Schedule 01 - Night Wanderer
The day starts off gently - the sun is just beginning to hang low enough in the sky to set, the roads and freeways are bustling with people returning home from their day jobs, and there’s usually a soft, pleasant breeze. I wake up at 5 PM, and I have no trouble getting out of bed right away. Once I’m up, I write down some of the details of my most recent dream (lately they’ve all been about flowers, for some reason). Then, I take a shower, tidy myself up, put on some casual outerwear, and make myself breakfast. I’ve found myself taking a liking to omelets as of late.
Once my breakfast is finished, I go back and tidy up whatever other messes I’ve made along the way so far. By now, the time is usually around 5:45, and so I lock up, depart from my apartment, and start out on my “morning” walk. This usually lasts for quite a few hours, and I make a point to at least stay out long enough to watch the sunset in full, even if I don’t really feel like walking. I try to watch the lights outside of storefronts and houses turn on as it gets dark, but it’s not that often that I succeed. If I decide to eat out for breakfast, which I do about once a week, I make my way over to some restaurant and eat there. I suppose around that time of day, it’s usually dinner that people are eating, and business is bustling accordingly. Eating out for breakfast like that really helps broaden the sorts of flavors I encounter just after waking up; I’m very glad restaurants are still open at that time.
The world is so beautiful at night. With the sun gone over the horizon, the world is illuminated by many individual light sources as opposed to just one. There are fewer people walking along the streets, fewer cars on the road, fewer reminders of the stress and momentum of daily living. Everything takes on a much more tranquil and meditative air after dusk. It all helps me gather my thoughts, figure out what I’m going to be doing for the day, and keep me feeling relaxed.
When I walk around, I don’t have any particular endpoints in mind - I wander. I live in a big city with a very low crime rate and very safe streets, and so, despite being a woman, I have no fears or reservations about wandering around at night. Just in case, I always bring a small taser and a personal alarm with me, although I’ve never had to actually use either of them. I’m fairly good with spaces and have a strong sense of direction, so over time I’ve slowly assembled a mental map of the area around where I live, within a 10km radius or so.
If there are any places I find myself at more often than others, it’d be 24-hour bookstores. The atmosphere of these places at this time of day can’t really be put to words, but the closest I can get is “a warmly cold tranquility”. I work as a freelance writer, and so these bookstores are a plentiful and varied source of inspiration and information. I’m certain that every graveyard-shift bookstore employee in the area recognizes my face with how often I find myself visiting. Usually, I only stay for around 45 minutes every time I go, but every now and then I get swept up and check the time only to realize I’ve actually been there for 3 or 4 hours already.
At around 1 or 2 AM, I have my second meal of the day. Since most restaurants aside from bars are closed at that time, I try to have myself home by midnight (though honestly that isn’t the case very often: most of the time, I get back at around 1 or 1:30). I use whatever groceries I may have bought the previous day and cook myself something, saving the leftovers for tomorrow or the next meal. A lot of people think that cooking something that late at night would give them a feeling of being bad or doing something they’re not supposed to, but not me. I suppose it’s just that I’ve gotten myself used to this sort of thing. After cooking, eating, and cleaning up, I spend the next hour or two reading, practicing hobbies, listening to music, or just generally lounging about.
Work begins for me at 3 AM. Since I work as a digital freelancer, there isn’t really any particular time I need to start or stop working - all that matters is that I get things done by the deadlines. This flexibility is what has afforded me the strange lifestyle I’ve subsumed now, and I’m deeply grateful for it. Freelance writing is surprisingly hard work, though. It demands a lot of self-discipline, attention to detail, and mental flexibility. In order to give myself a consistent income and not risk suddenly not having any jobs or contracts, I’ve needed to become good at writing a wide variety of things. Most commonly, I’m hired by news outlets to write articles about fairly insignificant things. Every now and then, though, I get more interesting and odd jobs, ones that allow me to really express myself. I don’t know if I’ve garnered any sort of fanbase or following, but all I really hope to do with my writing is make peoples’ lives better or easier, even if only a little.
Most of the time, at around 6 or 7 AM, I take a quick break from work and eat some leftovers for my third meal. I usually just eat whatever’s been kept waiting the longest, but there are also times when I decide I haven’t had enough of what I had for lunch instead. Often, I try to time the dinner break to happen at the same time as sunrise, so I can watch it as well. This break provides me with a much-needed boost in energy and focus, and I typically finish working at around 9 or 9:30 AM. Once that’s done, I tidy myself up again and head out once more, this time to do some “evening” shopping. Being outside while it’s daytime out is actually pretty tiring for me, and so I make sure to keep my shopping brief and to-the-point: I only buy the ingredients for whatever I might want to have for breakfast and dinner the next day. If I still have some energy left in me when I return home at around 10, I might choose to read some more or continue practicing a hobby or something. A lot of the time, though, I’m simply too tired to do anything like that, and so I usually end up going straight to bed upon arriving at home. I try to make sure that I’m in bed by noon at the latest.
I’ve settled into this lifestyle pretty openly and easily over the last 6 months or so. Despite how it may first appear, I’m living pretty much paycheck-to-paycheck, contract-to-contract. Somehow, I’ve managed to carve out a little hole for myself in the workforce as a freelancer, and for that I am eternally grateful. It may seem weird at first, but I don’t think I’d have my daily schedule and routine any other way.
Schedule 02 - Submarine Technician
My “day” begins at 0000. As someone who needs to make routine checks and observations to ensure the submarine my team and I inhabit is functioning nominally, my days follow a unique structure. I operate in shifts of wakefulness for 12 hours followed by sleep for 4 hours. This cycle takes a full 48 hours to loop back around such that I wake up at the same hour for a second time. Typically, my routine has me waking up at 0000 of the first day, sleeping at 1200, waking up again at 1600, sleeping at 0400 of the second day, waking again at 0800, sleeping at 2000, and finally waking at 0000 of the third day.
While the rest of the rest of the crew of the Hyperion research submarine sleeps and wakes at consistent times that align with a usual 24-hour sleep schedule, my upkeep work requires otherwise. On every ‘on’ day, I am only awake to see my coworkers in their respective early mornings and late evenings. On each ‘off’ day, conversely, I get to join them for lunch around noon and little else. My unique sleep schedule comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. I can more properly maintain the submarine and ensure that everything is operating as normal this way, and I don’t have to change my schedule whatsoever even when the vessel is at harbor; this comes at the cost of improper socialization and difficulty coordinating anything with anyone off-board. The world moves at a different rhythm than me. I don’t mind the solitude of it, at least.
The hours immediately after waking are consistently the busiest. Right after I wake up, I have to make my first set of rounds around the submarine and ensure that everything is in its right place and operating as it should be. My usual route takes me first to the back end of the submarine, where I check up on and monitor most of the mechanical components running the vessel, such as the engine and fuel cells. This submarine is also somewhat of a mechanical advent, as we are running on some newer technologies for the purposes of gaining mechanical and performance research simultaneously with the marine biological research getting done otherwise. This is the longest and most time-consuming part of my rounds, as I am the only person aboard the vessel that has a comprehensive enough understanding of these newer technologies to be fully qualified to monitor them and gather performance data. So far, no issues have occurred with machinery while aboard. I hope it will stay that way.
After ensuring that everything is order in the stren of the vessel, I make my way to the bow. I look over every safety mechanism on the way and ensure that nothing has been displaced or disturbed since my last check-up. I’ve gotten remarkably good at checking through everything of note quickly while moving through the submarine. On my usual route, I hardly even stop. It’s surprisingly difficult to walk consistently fast atop a layer or two of cans of preserved food, having to slouch or stoop over to get around, but I’ve been used to it for a long time and my crewmates have adjusted relatively quickly to the cramped halls of the cabin as well. During these early hours, I tend to be slower than I can be in moving around, if only to ensure that I don’t accidentally knock something over or make a noise and wake the others.
Upon making my way across the vessel, I look over the current standings for navigation with the captain. This is usually one of the last thing the captain does before heading to sleep and letting the plotted course and automatic navigation systems take over in his stead. I’m not especially versed in navigation and likely wouldn’t be able to change course effectively or pilot the vessel through tight spaces even if my life depended on it, but I take it upon myself to check in with the captain and navigator whenever possible. It gives me an extra little kick of certainty and assurance as well as some socialization with crew members I wouldn’t normally get to visit with.
Once I’ve made my rounds for the first time, I head back to the stern and spend the next hour or two monitoring the equipment there and marking down notes. Every half-hour or so I make another quick stroll through the submarine’s complex and re-check that everything else appears to be in order. My job largely consists of sitting around and making sure everything is operating nominally, because things only become an issue when they aren’t.
During the latter half of each day of mine, I get increasingly more truly free time to spend. If people are awake, I tend to socialize so long as it doesn’t infringe on their work and research. If not, I’ve taken a liking to reading as of late. Every time we get back on land I make at least one trip out to a nearby bookstore and get myself some new material to work through over my days underwater. I recently finished reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer and enjoyed it a lot more than I expected I would. One of my coworkers on land had recommended it to me despite my expression of distaste for the Cyberpunk genre. It turns out that my bland vision of some “high-tech, low-life” city differed greatly from where the genre actually got its start. I doubt I’ll be reading any other cyberpunk stories soon, though.
At the end of the “day”, I head back to the stern one final time and perform a final check-up on the equipment there. Afterwards, I head back into the crew quarters and crawl into my bunk. I have an alarm set on my phone to vibrate in my hands with very little audio to wake me up at an appropriate time so as to begin my next “day” just 4 hours later. It took a few weeks of getting used to sleeping in 4-hour chunks before I felt my sleep was restful. This is the general structure of my 16-hour day that I repeat 3 times with slightly different scheduling depending on who is awake and who isn’t during a given part of a 3-”day” cycle.
We usually stay out in the water for around 2 to 3 weeks at a time, then return back to harbor for another week or so to restock on supplies and fuel, as well as to return the data we gathered to more proper land-based R&D agencies and labs to be more thoroughly studied. During the week we’re on land, I spend most of my time networking with coworkers and making sure my data gets directed to the places it should go on time. I only really spend the last day or two before re-embarking on preparing and verifying the integrity of all the onboard systems in the submarine. It’s a system that ticks like clockwork and yet is also flexible enough to be able to work around just about any kind of error or incident imaginable.
I spend a lot of my time working out the order of events for how to deal with scenarios in my head. It’s an important part of my job as a technician, after all. I take it upon myself to ensure the safety of those around me and to make them feel safe as well. It takes a lot of practice and buildup of habit to instill that sort of safety in other people and to actually possess the know-how and means to avert potential crises as they come up. It’s a demanding job. It’s a lonely job. It’s a job where thanks are given quietly in sleepy voices and where my aim is to be invisible. I wouldn’t have it any other way.