appointed a Student Dictator who had used his power and popular support to shut down the Student Government and assume its powers. You really couldn’t make up stories like those.

I sat down in one of the plush chairs in the lounge and read for a few minutes. But I found myself increasingly getting anxious at how peaceful and quiet everything was around me. I’d never known my dorm to be so tranquil; generally, there was at least something going on. I decided to stop in the computer lab to see if they had their Internet up, and saw something I’d never witnessed before.

The place was entirely empty.

Quickly, I ran over to a computer, logged in, and checked the online news. And in doing so, I quickly discovered two things that put my entire experience into context.

First of all, it was Friday, not Thursday. I’d slept through an entire 24-hour day without even realizing it.

Second, while I’d been sleeping, something very, very bad had happened to the world around me.

Writing Scraps

by Sean J. Jordan