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Absent Thee From Felicity Awhile.... is a 4000-word short story by Somtow Sucharitkul (S. P. Somtow), which tells the story of how the entire human race is forced to live the same day over and over again, as part of an alien experiment. It was first published in the September 14, 1981 issue of Analog.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

John is an actor playing the part of Guildenstern in Hamlet. During the production, aliens come down to Earth and telepathically reveal that they are granting the human race immortality, but in exchange the human race must help out with what amounts to, for them, a junior high school science project—the entire human race will relive the same day, this day, over and over again, for seven million years (with time off between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m.).

For John, this had not been a good day; he slept in until 11 a.m. (meaning he sleeps through the only free time he gets), and then at breakfast his girlfriend dumped him for the actor with the lead in the play he’s in. He slapped her, and then he went to the performance. He and his girlfriend are forced to repeat this same scene day after day.

Eventually, John manages to force himself to wake up early, at 6 a.m., and he wanders around talking to people. He meets a woman on a train platform, who’s especially bitter, because her train crashes at the end of the day, killing her. This means she must relive the day of her death for seven million years, and at the end she will even be deprived of immortality, because she dies before the aliens arrive.

Later on, John manages to make a small change in his day; he refrains from slapping his girlfriend when she dumps him. From this, John realizes that he can resist the aliens.

Reprints

This story has been reprinted in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF.

Title

The title of the story is taken from William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act 5, scene 2, line 350. Stabbed and dying, Hamlet is talking to Horatio, urging him to live on and not commit suicide, so that he can tell Hamlet's story:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story. . . .

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