awn came in gray—drizzling its cold tears. Isaac was sprawled to his side with his mouth open. He groaned and stirred, squinting briefly at the morning and closing his eyes again, thinking about the argument from the night before. The soft touch of the Mind worked on his mind’s surface: reassuring, strengthening. He felt vague irritation at this obviously alien thought even as his body came to a pleasant alertness. He laid there trying to think of a reason to wake up and failed. The tugging came, gentle and insistent. He rolled and sat up.
He hugged his knees in half-light, pale skin luminous, limned by the protrusion of ribs and shoulder bones. There was no beginning for him, only death by movement, the grains of morning falling swiftly over one another, gradually compressed through a slender hole. And so he stretched and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He stood, pushing off of the bed with his hands. And he fed first one leg, then the other through his basepants. First one arm, then the other, through the holes of his baseshirt. He fed each button through each button hole, binding shirt to self. He walked to the restroom and closed the door, not bothering with a projection yet.
He descended the stairs to the kitchen, exaggerating the motions of falling and catching himself. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out the milk, setting it on the counter. He found a bowl in the cabinet above him and set it down. Walking over to the pantry, he pulled out the cereal. He opened it and poured it out slowly, the hard kernels plinking a few at a time into the glass bowl. The torrent of milk was beautifully white against the gray day, buoying up the little pieces of cereal. He pulled a spoon from a drawer and used it to push the kernels down under the surface of the milk, watching the softening kernels as he drowned them.
He fed himself, still standing at the counter. He slowed as he worked through his cereal, and stopped, staring at the half-empty bowl, dropping his spoon with a clink. He took it over to the sink and filled it up with water, purposefully depriving himself of the nutrition he knew he needed. His flesh crawled but he smiled thinly. These small discomforts were nothing to him: he had built up his resistance to the Mind through thousands of little acts such as this.
Outside, he unplugged his three-wheeled mindcar, the transportation for the Mind’s thickways, and climbed in. He calmed his mind, and waited. At once pleasure came upon him and his body relaxed. The machine booted up and hummed gently. Automatically, he scanned the area around him and it accelerated. He felt the data, vectors and coordinates passing through his mind like somebody else’s chess dream, data from the thickways: the new arteries of the earth.
Next to the Mindcar, his old natural-gas car was a vac relic. But vacs kept the old cars running on the old, dilapidated roads where there was no thickway to project the thickspace and the Mindcars couldn’t go. His old car was freedom from the Mind, and that’s exactly why he loved it. It had cost him almost a year’s work at Free Market odd jobs, but it had been worth ever penny.
But the Mindcar whirred, accelerating until all the other pods became a blur. He was conscious, as usual, of an intensifying focus that mirrored his speed, in a corner of his mind, until his pod slowed, pulling into his school.