In Which Our Deuteragonist is Presented as a Foil
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You've seen the tops of clouds. (Fog counts. Also: photographs.) You can breathe beneath the sea. (Theoretically.) You laugh with friends from across the world... or at least, you laugh at the same things they're laughing at, even if they don't know that you exist.

What you're trying to say is that you're basically a god, and the day starts when you flipping say it does. 

The digital birds are chirping in your pocket. The electric sun is shining: a string of christmas lights on an eight-dollar timer. If it's dark out-of-doors at 6:00 in November, you've no way of knowing through the insulating quilt duct-taped over the heat-leaky windowpane.

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You're a slow starter, so you've given yourself an hour to putter about. 

In an act of inspired Creation, you Divide the hour into sixty minutes of sixty seconds each. Now you can get - uh - now you can get more things done in that time. Where's your phone. Now you can get tap tap sixty tap times tap tap sixty equals three thousand and six hundred more things done. Or, if you assume that you would have done something in the next hour either way, you can get three thousand, five hundred, and ninety-nine more things done.

That's so many things!

You'll start by getting out of bed.

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You've got a whole new way of thinking about waking up.

Going vertical is front-loaded, or, like, the opposite of front-loaded where the first part is the worst part. (Maybe that's just front-loaded? The unpleasantness is front-loaded.) If you compare a hypothetical version of yourself who got up five minutes ago to a version of you who should have gotten up five minutes ago the one who's moving around is clearly happier and it's not even just because the one lying in bed feels stressed and guilty about it; people do things for fun, they don't, like, lie down on flat surfaces. That's not a hobby that people have.

The only problem is the divot you have to cross before you can start climbing again, into untrammeled utilitonous heights.

But your brain is basically a sea sponge that an idiot did gradient descent to until it could (mostly) pilot a fish. While it's true that fish have magic powers of precognition, they only PtV sixty seconds into the future at a time so as long as another sixty seconds of lying down beats the first sixty seconds of standing up it can never happen.

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It's much warmer inside your blankets than out of them. Your cellphone is in your hand. There are Apps. There is Internet. There are Paid Surveys and Tasks. 

An inferior intellect might quail at the challenge.

But you aren't so easily thwarted.

You've got this dog and that dog in you. You're so irrepressible that you used to be a serial ax-murderer until someone somewhere said the words "become ungovernable" in a vaguely imperious tone of voice where you could hear and that was what reformed you. 

A being of mere middling intellect might overcome the challenge through the application of Sheer Chthonic Will.

You could brute force it too: arduously, unreliably, and burning expendable resources in the first and easiest fight of the day. And you would, too...

if you were a fool!

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You're so far ahead of these gibbering morons that it isn't even funny. Your IQ is over nine thousand and - wait for it - now it's over eighteen thousand. That's right! Your intelligence doubles every second!! In three thousand and five hundred ninety-eight seconds it'll be, uhhhh, well, lots and lots. The point you're trying to make here is that you're a towering superman in a world of cognitive cardboard, and you don't give a kiss about about property damage. You're so smart that it loops back around into stupidity, and then loops back back around into intelligence. You lead the pack on the odd-numbered laps.

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In the kitchen, a time-locked safe unlocks. If you get there within five minutes, there's a kit-kat in it for you.

Crafting the box took you something like five hours, which is to say, you bought it for $30 on Amazon because you live in a society. It was worth the time.

You count backwards from ten and leave bed at zero. 

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You are going to check your survey and task websites, though, because you've got that grindset and have plenty of time blocked to putter.

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Woah, there's a survey that pays $12.50 an hour! Those go like hotcakes - you click on it to reserve a spot!

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...Oh, wait. It's 10 dollars for 50 minutes

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50 minutes.

But.

Ten dollars.

...Can you make that work?

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You can make that work.

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"Do you mind if I sit here?"

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