Chapter 13: Rest

That night I slept differently.

Not better, exactly. I'd been sleeping well enough since the breakdown, the deep heavy sleep of someone whose body was still recalibrating after seventy-three years of stasis. But this was a different kind of sleep. I was tired in my muscles, in my hands, in the specific places where the shovel had pressed and the wheelbarrow handles had rubbed. It was the tiredness of a body that had done something, and it pulled me under with a completeness that surprised me.

In my old life I had never slept well. I don't think I understood, until I came here, how badly I had slept. In 2027 I went to bed with my phone on the nightstand, its screen facing down but still glowing faintly at the edges, and even in sleep some part of me was listening for it. The notification sound, the vibration against the wood. I would wake at two or three in the morning and reach for it before I was fully conscious, and there would be emails, messages, mentions, and I would read them in the dark with one eye open and the blue light of the screen would reset whatever fragile progress toward rest my brain had made, and I would lie there for an hour composing responses in my head before sleep took me again, and in the morning I would feel as though I had not slept at all but had instead spent eight hours running on a treadmill in a dark room.

I had called this normal. Everyone I knew slept the same way. We compared our insomnia the way previous generations compared war stories, with a grim competitive pride. I slept four hours last night. I haven't slept through the night since 2024. I fall asleep fine but I wake up at three and my brain starts going. We said these things as though they were features of adult life rather than symptoms of a society that had made rest impossible by making every moment a potential moment of productivity or failure.

Here, lying in Adaeze's room with the faint amber glow and the smell of the garden coming through walls that seemed to breathe, there was nothing to listen for. No notification. No email. No competitor launching a feature at midnight that would require a response by morning. No algorithm optimizing my attention while I was unconscious. The silence was not empty. It was full of the sounds of growing things and wind and the distant murmur of a city that was, itself, resting. And I was tired in my body, genuinely physically tired, the way humans are supposed to be tired at the end of a day, and the sleep that came for me was not the shallow, fractured, anxious unconsciousness I had known. It was deep and dark and still.

I dreamed of a Tuesday.

Not the terrible Tuesday of my breakdown, not the nights of panic and disorientation. Just a Tuesday. I was in my office at Lumen, late, the cleaning crew working around me. The bay was visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows, black and glittering. My dinner was a plastic container of sushi that had been sitting on my desk for two hours. I was answering emails. I was always answering emails. The inbox had 347 unread messages and every time I cleared one, two more appeared, and I understood, even in the dream, that this was not a task that could be completed. It was a condition. The emails were not communications from people who needed things. They were the pulse of a system that required constant proof that I was still inside it, still responding, still alive in the way that mattered, which was to say: still producing.

In the dream I looked up from the screen and out the window at the bay, and I felt something I recognized from life, the flat gray feeling of a person who is succeeding at everything and experiencing none of it. The sushi was delivery sushi, cold and faintly stale. The view was extraordinary. The company was growing. And I felt nothing, because feeling required a kind of presence that the system had optimized out of me. You can't feel the view if you're composing an email in your head. You can't taste the food if you're calculating runway. You can't be in the room if every part of you is somewhere else, anticipating the next thing, defending against the next threat, performing for the next audience.

I woke up slowly, the way you surface from deep water. The room was light. The dream was already fading, but the feeling of it stayed, the gray flatness, and I lay in bed and held it up against what I felt now, in this room, in this life, and the contrast was so stark it was almost funny. I was a woman with no company, no inbox, no phone, no credentials, no plan, no status, no audience, and I had slept better than I had slept in my entire adult life.

I got up and went to the kitchen. Helen and James were already there, eating and talking quietly. Edward came in from outside with dirt on his hands and greeted me with the easy warmth that I was beginning to depend on more than I wanted to admit.

Over breakfast I asked a question that surprised me, because I hadn't known I was thinking it until it came out of my mouth.

"Where are your screens?"

Edward and Helen both looked at me.

"I've been here for weeks," I said. "And I just realized I haven't seen anyone watch anything. No TV. No movies. No streaming, no feeds, no videos. In my time, there was a screen in every room. People watched things constantly. On the subway, in bed, at dinner, while they were walking. And here there's just... nothing. I haven't even thought about it until right now, which is maybe the strangest part."

Helen set down her cup. She had the expression she got when I'd stumbled onto something she found interesting.

"How often did you go to the symphony?" she asked.

"What?"

"Or the theater. Live plays, live music. How often did you go?"

I thought about it. "Once, some friends and I decided we were going to be cultured. We got tickets to the symphony. I actually loved it. I went back a couple months later on my own. And then I just... never went again. I don't know why. I really did enjoy it."

"Before radio and television," Helen said, "people went to plays, concerts, lectures, public speakers multiple times a week. As often as you watched television. That was entertainment. Then radio came, and then television, and then the internet and streaming, and people lost interest in going out to see things performed live. The new format was easier, more accessible, and eventually it just replaced the old one."

"And you're saying the same thing happened again. Something replaced TV the way TV replaced the theater."

"In a way. But it wasn't that something better came along. It was more that people lost interest in watching other people's stories. Once the pressure was off, once people weren't exhausted and numb at the end of every day, they found they'd rather live their own lives than watch fictional ones." She paused. "That said, it's not as though we never watch anything. Some people enjoy it more than others. Some people love old movies and old television from your era. And the info can generate anything you want, any story, tailored exactly to you."

"But it's more like how going to the symphony was for you," Edward said. "Something you do occasionally and enjoy, not something you do every evening."

I sat with this. In my old life, I had watched television every night. Not because I loved it, but because by the end of the day I had nothing left. No energy for conversation, no capacity for presence. I would lie on my couch with delivery food and let the screen wash over me, and the stories I watched were about people who were more alive than I was, doing things I was too tired to do, and I had called this relaxation.

"There's something else," Helen said, and she looked at Edward, and something passed between them. "We haven't wanted to overwhelm you. These first weeks have been difficult, and we thought you needed quiet. But we don't typically spend our evenings sitting around the house going to bed early."

"What do you typically do?"

Edward smiled. "Would you like to find out tonight?"