A Quantized Life

Awake for an hour, asleep for a year. That was the summation of his entire existence, ever since he had agreed to this mad experiment as a way to avoid a boring life sentence without a chance at parole.

Every year, on New Years Day, they would wake him up, run him through a battery of cognitive tests, brief him on the more notable current events, and then send him back into a dreamless sleep.

For him, the hours were seamlessly connected. He no sooner closed his eyes than opened them once again, each time staring into the haggard eyes of whatever unfortunate soul drew short straw and had to spend their morning with him after a night of drunken revelry.

Hour by hour he saw fashions change, people age in short, but perceptable jumps. He desperately longed to end the experiment, but beg as he might, they never freed him. At one hour per year, they told him he might live for over a million years, but after the last several thousand he was ready to die. In the end, he merely traded one life sentence for another.