Book Five, Chapter 30: The Farm
Time was different between our two ships. This became abundantly clear, and the reason was simple: our ship had conscious players in it.
The other ship, filled with bedbugs and doomed passengers, wasn't exactly speeding up or anything like that. I didn't see them zooming around on the camera. Instead, I could see that all of the NPCs—the conscious ones, at least—were going from mark to mark and shooting footage for Carousel. As they did, the timestamp on the footage would jump forward days at a time.
It was probably a lot easier for Carousel when all of the characters in the movie were scripted. This spelled trouble for me because I really wanted my Dailies trope to activate, which would allow me to see uncut footage from the day before, but because I wasn't experiencing day and night cycles, the dailies didn't come.
Luckily, there was something we could do about that.
"I don't know exactly how this works," Antoine said. "There's not, like, a button in my mind or anything." He cleared his throat and then continued, "Nighttime!" He smacked his hands together. "It is now nighttime."
We waited for a moment.
Sure enough, all of the NPCs on our ship, the Helio, started to shift around as Rudy and Flannery went to off to the sleeping room, and some of the others took the helm. As they did, the dailies appeared in my mind on the red wallpaper.
Antoine's In Bed By Nine trope allowed him to trigger a sort of narrative bedtime that made a lot more sense when you were on Earth, or at least whatever Carousel was.
We weren't spinning on an axis near a star, so nighttime didn't make as much sense. His ability didn't just affect us. No, the time fast-forwarding on the other ships stopped immediately, and the player surrogates started getting ready to try and find a place to sleep, which was something we had not yet seen them do, and for good reason.