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It is 6:35 AM.
It is always 6:35 AM.
Sometimes the world gives the appearance of it being not 6:35 AM--being, for instance, 6:36 AM, or 3:45 post meridiem--but you're wise to its tricks. Any non-6:35 o'clock you see is a ploy to trick you into lowering your guard. You hear a noise in the bushes, you go to investigate, and bam, it's 6:35 AM again.
There's no rest, no respite, there is only 6:35 AM.
Day after day after day.
The piezoelectric buzzer within your alarm clock is an unfortunate creature.
Really, you think, squinting doggishly at the glowing display, it's nothing so much as a victim of circumstance.
Shrill and loud, like a 22,000 lb burrowing Grand Slam explosive--perfectly engineered to penetrate the skull and camouflet the amygdala--, the piezo could do no harm and perhaps much good were it affixed to such a device as a smoke detector. Likewise, it could go far announcing catastrophic mechanical failures within a space ship or submarine. Or be of great service screaming at the President from atop his desk to announce an imminent nuclear strike or alien invasion.
If aliens were invading, you expect that the president would like to know. And what better to notify him?
You nonetheless loathe the hateful device and have resolved one day to destroy it.
You and your alarm clock share a bedroom with a set of younger sisters.
Naturalists have observed that the older a human gets, the less they are permitted to sleep. (The rule of thumb is that for every five years after birth, school begins one hour earlier in the day--and extrapolating the trend, it's easy to see how Somer's Rule poses one of the greatest hurdles to the field of human life extension.)
This all to say; your sisters' school begins later in the day than yours, and a request is made of you that you "TURN OFF THE ALARM."
...And you were about to, but now you're tempted to let it ring.
Self-preservation proves stronger than malice; you disable the alarm with practiced fumbling efficiency.
The clock reads 6:35 AM. There was an alarm.
According to one popular theory, this means you should shortly observe yourself rising from bed.
But it seems your observations don't quite square with the theory. Like eclectic Mercury's orbit putting the lie to Kepler and Newton, except if--rather than a difference of 40 arcseconds per century between theory and practice--Mercury just stopped in mid-ether like a baseball in the catcher's mitt.
Oh, and also if Mercury hit this same exact snag and has every single day for as long as you can remember.
This probably calls for a new theory.
It can't be that 6:35 AM exerts no gravitational pull; if it didn't at all you wouldn't be awake and squinting at glowing red numbers.
But perhaps the lift provided by the pull of 6:35 AM--or by superego and fear of punishment--is matched by drag.
You can't remember what the word is for things which might be equations or inequalities, but think that it might be "relation." On one side of the relation, in your mind's eye, you write "6:35", and on the other side you list tiredness(t) + dread(d) + temperature difference(td) + hunger(h) + friction(f) + Earth's own gravity(g).
6:35 can be simplified as 6-in-41, which... this would be faster if you had a pencil. Six-in-forty is three-in-twenty is one-point-five-in-ten is one-point-five-by-ten is 0.15.
So now the question is whether t+d+td+h+f+g sums to point-fifteen--or, rather, when they will sum to 0.15, since they observably don't at this time. It occurs to you that tiredness and dread will only increase as a function of time that you spend lying awake in bed. Hunger increases as well, or, rather, decreases and becomes a greater negative number (you guess that you probably put it on the wrong side of the relation), but from just eyeballing it you don't think that hunger is going to be a determining factor here.
6:40 is 6-in-46, which is a smaller number than 6-in-41, which is at odds with how 6:40 has a greater pull on you than 6:35 ever did. (However illogical that might seem in light of how--as established five minutes ago--o'clocks like 6:40 are lies and deception.)
It now seems quite likely that in converting 6:35 from an odds ratio into a fraction, you got the numerator confused with the denominator.
6:35 was 35-in-41, and now 6:40 is 40-in-46.
You may have made an arithmetic error in your fake math, but it didn't stop you from intuiting the answer: you'll start your day at 6:41.
But first you'll take just a moment to close your eyes and mourn your dreams all shredded into constituent antimemetic atoms and scattered by the piezoelectric blast.
And you'll take another moment to sob without noise or water.
And to dread the coming day.
The schoolbus arrives at 7:05--or at least so goes the claim, and who are you to gainsay it?
A school bus is never early, nor is it late: it arrives at 7:05, and if it wasn't 7:05 before it arrived surely it must be after.
Gilbert Huph claims in The Incredibles that a company is like an enormous clock in that it only works if all the little cogs mesh together.
But you don't work for Gilbert Huph at Insuricare. You don't work for anyone. You are not a cog in the machine.
You should be so lucky.
You're not the sprocket-wheel of a bicycle: you're the playing card clipped to the spokes. (Seven of spades, have a nice day.)
Your life consists of walking from waiting room to waiting room, swept along by the implacable hands of the clock.
According to mormon scripture, humans have "agency" and can choose for themselves between good and evil.
According to rationalist sacred tradition, humans are "agentic" and can move house to San Fransisco.
You are neither possessed of agency in the mormon sense, nor agentic in the lesswrong sense.
You are an e. coli bacterium mechanically chemotaxiing along a chemical gradient, and you roll off your unframed mattress to rise to dress in the dark.
You will walk to the bus stop--this isn't a decision that you've made, it's just that to do otherwise would be a stone rolling uphill. As yesterday, so tomorrow, and overmorrow, and forever.
You're the oldest of your sisters, which means no hand-me-downs, which today means no clean long pants which fit.
You look to the window. It's black as night outside. There's frost on the grass. The window is fogged with condensation. Your face is colder just for facing in that direction.
You select your warmest skirt and socks like Powell and Donovan picking the shadiest patch on the bright side of Mercury.
You collect your school binder and chemotaxxi out of the room along the shortest path to the kitchen sink.
Taped to the window above the sink, a paper placard reads:
Do NOT leave dirty dishes in the sink (even temporarily)!
Either:
1) put them in the dishwasher OR
2) wash them by hand
Beneath the placard, piling dishes overflow the sink and sprawl--molding and precarious--all across the countertop.
The cabinets and dishwasher have apparently been emptied of glassware to make room for an emergency supply of breathable air.
That'll prove handy if anyone opens a window and exposes you all to hard vacuum, but it's a touch inconvenient in the moment.
The drinking fountains at school taste more like crayons than crayons taste like crayons, and you aren't nearly that desperate; you'll drink when you get home.
The chemical gradient carries you through the living room towards the shoe rack through the front door.
It's cold.
Your legs are cold, your ears sting, breathing through your nostrils hurts your nose, breathing through your mouth hurts all the way down in your lungs. Your breath comes out in great steaming plumes but you resist the temptation to warm your face with them--the accumulating moisture isn't worth it in the long run.
The air against your eyes feels dry and sharp, so you scrunch your eyelids and activate your x-ray vision.
The sky above shows bottomless black, save icily distant pinprick stars.
Eternity lurks behind each sunwashed blue day sky, as polished and clear as a black OLED screen.
Beneath the infinite majestic heavens shrink the overgrown yards, decaying tract houses, pitted asphalt, and street-parked RVs of Tanglewood Court.
Autopilot charts the shortest path to the street, and your legs execute it, cutting a line of crisper darker green against the frosty grass.
Shel Silverstein describes a land where the sidewalk ends, but before the street begins.
He says that there the sun burns crimson bright, and the grass grows soft and white, and the moon-bird rests from his flight to cool in the peppermint wind.
He describes an escape from this place where the smoke blows black and the dark street winds and bends, past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow, to the place where the sidewalk ends.
He claims that the children can guide, for the children, they know--the place where the sidewalk ends.
There must once have been a time when you knew the route to the moon-bird's summer-bright resting spot.
But this is the mark of your maturity: the only things you can see between the sidewalk and the street are the curb and gutter.
Stomping along, you hang a right on Maplewood and an immediate left onto Sycamore Street.
A parked truck obstructs your view, and you have to walk a little bit out past it before you can look both ways--you're annoyed but hardly concerned; you're not exactly crossing Main Street here. In terms of traffic, there's nothing but a yellow school bus--and it's parked all the way down at the far end of the street, where people can get on it--so you can shuffle across without fear.
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