Normally, my roommate and I get along fine. Cameron’s pretty good about respecting my space and all. But recently, he’s really started to get on my nerves. I guess the main problem is that the alarm he sets for his morning class keeps waking me up from my cryogenic sleep.
I understand that Cameron’s course load has been pretty heavy this semester and that some mornings, if he’s coming off a long night of studying, it will take him a while to shut off his alarm.
But he seems completely unaware of how loud his alarm’s shrill beeping sound is. In fact, the beeping is so loud that my automated stasis chamber interprets it as an incoming threat. This initiates its emergency wake-up protocol, and I then have to stumble around for a few minutes in the dark, bleary-eyed, before I realize that I am not in the ruins of what used to be central New Jersey—I am in my dorm room in what is currently central New Jersey. You can imagine how irritating this is.
The first few times Cameron accidentally woke me up, I tried to accept that it was just something that would happen from time to time. Cameron and I share the same living space, but we are still independent people with our own priorities. Sometimes he’ll need to wake up early. Sometimes I’ll need him to cover for me when Public Safety asks about the seven-foot-tall, futuristic cryo-pod in the corner of our room. That’s just life. But now things are getting out of hand. I’m losing hours of sleep, and I’m honestly not sure how many more times my internal organs can endure the process of going into and coming out of the induced hibernative state cryosleep entails.
I mean, why even set your alarm so early in the first place if you plan on sleeping straight through it? Sometimes Cameron will be courteous enough to hit snooze, but then he just sleeps through the second alarm too, and through all eight stages of my rewarming process.
Am I being unreasonable here?
I guess I wouldn’t be so upset about this if Cameron at least tried to be more understanding. The first time I mentioned that his alarm was bothering me, Cameron immediately got defensive. “Hey dude,” he said, “I thought we get up at around the same time.” I had to explain to him that my earliest scheduled release date isn’t until 2245, more than two centuries later than he would normally wake up. Still, he wouldn’t listen.
For now, it looks like I’ll just have to put up with my roommate’s disruptive behavior. Anyways, this might be what I deserve, considering how many times I’ve accidentally unplugged the machine he’s transferring his consciousness into.
-MA’19
