Early Bird

Marvin Fleischmann had always been punctual, but never this punctual. It started innocuously enough—waking up at 6:47 AM instead of his usual 7:00. The thirteen minutes felt like a gift from the universe, a cosmic dividend on his investment in responsible living. He used the time to polish his magnetized boots twice instead of once, because in the Orbital Station Gamma-7, where he spent his days calibrating the artificial gravity generators, scuffed footwear could mean the difference between walking and floating ignominiously into the recycling chute.

But the universe, Marvin discovered, was a compound interest kind of place.

The next morning he woke at 6:34. Then 6:21. By Thursday it was 5:58, and by the following Tuesday he was greeting consciousness at 5:15 AM with the bewildered enthusiasm of a man who’d ordered a small coffee and received a swimming pool full of espresso.

“The body adjusts,” he told his reflection in the hab-module mirror, watching his pale, angular face nod back with unconvincing certainty. “Circadian rhythms are just suggestions anyway. Like speed limits or expiration dates on synthesized protein paste.”

The real trouble began on Day Seventeen of what he’d started calling The Great Earliness. Marvin stumbled out of his sleep pod at 4:23 AM, shambled toward the nutrition dispenser, and found himself staring at the back of his own head.

Not a hologram. Not a hallucination induced by too much recycled air. Himself. Marvin Fleischmann, in his regulation gray jumpsuit, spooning reconstituted scrambled eggs into his mouth with the mechanical precision of a man who’d done this exact thing approximately 8,347 times.

“Excuse me,” Marvin said to himself.

The other Marvin—Yesterday Marvin, he supposed—turned around with a expression that suggested someone had just explained quantum mechanics using interpretive dance.

“Who are you supposed to be?” Yesterday Marvin asked.

“I’m you,” Marvin replied. “Or rather, I’m you tomorrow. Today. It’s complicated.”

Yesterday Marvin set down his spoon with the care of a man defusing a bomb made of breakfast. “That’s impossible. I’m me. You can’t be me because I’m already being me, and there’s only so much me to go around.”

“Time,” Marvin explained with the patience of someone who’d had seventeen days to think about this, “is apparently more flexible than the employee handbook suggests. I’ve been waking up earlier each day, and now I’ve lapped myself. Like a very slow, very existential race.”

They stared at each other across the cramped galley, two nearly identical men in a space station that suddenly felt significantly smaller.

“This is absurd,” Yesterday Marvin said.

“Completely,” Marvin agreed. “But also happening.”

The next morning—3:47 AM—Marvin encountered both Yesterday Marvin and Day-Before-Yesterday Marvin, who were having an animated discussion about the proper technique for brushing one’s teeth in zero gravity. By 3:12 AM the following day, there were four Marvins, and the hab-module had taken on the atmosphere of a support group for men named Marvin who worked in space and had serious issues with temporal displacement.

“We need a system,” announced the oldest Marvin—he’d started calling himself Prime Marvin, though the others disputed his authority on grounds of temporal seniority.

“I propose we number ourselves,” suggested Marvin-3. “I’ll be Marvin-3, obviously, since I’m the third-most recent version.”

“That’s backwards,” Marvin-2 protested. “If anything, you should be Marvin-negative-1, since you’re from the past.”

“Time doesn’t work that way,” Original Marvin said from where he sat in the corner, looking increasingly haggard. “Besides, I was here first. Technically.”

“You were here first yesterday,” Prime Marvin corrected. “Today, I was here first. Time is a circle, gentlemen. We’re all just different points on the circumference.”

The argument continued for thirty-seven minutes, during which they established a rotating schedule for bathroom usage and agreed that whoever had woken up most recently got first dibs on the coffee substitute, since he was operating on the least sleep.

By the time Marvin’s shift began at Orbital Station Gamma-7, there were six of him crammed into the transport pod, engaged in a heated philosophical debate about whether they constituted one consciousness experiencing multiple simultaneous timelines, or six separate individuals who happened to share memories up to their respective points of temporal divergence.

“Does it matter?” asked Marvin-5, who had developed a slight stutter that none of the others remembered having.

“Everything matters,” replied Prime Marvin, polishing his boots for the fifteenth time that morning. “The question is whether anything makes sense.”

Chief Engineer Rodriguez took their collective arrival with the weary resignation of a woman who’d spent twelve years managing the maintenance of humanity’s most remote outpost.

“Fleischmann,” she said, not looking up from her clipboard. “You’re early.”

“We’re all early,” the six Marvins replied in ragged unison.

Rodriguez finally looked up, surveyed the crowd of identical maintenance technicians, and sighed the sigh of someone whose Tuesday had just become exponentially more complicated.

“Temporal displacement?” she asked.

“Apparently,” Prime Marvin said.

“Union’s not going to like this. Do I pay you for six shifts or one?”

“One consciousness, one paycheck,” Marvin-4 suggested hopefully.

“Six bodies, six salaries,” countered Marvin-2.

Rodriguez made a note on her clipboard. “I’ll ask HR. In the meantime, Gravity Generator Seven is acting up again. Try not to multiply while you’re fixing it.”

But multiplication, Marvin was learning, was exactly what happened when you pushed the boundaries of causality. Each morning brought earlier awakening and another version of himself, until the hab-module resembled a convention for men with poor sleep hygiene and existential problems.

Marvin-12 suggested they were living in a loop, doomed to repeat the same morning forever with slight variations.

Marvin-18 theorized they were actually moving backwards through time, experiencing their lives in reverse one morning at a time.

Marvin-23, who had developed an unsettling habit of speaking only in questions, wondered if they weren’t all just fragments of the original Marvin’s consciousness, scattered across multiple probability matrices like jam on quantum toast.

“Does it really matter what’s happening to us,” he asked, “if we can’t change it?”

Prime Marvin, now sporting a beard he didn’t remember growing and a twitch in his left eye, had stopped trying to understand the mechanics of their situation. Instead, he focused on the practical aspects of managing twenty-three versions of himself in a space designed for one.

“The real question,” he announced during their daily morning meeting (which now lasted forty-seven minutes and required a reservation system), “is what happens when we run out of space.”

The answer came the following morning at 12:03 AM, when Marvin-24 materialized in the recycling chute and had to be excavated by Marvins-15 through -19 while the others debated the philosophical implications of consciousness emerging from garbage.

“This has gotten out of hand,” Original Marvin said, though by now it was unclear which of them was actually original and which were temporal echoes, quantum shadows, or elaborate practical jokes perpetrated by a universe with too much time on its hands.

“Maybe,” suggested Marvin-7, who had started wearing his jumpsuit backwards and claimed it helped him think more clearly, “we’re not supposed to fix this. Maybe this is just what happens when someone tries too hard to be punctual.”

“You’re saying the universe is punishing me for good time management?” Prime Marvin asked.

“I’m saying,” Marvin-7 replied, “that the universe has a sense of humour, and it’s not very funny.”

By the end of the month, there were thirty-seven Marvins, three separate breakfast schedules, and a waiting list for the shower that extended into the following Tuesday. Chief Engineer Rodriguez had requisitioned a larger hab-module and submitted a formal complaint to the Department of Temporal Anomalies, which responded with a form letter thanking her for her interest in “chronological irregularities” and suggesting she try turning the affected personnel off and on again.

The solution, when it came, was elegantly simple and thoroughly unsatisfying.

“I’m going to sleep late,” announced Marvin-38, the most recent addition to their temporal commune. “Tomorrow, I’m setting my alarm for 8:00 AM. Maybe if I start waking up later instead of earlier, I’ll catch up with myself going the other direction.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Prime Marvin.

“More ridiculous than thirty-eight versions of the same person arguing about shower schedules in outer space?” Marvin-38 asked.

They considered this point.

The next morning, Marvin-38 was gone. Then Marvin-37. One by one, they began disappearing in reverse order, like a cosmic game of temporal Jenga played by an entity with an appreciation for poetic justice and a deadline to meet.

When only Prime Marvin remained, he found himself alone in the hab-module at 7:00 AM sharp, staring at a note he’d apparently written to himself:

“Stop trying so hard to be early. The universe is already running on schedule. —Management”

Marvin crumpled the note, threw it in the recycling chute, and went to brush his teeth. In the mirror, his reflection looked back with the satisfied expression of a man who’d learned something profound about the nature of time, space, and the importance of reasonable sleep schedules.

He was only three minutes late for his shift, which, under the circumstances, felt like a victory.