Lil grabbed the couch as soon as we got in, mumbling something about wanting to work on some revised merch ideas she’d had. I glared at her as she subvocalized and air-typed in the corner, shut away from me. I hadn’t told her that I was offline yet—it just seemed like insignificant personal bitching relative to the crises she was coping with.
Besides, I’d been knocked offline before, though not in fifty years, and often as not the system righted itself after a good night’s sleep. I could visit the doctor in the morning if things were still screwy.
So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night, I had to go into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to get the time. It was 3 a.m., and when the hell had we expunged the house of all timepieces, anyway?
Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I tried to rouse her, so I covered her with a blanket and went back to bed, alone.
I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt of endorphin. Vivid dreams of death and destruction slipped away as I sat up. I preferred to let my subconscious do its own thing, so I’d long ago programmed my systems to keep me asleep during REM cycles except in emergencies. The dream left a foul taste in my mind as I staggered into the kitchen, where Lil was fixing coffee.
“Why didn’t you wake me up last night? I’m one big ache from sleeping on the couch,” Lil said as I stumbled in.
She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct her nervous system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will. I felt like punching the wall.
“You wouldn’t get up,” I said, and slopped coffee in the general direction of a mug, then scalded my tongue with it.
“And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shift for me—the merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to hit the Imagineering shop and try some prototyping.”