Author notes

136 - 24 Hours

El Cid

on Dec. 28, 2016

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the last page of this scene! We will never see this room or that musty old couch again! You may celebrate moderately for two seconds. Okay, that's enough celebrating, jeez! Settle down!

Of course Jetta wasn't going to make it out of this one unscathed. Zurena left her with a parting gift… and not the good kind. This is like one of those tacky shirts your coworkers give you but then you try to return it and all they'll give you is store credit. And then they strap a bomb around your neck. I hate that store! I'm gonna stop going there! (just as soon as I spend my store credit)



It may strike you as odd that people living on Triton would use a 24 hour day. I actually put a decent amount of thought into that. Having them go by Triton day lengths just wouldn't make any sense. Triton is tidally locked, so it doesn't noticeably rotate relative to Neptune from the perspective of someone standing on its surface. It *does* rotate, but it's a synchronous rotation, so one side is always facing Neptune and the other is always facing away from Neptune. It takes just a hair under six days for Triton to completely revolve around Neptune, so that would be a bit too long.

I figured that, since Triton geopolitically is sort of like Taiwan to Neptune's mainland China, it would make sense that they'd both use the same timekeeping to make doing business easier. (that analogy may or may not actually make sense, but I'm sure you get what I was driving at)

So what kind of time do they use on Neptune? Well, a Neptune day is a little over 16 hours, which seems too short. But having a Neptune day last two rotations – 32 hours – sounds painfully long. Nothing works. And since the people here all live either underground, or in orbital colonies, or on floating cloud cities in Neptune's atmosphere, they all live under artificial skies anyway… so they can pretty much just pick any arbitrary timekeeping method they want.



Even though most people in the Triton-Neptune commonwealth have never set foot on Earth, it still makes some sense for them to use an Earth-based 24-hour timescale in order to keep from messing with their circadian rhythms. I'm sure that if they wanted to, they could adapt to having a longer or shorter day one way or another… but… why?!!

One alternative I did consider was giving them a decimal-based time system, specifically having them go by Swatch Internet Time. Swatch Internet Time – invented by the Swatch corporation in 1998 – is a decimal concept that divides the day into 1000 .beats. That's how they spell it; it's not “beats;” it's “.beats,” with a decimal in front. Because why the hell not. Each .beat is 1 minute 26.4 seconds, and can be divided into one hundred centibeats. The cool thing about decimal-based time is that it's easy to adapt for different worlds where the day length is different. On Mars, for example, where a day is slightly longer than on Earth, a .beat would be 1 minute 28.64 seconds. The time @500.00 would be noon on Earth, and @500.00 would be noon on Mars as well. @000.00 would be midnight on both planets. (well, technically this isn't true for Swatch Internet Time, because they don't recognize Greenwich Mean Time or time zones, but still you get the point!)



In the end, I decided against using a decimal-based time system, because I realized it would be too confusing to have characters say things like “I'll meat you in 250 .beats,” or “The train will arrive @560.00.” I'd have to keep explaining it to people, and it would just be cumbersome and maybe even come off as a bit pretentious as well.

So yes, I did put some thought into it. It's weird, but it's less weird than the alternative.

One more page coming this week. It's an overflowing bounty of updates!