Snapshot — Tuesday, 2066
Tess woke to a different wall.
The bedroom had grown by half a metre overnight while she slept. The eastern wall — the one she had asked the building to thin for more morning light — had retreated, and the floor had extended to meet it. The wall had retreated slowly through the night, no sudden lurch, only floor where there had been wall. She lay looking at it for a moment. The building had pinged her tablet at three in the morning — the building, or whatever ran above the building — asking whether to proceed, and she had answered yes in her sleep, as she answered most things in her sleep now.
The light through the new wall, filtered through the building's capture skin, arrived a few degrees cooler than the outside light, and the building had registered a small credit overnight: the figure was sitting on her tablet when she picked it up. Not hers, the building's, but her share of the building's would matter on the lease renewal.
She dressed; the kitchen surface lit when she stepped near it. Breakfast at seven thirty? — her ear, the assistant, the layer she had never named and didn't bother to. Yes. The cultured egg arrived first, then the toast — from the building's own ferment, and she could taste the difference now between this and the eggs Dao brought up from his uncle's farm in the Hunter twice a month, which still came from chickens. She ate without ceremony; Dao's eggs were for Sundays and for arguments. He hadn't been up in three weeks but would be the weekend after.
She walked. Her halo's orange light was bright; she had errands. The street looked like a Tuesday morning: runners, the school children with their attention bands lit the pale green of good morning, settled, the older woman with the dog who'd been on this block as long as Tess had — longer; the woman had been there in 2058 when Tess moved in, when Tess was thirty and angrier. Tess raised a hand, and the older woman raised hers; the dog — Boots now — looked at Tess and looked away, Henry six years gone. Neither of them said anything: both were on record, both had been on record for most of their adult lives.
At the café she sat outside. Hari was at the next table, working — a brief filled his surface, something to do with a port allocation; she didn't look closely. His band was pale amber for focused, don't interrupt, and she didn't interrupt. The café's interior had reconfigured since the weekend; the long communal table had been retracted and replaced with booths, which Tess thought was a mistake, but the café had run the numbers and the booths held longer customers. The barista, who Tess thought was new, brought her coffee without being asked: she had read the preferences off Tess's tablet on approach. Tess thanked her anyway; she still thanked baristas.
A message came in from her sister in Perth. Mum's focus index is down to seventy. They want to talk about it. Tess read it twice. Seventy wasn't a crisis; seventy was the figure at which the aged-care visit moved from assessment to intervention, and intervention now meant a band fitted to her mother's temple and a continuous reading that would, in time, give the aged-care system more information about her mother's interior than her mother had given anyone in eighty-four years. The focus index measured the surface signal, not the woman — but the woman was inside the signal and not separable from it any longer in any way that mattered to the system. Call you at lunch, Tess typed back. Don't agree to anything before then.
She walked the rest of the way to work, past the new social-housing block, which captured less than her building did because the capture skin was an older spec, and the credits there belonged to the state. The residents knew. A child of six or seven was sitting on the front step with no band on. The child looked at Tess, and the child's face was doing something: not a smile, not a not-smile, an arrangement Tess couldn't name and couldn't query, because there was no band to query. Tess kept walking, and walked perhaps twenty metres before she realised she had been holding her breath.
The building she worked in was old — late twenty-thirties, before the capture mandate — and the lobby hadn't changed in five years. The wall behind the reception desk was real wood, not a programmable surface, and she put her hand on it briefly as she passed. Frank, who had been on reception longer than the wood — they had cut the panel from a Karri felled in 2042, and Frank had been on reception in 2039 — looked up and nodded. She nodded back.