The nurse waved a small white device in front of my forehead, looked at it, pushed one button on the pad she held on her lap, and said:

“You’re released. Metro, country?”

“What?”

She then did a sort of hard blink combined with a very slight shake of her head – more of a shake of her face, is what it looked like. I had seen the staff do this twitch several times before, always when they seemed impatient with me. She repeated:

“Metro, country. Rural. To live.”

Was she asking me my address? She must have known I’d been there since being revived.

“I don’t live out there. You know I’ve just been here these past days.”

“Release to metro, country?”

“To live? Are you asking me where I want to go? Or where I lived before?”

“This is release. Re-entry.”

She was silent. She peered at me as if she had just delivered a two-hour lecture. She was young, of striking looks but very off-putting to me, what with her rush. I felt like her head might explode, she seemed so anxious to get on with . . . whatever was happening.

Her name was Nurse Su Do, I had seen earlier. It was pronounced Do as in “doe,” but even the “e”s I would have expected on her names seemed to have been shaved off. Given how rushed she was, I imagined they had been cut in the interest of brevity.

“If you’re asking me where I want to live, and I have any choice in that, I’d say just near here. If I’m being discharged. You’re sure I’m fine to go? I still feel weak.”

She did the shake/blink/twitch again.

“You are released. There are no effects. Near here means metro. Eh one more thing.”

She reached into a pocket and pulled out something small. She displayed it to me in her open hand; it was a plastic bead.

“This is yours,” she said.

I picked it up. It was just a very dark purple plastic bead, the size of a pea. A large-ish pea. A small marble?

“Mine? What is this?”

“We did a cleanse of you. This was all the plastic in your body.”

“What?” I rolled it around between my fingers.

“I have to ask you Perry we have records that in your time sizable numbers of scientists and nonscientists understood that plastic particles were entering human bodies.”

“Particles. Well, that’s right. I remember that.”

“All of this was in you. I have to ask – ” and now she finally paused, which seemed an effort for her – “did you ever consider using fewer plastics?”

“Well. Many of us did. There was a growing awareness, I would say.”

“Rolph will direct you.”

Apparently we were done with the plastics conversation.

“I’m sorry – Rolph? I’m not sure who that is – ?”

“The one who directs you.”

I could not argue with that. Outside her office doorway a sort of hovering platform appeared, then, driven by a staff person in a white uniform who must have been Rolph.

“Safe trip,” she said. She rose and disappeared through a door behind her, while Rolph reached over, grabbed my arm, and lifted to goad me up.

I was continually struck by how this society’s speed in their speech was matched by their movement, whether this was walking, trotting, or transportation like their hovering platforms. Over the past two days everything with them had been full speed; except when I had been left alone to sleep, but even then I could see staff hurrying up and down the hall through the open doorway.

“We are off,” Rolph said. “You don’t need to help lift.”

“Help lift? Lift what?”

“Your bags,” Rolph said.

I had no bags, of course. I realized this was an attempt at humor, but we were moving already and Rolph was looking ahead. He stood at the controls, me behind him. By “the controls” I mean just a stick that rose up from the platform. He kept one hand on it. We traveled at some speed down the hallway but I felt no inertia. There was no need for me to hang on to him or anything else.

The hallway was on the building’s second or third floor, and emptied out onto a landing that overlooked a large lobby. We plunged ahead and right off it, into midair. Rolph dropped us down gently – of course this was probably not his steering skills but rather just the nature of the platform – and we then continued outside through sliding doors which opened for us and slid shut behind.

Out on the sidewalk the lack of inertia, of any feeling of movement, was even more odd. Rolph swerved past pedestrians, and then around some sort of large information screen, but I felt as if I were just standing on a floor in a room. The disconnect between what my eyes were seeing and what I was feeling – nothing – was beginning to make me queasy, when we arrived at my door.

It opened with a wave of Rolph’s hand. He then raised that hand in front of me, and I saw he was holding a small white device very similar to what Nurse Do had used in her final scan of my head.

He held it there.

I didn’t know what to make of it.

He jiggled it, once.

I then understood he wanted me to take it. It was my key, apparently.

“There’s food,” Rolph said. “Key on bed. Door com serves for Nurse Do. Mates Sven, Maya, Elle.”

He had stopped the platform but made no move to disembark. His few words were it, as far as any tour and orientation I would receive, I realized.

I stepped off.

He turned the platform and sped away.

*

There was no front door after the main one which he had waved open. Further inside was an open area, which I guess was just a large foyer. It was completely unfurnished. Then next was the kitchen.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

In the kitchen was a man, at the sink with the faucet running. He turned to face me as I entered. I’d been hoping I had misunderstood Rolph’s mention of “mates,” but Sven here’s presence must have meant that I was living in a group of four.

I learned that Nordics still looked Nordic. He had blond hair and eyebrows, blue eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “Perry?”

“That’s me. You’re Sven?”

“Must be. Not Maya or Elle.”

He shut off the faucet, dried his hands quickly, and walked out past me without saying any more.

I turned around and watched him walk through the foyer, then through the main door, and out. The main door swished shut again.

I turned around, kept going, and stepped into a large room which was next after the kitchen. In it was a sort of very large hologram – I don’t what to call it – swirling around in midair, floor to ceiling. It displayed a picture of what I took to be a space station, rotating. A disembodied voice was narrating something about it. It took me some time to even recognize the chatter as English, it was going so fast.

“Entranceinsouthquadrant and capacityfourthousandthreehundred, redlines bluelines risetosixteen perthecapacity” – it was jabber like that as the image of the station or whatever it was continued to rotate. I couldn’t make head or tail of it. The hologram was bright, and the voice was loud, and it was accompanied by fairly frenetic music. I took all this in bit by bit, I suppose because all of it was so foreign. The music, I realized, played in a pattern that matched the rotation of the image; it occurred to me that it may have been conveying information about the scene just as the narration did.

The depiction of the structure kept rotating. Parts of it would flash blue or green.

I basically felt as if I had walked in a giant roaring projected disco ball that was going to drive me deaf.

I said aloud:

“Can I turn this off?”

And it disappeared. That was easier than I’d guessed.

“How about back on?”

And it was back.

Only then I noticed two women seated in corners of the room, each on a chair. They were looking at me.

“Sorry, were you – watching that?”

They said nothing.

“You must be Maya? And Elle?”

“Maya,” one said, nodding toward the other.

That was apparently it for the introductions.

They looked to be about my age. Maya had black hair with thick eyebrows, and earrings which were very large, crescents wrapping up nearly all the way around her ears. She sat with a book open. Elle had brown hair, long and tied back. Both were wearing clothes that looked plain, just pants and shirts, which may have been linen and were in earth tones.

Well, at least they still read books.

Elle wasn’t doing anything in particular that I could identify. Maybe she had been watching the hologram thing.

“So, I’m Perry. Someone from the hospital just dropped me off.”

“Rolph,” Elle said.

“So you know him.”

Neither said anything.

“Well then. I suppose I’m staying here? I hope there’s room?”

Maya stood and pointed me down another hallway.

“Your room. Door’s open.”

“Okay then.” I felt like I should go drop a bag there, but I didn’t have anything with me.

They just sat motionless, still staring at me.

After some moments of this, for lack of anything better to do or announce, I said:

“I’ll go look at the room.”

Elle still didn’t move or say anything. Maya, for her part, then walked out entirely, just as suddenly as Sven had done.

I watched her go. I then looked to Elle to see if she had any reaction to the sudden departure, but she just continued to gaze at me.

Down the hallway were four rooms, each with its door open. Three were obviously lived in, with some clothes and other things draped about, and art on the walls. The last, mine, was extremely small, just a narrow bed barely long enough to hold me, and a desk. It had a closet.

In the closet was one towel. On the bed, two sheets and a small pillow. Nothing else.

Sven then stepped into my room from the hall. He held some folded clothes.

“A few more clothes,” he said. He placed them on the desk.

“You’re back. Thank you.”

“You are from the past, then?”

“Apparently so. I was in something like a coma for about a hundred years. That’s what I’m told.”

“Okay then,” he said.

He turned and left.

After a moment I walked after him, into the hologram room, for I had nothing better to do. But the room, and indeed the entire apartment, was now empty. All three of them had apparently left – Sven for the second time.

*

I eventually learned that Elle had a job producing those holograms; the one I’d seen first was indeed a depiction of a space station that orbited the Moon. Maya, for her part, wrote; reviews and commentary that appeared on holographic screens that one could project at arm’s length. She earned very little for this, and lived on basic income payments. Sven was an engineer at a water treatment plant, working full-time – which meant three days a week.

*

I considered, that first afternoon, taking my key and leaving to go for a walk. I could check out that large display stand thing we had passed on the way here, and I could explore and feel the ground below my feet rather than the odd floating platform. But suddenly I felt tired; fatigued nearly to the point of lying down right there on the floor. I returned to my room and collapsed on the bed.

I pictured – very briefly – a plow cutting through sod. A large steel plow, behind a tractor. This is what I used to focus on, in my past life, when I’d wanted to fall asleep. Something about the blade cutting through the sod, flipping it over, yard after yard after yard, would knock me out.

Or a hard rake being drawn through sandy soil. With rocks, pebbles, dragging through the tines. Fifteen or twenty furrows left behind, just running it from one end of the garden plot to the other.

Plowing; or digging. These would plunge me into sleep. I might picture a mole, its wide hands struggling through dirt. I would picture myself as that mole. There was something welcoming, down there in the tunnels, the warrens. The mole would be enclosed; safe. Excavating a little tunnel, because . . . that’s just what it needed to do.

A mole in the dark. Digging, content.

Just like pulling up a heavy blanket. A wool blanket, or two or three, stacked atop a sheet. Or sheets. I used to pile up clothes on the bed just to be able to slide under them, and feel their weight.

Just lying there in bed with the soft weight pressing down.

Tired. Enervated. Drained.

Enervated and drained were similar words. Enervated; you had been hobbled because you had lost your drive. Drained: hobbled because your energy had spilled out.

Weary. Drowsy. German-derived words.

Latin-derived words: Soporific, torporific. Soporific, from the Latin for sleep; torpor – the Latin for numb.

Torporous seemed like it should be a word.

I was torporous in my bed as my housemates – my silent housemates – presumably flitted about on their hover platforms, and the holographic space station whirled silently in the living room.

*

I woke up the next day, having slept for sixteen hours or so.

I learned what time it was only after lying in bed for a while wondering about it. Then I remembered how the hologram had been voice-activated, and I said aloud:

“What time is it?”

I had thought I might get a voiced answer, but numbers appeared on the wall across from me. It was past four.

The apartment was quiet, although I realized my roommates probably never made much noise even when present.

I noticed a slip of paper on my desk. It was folded. I reached for it.

Perry.

Fatigue is part of culture shock.

Su Do APRN

I held it and still lay in bed. I felt it was pathetic of me to think this, but it seemed touching that she had sent a message like that. Despite the terse communications, the hospital staff apparently did care about me.

When I look back I still remember what a lifeline that little note was.