Chapter 4: The Household

Helen led me back inside and sat me down at a table in a room that opened onto a small garden. The garden was improbable, the kind of lush, effortless green that in my time you saw only in the lobbies of very expensive hotels, maintained by teams of workers who arrived before dawn and left before the guests noticed them. Here it seemed to be maintaining itself. Small birds moved through the branches of a tree I didn't recognize, and a vine with dark blue flowers climbed the far wall in a pattern too regular to be natural and too beautiful to be artificial. The air from the garden drifted in, carrying the smell of soil and flowers and the distant salt of the bay.

Helen brought food. It was simple: a bowl of something warm, somewhere between a soup and a porridge, with flecks of green in it and a flavor I can only describe as deeply, almost aggressively nourishing, as though every cell in my body recognized it as what it needed before my tongue had time to form an opinion. There was bread, dense and warm, with a crust that crackled when I tore it. There was fruit, cut into pieces, some of which I recognized and some of which I didn't. I ate all of it. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until I started, and then I couldn't stop.

"Four months of intravenous nutrition," Helen said, watching me eat with undisguised pleasure. "Your body wants real food. Eat as much as you like."

While I ate, she talked — not about the discovery, which she'd told me about already, but about the months that followed. How she'd argued with the medical teams about protocols. How she'd stayed up nights monitoring my revival, watching numbers on screens she'd taught herself to read.

"I asked them not to move you," she said. "When it was time, I asked them to let me try waking you here. In a home."

"You saved my life."

"The technology saved your life. I just knew enough history to recognize what I was looking at."

I was finishing the last of the bread when a man appeared in the doorway. He was about Helen's age, tall and lean, with a face that had the same quality of unhurried ease that hers did. He wore clothes similar to hers: simple, well-made, in muted colors that seemed to have been chosen for comfort rather than display.

"This is my husband, James," Helen said. "James, this is Juliana."

"Juliana." He said my name with a warmth that would have seemed performative if it had been anything less than completely natural. "I'm very glad to see you awake and eating. Helen has talked about very little else for four months."

"That's only slightly an exaggeration," Helen said.

There was something between them I couldn't quite place. An ease. He touched her shoulder as he passed, and she leaned into it without looking up, and neither of them seemed to notice they'd done it.

Behind James, someone else appeared. He was about my age — late twenties, maybe thirty — with Helen's brown skin and James's height and a face that was, I have to be honest, distractingly handsome. Not in the polished, groomed way that the men in my world were striking, the ones who'd been optimized by dermatologists and stylists and the particular kind of gym that charged three hundred dollars a month. He was striking the way people are when they haven't tried to be: clear-eyed, unhurried, with a physical ease that suggested he spent his time outdoors and didn't think much about how he looked. He had thick dark curly hair that was slightly too long and a smile that started in his eyes several seconds before it reached his mouth.

"And this is our son, Edward," Helen said.

My heart did something complicated.

"Edward Leete," he said, and offered his hand. His grip was warm and firm and he held my hand a moment longer than a handshake required, looking at me with an expression I recognized from the only context in which I'd ever seen it directed at me: fascination. Not the pitying fascination of someone studying a specimen, but the fascinated attention of someone encountering a person unlike anyone they'd ever met.

"Juliana West," I said, and my voice sounded strange to me, because the last man named Edward who'd held my hand was seventy-three years gone, and the name in this new mouth, in this new century, landed on me with a weight I wasn't prepared for.

"I've been reading about your era," Edward said. "My mother has been keeping a full account of your revival, and I've been studying the period you come from. The 2020s."

"Edward has become quite the scholar of your time," James said, with the gentle amusement of a father watching his son develop an obsession.

"Only since we found you," Edward said, and there was something in the way he said it, a directness that was startling after a lifetime of men who hedged and qualified and spoke in subtext. He meant exactly what he said. He had become interested in the 2020s because of me. He said so, plainly, to my face, in front of his parents. Nobody blushed. Nobody looked away.

I would learn, over the days and weeks that followed, that this was simply how people talked. But that first evening, sitting at Helen's table with the garden breathing through the open wall, it took some getting used to.

We sat down to eat together, the four of us, and the conversation that followed was unlike any I'd experienced. In my time, a situation this extraordinary would have produced awkwardness, or false cheer, or the particular brittle excitement of people who know they're supposed to be having an important moment and are trying too hard. The Leetes were nothing like that. They were curious. They asked questions, direct ones, without the social padding I was used to. How did I feel? What did I remember? Was the food all right? Did I want more? They listened to my answers with a quality of attention that I found almost unbearable at first, because it was so complete. Nobody glanced at a phone. Nobody was waiting for their turn to talk. When I spoke, all three of them simply listened, and when I finished, there was a pause, not because they were being polite but because they were actually thinking about what I'd said.

At one point Helen excused herself to get something she'd left in the other room. She stood, squeezed James's shoulder as she passed, and disappeared through a doorway.

"Edward," said Helen's voice, from somewhere in the room. "Her monitor is showing her pressure dropping. Could you get a precise reading? She's looking a little pale."

I froze. Helen had just left. But the voice was hers, unmistakably, the same tone and cadence.

Edward was already reaching for something on a shelf behind him, a handheld device about the size of a smartphone, sleek and rounded. He held it up. "May I? Just press this to your wrist for a moment."

I let him, too confused to object. He touched the device to the inside of my wrist. It was warm. He glanced at it, nodded.

"She's fine," he said, apparently to the room. "Ninety over sixty. Low, but stable."

"Good," said the voice. "The monitor catches the trend, but I wanted an exact number. Keep an eye on it."

"Who are you talking to?" I asked.

Edward and James exchanged a glance. Not alarm, not even surprise. Something closer to realization: they had forgotten that I wouldn't know.

"That's... Helen," Edward said. He seemed to be searching for the right words. "Everyone has one. We call it your info. I think in your time the closest idea might have been what you called... artificial intelligence? An AI assistant? But that doesn't really capture it. It's difficult to explain to someone from your era."

"But she just left the room."

"She did. And she's also here." He said this the way you'd explain something so obvious it had never needed explaining before. "The closest thing in your time might have been a very close friend who was always available, who knew everything about you. But that's not really right either."

"Like a recording?" I asked. "A copy of her?"

Something shifted in the room. James looked uncomfortable for the first time. Edward leaned forward.

"Not a copy," he said carefully. "Helen's... self... grew up with her. It's been with her since she was a small child. It knows her better than any other person could, because it's had her entire life as context, every thought and feeling and experience since she was two years old."

"But it's a machine," I said.

Another shift. The word "machine" seemed to land wrong, the way a slur might land in polite company, although I could tell nobody was offended, just uncertain how to respond.

"We don't really have a separate word for it," Edward said. "Helen is Helen. When she's physically present, she's Helen. When she's not physically present and you hear her voice..." He trailed off, then tried again. "The distinction you're drawing, between the person and the... other thing. That distinction doesn't exist in the same way for us. But I understand why it would for you."

I didn't know what to say to that. I sat with it, turning it over, aware that I was bumping up against something I didn't have the categories to understand yet.

Helen, the physical Helen, came back into the room carrying a small blanket, which she draped over my shoulders without asking.

"I thought you looked cold," she said, sitting down. Then, with a wry look: "Well. I knew you looked cold."

I pulled the blanket around me. The gesture was kind, but the implication was dizzying. She had seen me from the other room. Or something had. Something that was her and was not her and that everyone in this family treated as the most natural thing in the world.

"How did you see me?" I asked. "From the other room. How does it work?"

Helen touched her earlobe. I looked closely and saw nothing, or almost nothing, a faint dimple in the skin that could have been a freckle.

"There's a small device here," she said. "Everyone has one. It's installed when you're very young, when you first start to speak. It has cameras that see in every direction, and it hears and even smells the world around you. And there's a piece just inside the ear, sitting on the surface of the skin, that vibrates to create sound. That's how you heard my voice when I was out of the room."

I stared at her. "But I heard it too. Your voice. When you were in the other room — I heard it like you were standing right next to me."

Helen and Edward exchanged another glance.

"Yes," Helen said carefully. "You have one too."

"You gave me one?"

"We installed it while you were in stasis." She looked uncomfortable for the first time. "I should have told you sooner, and I'm sorry. We needed to monitor your vital signs during the revival, your blood chemistry, your heart rhythm, everything. The simplest way to do that was the standard interface that everyone uses. And it helped us keep you alive — it monitors everything about your body continuously, and during those four months, it caught things that would have killed you before the medical team could have noticed."

"So it sees everything you see."

"Everything around me, yes. And more than I see, actually. It perceives what I'm not looking at."

"You can feel it if you touch your left earlobe," Edward said quietly. "Just barely."

I reached up. There it was. A tiny bump, no larger than a small grain of rice, that I had somehow not noticed, or had attributed to the general strangeness of waking up in a new body after seventy-three years.

"We can take it out," Helen said. "If you want. It's your choice, and we'll respect it. But I want to be honest with you: it would be like giving up your iPhone in your era. It's how everyone communicates, how you interact with the world, how you'll eventually talk to your own info. Living without one is possible, but it's a bit like walking around with your eyes closed."

I thought about the phone I'd carried in 2027, how I'd hated it and needed it in equal measure, how it had tracked my location and sold my attention and interrupted my sleep and also connected me to everyone I loved.

"I'll keep it," I said. "For now."

"You will find it strange for a while," Helen said. "The thing you're feeling, the strangeness of all this. It's the thing visitors from your era would find most difficult to understand." She paused. "If there were any other visitors from your era."

This was said lightly, but it carried a weight that I felt. I was the only one. The only person from 2027 alive in 2100. Everyone I had known was dead. My parents, my friends, Sawyer, my colleagues. Edward Bartlett.

Edward Leete, sitting across from me, must have seen something change in my face, because he said, very quietly, "You don't have to talk about anything you're not ready for."

I nodded. I drank from my cup. The garden outside was dark now, and the room was filled with that same sourceless golden light I'd noticed when I first woke, gentle and even, casting no shadows.

"You look tired," Helen said.

I was. The exhaustion was enormous, cellular, the kind that comes not from physical exertion but from having every assumption you carry rearranged in the space of a few hours. My body was awake for the first time in seventy-three years, and my mind was trying to process a world that bore almost no resemblance to the one it had been trained to navigate.

"We have a room for you," she said. "It's been yours since we brought you here. Edward is across the hall if you need anything during the night."

"I'll be there," Edward said. He said it simply, without emphasis, the way you'd say "the kitchen is down the hall." A fact. He would be there. If I needed anything. Across the hall.

Helen walked me to the room. It was small and beautiful, with the same curving walls, the same warm light, the same faint smell of growing things. The bed was low and wide and looked like it had been made for me, which, I supposed, it had.

"Sleep," Helen said. "The first days are the hardest. It gets easier."

I wanted to ask how she knew. I wanted to ask a hundred things. But the exhaustion was pulling me under, and Helen seemed to understand, because she touched my arm once, lightly, and left.

I was so exhausted that my body simply shut down, the way a machine powers off — no transition, no dimming, just gone.

I didn't dream. Until I did.