Friday, March 20, 2009

Equal day and night

We work three shifts, eight hours each.....they are called "day", "swing", and "graveyard".  These are old terms, brought out here long ago from Earth, where there are hours of dawning, hours of full day, twilight, night.....here deep beneath kilometers of frozen methane on a little ball of a moon spinning around a giant gas planet, there are just light strips glowing in the overhead along the corridors.....their light does not vary with the hours of the day.  Most of the workers do turn the lights off in their little rooms to sleep .....some don't....some sleep with the screen on all the time....noise and flickering images....I finished my "graveyard"....0001 to 0801.....some on my shift would go now to their rooms and go right to sleep, some would go to the cafeteria for breakfast....I go to the canteen, and claim my usual stool at the bar.  Trixie goes through the ritual of fixing me  a complicated Bloody Mary, and sets it down on the little bar napkin.  She seems wistful today, with a little smile, and a distracted manner.  "What you on about?" I ask.  "Why," she says,"Ain't it just lovely on this first day of Spring?"

1 comment:

Scifihed said...

Just Lovely! I like this, I like all of them, but this is really nice...