Confusing times.
As life from earth overflows a simple question gets very complex.
What is the time?
Denis is in London and the time is 11:15am he walks through a doorway and its now 7:15pm because the shuttle he had just got on was made in Hong Kong. ship time is always the same time as were the ship was built. The shuttle was taking him to the research ship The Helix which was built in Mexico so after the 6 hour shuttle flight the time will be 11:15am. Denis is on the way to Triton. But he has a lot of work to do on the way analysing the data from the super computers already on Neptune and Triton. Not everyone on The Helix is there to do research. for the first time 200 civilians are going to Neptune to set up home. Denis is hoping to do the same so as well as his heavy work schedule he will try to get to as many neptunian forums as he can.
It was 9am ship time and Denis joins the back of the crowd entering the conference hall. he has been up all night exchanging data with the Australasian research bass on Phoebe. Where the time is now 1am yesterday. A big screen filled the wall at the front of the hall with three words on it •name• currency• time This is the agenda of the first Neptunian forum the first two are straight forward. The newspapers started calling it Neptune city when the third research bass was built and most of the migrants are European so the euro is a dead cert. Time on the other hand is a bit harder. The three basis run on French, US and Russian time but A neptunian day is only 16.11 hours long. Denis in his sleep starved state was the only one to come up with a logical answer. “why don’t we make it the same time everywhere”
The Neptunian forum put their proposal to the UN who turn it down for 2 reasons. Neptune was not in the UN and because they don’t care if the weirdoes who choose to live on Neptune need three watches. But the scientific community supported Neptunians. Soon everyone outside Earth’s atmosphere agree to run on metric time. It only takes 1 metric year for Earth to give up and full inline with the solar system. New calendars without December and January are printed and a record number of clocks are sold.
100th of November 0002. billions of faces stare at the time. A simultaneous cheer rings through the solar system As the clocks strikes 10.
art work: drawing and photo shop
i never knew you had this in you??!! i'm absolutely astounded by the originallity of the scenario and the humour you've tackled it with. this is the most impressive thing i've read recently (and considering i've just started the new neil gaiman book, that's one hell of a complement)
ReplyDeleteknowing how long it takes you to write, i realise with all the research and everything that this must have taken a good while - if you want me to clean up the spelling a little jus let me know
This is pretty impressive Ian!!!
ReplyDeleteI think this has the makings of a film or TV concept :)
Think Firefly...
But really I am so impressed with what you've done here. Are you going to do more illustrations for this story or more stories with which to create 1 piece of art?
Good luck!
the plan is one illustration per story then I'm going to put together in a scrapbook
ReplyDeletei was thinking more red dwarf than firefly
and i have been watching a lot of philip k dick films