Sleeper Hit
Science Fiction Short StoryEarly July 2016, Chuck Wendig made his flash fiction challenge to write a story that featured insomnia in some way. The initial idea of people externalizing their sleep to professional sleepers sprung to my mind immediately, but it was during writing when it really formed. In the process, it became not only unexpectedly dark but also gained a structure I had never used before in a flash fiction piece.
When I finally sat down to write it after three days of having it in my mind, it was going to be a parallel to the way western consumer culture managed to turn a blind eye to the environmental devastation it caused by having most of the production take place in the most remote regions of the world possible. It was going to feature two characters, a never-sleeping westerner and the Asian minimum wage worker sleeping in his stead.
I spontaneously decided to include timestamps and that came in handy when switching to Bandar Tidur, sneaking in subtle narrative time travel by way of time zones. So we see Burt's current sleeper die on the job, causing Burt to notice something being wrong a few minutes later, just as the issue is being fixed. Bandar Tidur does, of course, not exist. It's a fictitious city where awakeness is produced by sleepers, its name translating from Malay simply as “Sleeping City”.
On the topic of names: Burt is named for its similarity to bird, intended to signify his experienced freedom. Izzati is just a common first name in Malaysia I liked. Steve goes back to Steve Jobs, furthering the topic of Asia carrying the west's environmental burden with Apple among the worst offenders.
Places were selected similarly: Edinburgh was chosen because this story was written shortly after the Brexit referendum, so I wanted to set it in Scotland, though I never got to mention how it is independent from the UK by the time this story takes place. Bandar Tidur had to be in Asia because that is where all these factories are nowadays. And San Jose is just the better known neighboring town to Apple's hometown of Cupertino. This also happens to give a nice range of time zones, further showcasing the international connections behind modern economy and technology and its implications.
When I started to write the midsection, I made the decision to actually make it the midsection with two more sections following. It felt right to give the story a structure slightly reminiscent of a poem while still keeping it distinctly prose. So, we skip back in time for the third and last time to meet Steve, struggling to write his autobiography as he tries to understand what exactly it was he did. By this point, another interpretation had joined my initial idea for the story, though I did not actively put it into the story. The dying Thai and how he dies for the pleasure of rich white guys reminded me of the way we treat cattle.
Both Steve and Burt reflect an experience I had about freeing time: Usually, time just is not the problem when we fail to get something done. Freeing time barely changes anything if you start filling the freshly freed time with random stuff again. The problem is not the amount of time we have, the problem is how we use it. Burt is partying for days on end, Steve simply fails to make the time gained worth it. However, with Steve in focus, it is finally time to explain what is going on, what kind of world this story takes place in and how Burt and the bulbs are connected.
From this, the story goes forward in time again to conclude the events in Bandar Tidur and Edinburgh. I like the final line of this, such a nice summary of the problem behind much of this.
July 2016
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How to Sing Butterflies
