You alone get an extra hour every day. During this hour, everyone else on earth is frozen and you are free to spend this hour as you choose. You do not age during this hour, so your lifespan does not change. No harm comes to those who are frozen.
Here is the fine print: You must pre-select how you will spend each of the seven hours of your week, and you can make changes just once a year, on New Year’s Eve. You can break up the week as you like. You also select which hour of the day gets frozen.
So, what is your schedule? You also may opt out if you like.
Here’s mine:
Monday – Read
Tuesday – Play piano
Wednesday – Listen to music
Thursday – Play piano
Friday – Read
Saturday – Play piano
Sunday – Nap
I get nothing from napping. After an hour nap, I’d wake up irritable, confused, and tired.
I’d spend my hour reading. But I read an hour or more daily anyway, so maybe I need to think more about this.
Is it possible to use my daily hour to mess with everyone else who is “frozen”? Rearranging their stuff, writing on them with a sharpie, etc or does that violate the hypothetical?
I would much prefer the hypothetical include a second person. I can certainly think of something I’d happily do for an hour every afternoon with somebody of the right configuration.
I think we need more details about the rules of the game.
Other people are frozen, but to what extent can you affect or move other objects?
Can you, for example, walk into a bank and help yourself to large piles of money in easy-to-carry bags?
Can you pick up a gun and shoot someone?
Then, if you can affect other things, are the effects permanant after the hour?
Would the bank money vanish like fairy gold, and the bullet you fired at the victim never reach its target?
If you can affect other things and the result is permanant, you are pretty much God for all practical purposes…
Right. It sounds like a simple idea at first, but if you want to work out all the logical consequences, you need to do a lot of world-building. What are the rules?
Of course there have been many variations on this. For example:
Not necessarily. Or at least not necessarily as I understand the OP’s idea.
This isn’t Groundhog Day where you relive the same (extra) hour each week.
But if Sunday is bank robbing day, then yes, every Sunday you need to go rob a bank. Some bank. Someplace. And there’s nothing preventing you from taking the hours pre-freeze and using them to get in position, get all your equipment in your van, etc. Heck, you could be standing in the lobby having just walked in as the freeze time starts for everyone else.
Although I suppose if instead of specifying “bank robbing” on your Sunday freeze hour application you just put down “miscellaneous criminality” you could do quite a much larger variety of mischief every Sunday. Kinda depends on how literal versus generous the Magic Genie or whatever is.
Seems to be an inconsistency here. You say the person shot would have a bullet in them, and the effects are permanent. So the money should still be in your hands? Maybe fingers got a bit ahead of brain on that one…
Scenario 1: It is frozen hour. You shoot a frozen dude. The hour ends and he wakes up with a bullet in him.
Scenario 2: It is frozen hour. You go into a bank and remove a $100 bill. The hour ends and the bill is gone from the bank and is now in your pocket.
What am I missing?
mmm
ETA: Oh wait, I think I get it now. When I read “the money vanishes”, I interpreted that as the money vanishes from the bank because you now have it. Not that it vanishes into thin air.
Does the rest of the world continue to function? Does rain fall? Do birds fly and sing? Waves crash and break?
If so my extra hours are pretty much going to be about going and quietly appreciating that, without the noise of human civilisation.
What if the frozen people are driving a car or sit on a moving train or plane? Would the car keep going straight into the next obstacle? Would the dead man switch stop the train, but not the plane? If the frozen person happened to be walking when freezing and had one foot in the air just then, would they topple over? Or would they stay upright in precarious equilibrium? If the latter, what happens to the momentum they had, does it continue seamlessly when they unfreeze, or will they stumble then?
If a frozen person is about to sip from a freshly brewed espresso cup, will the espresso be cold when he unfreezes?
Does radioactivity continue, in particular in nuclear reactors, specially in nuclear reactors on submarines and aircraft carrieres?
