July 8 - The Time Out Room

They called it the Time Out Room. It was about the size of a living room, and you could reserve it for up to 12 hours at a time. There wasn't much in it. Just some furniture and electronics.
But when the room was activated, when the door closed, time froze on the rest of the ship. Everything--time, people, gravity, chemical reactions, motion--everything outside the Room paused. But inside the Time Out Room, time continued. It was the only place on the ship that time wasn't paused.
People reserved the Time Out Room for consequence free laziness, chill time. The rest of the ship waited (or paused) while you read, took a nap, vegged out in front of the TV for hours, painted, practiced yoga, did whatever you wanted. It was pure, guilt-free relaxation. You could waste as much time as you wanted without worrying about falling behind.
And when your time was up, you opened the door again, and everything unpaused and resumed what it had been doing the moment you'd entered the Room and closed the door. The transition from pause to unpause was seamless. It was like everyone and everything blinked at the same time.
In the early days of the Time Out Room, there was a murder. Apparently the murderer figured with the rest of the ship frozen he would be able to commit the crime and flee the ship before anyone noticed. However, he forgot that the Time Out Room was designed to unpause the rest of the ship the moment its door was opened again, which was what happened when the murderer opened the door to drag his dead wife out of the Time Out Room and to the incinerator, seemingly the very second they'd gone in and closed the door.
The Room was closed down for a couple of weeks after that, just as it was when a man died of a heart attack while in the Room by himself (the door automatically opened again after 12 hours). In both cases, use of the Room resumed shortly thereafter but after modifications were made to the Room, such as sensors that would trigger an automatic opening of the door if it they failed to detect a pulse from all in the Room.
There were other controversies--drug overdoses, attempted fraud, blackmail--but the Time Out Room survived each time, because what it offered--an opportunity for relaxation, rejuvenation, laziness, and recharging--was too good not to.