Challenge #02463-F273: Night of the Living PJ's

“I fucked up my internal clock and having insomnia always triggering midnight hunger.”
“Midnight hunger?”
“A zombie like state that make me crave food.”
“What's a zombie?”
“You’ll see tonight.” -- Anon Guest

Humans have weird terms for everything. Spacers, even more so. It's as if being locked inside a limited space with only audio channels available for communication triggers its own unique permutations on language. Either that, Grux speculated, or they were just Like That from the beginning.

"Just a warning," said the Human trucker who was giving Grux a lift to Nowhere Station, "I messed up my internal clock, and my chronic insomnia is always triggering midnight hunger."

Grux briefly pondered educating the Human in the many ways that time was a social construct to keep large masses of intelligent beings lined up in the same work cluster. But it was also an important unit of currency that no wealthy person could hoard. Instead of any of that, ze said, "Midnight hunger?"

"Yeah, it's like a zombie state that makes me crave food."

Why did Human answers lead to more questions? "What's a zombie?"

"You'll see at midnight."

Ominous forebodings kept Grux awake in the middle of Ship's Night. Ominous, ominous forebodings. They were why Grux made sure hir livesuit was both on and sealed. The appointed hour came with matching chimes of the Human's archaic clockwork timepiece, and minutes passed in terror and darkness.

The Human shuffled through the shared space in their Ships' Skins, murmuring a deep noise in the back of their throat that had nothing to do with words. In this absent state, the Human stumbled towards the food stores and selected a single serving of Nutri-Food(tm) in its easiest-to-ingest format of a liquid puree.

Grux watched in amazement as the Human stood there, sucking the regulated mixture of vitamins, minerals, and so forth from the bag, whilst apparently staring into the rest of the food stores. Once they extracted the last possible morsel from the baggie, they closed the stores, put the empty bag in the recyc chute, and stumbled back to their rest nook.

Okay. Disturbing, but not deadly. Humans were capable of performing mundane tasks in a non-cogniscent state. Who knew?

[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / Elnur]

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