Chapter Seven: The Complications Deepen (Part II)

World 126

The patient was dreaming, and the dream was spreading, and K. was the specialist who was supposed to wake them, but every attempt to intervene drew him deeper into the dream's architecture.

"The dream has been active for four months," the hospital liaison explained, from outside the quarantine zone. "It started with one patient and now affects thirty-seven staff members and twelve visitors."

K. looked at the sleeping figures. They lay in beds, in chairs, on the floor—wherever they had been when the dream caught them. Their faces were peaceful, their eyes moving behind closed lids, their breath synchronized.

"Why hasn't anyone woken up?" K. asked.

"The dream is self-reinforcing. Anyone who gets close enough to attempt intervention becomes part of the dream. You're wearing the protective equipment, but it's only effective for about an hour."

K. approached the original patient—a young woman, unremarkable, who had fallen asleep four months ago and taken an entire ward with her.

"What's she dreaming about?" K. asked.

"We don't know. Dream content analysis requires entering the dream, and everyone who enters stays."

K. had forty-seven minutes of protection remaining. He could observe, analyze, attempt to understand the mechanism. But understanding would not be enough—he would need to act, to intervene, to somehow break the chain of sleeping.

He placed his hand on the patient's forehead. The dream reached for him—he could feel it, warm and inviting, promising rest and peace and an end to waking troubles.

"Don't," the liaison warned. "Don't engage with it."

"I'm not engaging. I'm just—"

The dream showed him something: a house, a garden, a family that welcomed him. It showed him peace. It showed him what he might have, if he simply closed his eyes and joined them.

K. pulled away. His protection was working, barely. The dream receded, disappointed, still reaching.

"I can't save them," K. said. "Not from out here. And if I go in, I become another patient."

"Then what do we do?"

K. looked at the sleeping figures. They were dreaming, peacefully, together. Whatever the dream was offering, they had accepted it. Whatever reality was offering, they had refused it.

"Maybe we let them sleep," K. said. "Maybe we ask why they want to stay."

World 127

The competition was in its third round, and K. was winning, and he was increasingly certain that winning was not the goal.

"You've eliminated seventeen competitors," the announcer said. "Only three remain. The final round begins at midnight."

K. looked at his remaining opponents. They were tired, desperate, fighting with everything they had to stay in the competition. He was winning because the rules favored him—whatever the rules were, because no one had explained them clearly.

"What do I win?" K. asked the moderator.

"The prize is revealed at completion. That's how it works."

"But everyone's fighting so hard. They must know what they're fighting for."

"They know it's important. That's enough."

K. had been competing for three days without sleep, completing tasks that ranged from physical challenges to abstract puzzles to things he couldn't categorize. He had succeeded at all of them, not through skill or luck, but through a kind of desperate persistence that seemed to be the real requirement.

"What happens to the losers?" he asked.

"They return to their lives. No penalty."

"Then why are they so afraid?"

The moderator's expression was complicated. "Losing is not punished. But winning—" they paused, "—winning has consequences."

K. looked at the final three opponents. They were not trying to win, he realized. They were trying not to lose badly enough to be noticed, but also not to win completely. They were navigating some optimal middle ground that K. had already passed.

"I've already won too much," K. said. "Haven't I?"

"You're the frontrunner. The prize is almost certainly yours."

"And the prize is something I don't want."

"The prize is something. Whether you want it is not the relevant question."

K. entered the final round. He considered losing deliberately, but it was too late—his lead was insurmountable. Whatever the prize was, it was already his.

The round ended. The prize was revealed. K. accepted it, because there was no way to refuse, and the thing he had won was as terrible as he had feared: responsibility for the next competition, a perpetual obligation to compete until someone else won.

World 128

The emotions were being repossessed, and K. was watching the collectors take them, one by one, while he tried to explain that he needed at least some feelings to continue functioning.

"Your emotional lease expired," the collector explained. "Standard terms. We provided the emotions, you used them, now the lease is over."

"But I've had these emotions for years. They feel like mine."

"They were never yours. They were rentals. Very common arrangement. Most people don't own their feelings outright."

K. felt the collector reach into his chest—not physically, but in some other way—and remove something. The sadness went first. The absence was strange: a hollowness where heaviness had been.

"What about happiness?" K. asked. "Can I keep happiness?"

"Happiness is on the premium tier. You've been receiving basic happiness. That's included in the repossession."

The happiness left. K. felt it go—a departure, an emptying, the evacuation of something essential.

"Love? Can I keep love?"

"Love is the most expensive emotion. Your account shows no love purchases. What you've been experiencing was affection-adjacent substitutes. Those are being repossessed too."

K. sat in his apartment as the collectors worked. They took joy, took fear, took the particular shame he had carried for decades. They took the grief he had accumulated and the hope he had harbored and the complex web of feelings that had made him a person who felt things.

When they were done, he was empty. He could perceive the world—see, hear, touch—but there was no reaction. The world happened to him, and he did not respond.

"You can apply for a new lease," the collector said. "Basic emotional package is quite affordable. Or you can live without—some people prefer it."

K. sat in his empty apartment, feeling nothing, and couldn't even feel distressed about feeling nothing, because distress was gone too.

After a long time, he went to the emotion leasing office. He signed papers. He took on new emotional debt.

The feelings returned—different feelings, rental feelings, feelings that belonged to a company and were temporarily his.

They would do. They would have to do.

World 129

The divinity had been revoked, and K. was standing in the Department of Celestial Affairs, trying to understand why his godhood had been administratively terminated.

"Insufficient worship metrics," the clerk explained. "Gods are required to maintain a minimum of 10,000 active worshippers. Your count dropped to 7,832 in the last quarter."

"I had worshippers?"

"You had a modest cult. Small but dedicated. They held ceremonies on solstices and equinoxes. They made offerings. They believed in you."

K. had no memory of being a god, of being worshipped, of receiving offerings or answering prayers. But the paperwork was clear: he had been deified, had held divine status for decades, and had now lost it due to declining devotion.

"What happens to my worshippers?" he asked.

"They're being reassigned to other deities. Standard practice when a god is decommissioned."

"And what happens to me?"

"You return to mortal status. You lose access to divine privileges: omniscience, omnipresence, the ability to influence prayer outcomes. You're just a person again."

K. walked out of the department. The world looked different—smaller, more confining, bound by the limitations that mortals faced. He had been a god, apparently, and had failed at godhood, and now he was simply human, which seemed like a demotion but was also a relief.

He had no responsibilities anymore. No one was praying to him. No one expected him to answer, to intervene, to demonstrate his power.

But somewhere, 7,832 former believers were being told that their god was gone, that their prayers had been redirected, that the entity they had trusted was now just a man who couldn't remember their names or their needs.

K. wondered if he owed them something. An explanation. An apology. A final miracle to prove he had been real.

He owed them nothing, officially. His divine contract was terminated. His obligations were void.

But the weight of having been worshipped, even without remembering it, settled onto him like a garment he couldn't remove.

World 130

The secret was that K. had a secret, and in a world where memory was public, having any private thought was dangerous.

"Your mental activity shows anomalies," the monitor explained. "Patterns consistent with concealment. What are you hiding?"

"I'm not hiding anything," K. said.

"Everyone's thoughts are public. Everyone's memories are shared. You have something that doesn't appear in the shared record. That's a secret. Secrets are illegal."

K. tried to remember what he was hiding. The secret had become so hidden that even he couldn't access it—a thought buried so deep that it had disappeared from his own awareness.

"I don't know what the secret is," K. said. "I'm not even sure I have one."

"The scans show you have one. Somewhere in your mind, there's something private. Something that belongs only to you."

K. underwent additional scanning. Technicians explored his neural architecture, looking for the hidden chamber where his secret lived.

"It's very well protected," one technician said. "You've created multiple layers of concealment. Impressive, actually."

"I didn't do it consciously."

"No one conceals consciously. The hiding is automatic. The mind protects what matters."

After hours of searching, they found it: a small thought, a private memory, something that K. had kept for himself in a world that demanded total transparency.

"It's your name," the technician said, surprised. "You have a secret name. One that isn't in the public record."

K. didn't remember having a secret name. But when they showed him the encrypted thought, he recognized it: a sound, a syllable, something that meant him and only him.

"That's illegal," the monitor said. "Private identity. You're fined for the concealment."

K. paid the fine. The secret name was added to the public record, shared with everyone, no longer his alone.

But even as they took it, K. realized he still had the secret of having had a secret. The memory of privacy. The knowledge that once, there had been something only he knew.

They couldn't take that. Not yet.

World 131

The harvest was scheduled for Tuesday, and K. was the crop, and the farmers were explaining that regrowth typically took six to eight weeks, depending on nutrition and rest.

"You're renewable," the agricultural liaison said. "Your tissue regenerates faster than average. That makes you a premium source."

K. looked at his body. It looked ordinary—skin, muscle, bone. But apparently it was agricultural property, cultivated and harvested like any other crop.

"What do they harvest?" K. asked.

"Different parts, depending on market demand. Skin is always popular. Muscle tissue for medical applications. Blood, of course. Various secretions."

"And I regrow all of this?"

"Within weeks. You've been harvested thirty-seven times. Each time, you return to full status. You're an exceptional specimen."

K. tried to remember being harvested before. The memories were vague—days of recovery, the sensation of being less than complete, the gradual restoration of parts that had been removed.

"What if I refuse?" he asked.

"Refusal isn't an option. Your growth rights were sold at birth. You're legally a farm product. Very valuable, very renewable, very much in demand."

K. reported on Tuesday. The harvest facility was clean, efficient, staffed by professionals who were kind but businesslike. They took what they needed—he didn't ask for details—and returned him to his recovery quarters.

The regrowth began immediately. He could feel it: cells dividing, tissue reforming, the body rebuilding what had been taken.

"Good crop this time," a nurse said. "You're producing beautifully."

K. said nothing. He was a crop. He was producing. He would continue to produce until he stopped being renewable, and then—what? Disposal? Retirement? He didn't know what happened to crops that stopped growing.

He lay in his bed and regrew. The next harvest was in six to eight weeks. The one after that was six to eight weeks beyond. His life stretched before him, a calendar of removals and renewals, an existence defined by what could be taken and what would return.

World 132

The marriage was maintained at a distance of exactly 1,000 kilometers, and K. had never touched his spouse, and the rules said that proximity would void the contract.

"Distance marriages are more stable," the marriage counselor explained. "Physical proximity introduces complications. Expectation. Disappointment. The messy realities of cohabitation."

K. looked at the screen that showed his spouse—a woman he had married seven years ago, who lived 1,000 kilometers away, whom he had never met in person.

"I'd like to meet her," K. said.

"That's not advisable. Meeting would reduce the distance below the contractual minimum. You would be divorced automatically."

"What if we both wanted to meet?"

"Then you'd both be divorced. The contract is clear. Distance is a condition, not a preference."

In another life—he remembered this suddenly, the memory surfacing unbidden—he had touched someone. He remembered the warmth of skin, the specificity of contact. That K. had known what proximity meant.

K. communicated with his spouse daily. They talked, shared, built a relationship across the prescribed gap. He knew her favorite foods, her childhood memories, her hopes and fears. He knew everything except what it felt like to be in the same room with her.

"Do you ever think about it?" he asked her one night, across the encrypted channel. "About what would happen if we met?"

"We would stop being married," she said. "That's what would happen."

"But we would be together."

"Being together and being married aren't the same thing. We're married because we're apart. That's the foundation."

K. understood the logic. He understood the rules. He had chosen this arrangement—or someone had chosen it for him—and it had worked, in its way. A marriage of words and images, of presence without proximity, of love expressed through distance.

But sometimes, late at night, he wondered what her hand felt like. What her presence felt like. What it would mean to share space rather than just sharing time.

He would never know. The 1,000 kilometers stretched between them, a guarantee of marriage and a barrier to everything else.

World 133

The fiction was taxable, and K. was a novelist, and the auditor was examining his dreams to determine how much imaginary income he owed.

"Your novel last year generated 47,000 imaginary transactions," the auditor said. "Each transaction between fictional characters is a taxable event."

"But they're not real transactions. They're made up. I invented them."

"Invention is production. Production is taxable. The economy of your novel—the exchanges, the commerce, the labor—all of it falls under the Fiction Revenue Code."

K. looked at his tax forms. They listed every transaction in his novel: the protagonist buying coffee, the antagonist paying rent, background characters making purchases that he had barely described but which the automated analysis had identified and valued.

"I don't have this money," K. said. "The transactions were imaginary. They used imaginary currency."

"The tax is real. That's how fiction taxation works. Real consequences for imaginary events."

"What if I write a sequel where everyone gives everything back?"

"That would generate additional taxable transactions. Returns are taxed as income."

K. owed 12,000 real credits in taxes on imaginary events. He didn't have 12,000 credits. He would have to earn them, in reality, to pay for what he had invented.

"What happens if I don't pay?" he asked.

"Asset seizure. Including creative assets. Your fictional characters could be repossessed and licensed to other authors."

K. paid. He drained his savings, took on real debt, worked real hours to compensate for imaginary commerce.

His next novel, he decided, would be about poverty. Characters who owned nothing, exchanged nothing, existed in a fiction of absolute austerity.

But even poverty, he learned later, was taxable. The absence of transactions was a form of economic activity.

World 134

The replacement was watching from the corner, and K. was going about his day, and they both knew that the handover was approaching but neither acknowledged it directly.

"You make coffee at 7:15," the replacement noted. "Two sugars. No milk."

"That's right."

"And you check your messages at 7:32, after the coffee has cooled."

"You're learning quickly."

The replacement had been observing K. for three weeks. Soon—the exact date was not disclosed—K. would be replaced, and the replacement would assume his role, his routines, his relationships. The transition was supposed to be seamless.

"Why am I being replaced?" K. asked.

"That information is not available to either of us. The decision was made at a level we don't have access to."

"But I'm still here. I'm still functioning. I don't feel obsolete."

"Replacement is not about obsolescence. It's about optimization. You may be functioning perfectly. The replacement may simply be a better fit for upcoming requirements."

K. continued his routines while the replacement watched, memorized, prepared. There was something intimate about being observed so closely—someone learning his habits, his preferences, the small details that made up his existence.

"What happens to me?" K. asked. "After the handover?"

"You're reassigned. New context, new role. You won't remember this life."

"Will I remember you? The replacement?"

"No. And I won't remember the training period. When I become K., I'll believe I've always been K. That's how replacement works."

K. finished his coffee. In a few days or weeks, someone else would make this coffee, at this time, in this way. Someone who was K. without being him.

The replacement took notes. The handover approached. Neither of them could stop it, so neither of them tried.

World 135

The disease was remembering, and K. had been diagnosed, and the treatment was aggressive because individual memory was contagious and potentially civilization-ending.

"Memory was abolished three generations ago," the doctor explained. "Collective consciousness replaced it. Everyone knows what everyone knows. Individual memory is a regression—a dangerous mutation."

"But I remember things," K. said. "Specific things. Things that happened to me specifically."

"That's the disease. Healthy minds don't distinguish between individual and collective experience. What happens to one happens to all. What one remembers, all remember."

K. tried to access the collective consciousness. It was there—vast, omnipresent, containing everything that everyone had ever experienced. But alongside it, separate from it, his own memories persisted: childhood moments, personal sensations, experiences that belonged only to him.

"The treatment will integrate your memories into the collective," the doctor said. "And it will eliminate your capacity to form new individual memories. You'll become part of us again."

"I don't want to be integrated. I want to remember things my own way."

"That's the disease talking. Healthy minds don't want individual existence. Healthy minds embrace the collective."

K. underwent treatment. It was not painful—there was no pain in the collective, because pain was shared and divided until it became almost nothing. But it was thorough.

When the treatment was complete, K. emerged into a world where everything was shared. His childhood was everyone's childhood. His sensations were everyone's sensations. The boundaries between K. and everyone else dissolved, and he became a node in an infinite network of shared experience.

Sometimes, rarely, a fragment of individual memory surfaced: a moment that felt like his, specifically his, no one else's.

The doctors called this relapse. They treated it when it occurred.

Eventually, even the relapses stopped. K. was cured. K. was everyone. K. was no one in particular.

World 136

The diplomatic crisis required a shape expert, and K. was the only qualified negotiator, and the circles and triangles were threatening war if K. couldn't find common ground.

"The circles believe they are inherently superior," K.'s briefer explained. "Their lack of angles represents perfection. The triangles believe their angles are strength—definition, precision, the ability to point in directions."

"And I'm supposed to reconcile this?"

"You're supposed to prevent violence. The shapes are massing at the border. If they clash, the geometric fabric of this region will be destabilized."

K. met first with the circle delegation. They were round, obviously, with smooth edges and a continuous curvature that seemed both simple and profound.

"We don't trust angles," the lead circle said. "Angles are where things break. Angles are where weakness hides. You, with your angular body, should understand why we cannot accept their demands."

"What are their demands?"

"Recognition of angular validity. The claim that triangles have equal ontological status. We cannot accept this. We are complete. They are broken."

K. met with the triangles next. They were angular, obviously, with sharp points and defined vertices that seemed both aggressive and precise.

"Circles are smug," the lead triangle said. "They think smoothness is superiority. But smoothness is absence—absence of definition, absence of direction, absence of meaning. We point toward things. They point toward nothing."

"What do you want?" K. asked.

"Acknowledgment. Respect. A seat at the geometric table."

K. spent days in negotiation, moving between circles and triangles, trying to find language that both sides could accept.

"You're both shapes," K. said finally. "You both occupy space. You both exist. The differences are real, but the commonalities are also real."

Neither side was satisfied. Neither side was willing to concede. But they agreed to continue talking, which was better than war.

K. left the negotiation with no resolution, only postponement. The circles and triangles would eventually clash, or they would eventually reconcile.

His job was to delay the clash long enough for reconciliation to become possible.

World 137

The favor was being called in, and K. owed it, and the request was impossible, and the debt was real.

"You agreed to do anything," the creditor said. "Twenty-three years ago. I saved your life, and you agreed to do anything in return. This is the anything."

K. looked at the request. It was written on formal paper, in formal language, and it demanded something that could not be done: bringing back someone who was dead, restoring time that had passed, reversing a loss that was irreversible.

"This isn't possible," K. said. "No one can do this."

"You agreed to do anything. Anything includes the impossible."

"But I can't—no one can—this isn't how reality works."

"Reality is negotiable. You agreed to do anything. The terms were clear."

K. felt the weight of the old promise. He had made it in desperation, in a moment when his life was ending and someone had saved him. He had agreed to anything, meaning it completely, never imagining what anything might mean.

"If I fail," K. said. "What happens?"

"The debt remains. It will pass to your descendants, if any. It will grow with interest. The favor will be called again, and again, until it is paid."

K. attempted the impossible. He researched, experimented, tried approaches that no one had tried. He failed, repeatedly, definitively.

"I can't do it," he said finally. "I tried. The impossible is impossible."

"Then you are still in debt. The favor is still owed. We will meet again."

The creditor left. K. sat with his unfulfilled obligation, his impossible promise, his debt that would outlast him.

He had been saved, once, and the price of that salvation was infinite: a promise that could never be kept, a debt that could never be paid.

World 138

The rage farm was producing too much, and K. was responsible, and the anger was spreading beyond the field boundaries into the surrounding communities.

"Your yields are excessive," the agricultural inspector said. "We authorized 200 units of rage per hectare. You're producing 700."

K. looked at his fields. They were thriving—rows of anger crops, red and vibrant, practically pulsating with fury. He had been a good farmer, apparently. Too good.

"I don't know how to reduce the yield," K. said. "I've been following the standard cultivation practices."

"Your soil is too rich. Your climate is too favorable. The rage is growing faster than we can process."

In the nearby villages, people were getting angrier. They fought over nothing, raged at small inconveniences, experienced fury that they couldn't explain. The excess rage from K.'s farm was leaking into the environment, affecting everyone nearby.

"You'll have to destroy some of the crop," the inspector said. "Controlled burning. Before the anger spreads further."

"Burning rage won't that cause—"

"There will be smoke, yes. Residual fury in the atmosphere. But it's better than letting the crop mature. Mature rage is much more dangerous."

K. burned a third of his fields. The smoke rose, thick and red, carrying anger upward where it would dissipate in the higher atmosphere. The burning rage screamed as it died—an agricultural sound, he told himself, nothing more.

"Better," the inspector said, surveying the reduced fields. "Keep your yields to authorized levels. We don't want another incident."

K. walked through his diminished farm. The remaining crops were still beautiful, still vibrant, still producing anger that someone would harvest and sell and distribute.

He was a rage farmer. This was his life. The emotions he grew would enter other people's bodies, would make them feel things, would spread through the economy of feeling.

And he would continue to farm, carefully now, keeping his yields within limits, managing the fury that grew from his soil.

World 139

K. had been a color, once, but he had been demoted, and now he was a shape, and the color he had been still missed him.

"Former Color #7,832," the classification officer read from the file. "Demoted to Shape Class C-17 due to insufficient saturation and public indifference."

"I don't remember being a color," K. said.

"You were a shade of teal. Specific wavelength. Distinctive character. But you were rarely used, rarely appreciated. The Chromatic Authority determined that your existence as a color was inefficient."

"So now I'm a shape instead?"

"A trapezoid. Useful in construction, packaging, various industrial applications. More purpose than teal ever had."

K. looked at his trapezoidal body. It was geometric, angular, decidedly not teal. He had been transformed at a fundamental level—not just appearance, but essence.

"Can colors miss shapes?" he asked.

"Not typically. But your former wavelength has been exhibiting anomalous behavior. Appearing in unexpected places. Manifesting in contexts where teal has no business being."

K. noticed it himself, occasionally: a flash of teal in his peripheral vision, a color that seemed to be watching him, following him, mourning the shape that had once been chromatic.

"Is that dangerous?" K. asked.

"A color that misses its former existence is unstable. It may try to reclaim you. To restore you to teal."

"Would that be possible?"

"Reversal of classification decisions is extremely rare. But colors have been known to cause unauthorized transformations. You should be careful."

K. was careful. He avoided situations where teal might appear, where the color might find him and attempt restoration. He embraced his trapezoidal existence, his useful functionality, his life as a shape.

But sometimes, late at night, he saw teal in his dreams—the wavelength he had been, the color he had lost, the essence that was still, somehow, reaching for him across the boundary between categories.

World 140

The replacement was not as good as the original, and K. knew this, and everyone knew this, and they all continued to pretend otherwise because pretending was easier.

"You're wonderful," they told K. "You're exactly what we needed."

K. smiled. He had been installed as a replacement for someone everyone had loved—someone charismatic, talented, irreplaceable. K. was none of these things. He was a functional substitute, a placeholder, a body filling a space that should have contained someone else.

"I know I'm not him," K. said once, to a friend who had known the original.

"You're you," the friend said. "That's enough."

"But you loved him. You all loved him. And I'm just... here."

"You're here. That's more than he can say."

K. performed the functions of the original. He attended the meetings, maintained the relationships, did the work that needed doing. He did it adequately—never brilliantly, never terribly, just adequately.

People smiled at him with complicated expressions. They saw the original in him, or wanted to, or resented him for not being more like the original. He was a constant reminder of what had been lost.

"Do you ever forget?" K. asked. "That I'm the replacement?"

"Sometimes. When you do something unexpected. When you're clearly you and not him. Then I remember that you're different, and different is okay."

K. tried to do unexpected things. He developed habits the original wouldn't have had, opinions the original wouldn't have held. He became aggressively, deliberately himself.

It helped, a little. He stopped being pure replacement and became something else: the person who came after, the next chapter, the continuation.

He would never be what the original was. But he didn't have to be. He only had to be enough.

World 141

The union was on strike, and K. was a dreamer, and without union dreamers, the city's dreams were being handled by scabs who didn't know the craft.

"Thirty years I've been dreaming for this city," K. said to the picket line. "Thirty years of quality dreamwork. And they bring in replacements who've never handled a nightmare."

"The management doesn't care about quality," another dreamer said. "They care about cost. Scab dreamers work for half our rates."

K. looked at the dream processing facility. Inside, inexperienced replacements were handling the city's sleep—constructing scenarios, managing anxieties, resolving the unconscious material that accumulated during waking hours. They were doing it badly.

Reports came in: citizens waking confused, nightmares bleeding into adjacent sleepers, symbolic content appearing in the wrong people's minds. The scab dreamers were causing damage that would take months to repair.

"We should go back," one dreamer suggested. "Before the damage is permanent."

"If we go back now, we lose everything," K. said. "Better benefits, better working conditions, recognition of dream work as skilled labor. We have to hold out."

The strike continued. The dreams got worse. The city's collective unconscious became cluttered, disorganized, polluted with low-quality imagery and poorly resolved conflicts.

Finally, management capitulated. The dreamers returned to work, bringing their expertise back to a system that had nearly collapsed without them.

K. entered the first dream that night—a citizen who needed careful handling, whose unconscious had been damaged by weeks of scab work. K. repaired what he could, soothed what he couldn't repair, and wove a dream that would begin the healing.

"You can't replace us," K. whispered into the dreaming mind. "We're not just labor. We're artists. We're what makes sleep worthwhile."

The citizen slept peacefully. The union had won. The work continued.

World 142

The excavation had unearthed joy, and it was still active, and the dig team was infected, and K. was the containment specialist called in to prevent the spread.

"Ancient joy," the lead archaeologist explained, through the isolation barrier. "Pre-industrial, possibly pre-agricultural. It's been buried for millennia."

K. looked at the dig site. The team was laughing—uncontrollable, helpless laughter that had been going on for three days. They were exhausted, dehydrated, but they couldn't stop.

"What makes ancient joy different from modern joy?" K. asked.

"Intensity. Duration. Resistance to moderation. Modern joy is refined, controlled, sustainable. Ancient joy is wild. It wasn't meant to last this long."

K. suited up in protective gear. The joy was visible now—a faint golden glow rising from the excavation pit, carrying particles of happiness that could infect on contact.

"How do I contain it?" K. asked.

"Joy responds to acknowledgment. You have to recognize it, appreciate it, thank it for existing. Then it becomes willing to be contained."

K. approached the pit. The joy was old, so old it predated any civilization K. could imagine. It had been buried by someone who feared it, who thought that this much happiness was dangerous.

"I see you," K. said to the joy. "I appreciate you. Thank you for existing."

The joy seemed to respond. The glow softened, became less aggressive, more willing to be understood.

"You've been alone a long time," K. continued. "Buried. Forgotten. But you're still here. You're still doing what joy does."

The dig team's laughter softened to smiles, then to peace, then to ordinary contentment. The ancient joy, acknowledged and appreciated, allowed itself to be collected into the containment vessel.

"What happens to it now?" K. asked.

"Research. Understanding. Maybe, eventually, careful release. Joy this pure could help a lot of people, if we learn to distribute it safely."

K. looked at the contained joy. It glowed softly, patiently, waiting to make people happy.

World 143

The museum was K.'s home, and he was the exhibit, and visitors came every day to observe how an authentic human lived in the twenty-first century.

"Visitors will tap the glass," the curator had explained. "Try not to react. You're representing an entire era."

K. lived in his reconstructed habitat: a replica apartment with replica furniture, replica technology, replica everything. He ate replica food, wore replica clothes, performed the replica activities that the museum's research suggested were typical for his time period.

"Look, he's using a 'phone,'" a child said, tapping the glass. "They had to hold them in their hands."

"Don't tap the glass," the parent said, tapping the glass.

K. pretended not to hear. He was an exhibit. Exhibits didn't acknowledge observers. He continued his simulated phone usage, demonstrating the primitive technology of his alleged era.

"Is he real?" another child asked.

"He's an authentic specimen. Found in a preservation capsule. They've been keeping him alive to study."

K. didn't know if this was true. He didn't remember a preservation capsule or being found. He only remembered waking up here, in this museum, with instructions to be an exhibit.

At night, when the museum closed, K. could move more freely. He explored the other exhibits—ancient tools, historical documents, the reconstructed habitats of species that had gone extinct. He was not alone in being displayed. The museum was full of preserved moments, frozen eras, the past made visible for a present that needed to remember.

"Do you like it here?" a night guard asked once.

"I don't know what else there is," K. said. "This is all I know."

"You could leave. We're not holding you prisoner."

"Where would I go? What would I do? At least here, I have a purpose. I represent something."

The guard nodded, understanding. K. returned to his habitat, waiting for the morning, when the visitors would return and he would resume the performance of being himself.

World 144

The garden was growing truths, and they were spreading, and K. was trying to control the invasive facts that threatened to overrun everything.

"We only planted basic truths," K. explained to the agricultural board. "Simple, manageable facts. Two plus two equals four. Water is wet. The standard curriculum."

"But the garden has exceeded its boundaries. Truth is appearing in unauthorized locations."

K. looked at the garden. What had been a modest patch of cultivated facts was now a sprawling wilderness of information. Truths had seeded themselves everywhere—on walls, on surfaces, in the air itself.

"That's true," a wall said as K. walked past. "The average human body contains enough carbon to make 900 pencils."

"I didn't plant that," K. said.

"Truths self-propagate," the wall explained. "One truth leads to another. It's the nature of facts."

The invasion was accelerating. Every surface was now covered with truths—some useful, some trivial, some deeply uncomfortable. People couldn't walk down the street without learning things they hadn't asked to learn.

"Make it stop," the board demanded.

"I don't know how. Truth doesn't have an off switch. Once it starts growing, it just... continues."

K. tried various approaches: covering the truths, pruning them, introducing lies to compete for resources. Nothing worked. The truth was too hardy, too adaptable, too persistent.

Eventually, people adapted. They learned to live with constant information, with facts that announced themselves unbidden. Some found it liberating. Others found it exhausting.

K. tended his garden, such as it was. He hadn't meant to cause an information invasion. He had only wanted to grow a few simple facts.

But truths, it turned out, were not simple. They were connected, interrelated, part of an infinite network that, once activated, could never be fully contained.

World 145

The marriage was accidental, and the divorce would take a lifetime, and K. and his spouse were sitting in the arbitration office, agreeing that they wanted out but couldn't afford the process.

"You were married by environmental factors," the arbitrator explained. "You stood in the same place at the same time while wearing compatible clothing. The marriage was automatically registered."

"We didn't consent," K. said.

"Consent is implied by circumstance. You were in a marriage zone. You met the criteria. The union was legally formed."

K. looked at his spouse—a stranger, really, someone he had been standing near for thirty seconds in a location he hadn't known was legally significant.

"I don't even know your name," K. said.

"I'm Patricia. And I agree—this is absurd."

"The marriage may be absurd," the arbitrator said, "but it's legal. Dissolution requires a waiting period of—" she consulted the regulations, "—thirty-seven years. Plus paperwork, plus fees, plus demonstrated irreconcilable differences."

"We're strangers," Patricia said. "Isn't that irreconcilable enough?"

"Strangeness is not a recognized grounds for dissolution. You need documented conflict, verified unhappiness, proof that the marriage cannot function."

K. and Patricia looked at each other. They were married now, legally bound, stuck together by circumstance and bureaucracy.

"We could learn to get along," Patricia suggested. "Since we're trapped."

"We could. Or we could spend thirty-seven years documenting our incompatibility."

"Why not both? Get along while proving we shouldn't."

They left the office together—spouses, strangers, accidental partners in an involuntary union. The thirty-seven years stretched before them, a sentence or an opportunity or simply time that would pass regardless.

They walked home together. They had no choice. The marriage zone had spoken.

World 146

The echo was still reverberating, and the original voice had stopped speaking centuries ago, and K. was part of the chain that kept the sound alive.

"You are echo number 7,492," the sound keeper explained. "Your job is to receive the vibration from echo 7,491 and pass it to echo 7,493."

K. felt the sound approaching—a distant hum, growing closer, carrying information that had originated somewhere in the ancient past.

"What is the original saying?" K. asked.

"We don't know anymore. The content has degraded. What remains is the shape of the sound, the pattern of the vibration. The meaning is lost."

"So we're preserving a sound without knowing what it means?"

"We're preserving continuity. The original spoke, and the sound continues. That matters, even without meaning."

The vibration reached K. He received it—a strange sensation, like being filled with ancient noise—and then passed it on, adding his own resonance, his own contribution to the eternal echo.

"How long does this continue?" K. asked.

"Forever, if we maintain the chain. Each echo adds something, changes something. The sound evolves."

K. thought about the original speaker. Someone, centuries ago, had made a sound—said a word, sung a note, cried out in joy or pain. That sound had propagated, passed from throat to throat, transformed by each transmission.

The original was long dead. But their voice continued, in K., in thousands of others, in an infinite relay that would never stop.

"Is this important?" K. asked.

"Is anything important? We keep sounds alive. We preserve what would otherwise be silence. That's enough, isn't it?"

K. waited for the next vibration. It would come, as it always came, and he would receive it and pass it on. The echo would continue. The meaning would remain unknown.

But the sound itself was real. The sound itself persisted.

World 147

The gravity class was written on K.'s certificate, and it was wrong, and he was floating above his designated station because his body didn't match his documentation.

"You're registered as Class C gravity," the classification officer said. "That means you should weigh approximately 150 pounds under standard conditions. You currently weigh approximately 30 pounds."

K. held onto a railing to prevent himself from floating to the ceiling. "I don't know why I'm so light."

"Your mass hasn't changed. Your gravitational relationship has. Somehow, gravity isn't affecting you correctly."

K. looked at his floating body. It should have been heavy, should have been pressed to the earth like everyone else. Instead, it rose, drifted, refused to be properly grounded.

"Is this a medical condition?" K. asked.

"Gravitational irregularity is classified as an identity issue, not a medical one. Your body is fine. Your relationship with fundamental forces is the problem."

K. was assigned to the buoyancy ward, where others with gravitational anomalies lived. Some floated like K. Others sank too quickly, pressed to the floor by excessive attraction. The world affected them differently than it affected everyone else.

"You get used to it," a fellow floater said. "You learn to navigate. You find ways to stay connected to the ground."

"But I want to be normal. I want gravity to work."

"Normal is just a statistical average. You're outside the average. That doesn't make you broken—it makes you different."

K. learned to live in the air. He wore weighted clothing, held onto furniture, slept strapped to his bed. His life became a constant negotiation with a force that didn't take him seriously.

Sometimes, he let go. He floated to the ceiling and looked down at the world that had rejected him—the ground, the gravity, the normal people walking normally on normally weighted feet.

From above, everything looked different. Maybe that was the point.

World 148

The families were renting K. as an ancestor, and he was learning that professional genealogy was more complicated than it appeared.

"You'll be the great-great-grandfather," the family representative explained. "Impressive but not too impressive. We need you to have been a shopkeeper in Warsaw, with moderate success and a large family."

"I'm not actually anyone's great-great-grandfather," K. said.

"That's why you're for rent. Real ancestors are dead. They can't attend reunions, can't tell stories, can't pose for photographs. You're a living ancestor. That's the product."

K. memorized his role. He learned the name, the trade, the number of children. He developed the accent, the mannerisms, the particular way a shopkeeper from Warsaw might have carried himself a hundred years ago.

At the reunion, he was a hit. The family gathered around him, asking questions, taking photographs, treating him as the root of their tree.

"You must be so proud of us," a young woman said. "Your descendants."

"I am proud," K. said, in character. "You have done well. The shop is gone, but the family continues."

The woman cried. K. patted her shoulder, feeling like a fraud but also like something else—something useful, something needed.

After the reunion, another family booked him. He became a different ancestor: a farmer in Ireland, stern but loving, remembered for his work ethic and his songs.

"You're very versatile," the rental agency said. "Most ancestors can only play one role. You seem to absorb the characters completely."

"I don't have my own past," K. said. "So I borrow others'."

The agency scheduled him months in advance. He would be a hundred different ancestors to a hundred different families. He would be the foundation they needed, the past they required.

None of it was true. All of it was meaningful.

World 149

The rehearsal had been going on for thirty years, and the performance had never happened, and K. was beginning to suspect that rehearsing was the point.

"From the top," the director said. "Act one, scene one. Places."

K. took his position. He had played this role a thousand times—the protagonist's father, with three scenes and a pivotal monologue. He knew the lines, the blocking, the timing. He could perform it in his sleep.

But they never performed. They rehearsed, endlessly, making tiny adjustments, refining details, preparing for a performance that remained eternally future.

"The theater isn't ready," the director explained, when asked. "The audience isn't assembled. The conditions aren't right."

"Will they ever be right?"

"When the play is perfect. When we've rehearsed until there are no flaws, no hesitations, no moments that could be better."

K. looked at his fellow actors. They were old now—thirty years of rehearsal had aged them, had transformed the young cast into an elderly company, still performing roles they had accepted in their youth.

"What if we never perform?" K. asked. "What if we spend our whole lives rehearsing?"

"Then we will have spent our lives making art. Preparing for art. Inhabiting art. Isn't that enough?"

K. wasn't sure. He wanted an audience, wanted applause, wanted the experience of performing for someone other than the empty rehearsal hall. He wanted his work to mean something to someone other than himself.

But the director called places, and K. took his position, and the rehearsal began again—the same lines, the same movements, the same pursuit of a perfection that remained always out of reach.

Maybe the director was right. Maybe rehearsal was enough.

Or maybe they would all grow old and die in this hall, still preparing for a performance that would never come.

World 150

The economy ran on exported emotion, and K. was hollow, and the hollowness was the point—he had been emptied so that others could feel.

"Your emotional output exceeded projections," the export manager explained. "Last quarter, your happiness alone enriched seventeen import nations."

K. felt the absence where his feelings should have been. They had been extracted, packaged, sold to populations that needed to feel joy but couldn't produce their own.

"When do I get to feel something?" K. asked.

"Your feelings are more valuable as exports than as domestic experience. You produce premium-grade emotion. Why would we waste that on personal consumption?"

K. sat in his extraction chair. The machines hummed, drawing out whatever feelings he had accumulated overnight. He could feel them leaving—small surrenders, tiny evacuations—and then the familiar emptiness that followed.

"You're very efficient," the manager said. "Most producers burn out after a few years. You've been producing for a decade."

"Because I don't feel the loss. I can't feel the loss. That's been extracted too."

"Exactly. Your capacity for regret was exported in 2017. Best deal we ever made."

K. returned to his quarters. He performed the activities that should have generated emotion: watching beautiful sunsets, listening to moving music, remembering what he had lost. Nothing registered. The capacity to feel was the export; the shell remained.

Somewhere, in seventeen different nations, people were feeling K.'s feelings. They were happy with his happiness, sad with his sadness, experiencing the emotional life that had been extracted and sold.

K. hoped they enjoyed it. He hoped his feelings were being used well.

He couldn't hope anymore, actually. Hope had been exported in 2019.

He sat in his empty quarters, producing emotions he couldn't experience, a factory of feeling with nothing for himself.