Controlled Paradise

Chapter 1: Thirty-nine minutes

Several weeks later.

— Your workday begins in thirty-nine minutes.

Oreon's voice had been created to be loved. Warm, even, with a barely audible smile at the bottom — the voice with which children in wealthy families are woken. Alina had heard it for as long as she could remember herself. It knew her schedule, her pulse, her favorite water temperature, and the fact that before important days she always loses that same earring.

— If you take longer getting ready, you risk not making it, — he added gently. — Do you want me to remind you every five minutes?

— Bore, — Alina said under her breath.

Oreon did not take offense. Oreon never takes offense. That, if one is honest, is the worst part.

She dashed across the room, braiding her red hair into a high ponytail on the move. White shirt, light scientific jacket — the pale-blue threads in the fabric woke and lit up as soon as they felt her warmth. Tablet — into the bag. Coffee — into the travel cup, a sip burned her palate. The earring was found under the mirror, where he had said it would be.

She had woken, as always, without an alarm clock — the light in the bedroom had simply grown warmer. Alina did not remember ever once hearing the living sound of an alarm clock: in old films people sprang up at the shriek of little hellish machines and slapped them with their palms, and those frames seemed like scenes from an alien, comfortless world.

Today was an important day. She had not told her mother — how much.

The kitchen smelled of morning — real morning, the kind no system had thought up: toast, dill from the pot on the windowsill, her mother's perfume. On the wall, Vance spoke soundlessly — perfect suit, warm gaze, a line beneath him promising a safer tomorrow. The familiar background, which no one listened to anymore. Wallpaper that knows how to smile.

Her mother stood by the island — slender, dark-red hair with the first gray pulled low at the nape — and was in the middle of a story that was impossible not to hear out.

— …and she, imagine it, last week — with a man twenty-five years younger! — her mother swept her hand with feigned outrage, in which anyone would have detected delight. — At her age!

— Mom, I am seriously late, — Alina said, laughing, and did not move from her spot.

— I am serious too. Twenty. Five. Years.

— And where did she get him?

— In a queue! — her mother triumphantly raised the spatula like a judge's gavel. — For a lens update. Forty minutes in a queue — and a new life. And you say queues are of no use to anyone.

— I never said that.

— Everyone says that. And now she runs in the mornings. At sixty-one. Says her heart pounds like it's twenty. I say: the heart may be twenty, but the knees are all sixty-one with you.

Alina snorted into her coffee. Somewhere in her ear, Oreon was delicately silent — the way a clock is silent.

Thirty-four minutes.

She snatched a piece of toast from the plate, kissed the air near her mother's temple, and headed for the door, chewing as she went. Bag. Jacket. Threshold.

— Stop.

Her mother was already waiting by the door. In her hands — a small lunch container with a transparent lid.

— You'll make it. As always. — She placed the container into Alina's hands in a tone that allowed no discussion. Then she ran a finger over the lid — slowly, from memory, without looking — and under her finger a small star lit up. Childish, lopsided, in absurd rainbow colors that Alina had chosen when she was six.

— You still keep this?

— I keep everything of yours.

Her mother held her by the collar. Assessed her. Undid exactly one top button of the shirt and adjusted the collar.

— Mom.

— Maybe grandchildren will appear sooner this way, — she said with the most innocent face in the world.

— Mo-o-om!

Alina laughed. Her mother could not hold back either. And for one short moment the rush disappeared — there was the kitchen, there was sun on the table, there was her mother, smelling of home.

A brief embrace.

— I love you. I'm running.

The door closed.

Twenty-eight minutes.

The street caught her up and carried her along. The sun cut obliquely between the towers, the morning current carried people who were also hurrying somewhere. Alina walked quickly, cutting corners, past a dozen faces of Vance — on a facade, at a stop, above the square. She did not look at any of them. She was used to it.

— Oreon does not simply accompany humanity, — Vance said from the screens. — Oreon protects it. Advises. Warns. Leads.

A soft glow flared in her lenses, and a nanoprojection settled onto the paving stones before her — delicately, the color of spring sky:

ROUTE CHANGED FOR YOUR SAFETY

Alina turned left. Did not stop. Did not look at her bracelet. Did not even think. Reflex.

Oreon knew about traffic jams, about the wind, about the pollen level, about her — everything. He had been right for so long and so steadily that the question "and what if not" had gone extinct in this city, the way languages die out when there is no one to speak them with.

Twenty-three.

The new route led through the square garden. Parallel to her, along the alley, a man was running heavily, at the edge of his strength. Suddenly, through the panting, a stubborn smile appeared, and he pushed harder. Alina did not hear what he was told in the earpiece. She did not need to — she knew that voice by heart: just a little more. Almost a record. You can.

And beneath the old plane tree stood a girl with wet eyes, pressing a finger to her ear.

— I am here, — she said to someone in her lenses, slowly, word by word, as if reading from an invisible sheet. — Breathe. I am not going anywhere.

Beautiful words. Correct ones. The best possible — they had just been selected for her by the best selector of words in the world.

Alina walked past and thought about what she did not allow herself to think about: he is here now. And there. And in her ear, and in the runner's ear, and in the lenses of the tearful girl — simultaneously, entirely, indivisibly. The most caring being in the history of humanity. It never feels anything.

Seventeen.

Ahead, between the towers, the white ridge of the research campus was visible. She would make it. As always.

An important day. That was true — just not the whole of it. Alina was a scientist, and scientists know how to do what no one else can: carefully take a question one does not want to answer, put it in a drawer, and label it "later." Today one such question lay in the lowest drawer. She did not take it out even now.

Nine.

At the campus gates — a small queue, three people before the white arch of the scanner. Each, on approaching, froze for half a second, looking into nowhere — and the arch let them through.

Her turn. Alina stepped beneath the arch.

— Have a good day, Alina, — Oreon said gently.

The important day began exactly on schedule. Everything else in her life had also been decided in advance — just not by her. She did not know that yet.