The Efficiency of Arthur Finch

Hello All:

Chronobiology—the study of biological rhythms—has revealed that our internal circadian clocks affect everything from cell regeneration to peak cognitive performance? While most people sync their day to the rise and fall of the sun, extreme time-optimization enthusiasts often attempt to override their natural biology entirely. The human obsession with shaving off seconds can lead to fascinating, if slightly surreal, behavioral adaptations.

Below is a complete short story expanding on a character concept I created in 2007 intended for the crafted Bizzaro genre to highlight a surreal, hyper-optimized life of a character that I named (in the character sketch) 37-second-cereal-eater.

The Efficiency of Arthur Finch

Arthur Finch did not sleep in pajamas. To Arthur, pajamas were a friction point—a two-minute structural delay that served no mechanical purpose. Every night at precisely 9:00 PM, after pre-making a brown-bag lunch and lining up his morning vitamin beside a single glass of water, Arthur showered, shaved, dressed in his pressed charcoal suit, and climbed under the covers fully clothed.

When his alarm sounded at 3:00 AM, there was no snooze button. Snooze was a metric of failure. Arthur sat upright, performed seven rapid arm rotations to push oxygenated blood into his torso, and retrieved his key fob. Before his feet hit the hardwood floor, he pressed the button. Across the house, the heavy garage door mechanism hummed open, and the sedan’s engine roared to life.

Five minutes and twelve seconds later, Arthur was sitting in the driver’s seat. It was twelve seconds off his personal record, a discrepancy he noted with a tight grimace as he adjusted his radar detector. By the time he hit the interstate—cruising at a deliberate eighty-five miles per hour—he had been conscious for a mere seven minutes.

At the plant, Arthur’s arrival was treated by his co-workers like the passage of a localized comet. He burst through the double doors seven minutes before shift start, carrying his lunch bag. He pulled out a plastic bowl pre-filled with dry flakes, unsealed a pint of milk, and poured. Spoon in hand, he executed a sequence of high-velocity shoveling movements. Thirty-seven seconds later, the bowl was entirely empty, wiped clean, and tossed into the cooler.

His morning rituals only escalated from there. Standing at the breakroom coffee machine, Arthur would hit the brew button, wait for the internal pump to engage, and snatch the paper cup away a split second before the dark liquid poured, letting the coffee wastefully drain away into the machine's drip tray. He would sprint to the sink, fill a glass with lukewarm tap water, gulp it down, and bounce violently in his chair while doing seated arm pumps. He refused caffeine; his system was powered entirely by kinetic momentum and ambient anxiety.

On the assembly line, Arthur was a terrifying marvel of biomechanical symmetry. While standard technicians worked on a single tray of circuit components, Arthur had mapped his nervous system to split down the spine. He deployed two trays simultaneously, his left hand soldering micro-capacitors while his right hand routed harness wiring, completely independent of one another.

During shift changes, co-workers occasionally witnessed his mid-day calibration in the restroom. Arthur would lean over the porcelain basin, rapidly slapping his own cheeks to force adrenaline through his capillaries while snorting handfuls of cold tap water directly up his nasal passages to reset his central nervous system.

His home was no less calculated. Precision-taped painter’s squares marked the exact coordinates for his keys, his wallet, and his remote controls. Clocks lined every wall, ticking in near-perfect synchronization. In his living room, two identical television sets sat side-by-side; one broadcasted the local evening news while the other ran international headlines, allowing Arthur to absorb double the global information in a single thirty-minute window.

Nothing in Arthur’s life was wasted. Every micro-second was accounted for, filed away, and banked against the inevitable entropy of the universe.