Your Move

Chapter 12 - Times Are Changing

Growing up, the way I woke up in the morning changed over the years. Up until I was 8 or 9, I would open my eyes every morning to the smiling face of either my mom or my dad. If I was lucky on a weekend, they'd both be there. I almost always woke up sad and angry at myself anyway, because my Pull-Ups and later Goodnites were soaked more often than not.

Waking up in a cold clammy diaper was one of the first uncomfortable feelings I'd ever known. Knowing that the cause was my failure in controlling my own bladder was just fuel to the fire. My parents understood how I felt and did their best to comfort me, which included greeting me with their cheeriest smiles and hugs and kisses. Every single morning, without failure.

If I was unusually sad or frustrated, like the days after my birthday when I'd be a year older and still a bedwetter, my parents would tickle me, tell me jokes, pull faces, and do everything they could until I smiled. It was their mission to never let me start the day grumpy, and that contributed massively to my childhood self-esteem, confidence, and joyous attitude.

By the time I finally managed to stay dry consistently, I was already 9. Weeks later, my parents received simultaneous promotions. Their new positions meant they could get home earlier and spend more time with me, which I relished. However, they also had to leave before dawn. Since I didn't want to get up three hours before school started, they let me sleep in and wake up to an alarm on my phone.

In high school, my schoolwork started picking up, and my sleep schedule started getting shifted later and later. I'd start to sleep at 1 am, then 2, then 2:30, and wake up fifteen minutes before my first class. I'd skip breakfast, throw together a sandwich for lunch, and dash out the door half-dressed, hair all messy and generally looking like a street urchin. That probably contributed to my not having many friends, and I found myself spending more and more time with computers instead.

I was sleeping at 3 am by my first year at MIT, where I majored in computer science. There, I discovered many others just like me, and my friend-count shot up. Like my new friends and most other programmers, I found that I coded a lot better in the small hours of the morning, so I regularly woke up at noon. I'd managed to schedule my classes to be in the afternoons and early evenings, so I would wake up, freshen up, have brunch, and head to class.

Thanks to summer internships at Google, Amazon and Meta, which back then were the biggest tech companies, I was offered a six-figure salary plus lucrative benefits at a small Silicon Valley start-up the day I received my Bachelor's degree. My compensation included perks like flexible work hours and a sizable stake in the company once it IPOed, the former of which I took advantage of to go to chess tournaments, and to never fix my sleep schedule. In fact, from when I was 17 until I was teleported to this new dimension, I was almost consistently a night owl!

That first morning at Mike's place — my new home, I awoke in a massive Amazon-sized bed with all four limbs wrapped around my new dolphin. My dress was gone, and in its place was one of the footed sleepers I'd picked out the day before. I was also wearing one of the extra-thick MapleLove night diapers. From how swollen it was, a thinner diaper like the one I was last wearing when I fell asleep would probably have leaked. I stretched my arms and yawned as my stomach growled. Having fallen asleep in the car, I'd missed out on dinner, and I was positively starving.

The room was dark, but rays of natural light seeped in from under the door, so I knew it must have been morning. I carefully hopped off the bed and walked — well, waddled — over to the door. It was the first time in ages that I'd woken up outside a crib or a car, and the freedom to walk about felt great.

Strangely, there was no visible handle on the door. I was just contemplating what to do when it slid into the wall by itself and Mike waltzed in.

"Morning princess! Did you sleep well?"