Give It Time
⏱ 40 - 50 min
The transport module was nearing its destination. The cabin lights faded. The tinted windows began displaying a film.
Lara had been watching the reflection of Ivo trying to open a bottle that resisted all his attempts. He had rejected the assistance prompt twice, then a third time with sufficient irritation that the bottle apparently decided the matter was now educational.
“Do you want me to…?” Lara tried to ask.
“No.”
“You've been doing that for three minutes.”
“Exactly.”
Across from them, Sen had already opened hers.
She took a drink.
Ivo looked at it. “How?”
“I accepted the assistance.”
“Oh, for goodness sake,” said Lara.
A soft orchestral chord emerged from somewhere above them.
On the window beside Ivo's head, white letters appeared.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENOUGH
“Four months,” Ivo said. “And this is how they welcome us.”
“You knew there was an induction.”
“I knew there’d be information. Nobody said there'd be popaganda.”
The first image appeared: black rock breaking through the swirling, inky blue Atlantic. Fire moved under the water. The camera rose through steam, accelerated across thousands of years, and watched an island accumulate itself.
The voice was warm and unmistakably pleased with humanity. Though it wasn’t actually human.
Long before this was an arcology, it was an experiment in geology.
“That's actually quite nice,” Sen said.
“Give it time,” said Lara.
Forest spread down mountainsides. Cloud rolled in from the sea and became trapped against a ridge. On the opposite slope, the land dried almost at once into ochre and black.
The date changed.
1496
A shallow body of water appeared on an inland plain. Beyond it, mountains caught the last light.
Following the European conquest of the island, settlers established a new town beside a lagoon on the high plateau.
“Established,” Sen repeated.
“I heard it,” said Ivo.
“Very tactful verb.”
The reconstruction populated itself with timber, stone, animals and people. Paths formed without apparent agreement around a small church.
The first settlement grew informally.
“Ah,” Lara said. “Humans.”
The image froze.
Then a second settlement unfolded beside it in immaculate lines.
Within a few years, its lower town had become one of Europe's earliest experiments in planned colonial urbanism: open, unfortified, and designed according to philosophical principles.
Ivo looked at Lara. “Don't.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You made a face.”
“I made no such face.”
“You made your philosophical-principles face.”
“My what?”
Sen smiled into her drink.
On-screen, streets widened. Courtyards appeared behind façades. A central square filled with merchants, soldiers, clergy, children and animals.
Its planners believed that physical order could help produce social order.
“There,” Lara said.
Ivo groaned.
“I said nothing.”
“You said ‘there’.”
“That's barely a word.”
The centuries accelerated.
Ships crossed the ocean in both directions. Timber balconies grew above narrow streets. Warehouses filled and emptied. Churches appeared. Sugar, wine, books, diseases, ideas and people passed through the island.
A university courtyard.
A telescope beneath a cold, startlingly clear sky.
The old town filling with motor vehicles.
Aircraft.
Hotels advancing along a distant coast.
A motorway.
Satellite dishes.
Crowds holding rectangular screens toward a volcanic summit.
1999
The old city was recognised internationally for a plan that had survived five centuries of changing ideas about how people ought to live.
“That's fair,” Sen said.
“It is,” Lara admitted.
2007
The summit returned: pale ground, immense caldera, shadow stretching across cloud.
The high volcanic landscape received its own protections soon afterwards.
Ivo leaned sideways toward the still-opaque window. “Are they deliberately not naming anything?”
“We know where we're going,” Lara said.
“Do we?”
Sen looked at him. “We spent six months arranging this.”
“Yes. But mostly through icons.”
The images accelerated again.
Summer fires.
Reservoirs.
Traffic.
Apartment blocks.
Protests.
Cruise ships.
Rows of parked cars gleaming in the sun.
For the first time, the orchestra became slightly sombre.
2028
Like many desirable places of the early twenty-first century, the island discovered that abundance in one dimension could produce scarcity in another.
Ivo laughed. “No one said that.”
“Not then,” said Sen.
“What did they say?”
“Much ruder things.”
The montage did not linger.
Rooftops acquiring solar films. Old car parks becoming buildings, orchards, playgrounds. Desalination plants retreating underground. Narrow streets emptying of parked vehicles. Autonomous shuttles appearing briefly, then almost disappearing from later images altogether.
2034
Energy became cheaper.
Lara raised an eyebrow. “Cheaper?”
“Maybe this is the children's version.”
2037
Construction accelerated and became reconstruction.
“Technically true,” said Sen.
2041
A factory emptied.
An office emptied.
A classroom changed shape.
A supermarket checkout vanished.
Roadworks continued exactly as before.
Robots and androids zoomed around.
Work became optional.
All three spoke at once.
“No.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Oh, come on.”
They looked at each other.
The narrator proceeded, untroubled.
Images of people repairing wetlands, rehearsing orchestras, tending crops alongside machines, caring for children, arguing around tables, sleeping late, studying old manuscripts, climbing mountains.
Ivo pointed at the window. “Popaganda.”
“You literally moved to Pelagos because they abolished compulsory schedules.”
“Yes, and then everyone invented worse ones.”
As automated systems assumed more of the labour required to maintain material security, the central political question of the century changed.
A woman in an old parliamentary chamber raised her hand.
A queue outside a housing office dissolved into an archival transition.
A construction robot folded itself into a wall.
For generations, societies had asked how people might earn enough to live.
“Some societies,” Sen said.
Lara glanced at her.
Sen shrugged. “If we're correcting the fifteenth century, we can correct the twenty-first.”
Increasingly, the question became how people might live when earning was no longer the organising principle of everyday life.
This time none of them interrupted.
The window filled with images too quickly to categorise.
A floating settlement.
A monastery converted into a research residence.
Children walking through a forest with no visible adults.
An orbital ring rotating against darkness.
A desert settlement surrounded by wetlands.
An elderly man learning the trumpet.
A woman alone on a balcony, apparently doing nothing.
Then came the phase Lara had been waiting for.
2048
Humanity reclaimed its time.
She laughed.
Sen did too, but more quietly.
Ivo leaned forward. “No, I like that one.”
“Of course you do.”
“What's wrong with it?”
“Everything.”
“Specifically?”
“Time isn't a resource you reclaim once.”
“It's a ninety-second orientation film.”
“Exactly. They had a chance.”
“You want footnotes?”
“I want fewer slogans.”
The window obligingly supplied another.
2052
The Coordination Era began.
Lara covered her face. “I knew it.”
Ivo was laughing now.
Sen said, “My grandmother still calls it the Coordination Crisis.”
“Everyone's grandmother calls it that.”
“Because she was there.”
“She was nine.”
“She was an unusually attentive nine-year-old.”
The film showed warehouses, energy networks, automated ports, municipal assemblies, machine-readable contracts, forests growing where roads had been, vast systems moving goods with very little visible human intervention.
Artificial intelligence did not eliminate disagreement. It made more forms of agreement possible.
Lara lowered her hands. “Hmm.”
Ivo turned to her. “You're allowing that?”
“Provisionally.”
“Record the date.”
“I think that's actually the first defensible sentence they've had since the lagoon,” Sen said.
The orchestra brightened.
2059
A map of the island appeared without names.
Most of the coastline dimmed. Dense settlements contracted into a handful of luminous clusters linked by lines through the mountains. Former roads faded into green. The high central landscape remained almost entirely dark.
The Island Compact concentrated infrastructure while returning large areas to ecological succession.
A forest advanced across an abandoned carriageway.
One tunnel swallowed three modes of transport and released none that Lara could identify.
Terraces that had been dry became cultivated again; others disappeared beneath trees.
An old hotel was dismantled from the top down by machines small enough to look like insects.
The goal was not to minimise human presence.
A crowded square at night.
Music.
Food.
Children running between tables.
It was to minimise how much of the world human presence needed to exclude.
Sen sat a little straighter. “I like that.”
“So do I,” said Lara.
Ivo looked wounded. “Why am I suddenly the cynical one?”
“You've been practising.”
The map changed again.
2063
The first Attentional Ecology Charter transformed the island from a settlement experiment into a residency experiment.
“Oh no,” said Ivo.
“What?”
“Here comes the mission statement.”
Its founding hypothesis was simple.
The orchestra withdrew until only one sustained note remained.
Lara looked suspiciously at the ceiling.
When fewer necessities compete for human attention, people do not become passive.
A sequence of faces.
No one especially beautiful. No one performing visible transcendence.
Someone kneading bread.
Someone arguing.
Someone staring at a beetle.
Someone crying on a train.
Someone asleep under a tree.
They become more able to discover what they are willing to give their attention to.
Lara did not laugh.
Neither did Ivo.
Sen said, “That's almost good.”
“Almost?” said Ivo.
“‘Willing to give’ sounds like a committee spent a year on it.”
The sustained note resolved.
The window went black.
For a moment there was only their reflection again: three people in a cabin, older than the versions of themselves that had first promised to do this together, and not yet sure whether that was important.
Then one final line appeared.
WELCOME. FOR THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS, YOUR TIME IS YOUR OWN.
Ivo raised his bottle. “To having absolutely no idea what that means.”
Lara touched hers against it. “I know exactly what it means.”
“That's what worries me.”
Sen reached across last. “I came to see you two.”
There was a brief silence.
“That is incredibly manipulative,” Lara said.
“What?”
“Now whatever I say sounds shallow.”
“You were going to give us a list, weren't you?” said Ivo.
“No.”
“You have a list.”
“I have categories.”
“Of course you do.”
The cabin shuddered almost imperceptibly.
The windows became transparent.
Cloud rushed beneath them.
All three turned.
For several seconds there was nothing else.
Then the cloud opened.
Below lay a dark green ridge falling sharply toward the sea. White vapour spilled through one saddle and dissolved almost immediately on the far side. Beyond it, rising impossibly high above the lower cloud deck, stood the pale summit they had seen in the film.
Ivo moved closer to the glass. “Oh.”
Lara forgot whatever she had been about to say.
The ship banked.
The north side appeared first: wet, folded, intensely green, with settlements tucked into the terrain so carefully that Lara could not immediately distinguish old stone from new construction. Then came the plateau.
A grid.
Terracotta roofs.
Interior courtyards.
A geometry six hundred years older than anything that now moved through it.
No towers.
No landing complex.
No visible transport network.
“Where's the arcology?” Ivo asked.
Sen gestured through the window. “You're looking at it.”
He frowned. “All of the island?”
“I think that's the point.”
*******
They ate that evening in a courtyard whose age none of them could establish.
Ivo said sixteenth century.
Lara said nineteenth-century reconstruction of something older.
Sen asked the table.
The table declined to arbitrate.
“That,” Ivo said, “is good design.”
Warm light fell from a wooden gallery above them. Somewhere beyond the roofline, rain tapped briefly against tiles although the sky above the courtyard remained clear.
Their food arrived without visible ceremony: small potatoes wrinkled with salt, vegetable stew, grilled cheese, bread still warm in the middle, three sauces whose ingredients Lara correctly identified until the third one and then refused assistance on principle.
“You saw what happened with the bottle,” Sen said.
Lara felt accused. “It's day one,” she said. “I'm just experimenting.”
“Voluntary inconvenience.” Ivo stopped eating.
“That's my answer,” he added.
“To what?”
“What I want from this.”
Lara sighed. “We aren't doing intentions.”
“We absolutely are.”
“No. The orientation film has infected you.”
He ignored her. “I've just spent two years living somewhere designed to remove surprises. Beautifully. Efficiently. I love it. And if I stay there another year, I may have to start vandalising things just to see what happens.”
“You did vandalise something.”
“It was moss.”
“You moved the moss.”
“It adapted.”
Sen looked at Lara. “Your turn.”
Lara tore off a piece of bread. “I don't want anything.”
They waited.
She looked up. “That's a valid answer.”
“No,” Ivo said. “That's the preface to your answer.”
Lara considered denying this and decided it would waste time. “I want to find out which parts of my life are actually mine.”
Neither of them mocked her.
She immediately regretted the phrasing. “That sounded much more dramatic than I intended.”
“What does it mean?” Sen asked.
“I don't know yet.”
“Good,” said Ivo.
“Don't be pleased about that.”
Sen turned a potato over with her fork.
“And you?” Lara asked.
Sen looked mildly surprised. “I told you.”
“No, you emotionally blackmailed us on the ship.”
“I came to see you two.”
“For four months?”
“Yes.”
“That can't be the whole reason.”
“Why not?”
Ivo and Lara exchanged a glance.
Sen watched them exchange it.
“Interesting,” she said.
“What?”
“You both think I need a project.”
“No,” Lara said.
“Yes,” said Ivo simultaneously.
Sen smiled.
A bell sounded somewhere beyond the courtyard.
Not an alert. Not a reminder. An actual bell.
Ivo looked upward as though expecting an explanation to appear in the air.
None did.
“We should make a rule,” he said.
“No rules,” said Lara.
“One rule.”
“That's how it starts.”
“Dinner once a week.”
Sen laughed. “We only live eleven minutes apart.”
“Nine,” said Lara. “They updated the transit loop.”
“At least once a week then. Whatever else happens.”
Lara lifted her glass. “No excuses?”
“No excuses.”
Sen hesitated just long enough for both of them to notice.
Then she touched her glass to theirs. “No excuses.”
Above them, rain began to fall properly.
Nobody suggested moving.
*******
The questions arrived the following morning.
Not as a form.
Lara had been halfway through making coffee when three lines appeared on the kitchen wall.
She waited for the fourth line.
It didn’t appear. Instead, the first line transformed into a question:
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BECOME EASIER?
“No.”
A space emerged below the question.
“You're not getting an essay.”
Still nothing.
Lara took her coffee to the window.
The apartment overlooked a narrow street that appeared much older than the building containing her. At ground level, someone was opening wooden shutters. Three floors above, a section of wall had become translucent and was admitting morning light into a room that had not contained a window the night before.
She drank.
“Saying ‘no’ more often.”
The words appeared beneath the question.
Lara frowned. “I didn't say you could transcribe that!”
The words disappeared.
“That wasn't a ‘no’…”
They reappeared.
She laughed despite herself.
The second question slid into view.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BECOME HARDER?
That one took longer.
Outside, a small delivery machine stopped to allow two children and an elderly dog to cross the street, although none of them appeared to have noticed it.
“Being predicted.”
The third question arrived.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BECOME MORE SENSITIVE TO?
Lara looked down at the coffee in her hands. “Why I reach for things…”
The wall accepted this without comment.
Then:
THANK YOU.
“That had better not be enough information to organise my next four months.”
A pause.
IT ISN'T.
Lara stared at it.
“Good.”
Another pause.
WOULD YOU LIKE SOME SUGGESTIONS?
“No.”
THANK YOU.
She distrusted how satisfied this made her.
*******
Ivo answered all three questions in under a minute.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BECOME EASIER?
“Starting things with people I don't know.”
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BECOME HARDER?
“Knowing what happens next.”
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BECOME MORE SENSITIVE TO?
He considered this one for almost four seconds.
“When I'm bored.”
The system asked whether he meant the onset of boredom, the causes of boredom, or the possibilities concealed by boredom.
Ivo said, “Yes.”
At eleven-sixteen that morning he accepted an invitation from six strangers to construct an instrument nobody had designed, for a performance none of them had agreed to give, using materials that would be returned to other purposes at midnight on the final day.
At eleven twenty-three he sent a message to Lara and Sen.
Ivo: Found my people.
Lara: Condolences to them.
Sen: Dinner Thursday?
There was a pause.
Ivo: Can't. Apparently we're performing something.
Lara: Apparently?
Ivo: They haven't decided if it's music yet.
Sen: Friday?
Lara: I have something.
Ivo: You have been here eighteen hours.
Lara: Correct.
*******
Sen did not answer the questions.
She had walked out of her apartment after breakfast and kept walking.
The old streets gave way gradually rather than decisively. Courtyards became gardens. Gardens widened into cultivated terraces. The air cooled. For a while the route ran beside a channel of moving water, then entered forest.
She stopped because she heard something rustling in the leaves above her.
A prompt appeared at the edge of her vision.
IDENTIFY?
“No.”
The prompt disappeared.
She waited.
The sound came again.
Not one sound, she realised. Three.
A dry movement in the canopy.
A short descending whistle.
Something much smaller working methodically through leaf litter beside the path.
Sen remained there until she could hear all three separately.
Only then did she ask.
The system named two birds and declined to identify the third sound.
WHY?
“Why what?”
WHY DID YOU WAIT?
Sen looked back toward the branches. “Because I hadn't finished listening.”
The question vanished.
Ten minutes farther along the path, she reached a section of forest in which the new growth stopped abruptly.
Beyond it lay an old road.
Or what had once been one.
Half the asphalt had already been removed. Ferns occupied the drainage channels. Young trees had been planted through cracks in the remaining surface. Several humans and twice as many machines were dismantling the road in no obvious hurry.
A woman standing knee-deep in a trench waved at Sen. “You looking for the restoration group?”
“No.”
“Good. We're terrible at recruiting.”
Sen stayed until sunset.
She decided to answer the three questions that night.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BECOME EASIER?
“Returning.”
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BECOME HARDER?
“Leaving because something else sounds better.”
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BECOME MORE SENSITIVE TO?
“What changes slowly.”
This time the system asked nothing else.
*******
Lara discovered the low-assistance district by accident, which was exactly how the district claimed people ought to discover it.
She had refused routing assistance and taken the wrong underground line.
There were only two stops.
At the first, almost everybody left.
At the second, Lara emerged into a square containing no visible adaptive surfaces, no directional overlays and, as far as she could tell, no interfaces.
She looked around.
Nothing offered to explain itself.
A sign beside the station exit read:
YOU ARE STILL ALLOWED TO ASK PEOPLE.
Someone had written underneath:
…FOR NOW…
Lara smiled.
Inside a shop, she picked up a small object whose purpose she couldn't identify.
Normally that would have been enough. Its provenance, probable function, material history and the three most relevant reasons she might enjoy owning it would already have unfolded around it.
Nothing happened.
She turned it over.
Ceramic. Rough on one side. Hollow.
The shopkeeper watched her.
“What is it?”
“What do you think?”
“Oh, don't do that.”
The shopkeeper laughed.
Lara spent twelve minutes trying to work it out.
It was a bird feeder.
She didn't buy it.
She did, however, return the next day.
And the day after that.
*******
Ivo's instrument had become music.
This annoyed several members of the group.
By the third day it had also become architecture.
A flexible wall in one of the old industrial districts was made to resonate at frequencies just below easy perception. People passing through the building slowed without knowing why. Someone suggested adding light. Someone else argued that explaining the effect would ruin it.
Ivo argued both positions at different times.
On the fourth evening, he noticed he had gone six hours without checking whether he was bored.
This pleased him until he realised that noticing it had broken whatever state he had been in.
He sent a message instead.
Ivo: Dinner tomorrow?
Lara: Can't.
Ivo: Why?
Three dots appeared.
Stopped.
Appeared again.
Lara: I'm not sure yet.
Ivo: Excellent answer.
Sen: I can do tomorrow.
Ivo: I can't now.
Sen: You suggested it twelve seconds ago.
Ivo: Something's happening.
Lara: Of course it is.
Sen: We are very bad at unemployment.
*******
The restoration group removed thirty-seven metres of road during Sen's first week.
She knew because one of the machines told her.
The humans did not seem interested in measuring it.
They were interested in drainage.
And fungi.
And whether a particular patch of shade had become three minutes longer since a tree farther up the slope had put out new leaves.
Sen learned to distinguish five kinds of dampness.
She learned that one moss colonised exposed stone quickly but abandoned it when the canopy thickened.
She learned that the young trees planted nearest the old retaining wall survived better, probably because the wall continued releasing stored heat after sunset.
On the eighth day, she noticed that the descending whistle she had first heard on the path was arriving from farther away.
She asked why.
The system offered several possibilities.
Sen dismissed them.
The next morning she listened again.
And the next.
The bird had moved on.
That was all.
She found this unexpectedly satisfying.
*******
By the end of the second week, Lara had accumulated seventeen invitations despite having requested none.
The arcology did not recommend them.
That distinction was apparently important.
People did.
A woman she had met while deliberately getting lost invited her to a dinner at which nobody was allowed to discuss their occupation, former occupation, training, arcology of origin or current project.
A child invited her to watch a wall change colour.
A retired historian invited her to help reconstruct an obsolete argument about whether private cars had once represented freedom.
A man in the low-assistance district invited her to an evening called BAD RECOMMENDATIONS, where everyone brought something they believed nobody else present would enjoy.
Lara attended that one.
She was given ninety minutes of devotional music from a religion she did not understand, a nineteenth-century manual on drainage, a competitive memory game she initially despised, and a lecture on extinct telephone numbering systems.
She returned home at two in the morning.
The wall illuminated itself gently.
ENJOY YOUR EVENING?
“I don't know.”
WOULD YOU LIKE—
“No.”
The wall went dark.
A moment later Lara turned it back on.
“Actually, tell me why country codes used to be different lengths.”
*******
Ivo's temporary collaboration survived the midnight deadline of its final day.
Then another midnight.
The instrument was dismantled as promised, but the people kept meeting.
They built something else from its remains.
Then something from the mistakes in that.
A dancer joined them.
Then a mathematician who insisted she wasn't going to join them.
Someone brought three children who immediately improved the project by misunderstanding its purpose.
There was no director.
This meant they spent extraordinary amounts of time deciding things that a director could have decided in seconds.
Ivo loved this.
Then hated it.
Then became suspicious that the hatred might be part of what he loved.
At one meeting, after forty minutes of disagreement over whether a sound should happen before or after a door opened, he asked why they didn't simply let the system model both versions and select the one audiences preferred.
Everyone stared at him.
“What?”
A woman handed him a piece of chalk.
On the wall behind her someone had written:
EFFICIENCY IS AVAILABLE ON REQUEST.
Ivo laughed. “Popaganda.”
“Probably,” she said.
Nobody requested it.
They argued for another hour.
*******
Sen: Dinner this week.
Lara: Yes.
Ivo: Definitely.
Sen: Wednesday?
Lara: No.
Ivo: Thursday?
Sen: No.
Lara: Friday?
Ivo: Possibly.
Sen: Define possibly.
Ivo: Something may or may not exist by then.
Lara: That's not what possibly means.
Ivo: Here it is.
*******
The low-assistance district contained a room people informally called the gymnasium.
There was no exercise equipment.
Inside, twelve people were memorising a map.
Lara stood in the doorway. “Why?”
A teenager looked up. “Because we don't have to.”
That was the entire explanation.
She stayed.
The map represented a district on the opposite side of the island. They were given seven minutes with it, then asked to reproduce it from memory.
Lara did surprisingly well.
The next exercise removed street names.
The next removed streets.
They were shown relationships instead: bakery beside courtyard, fountain visible from library, steep lane after the blue door, smell of wet stone before the tunnel.
“That's not a map,” Lara said.
“It gets you there.”
The following day she crossed the district without navigation.
She took three wrong turns.
And discovered three serendipities.
*******
Sen stopped telling herself she was helping restore the forest.
The machines were better at almost everything.
They cut more accurately, lifted more safely, predicted water flow more reliably and could identify several kinds of root damage before humans could see them.
The humans nevertheless remained.
One morning Sen asked the woman from the trench why.
“Why what?”
“Why are we doing this?”
The woman looked genuinely puzzled. “Because we're doing this.”
Sen waited for more.
None came.
Later they spent nearly an hour moving stones from one side of a path to the other.
A machine could have completed the task in ninety seconds.
The stones needed to be placed irregularly enough to slow rain-water run-off without creating a pool.
Sen's first arrangement looked deliberate.
The woman's looked accidental.
The water preferred hers.
Sen dismantled her own and began again.
*******
At the beginning of the fourth week, the three finally found an evening when none had anything scheduled.
They celebrated by failing to meet.
At four-twenty-six, Lara wrote:
Lara: Are we still doing tonight?
Sen responded immediately.
Sen: Yes.
Ivo did not.
At five-eleven:
Ivo: Sorry. Just saw this.
Lara: So yes?
Three dots.
Ivo: I think so.
Sen: That is not reassuring.
At five-forty:
Ivo: I have to finish something.
Lara: You don't have to.
A minute passed.
Ivo: Correct.
Another minute.
Ivo: I want to finish something.
Lara stared at the message.
She began typing: Isn't that worse?
Deleted it. Typed: Fine. Next week?
Before sending, another message arrived.
Sen: I don't want to come tonight either.
Lara: Why?
Nothing.
Then:
Sen: I want to hear if the bird comes back.
Lara laughed aloud in her empty apartment.
She looked at the evening she had carefully refused to fill.
The wall remained dark.
Outside, rain moved through the street in a brief silver sheet.
Lara: Fine.
Ivo: We really must have dinner this week.
Lara: Next week is now “this week”?
Ivo: Time became optional in 2041.
Sen: Popaganda…
Lara put the device down.
For a moment she considered asking what there was to do nearby.
Instead she opened the window.
The rain had already stopped.
Somewhere below, someone rang a bell.
She sat listening until she could tell whether it was the same one she had heard on their first night.
*******
The second dinner finally happened on day fifty-eight.
It was not technically dinner.
Sen had proposed a picnic beside the restoration site. Ivo had proposed bringing something they could cook. Lara had proposed not defining it any further, on the grounds that every additional message reduced the probability of the event actually occurring.
They agreed to meet at six.
At six-twelve, Sen was sitting on a section of obsolete road with a basket beside her.
At six-seventeen, Lara appeared from the wrong direction.
“You came through the forest.”
“I know.”
“The path is over there.”
“I know.”
“Did you get lost?”
“Not exactly.”
Sen looked at her shoes. “You've got mud halfway up your legs.”
“I said not exactly…”
Lara lowered herself onto the asphalt. “Where's Ivo?”
Sen checked. “He says he's nearly here.”
“How nearly?”
“He sent a picture.”
The picture showed Ivo holding three skewers of vegetables beside a woman neither of them recognised. Behind him stood what appeared to be a dismantled greenhouse.
Lara stared at it. “That contains no geographical information.”
“He seems happy.”
“That was not the question.”
At six-thirty-four, a small transport unit appeared silently between the trees.
Ivo stepped out carrying a metal container, a folded piece of fabric and something long and wooden that neither woman could identify.
“You cheated,” Lara said.
“I adapted.”
“You took transport.”
“You took fifty-eight days to meet me. We're beyond purity.”
He looked down at the old roadway. “Is this it?”
Sen nodded.
“This is where you spend all your time?”
“Some of it.”
“You've been cancelling dinner for a road?”
“Former road.”
Ivo looked along it.
The transformation had progressed considerably since Sen's first visit. Most of the remaining surface had been broken into irregular islands. Ferns and grasses occupied the gaps. Water crossed beneath them through channels whose geometry was just untidy enough to look accidental.
A machine farther down the slope was lifting slabs of asphalt.
Beside it, two people were arguing about a tree.
Ivo smiled. “I approve.”
“You haven't seen anything yet.”
“I've seen people arguing beside a machine that could probably settle the argument. That's promising.”
They walked.
Sen showed them the retaining wall.
The drainage channels.
The place where water had rejected her first arrangement of stones.
Lara crouched beside a patch of moss. “This is what you've been doing instead of seeing us?”
“No.”
“What else?”
“Listening.”
“To?”
Sen pointed into the trees.
They waited.
Nothing happened.
Ivo looked at Lara.
Lara looked at Ivo.
Sen continued listening.
After perhaps twenty seconds, a short descending whistle came from somewhere upslope.
“There.”
Ivo looked up. “A bird…”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“I call him… or her… Lagoony.”
“That wasn't what I asked.”
“I know. I prefer my name.”
They waited again.
The bird did not repeat itself.
Sen continued walking.
Ivo fell into step beside Lara. “She crossed half the system to listen to a bird she refuses to identify for us.”
“She lives nine minutes away.”
“Luxury.”
They reached a clearing where the old road curved toward a view of the coast.
Someone had left a table there.
Or possibly grown one.
Its surface emerged directly from the remains of a concrete barrier and broadened into something smooth enough to eat from.
Ivo unpacked the food.
Lara inspected the contents. “Did you make this?”
“Some of it.”
“Which?”
“I've forgotten.”
“That sounds hygienic.”
“The vegetables are definitely vegetables.”
Sen unfolded the fabric and spread it over the table.
“You brought a tablecloth?”
“It isn't a tablecloth.”
“What is it?”
“It is for putting under food on dirty surfaces.”
Ivo looked at Lara. “Tablecloth.”
Sen ignored them.
For several minutes they concentrated on assembling dinner.
Nobody asked the table anything.
Eventually Ivo leaned back. “This is ridiculous.”
Lara nodded. “The aubergine?”
“Us.”
“Oh.”
“We came here specifically to live near each other.”
“We do live near each other.”
“We've seen each other twice.”
“Three times,” Sen said.
“When?”
“You passed me outside the eastern transit entrance.”
“You waved.”
“That counts.”
“It absolutely does not.”
Sen ate.
Lara said, “We could have met virtually.”
Both of them looked at her.
“What?”
Ivo pointed his fork at her. “You said we weren't going to do that here.”
“I said I didn't come all this way to continue seeing both of you as projections.”
“Exactly.”
“I am explaining why we haven't.”
“That does not explain it.”
Sen smiled. “Our last three years consisted mostly of saying we should meet physically.”
“And now,” Ivo said, “we are physically capable of meeting and digitally incapable of scheduling it.”
“Progress.”
“Maybe that's what the Coordination Era was…”
“Popaganda,” Sen said.
They laughed.
For a while they ate without talking.
Cloud had begun creeping through the trees behind them. It moved slowly enough that Lara only noticed when the nearest trunks started disappearing.
“So,” Ivo said eventually.
“No,” said Lara.
“I haven't asked anything.”
“You're about to.”
“Are we different?”
Lara groaned.
Sen said, “Different from what?”
“Day one.”
“That was fifty-eight days ago.”
“Exactly.”
“That's not very long.”
“It used to be most of a school term.”
“That's an alarming unit.”
Ivo ignored her. “Come on. We had the questions. We've all been doing our experiments. What have we learned?”
Lara picked up her glass. “Who says we've been doing experiments?”
“You told your wall you wanted to find out why you reach for things.”
“How do you know that?”
“You told us.”
“I did not.”
“You absolutely did.”
Sen shook her head and looked away.
“Alright. She told me.”
Lara pointed at her. “Traitor.”
“You were pleased with the answer.”
“I was investigating an idea.”
Ivo spread his hands. “What did you discover?”
Lara sighed. “Fine… I think I was wrong about the assistance.”
“How?”
“I thought I wanted less of it.”
She looked toward the trees. “I don't.”
Ivo smiled. “That lasted well…”
“No, listen. I like having it. I like knowing I can ask almost anything and get somewhere useful immediately. I just don't want the answer arriving before I've had a chance to form the question.”
Sen looked at her.
Lara continued. “The low-assistance district isn't good because things are difficult. Most of the difficulty is artificial. Sometimes ridiculous.”
“You memorise maps for entertainment.”
“I know.”
“You got lost coming here.”
“I found three—”
“Serendipities?”
Lara stared at him. “Have I already said that too many times?”
“Yes.”
She considered. “Fine. Two serendipities and one nettle.”
Ivo laughed.
“The point is that when nothing anticipates me, I notice the moment when I actually want something.”
“What thing?”
“Information. Help. A direction. Whatever.”
Sen nodded slowly. “You notice the reaching.”
Lara glanced at her. “Yes.”
She disliked how accurately Sen had compressed it. “But I'm not turning into one of those people who refuses systems on principle.”
“Not yet,” said Ivo.
“I spent two hours yesterday reading about obsolete telephone numbering because I asked the system.”
“That might be the strongest argument against assistance I've heard.”
“It was fascinating.”
“Was it?”
“No. That's why I kept going.” She rolled her eyes.
Sen laughed. “That makes no sense.”
“It does to me.”
Ivo lifted his glass. “So, you've learned that freedom means voluntarily wasting time.”
“That sounds like popular propaganda!”
“I'm using that.”
“You're not.”
“I already have.”
Sen turned to Ivo. “And you?”
Ivo's expression changed immediately.
He had been waiting. “I was right.”
Lara groaned.
“Of course you were…”
“I wanted unpredictability.”
“You wanted to be entertained.”
“No. That's what I thought I wanted.”
He leaned forward. “Surprise isn't enough.”
Sen stopped eating. “Go on.”
“Pelagos can surprise me perfectly. Better than people can. It knows what I've seen, what I haven't seen, how much novelty I tolerate, when I'm beginning to disengage. It can give me exactly the right amount of unexpectedness.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It isn't. That's the problem.”
Lara looked at him.
Ivo tapped the table. “With the group, half the things that happen are pointless.”
“Only half?”
“Yesterday we spent ninety minutes trying to make a door sound disappointed.”
Sen blinked. “Why?”
“We don't know.”
“Did you manage?”
“It did sound disappointed…”
“And so do you. Was that the thing you had to finish last week?”
“No, that was worse.”
Lara smiled. “So you've discovered inefficiency.”
“I've discovered other people.”
Both women stared at him.
“I'm serious.”
“You knew other people existed before this,” Lara said.
“Obviously. But these are people I’m not optimising away from.”
He searched briefly for the thought. “If I'm collaborating with a system and it misunderstands me, I correct it. If it keeps misunderstanding, I replace the interface.”
Sen nodded.
“If Lara misunderstands me, I can't just recalibrate her.” He winked.
“You can try,” Lara said.
“I have.”
“Unsuccessfully.”
“Exactly.” He smiled. “That's the interesting bit.”
Lara considered this. “You wanted it to become harder to know what happens next.”
“Yes.”
“And now you've joined the same group every day for nearly two months.”
Ivo opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Sen looked between them. “Oh.”
“What?” Ivo blurted.
“You've made unpredictability into a routine.”
“I have not.”
“You absolutely have.”
“They're unpredictable.”
“The people are. Your returning isn't.”
Ivo stared at his food.
Lara raised her glass. “To progress.”
“Shut up.”
Sen was smiling.
Ivo looked at her. “Fine. Your turn.”
“No.”
“That's Lara's thing.”
“I don't have a conclusion.”
“That is suspiciously convenient.”
“I said I wanted returning to become easier, and I've been returning.”
“To a road.”
“Former road.”
“To the same former road.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And I like it.”
Ivo waited.
Sen waited too.
Eventually he said, “That's all?”
“So far.”
“What about sensitivity to slow change?”
“I notice more.”
“What?”
Sen looked around them. “The road.”
“We can all see the road.”
“No. I mean I notice when something is different that I wouldn't have noticed before.”
She pointed toward the slope. “That water used to cross farther down.”
Lara followed her finger. “And?”
“And now it doesn't.”
“Why?”
“I don't know yet.”
Ivo sighed. “You are deeply frustrating.”
“I know.”
“What about the bird?”
“What about it?”
“You've spent weeks listening to it.”
“Not just it.”
“What have you learned?”
Sen thought. “That the forest reveals its layers more fully when I stop asking it to be interesting.”
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Sen looked uncomfortable. “That sounded terrible.”
“No,” said Lara.
“It sounded like the induction film.”
“Much worse,” said Ivo. “You sounded sincere.”
Sen threw a piece of bread at him.
He caught it.
Cloud reached the clearing.
The coast disappeared first.
Then the lower slopes.
Within a minute the world beyond the table had narrowed to perhaps thirty metres of wet leaves and misty air.
The change in temperature was immediate.
Ivo rubbed his arms. “Did either of you bring anything warm?”
Sen and Lara both looked at him.
“What?”
“You live in Pelagos,” Lara said.
“Yes.”
“On water.”
“Mostly.”
“And you didn't anticipate weather?”
“I specifically asked for knowing what happens next to become harder.”
Lara laughed. “There. Self-actualised. Congratulations.”
Sen took another folded layer from her bag and handed it to him.
He wrapped it around his shoulders. “What is this?”
“Not a tablecloth.”
They remained where they were.
Rain began lightly.
For a while the conversation moved elsewhere.
People from home.
An arcology Ivo had once considered moving to and now couldn't imagine tolerating.
Someone Sen had met at the restoration site who had spent seven years rotating through residencies without ever renewing one.
A woman Lara had encountered in the low-assistance district who used predictive systems for every major decision and refused them for minor ones.
They disagreed about whether that made sense.
Then about whether the distinction between major and minor choices made sense.
Then about whether either of them would allow an algorithm to choose a partner.
Then whether allowing friends to do essentially the same thing was meaningfully different.
At some point Ivo looked around and said: “We've been here three hours.”
Lara sounded surprised. “Have we?”
“Approximately.”
Sen smiled. “You have somewhere to be?”
“No.”
Lara looked at Ivo. “Neither do I.”
They all laughed harder than the observation deserved.
Perhaps because it had taken them fifty-eight days to discover an evening with nowhere else they preferred to be.
The rain strengthened.
A transport offer appeared discreetly at the edge of Lara's vision.
She dismissed it.
Sen had apparently done the same.
Ivo was looking upward, letting the water hit his face. “Dinner next week?” he said.
“No rules,” Lara replied.
“One rule.”
“We tried that.”
“Fine. No rule.”
Sen gathered the empty containers.
Ivo looked suddenly serious. “We should actually see each other again.”
“We are seeing each other.”
“You know what I mean.”
Sen tied the folded cloth around the basket. “Then we'll choose it again.”
Lara watched her. “That sounds suspiciously healthy.”
“Don't worry. I can ruin it if you want.”
They began walking back through the rain.
Behind them, water reached the stones Sen had arranged weeks earlier.
It hesitated.
Divided.
And took two different paths.
*******
By day seventy-three, Lara had stopped going to the low-assistance district.
This concerned her for approximately half a morning.
Then she noticed that she had stopped going because she no longer needed to.
She still declined automatic explanations sometimes. At other times she asked before the question had fully formed. Occasionally she let the system interrupt her.
The distinction had become less ideological.
One afternoon she walked through a neighbourhood on the northern slope with every interpretive layer disabled.
She noticed a row of houses facing what seemed to be the wrong direction.
Three kinds of lichen on the same wall.
A channel carved into stone above head height.
A tree whose roots disappeared beneath a building and emerged in a courtyard twenty metres away.
She stopped at the end of the street.
“Alright.”
YES?
“Show me what I missed.”
The world became briefly denser.
The houses had been aligned against a prevailing wind that no longer reached the street.
The lichens marked three periods of changing humidity.
The channel had carried water before pipes crossed the island.
The tree was older than the building.
Lara turned the layers off again and walked back the way she had come.
That same street was no longer the same street.
She began doing this deliberately.
A first look.
A second look.
Sometimes a third.
She stopped referring to it as “getting lost”; it now felt more natural to call it “micro-discovery”.
*******
Ivo's group completed something.
Nobody could agree what.
It involved the disappointed door, two resonant walls, a section of floor that translated footsteps into harmony and a passage that visitors repeatedly mistook for an exit.
For twelve evenings there were queues.
On the thirteenth, there weren't. Nobody passed through.
The group met the following morning.
“What next?” someone asked.
Nobody answered.
Ivo waited.
Normally, someone misunderstood the silence and something began.
This time it remained silence.
Eventually the mathematician who had never joined them before stood up.
“Nothing for a week?”
Several people nodded.
Ivo laughed.
Nobody else did.
“Oh.”
They left.
He remained in the room.
The disappointed door opened.
It sounded disappointed.
Ivo sat down.
For the first time since arriving, nobody was expecting him anywhere and nothing nearby appeared sufficiently interesting to justify leaving.
He considered asking what was happening elsewhere.
He didn't.
Twenty minutes later he reconsidered.
Then didn't again.
After an hour, he noticed that the room sounded different without people inside it.
He returned the following morning.
*******
Sen left the forest on day eighty-one.
Lagoony had already done so.
The descending whistle had disappeared four mornings earlier. Sen listened each day before finally asking the system whether the bird had moved.
PROBABLY.
“Where?”
A map appeared.
The likely range extended upward across the island.
Sen stared at it. “That's enormous.”
YES.
She dismissed the map.
Then restored it.
Three days later she was above the cloud layer.
Almost nothing at the summit resembled the restoration site.
There was no wet leaf litter. No moss. No hidden water.
Rock, scrub and immense quantities of sky.
The air was thin enough to make walking slightly ridiculous.
At sunset the shadow of the volcano stretched across the atmosphere.
Sen joined a survey group measuring ecological movement through the high-altitude zone. Most of the work was done by autonomous instruments. The humans walked between them anyway.
At night, one of the old observatory structures opened overhead.
Sen looked upward.
A system offered to identify what she was seeing.
“Yes.”
Names appeared.
Distances.
Spectra.
A star whose light had begun travelling toward them before the old city below had been planned.
Sen left the information visible.
Someone beside her said, “I thought you were one of the people who didn't like labels.”
Sen looked over. “Who told you that?”
“The bird people.”
“I'm not a bird person.”
“They called you the bird woman.”
Sen laughed.
The next morning she did not return to the forest.
*******
On day eighty-seven, Lara and Sen received a message.
Ivo: We should see each other.
Lara: I agree.
Sen: Me too.
No one proposed a time.
Eight hours later:
Lara: This went well…
Ivo: Tomorrow?
Sen: I’ll be on the summit until late.
Lara: Morning?
Ivo: I'm doing nothing.
Lara: So, morning it is!
Ivo: I mean nothing. Deliberately.
There was a long pause.
Sen: Virtual?
Another pause.
Ivo: Have we fallen this far?
Lara: Apparently.
*******
They met the following evening in a courtyard that did not exist.
Or rather, the courtyard existed. They had eaten there on their first night.
This version did not.
The system had reconstructed it from their memories rather than from records, which meant Lara's wooden balcony was darker than Sen remembered, Ivo's table was too large, and all three disagreed about where the bell tower ought to have been.
Lara appeared first.
Then Sen, still wearing equipment from the summit.
Ivo materialised last, sitting on a chair that belonged to another room.
For several seconds they stared at one another.
Ivo raised both hands. “We did it.”
Sen applauded.
Lara joined her. “Eighty-eight days,” she said. “Nine minutes apart.”
“Eleven from me.”
“Sorry.”
Ivo looked around the simulated courtyard. “And to think our ancestors believed telepresence would reduce travel…”
“We travelled here so we wouldn't have to do this,” Sen said.
“Exactly. And now we can do it locally.”
“Progress,” Lara sighed.
“Historic progress.”
A bottle appeared in front of Ivo.
He picked it up.
It opened immediately.
His expression changed.
“What’s wrong?”
“That used to be harder.” He looked pleasantly surprised.
Lara laughed.
Sen reached for a glass and missed it slightly. “I hate their depth correction, though.”
“You can turn it off.”
“I know.”
She didn't.
For a moment nobody spoke.
The silence was almost convincing.
Then Lara heard wind moving across Sen's microphone field.
Somewhere behind Ivo, though invisible in the reconstruction, a door gave a faint mournful groan.
Lara smiled. “You're back there, I hear…”
“Where?”
“The room.”
Ivo looked sideways. “Yeah…”
“I thought the project finished.”
“It did.”
“So why are you there?”
He shrugged. “I like the room.”
Sen grinned. “Routine?”
“Don't.”
Lara turned to Sen. “And you're not at the road?”
“No.”
“Returning?”
Sen looked toward something outside the shared space. “Eventually.”
“That sounded ominous.”
“It wasn't.”
“Have you found Lagoony?”
“No.”
“Are you still looking?”
Sen considered. “I think I forgot.”
Ivo laughed. “Four weeks of bird obsession and you forgot the bird?”
“I didn't forget the bird. I forgot that finding it was supposed to be the point.”
Lara leaned back. “That sounded like popaganda.”
“Everything sounds like popaganda if you pause before saying it.”
Ivo paused. Then: “Freedom.”
“Stop.”
They managed twenty-three minutes.
Then Sen wanted to see the night instruments being uncovered.
Ivo wanted to savour being alone in the empty room.
Lara had no particular reason to leave but had become curious about why someone was ringing a handbell in the street below her apartment every evening at almost, but not exactly, the same time.
They agreed that the virtual meeting had been a great success.
*******
Lara found the bell-ringer on day ninety-one.
He was eleven years old.
The bell was older than he was by several centuries.
“Why do you ring it?”
He looked confused by the question. “Because it's nine.”
Lara checked. It was 9:07.
“It isn't.”
“It is here.”
“What does that mean?”
He pointed upward.
At first Lara saw only buildings.
Then the fading light caught one particular roof.
A narrow strip of sun disappeared behind it.
The boy rang the bell. “Now it's nine.”
“That is not how time works.”
He shrugged.
Lara started to ask the system when the custom had begun.
Stopped.
Asked the boy instead.
He didn't know.
The following evening she returned.
*******
Ivo received seven invitations during his week of doing nothing with the group.
He declined six.
The seventh was from a woman he had met on his second day.
We need someone who doesn't know anything about ceramics.
Ivo replied:
Perfect. I know almost nothing.
Then deleted it.
He looked around the empty room. The resonant wall hummed faintly as the temperature changed.
He sent:
Not this week.
The refusal surprised him enough that he nearly reversed it.
He didn't.
The next morning the group began drifting back.
Nobody announced that the week was over.
Someone brought breakfast.
Someone else opened the disappointed door and said: “Still funny.”
It was.
They did not begin a new project.
For three days they simply occupied the room.
Ivo began to suspect that he had mistaken collaboration for production.
He kept this thought to himself because it sounded intolerably like the orientation film.
*******
When Sen finally returned to the restoration site, twenty-two metres more road had been removed.
She disliked this.
Not the restoration.
The fact that it had continued without her.
The woman from the trench was moving stones. “You left?”
“Yes.”
“And you came back?”
“Yes.”
“Good trip?”
“Yes.”
Sen waited.
The woman moved another stone.
“That all?”
“What?”
“You're not going to ask what I learned?”
“Did you learn something?”
“I don't know.”
“Then why would I ask?”
Sen laughed.
She picked up a stone.
It was heavier than she remembered.
The water had altered course again.
The moss had advanced.
A young tree beside the retaining wall had died.
Lagoony hadn’t returned.
Sen stayed until dark.
*******
By day one hundred and twenty, the three had become better at communicating.
They no longer repeatedly asked when they could meet.
Instead they sent one another things.
A recording from Ivo containing forty seconds of people arguing followed by three seconds of extraordinary music.
A photograph from Sen of two stones with no explanation.
A message from Lara:
I have discovered that the bell is seven minutes late because the sixteenth century was badly aligned with the twenty-second.
Ivo replied:
Finally something useful.
Sen sent:
Dinner?
Lara looked at the message.
She had nowhere she needed to be.
Nothing she had promised to do.
No question she was halfway through answering.
She opened her calendar anyway.
Then closed it.
Lara: Yes.
Ivo took seventeen minutes to respond.
Ivo: Yes.
Sen: Tomorrow then. Same place as day one.
This time nobody proposed an alternative.
*******
They returned to the courtyard from their first night without discussing whether this was symbolic.
Sen arrived first.
Ivo arrived four minutes later.
Lara was already there.
“How?”
“I was nearby.”
“You're never nearby.”
“I am currently extremely nearby.”
Sen put her bag on the chair beside her. “We could have been doing this for four months…”
“No,” said Ivo. “We've only just developed the technology.”
Lara looked at him. “How was your journey?”
“Eleven minutes. Exhausting.”
Sen began unpacking something.
Ivo pointed. “Is that the tablecloth?”
“It has never been a tablecloth.”
“I'm going to miss that.”
“You don't have to.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m going to give you one for your birthday.”
Ivo feigned offence.
The courtyard had changed very little.
Lara thought it had. The wooden balcony above them looked more vivid than she remembered it, although the virtual reconstruction had contaminated her confidence. There were more plants around the upper railings. One wall had acquired a patch of damp near its base. The light seemed warmer.
She resisted checking whether any of this was true.
Their food arrived.
Ivo picked up a bottle.
It resisted him.
He looked at it for perhaps half a second. “Open.”
It opened.
Lara stared at him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Say it.”
“Growth.”
“Efficiency is available on request.”
Sen raised her glass.
They drank.
For several minutes nobody attempted to summarise anything.
This lasted longer than Lara had expected.
Then Ivo put down his fork. “So…”
“No,” Lara said.
“I haven't said anything.”
“You're going to ask what we've learned.”
“I wasn't.”
Sen looked at him.
“I was going to ask whether we've self-actualised.”
Lara closed her eyes. “That is worse.”
“Speak for yourself. I feel extremely actual,” Sen retorted.
“You always did.”
“Thank you.”
“That wasn't praise.”
Sen took another potato.
Ivo waited.
Nobody helped him.
Eventually he said, “Fine. Lara.”
“No.”
“Did you ever work out which parts of your life are actually yours?”
Lara looked at him.
She had forgotten saying that.
Not forgotten exactly. Misplaced it among too many subsequent versions of herself. “No…”
Ivo nodded solemnly. “Four months well spent.”
“I think the question got worse.”
“Worse?”
“More complicated.”
“That's not the same thing.”
“It is if you're Lara,” Sen said.
Lara ignored her.
“I thought I was trying to separate things. My choices from recommendations. Curiosity from prompting. Things I genuinely wanted from things that were made easy to want.”
“And?”
“And now I don't think they separate very cleanly.”
Ivo looked delighted. “Excellent. You learned nothing.”
“I learned that I can sometimes notice the reaching.”
Sen smiled.
Lara caught it. “Don't.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You made a face.”
Ivo looked between them. “Was it her philosophical-principles face?”
“No.”
“I don't have one.”
“You absolutely do,” they said together.
Lara sighed. “What I mean is, sometimes I want the answer immediately. Sometimes I want to walk around the question first. Sometimes I want someone else to interrupt me with a better question.”
“So… assistance is good?”
“Yes.”
“And bad?”
“Yes.”
“And your solution is?”
“I don't need one.”
Ivo leaned back. “That is upsetting.”
“I know.”
Sen looked at Lara. “Did saying ‘no’ become easier?”
“Yes.”
“And ‘being predicted’ harder?”
Lara considered. “No.”
Ivo laughed. “No?”
“I think I've become easier to predict.”
“That went well.”
“I also care much less about that.”
Sen nodded.
Lara pointed at her. “Your turn.”
Sen looked unsurprised.
“Did ‘returning’ become easier?” Lara asked.
“Yes.”
“And ‘leaving because something else sounded better’ become harder?”
“No.”
Ivo frowned. “That's the opposite of what you wanted.”
“I know.”
“So you failed.”
“Yes.”
“You sound pleased.”
“I am.”
Sen reached for some bread.
Lara waited.
Sen eventually continued. “Leaving got easier too.”
“That makes no sense,” Ivo said.
“It does.”
“No, you're doing that thing where you say something contradictory and then make us wait.”
Sen smiled.
They waited.
She ate.
“Sen.”
“Fine. I thought returning meant staying loyal to something forever.”
“The road,” said Ivo.
“Former road.”
“Obviously.”
“But I left. Then I came back and things had changed without me.”
“You were furious about that.”
“I wasn't furious.”
“You sent us six photographs of a drainage channel…”
“It had moved.”
“Devastating.”
Sen ignored him. “I think I liked imagining that noticing something gave me some sort of relationship with it.”
Lara looked at her. “It does.”
“Maybe. But not ownership.”
The bell rang somewhere beyond the courtyard.
Ivo looked up. “Nine?”
“Exactly,” said Lara.
He checked. “Nine oh seven.”
“Exactly.”
Sen smiled.
Ivo looked between them. “I've missed something.”
“Several things,” Lara said.
“Explain.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you're leaving tomorrow.”
“That is vindictive.”
“It gives you a reason to come back.”
Sen laughed.
The bell faded.
Ivo looked toward the roofline for a moment. “Fine.”
Then Sen asked, “Did boredom get easier?”
Ivo immediately looked suspicious. “That wasn't one of my questions.”
“You wanted to become more sensitive to it.”
“Oh.”
“Did you?”
“Unfortunately.”
“And?”
“And sometimes I'm bored.”
Neither woman spoke.
Ivo looked offended. “That's it.”
Lara raised her eyebrows.
“You're waiting for the insight.”
“I am not.”
“You made a face.”
“I don't have an insight face.”
“You absolutely do.”
He sighed. “I spent the first month noticing boredom because I wanted to escape it. Then I got so busy being fascinated that I stopped noticing it. Then everyone left the room and I thought something had gone wrong.”
“Had it?”
“No.”
“And now?”
“Sometimes I sit there.”
“In the disappointed room?”
“That's not its name.”
“It is to us.”
“Yes. In the disappointed room.”
“What do you do?”
“Not much.”
Sen nodded approvingly.
“Don't.”
“What?”
“You're about to make doing nothing sound profound.”
“I wasn't.”
“You made a face.”
Sen threw bread at him.
He caught it. “Still got it!”
They ate.
Someone on the gallery above them began playing an instrument Lara did not recognise.
The melody descended through four notes, paused, and began again differently.
Nobody asked what it was.
After a while Ivo said, “So what are we doing next time?”
“Eating?” Sen suggested.
“No. Next place.”
Lara looked at him. “There is a next place?”
“Obviously.”
“You've already decided?”
“I've decided there should be one.”
“That's almost the same problem.”
Ivo ignored her. “We could do The Long Night.”
Sen looked interested. “The seasonal one?”
“Sixteen weeks of winter. Minimal artificial daylight.”
“No,” said Lara.
“You didn't even consider it.”
“I considered darkness.”
“You like darkness.”
“I like having the option of turning on a light.”
Sen said, “What about Libration?”
Ivo brightened. “Yes.”
Lara looked between them. “What happens there?”
“Gravity.”
“What about it?”
“It changes.”
“No.”
“You've said ‘no’ to everything.”
“Correct.”
“Your first answer really did stick.”
Sen thought. “The Commons?”
Lara stared at her. “You want to spend four months with almost no private space?”
“I didn't say I wanted to.”
“You proposed it.”
“I wanted to see your face.”
“It has worked.”
Ivo said, “Pelagos.”
Both women looked at him.
“What?”
“You've spent years complaining about it,” Lara said.
“I've spent years describing it.”
“You said it anticipates you so efficiently that you want to vandalise things.”
“I moved moss once.”
Sen looked at Lara. “We should go.”
“Why?”
“I want to see the moss.”
“It won't be the same moss.”
“Then I want to see its descendants.”
Ivo smiled.
Lara said, “Absolutely not.”
They continued for half an hour.
A settlement inside a permanently moving ocean platform.
A mountain community organised around preserving obsolete crafts.
An orbital arcology where residents could choose between four effective gravitational environments before breakfast.
A city with almost no private interiors.
A forest settlement whose inhabitants had voted to remove predictive interfaces for a decade and were already three years into an argument about whether the vote itself should count as prediction.
The Quiet came up twice.
So did somewhere all three referred to only as The Party, although none of them knew its official name and all three had heard incompatible explanations for what really happened there.
No decision survived for more than three minutes.
Eventually Sen said, “Maybe we shouldn't choose tonight.”
Ivo looked horrified. “We are physically together.”
“Exactly.”
“This is our chance.”
“Our chance to do what?”
“Coordinate.”
Lara laughed.
Ivo pointed at her. “Don't.”
“I'm not saying it.”
“You're thinking it.”
“Provisionally.”
Sen gathered the plates toward the centre.
Ivo said, “Next time we need a different system.”
“One shared project?” Lara asked.
“Yes.”
“That sounds like a rule.”
“It is not a rule.”
“What is it?”
“An intention.”
“That's how rules start.”
Sen said, “What if we agree to meet every day?”
They both looked at her.
She smiled. “I wanted to see your faces.”
The table cleared itself.
Lara leaned back. “So… no plan…?”
“No plan,” said Sen.
Ivo looked uncomfortable. “Very small plan?”
“No.”
“One constraint?”
“No.”
“A continent?”
“No.”
“A planet?”
Lara considered. “Maybe.”
“Excellent.”
“That wasn't agreement.”
“It was movement.”
Above them the four-note melody began again.
This time the final note went somewhere else.
Nobody commented on it.
When they finally stood to leave, Ivo looked around the courtyard. “Same place next time?”
Lara said, “That would require coming back.”
Sen folded the not-tablecloth. “We know how.”
*******
The following morning, Lara arrived at the transit hub twelve minutes earlier than necessary.
She had intended to arrive exactly on time.
The route had been quicker than predicted because she had ignored the predicted route.
She considered this mildly irritating.
The terminal occupied what had once been several disconnected buildings and, before that, several different centuries. Stone walls met transparent spans of something Lara could not identify. Plants descended through open spaces between platforms. There were almost no signs.
She had become sufficiently accustomed to this that their absence no longer felt futuristic.
Her departure details appeared unobtrusively at the edge of her vision.
She dismissed them.
She knew where she was going.
“Of course.”
Lara turned.
Ivo was standing behind her.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you here?” Lara hadn’t expected to see him again so soon.
“I’m leaving.”
“I know you're leaving.”
“Then this should be less surprising.”
“What time?”
He showed her.
Lara stared.
Their departures shared the same transfer window.
“You've got to be kidding.”
“That was my reaction.”
“Four months.”
“One hundred and something days.”
“Nine minutes apart.”
“Eleven.”
“And we accidentally arrive at the same hub at exactly the same time.”
“The Coordination Era.”
Lara looked at him. “Provisionally.”
A voice behind them said, “I knew you'd both be here.”
Sen arrived carrying the same bag she had used during her first week.
Ivo pointed at her. “You did not…”
“No.”
“What time is yours?”
She showed them.
Lara laughed.
All three routes overlapped for seven minutes.
Ivo looked upward as if seeking someone responsible. “We could have let the system do this the entire time.”
“Don't tell past-us,” joked Sen.
“They wouldn't listen.”
“Past-Lara definitely wouldn't.”
“Past-Lara had principles.”
“Current-Lara has more.”
“I have fewer.”
“That sounds suspiciously like progress.”
“Stop.”
They began walking.
Around them, people were arriving and leaving with very little ceremony.
A family argued about luggage that no longer required carrying.
Two teenagers were saying goodbye while apparently continuing an earlier disagreement about marine biology.
Someone ran past them, then stopped abruptly to examine a flower growing from a crack beside the platform.
Nobody appeared impressed by the technology.
At a junction, their routes separated.
A display briefly surfaced in the air.
PELAGOS
Ivo pointed. “Home.”
Another route curved upward toward an orbital transfer.
Sen looked at it. “Libration.”
“You aren't going there,” Lara said.
“No.”
“Yet…”
Sen smiled.
Lara's own route vanished behind a destination label neither of the others recognised.
Ivo read it. “What is that?”
“I'll tell you when I know.”
“You booked a place you don't understand?”
“I booked transport.”
“To where?”
“Somewhere with very enthusiastic geology.”
Sen laughed. “That is not an answer.”
“I think that's the point.”
Ivo stopped. “Oh, that's annoying.”
“What?”
“You've been waiting four months to use that.”
“I hadn't.”
“That makes it worse.”
A boarding indicator appeared.
Ivo's.
He looked at them. “Well.”
“Well,” said Lara.
Sen hugged him.
It was brief and badly aligned because he was still holding something.
Lara hugged him next. “What is that?”
He looked at the object in his hand.
“The piece from the first instrument.”
“You kept it?”
“Apparently.”
“I thought everything was returned to other purposes at midnight.”
“So did I.” He winked.
His boarding indicator pulsed again.
“Send me the door if it ever becomes satisfied,” Sen said.
“It won't.”
“You don't know that.”
“That is strangely reassuring.”
He looked at Lara. “Send me the bell if it starts being on time.”
“I'll stop going if it does.”
“Good.”
He stepped backwards toward his route. “Pelagos.”
“No,” said Lara.
“Think about it.”
“No.”
“That's almost a yes now.”
“It really isn't.”
He disappeared around the curve.
Sen and Lara continued walking together for perhaps thirty metres.
Neither said anything.
Then Sen's route branched.
“That was quick,” Lara said.
“Efficient.”
“Suspicious.”
Sen looked toward her platform. “Send me something I wouldn't normally notice.”
Lara smiled. “You too!”
Sen began walking.
Then turned. “Lagoony came back yesterday.”
Lara stopped. “You didn't tell us.”
“I just did.”
“Was it definitely Lagoony?”
Sen smiled. “I didn't ask.”
Her route called her.
She left.
Lara remained alone for twelve seconds.
Then her own transport arrived.
As she walked toward it, another module slid silently into the opposite side of the terminal.
Its windows were opaque.
A soft orchestral chord sounded.
Lara stopped.
White letters appeared across the glass.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENOUGH
She laughed.
Inside, first-time passengers were finding their seats.
One of them was already talking over the narration.
Through the glass Lara could not hear everything.
Only fragments.
Long before this was an arcology…
Someone gestured toward the window.
Another passenger laughed.
The geological history accelerated.
Lara began walking again.
Behind her, the film passed through centuries.
…one of Europe's earliest experiments in planned colonial urbanism…
A voice from inside said something she couldn't catch.
Then louder: “Popaganda!”
Lara looked back.
The passengers were laughing.
The film continued.
…Humanity reclaimed its time.
More laughter.
She reached her transport.
Its door opened.
Behind her, the orchestral music thinned to one sustained note.
She knew what came next.
When fewer necessities compete for human attention, people do not become passive.
Lara stepped inside.
The arriving passengers were still talking over it.
They become more able to discover what they are willing to give their attention to.
Someone applauded ironically.
Someone else shushed them.
Lara sat beside the window.
Across the platform, the film went black.
Then the final line appeared.
WELCOME. FOR THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS, YOUR TIME IS YOUR OWN.
A woman inside the arriving module read it and smiled. “That's actually quite nice.”
The person beside her rolled their eyes.
Lara watched them for another moment.
Then her own window cleared.
The terminal began to move away.
Somewhere beyond it were the old grid, the wet forest, the disappointed door, a road slowly becoming something else, and a bell that would ring at nine.
Eventually.
Lara turned toward whatever was next.