Stupid Perfect World

Three

THE FIRST PROBLEM WAS finding the right furniture.

When I got home, I asked Dad if I could synthesize a bed for my room. He immediately put on his serious face and sat me down.

“Sixteen is too young to have a bed in your room, Kieran. Remember when we talked about this, how a little bioframe tweak can make those feelings less…persistent?”

I groaned. “This isn’t about that, Dad!”

“Who was that girl you were obsessed with last summer? Chrissy?”

“Christine,” I said. “And this has nothing to do with girls. It’s for a school project.”

He laughed too hard in a really embarrassing way, actually slapping his thigh. “Nice try, buddy.”

“No, really. It’s for Scarcity!” I started to explain my project, but as usual Dad’s brain switched off. There hadn’t been any Scarcity classes back in his day, and he never understood how I could get worked up over an ungraded course.

By the time my explanation sputtered out, his serious face was back. “So, Kieran. Is there anyone special you want to tell me about?”

I groaned again. This was useless. At least Mom wasn’t around, which would have been twice as embarrassing. “Just forget I brought it up.”

“Are you sure, son? You know I’m here if you need me.”

I rolled my eyes and headed to my room.

Around midnight I gave it my best shot.

A pile of parkas wasn’t a terrible bed. It was a lot more comfortable than the furniture I’d been making out of snow. I sank into the thermal fibers, closing my eyes and trying to feel for any changes inside me.

It had been about eight hours since Maria had switched off the metabolic nanos that kept my body humming twenty-four hours a day. For the next two weeks, my cells were going to divide their time the old-fashioned way: breaking down complex molecules while I was awake, and building up new ones while I slept. Not as efficient as doing both at once, but nothing I had to consciously control. Even Mikey the hamster could do it.

I darkened the room to make it like outside at night, then I lay there with my eyes closed, waiting for some kind of change.

According to headspace, there were five stages of sleep. Stage 1 was no big deal, like that feeling right after a brainsmoothing session, when everything’s fuzzy for a few minutes. Stage 2 was exactly how sleep looks in old movies: lying around unconscious, like after surgery or getting hit on the head. Basically your average waste of time, except you couldn’t be bored, which was a bonus.

I wasn’t looking forward to Stage 3, which featured these weird interruptions like sleepwalking, sleep-talking, night terrors, and something called “bedwetting.” (Don’t ask.) Luckily, that part usually passed quickly, and then it was on to Stages 4 and 5, but it wasn’t like I’d researched every detail yet. I was just hoping to get to Stage 1 tonight.

So I waited some more.

And waited…

I won’t say that nothing happened. I thought about lots of stuff: my lines for Hamlet, Dad’s lameness, Barefoot Tillman in a swimsuit, Mikey the hamster, the way Maria Borsotti might be cute if she wasn’t such a meeker. But it wasn’t exactly sleep. I had so many thoughts, it was the opposite of unconsciousness; I was suddenly conscious of every sound in my room, every worry in my head, and especially every itch and crick in my motionless body.

I wasn’t supposed to move, but my muscles kept demanding random adjustments. By the end of the first hour, I was tangled in the parkas and ended up throwing half of them across my room. (Is that where “tossing and turning” came from?) I hadn’t noticed any unconsciousness, but then I started wondering how you could even know you were unconscious, because you wouldn’t be conscious to know anything at all, which started my head spinning with thoughts and thoughts and more thoughts.

Finally, I sat up, not caring if I failed Scarcity, anything to escape the crushing, sweaty boredom of not sleeping.

And lo and behold, my three hours were almost up.

But it hadn’t seemed that long. Was that because I’d never been still that long before, so I had nothing to compare it to? Or had there been a little bit of missing time in all that tossing and turning—a tiny sliver of sleep?

If so, that was kind of cool—almost like some lame form of time travel. My head felt a little fuzzy, but I knew a quick shot of Antarctic wind would clear that up. I slipped on a tempsuit and headed for the teleporter, for the first time thinking that this project might not totally suck.

It wasn’t until later that day that I really started to feel weird.