NULL AND RISING

  Book One: Sovereign Embryo

  Chapter 5: The Weight of Average

  Tuesday.

  He woke at 6:58, seventeen minutes before the alarm, which happened occasionally and which he had never been able to explain. His body made this decision independently. He lay in the dark for a moment with the specific awareness of someone who knows sleep is finished but has not yet fully committed to being awake, then got up, because lying there accomplished nothing.

  Teddy was on the bed. This was not unusual — Teddy had migrated from the foot of the bed to the pillow adjacent to Igor's at some point in the past six months, a territorial expansion that had happened so incrementally that Igor had not noticed it until it was complete. He was there now, eyes open, watching Igor get up with the attention of someone who had been awake for a while and had opinions about the hour.

  "I know," Igor said.

  Teddy slow-blinked.

  Igor showered, dressed, made coffee. While the coffee was brewing he stood at the kitchen window and looked at the courtyard. 7:08am. Dark still — November in Leipzig, the sun arriving late and leaving early, the city operating for weeks in a kind of permanent dusk at the edges of the day. The building opposite had three lit windows. One of them was the television-watcher. The other two were, presumably, people doing what Igor was doing: standing in a kitchen in the early dark, waiting for coffee, preparing to go somewhere.

  He poured the coffee. He drank half of it standing and took the other half to the table.

  On the table was his notebook.

  He opened it to last night's entry — the one he'd written after closing the LitRPG novel, after the sentence about hope. He'd written three lines:

  Without terrestrial explanation.

  The protagonist received this information and felt hope.

  I am not sure what I feel.

  He read this. Then he turned back several pages, to the entries from the past month, reading them the way you read a document you produced a while ago and are now assessing with some distance. They were mostly practical — numbers, observations, small accountings of things that had happened or needed to happen. A note about this month's football payment — €300 total, end of month, Schreiber's handwriting on the envelope. A note about calling the building manager about the stairwell light. A reminder to check whether his work contract renewal required any paperwork on his side.

  But there were other entries too. Shorter ones, often late at night, in the slightly different handwriting that meant he had been tired when he wrote them. Average is not the same as stable. The gap between good and good enough is not a distance. It's a category. Luka scored a hat trick. I watched the highlights twice. The second time I was studying him. That's what I told myself.

  He closed the notebook.

  He finished his coffee. He fed Teddy, who had appeared in the kitchen doorway with the timing of a creature that could hear the sound of a can opener from a floor away, possibly through walls. He put on his jacket. He checked his phone — no messages, no news alerts he hadn't already seen. The signal story had gone quiet overnight, which was either because nothing new had happened or because the people reporting it had stopped knowing how to frame it.

  He left at 7:34. The tram came at 7:41. He stood in the aisle and held the bar and watched Leipzig wake up.

  The office was the same office. This was a thing he noticed about Tuesdays specifically — that the office on Tuesday was identical to the office on Monday in every measurable way and yet had a slightly different atmosphere, the atmosphere of a place that had accepted the week was happening and had stopped resisting it. Monday had the quality of a held breath. Tuesday had the quality of the breath released.

  He processed twelve tickets before noon. Two were genuinely interesting — one a server configuration problem that required actual diagnostic work, the kind that used a part of his brain the other ten tickets did not reach. He did the interesting ones last, as a structure. The boring ones first so the interesting ones felt like a reward. He had been doing this for four years and it still worked, which said something about the reliability of small systems.

  Benny was quiet in the morning. This was unusual enough that Igor noticed it. By 11am Benny had not come to his desk or said anything beyond a brief Morgen at the start of the day. Igor looked across the room at him once — he was at his desk, headphones on, working with a focus that was not his usual energy. Not distressed. Concentrated in a way that felt deliberate, like someone who had decided to keep something inside the perimeter of themselves.

  At 12:15 Benny appeared at Igor's desk. Without preamble: "My girlfriend's brother is in a hospital in Hannover. He had some kind of — they're saying seizure but it doesn't look like a seizure. He was fine yesterday and this morning he just—" He stopped. Collected himself with a visible effort. "He's stable. But they don't know what caused it."

  Igor looked at him. "How old?"

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "Twenty-three."

  "Has he had anything like this before?"

  "No. Nothing. He runs half marathons. He's completely healthy."

  Igor was quiet for a moment. "Is she going to Hannover?"

  "This afternoon. I'm — I might need to leave early. To take her to the station."

  "Tell Jana now. Don't wait until this afternoon."

  Benny nodded. He was holding himself with the particular tension of someone managing feelings in a public space, which was a skill that got easier with practice and which Benny had clearly not had much practice with. Igor did not find this weak. He found it accurate — Benny was twenty-four and his girlfriend's brother was twenty-three and in a hospital, and the correct response to that was to be affected by it.

  "It might be nothing," Igor said. "Seizures happen. People have one and never have another."

  "Yeah." Benny exhaled. "Yeah. The signal thing though. He's in Hannover. And Hannover is one of the—"

  "Don't connect things that might not be connected," Igor said. Not unkindly. "You'll make it worse."

  Benny looked at him. "Can you actually do that? Just — decide not to connect things?"

  Igor considered this honestly. "No," he said. "But it's worth trying."

  Benny left early at 2pm. Igor watched him go and then returned to his tickets.

  He thought about the signal thing on the tram home.

  He had told Benny not to connect things that might not be connected. This was sound advice. It was also the advice of someone who was, in fact, connecting them — quietly, in the back of his mind, running the accumulation of data points against each other with the systematic attention he applied to most things.

  Sixty-one cities. Animals. The internet slowdown. A twenty-three-year-old with no medical history having a seizure in Hannover.

  The pressure in his ears on the tram, now present again — the same altitude-change sensation, slightly stronger than before. He noticed it when the tram went through the underpass near Hauptbahnhof, dismissed it, noticed it again on the elevated section near Mockau. It was not painful. It was not even uncomfortable, precisely. It was the sensation of a threshold being approached.

  He thought about the word terrestrial. From the Latin, meaning of the earth. Without terrestrial explanation meant the explanation was somewhere else. The scientists at the Stockholm institute had written this in a paper and then presumably sat with what they had written and decided to publish it anyway, which meant they had decided that accuracy was more important than the discomfort of saying a thing that had no comfortable implications.

  Igor respected this.

  He got off the tram. He walked. The November evening had the texture of something about to happen — though this was probably, he acknowledged, the product of his own pattern-seeking laid over the ordinary atmosphere of a Tuesday in November. Leaves. Cold. The smell of someone's dinner from an open window. The city doing what it always did.

  He stopped at the small supermarket on Brüderstra?e. He bought bread, ham, cheese, coffee, and — without fully deciding to — two extra tins of cat food and a large bag of dry food. He stood in the aisle with the large bag for a moment. He could not have explained why he was buying it. He put it in his basket.

  The cashier said eleven euros forty. He paid. He walked home.

  He made dinner properly that night — not bread at the window but actual food, pasta with a sauce that required chopping and time, the kind of cooking he did when he had the patience for it and the evening was long. He did not know why he had the patience tonight. He cooked and thought about nothing specific and listened to the sound of the city outside.

  Teddy sat on the kitchen counter watching him cook. He had been told repeatedly and without effect that the counter was not a sitting location. They had reached an understanding about this in the same way they had reached most of their understandings — Teddy simply continued and Igor eventually reclassified the boundary.

  "You're watching very carefully," Igor said.

  Teddy looked at the pasta water.

  "It's not for you."

  Teddy looked at Igor.

  "It's still not for you."

  He ate at the table. Teddy ate his own food beside the kitchen door with the focused efficiency of an animal that took meals seriously. They finished at roughly the same time. Igor washed up. Teddy went to the window.

  After washing up Igor sat at the table with his notebook open and did not write in it. He sat with the pen in his hand and thought about what there was to say that he hadn't already said, and found that the situation had outpaced his vocabulary for it. He knew how to account for the things in his life that had names and categories. He did not have a category for without terrestrial explanation or for the pressure in his ears that was getting slightly stronger each day or for the fact that he had bought two weeks of emergency cat food without deciding to.

  He wrote one line:

  Whatever is coming — I want a fair start.

  He looked at it for a while.

  Added:

  That's all I've ever wanted.

  He closed the notebook.

  He took his LitRPG novel from the couch — Teddy had relocated from the window to the couch and was sitting on it, as was customary — moved Teddy, sat down, and read for two hours. The protagonist was preparing for the integration event. He was cataloguing resources, assessing the people around him, thinking about who would be useful and who would be a liability. He was doing this without cruelty — he did not dislike the people who would be liabilities, he simply understood that an event of this nature required clear thinking about who you could depend on.

  Igor read this with the specific attention he gave to things that felt relevant.

  At 10:15 he brushed his teeth, set the alarm for 7:15, and lay down. Teddy relocated to the pillow beside his within two minutes, the territorial expansion complete and undeniable.

  Igor lay in the dark.

  The pressure in his ears was faint but present. Steady, like a note being held at the edge of hearing. He had been attributing it to weather and stress and the accumulated physical effects of not sleeping well, and all of these were still possible, and he was still not going to catastrophize about it, but he was also done pretending he hadn't noticed.

  He noticed.

  He lay in the dark and noticed and thought about nothing else and after a while he slept.

  Outside: sixty-one cities. The hum. The threshold being approached.

  Tomorrow was Wednesday.

  — ? —