Derek was familiarizing himself with the readouts at his station.  There wasn’t much to do, and the ship was functioning on autopilot so that meant he was redundant and could take his time learning what was where.  There were engine controls for direction, readouts for various engine conditions, screens to display and identify debris in the path--and that must be a clock, ticking away hours, minutes, seconds, much like home.

He watched it for a moment, but then, something about it bothered him.  Was it running fast?

He set up his laptop on the counter beside him and booted it up.  Opening the clock, he watched it.  Sure enough, the ship’s minute took only just over fifty seconds according to time on his computer.  He was going to have to work this out.  It looked like each second was about five sixths as long here, which meant shorter days, about twenty hours.

So how long was a shift?  That was something he could ask the ship’s computer.

He and Vashti were expected to work six hours.  Those were ship’s time hours, which meant about five hours.  That wasn’t a rough shift.  He told the computer to give him a five minute--no, a six-minute alert before his quitting time.

It was an interesting new data point about the world.

There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #432:  Whole New Worlds.  Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter.  It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.

As to the old stories that have long been here:

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