Lies on her mattress, her legs twitch, she tries to read but can’t concentrate because her legs are twitching. And her brain isn’t trained for the grasping of long blocks of text.

“Is there a lot of dialogue?”

Asks Hannah.

“What do you mean, dialogue?” asks Don. “It’s a book about algorithms.”

Hannah lies down next to Don, whose skin immediately becomes sensitive. Nearly painful in the areas where Hannah’s body touches hers. From outside the wind blows through the drafty windows, a candle flickers in the kitchen; another nod to adulthood, they always light candles, adults, and then they drink wine. The children have also drunk wine today; it makes you bleary.

“My favorite part of books is the dialogue,” says Hannah. She stares at Don’s book. “Do you mean comics,” asks Don, shifting to the side a bit so she can breathe. “No,” says Hannah. “Dialogue, I can hear people talking, and they talk the way we talk, it draws me closer to the story.”

Don is silent. Her heart races, her head buzzes. She is. Simply out of her mind. Don hates books with dialogue and is convinced that it’s a lazy trick used by writers, this whole writing of dialogue thing. It fills pages so nicely. With the empty sentences that most people exchange, with all the incredibly meaningless words they use to demonstrate their self-importance or to talk about their relationships or just their fear of being nothing more than an aggregation of desires. “Do you want to kiss me?” Don doesn’t ask, staring into her fucking book. It’s about the benefits of an algorithm-defined society. And it has no fucking dialogue. But it is fucking horrible. Bots pushed it to the top of the best seller list. Bots push all kinds of shit, but people have gotten accustomed to it, or perhaps nobody cares whether they see real news or fake, whether they’re chatting with a bot or a human. The point is that someone is listening to them. Back when they were still around, many media experts had urged citizens to become critical, um, users. The truth of every news item, every article, every video could be checked through time-consuming research. Well. Okay. A kind of truth. Nobody did it. Truth is a feeling. A gut feeling, people say, people who should be smacked for the use of the phrase. But everyone just continues to believe what they want to believe—like an apocalypse brought on by jet airplane chemtrails, the victory of anarchists, or that vaccines are deadly. The more confusing the world gets, the more desperate individuals are to create an inner catalog of the comprehensible.

Hannah has returned to her mattress, has turned off her bedside lamp; now just the TV is on so the voices can calm the children, talk them to sleep, sleep that doesn’t want to come when it is too quiet.

It’s going well, thinks