Izabel pressed a button on the wall and the first set of double doors opened. Cami went through them. As soon as they closed behind her, the second set of double doors opened, and she went out those and ran to the car. There was a burst of air in the small room, a quick blast to clean it out, a small safeguard, keeping one batch of air from another. It obscured Cami for a second, but Izabel was used to that. She watched her every morning like this. As tired as she was of nearly every moment of her life, some parts still filled her with fear. Cami getting to a car was one of them.

Cami pressed a button on the car and the door opened for her. She got in, the door closed, and off the car went. Izabel would get an alert on her tablet when the school checked her in.

At this point, she would usually eat breakfast with Kaito before his workday started, but she didn’t want to talk to him right now. She knew she’d start a fight. Neither of them needed that.

She went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet and peed and looked around on her tablet. She opened her favorite app. It ran news articles and newsletters and email blasts that went out years before the Turning. She could lose herself for hours in the news of the past. When humans thrived—too well. When we were drinking all the clean water. When we traveled so often we ripped holes in the ozone. When we couldn’t see another way. When we melted the ice caps and debated the commodification of natural resources and thought we would need seed stores.

She usually didn’t remember which year was which. Little memories across her childhood of local and global traumas that she couldn’t sort chronologically. Today, legs hard against the toilet seat, she tapped on 2020. The summary popped up. A bad year. A global pandemic. Everyone wearing masks then, too. She was eight years old. Her mother was alive. They were happy.

She tapped on Most Popular. An article came up about the garden eels in an aquarium in Tokyo. It was becoming hard to monitor their health. They hid from their keepers. They had grown fearful of humans as the aquariums sat empty during quarantine.

In an attempt to make them more comfortable, to make them betray their instincts, they were arranging a festival. For three days people could call in and video-chat with the eels. They were going to set up five screens in front of their tank. There were rules. You couldn’t be loud or obnoxious. They wanted smiles and waves and soft conversation.