The Abolition of Night

Sleep had been the last inefficiency, and like every inefficiency before it, it was solved by a committee.

The compound was called Continuance, though the citizens who breathed it — which was all of them, by the ninth year of the Program — gave it no name at all, in the manner of fish declining to name water. It came down with the municipal mist at each hour the almanacs still politely called dawn, although dawn implies a preceding darkness, and there was no longer any darkness worth the word. The cities held at a constant, benevolent amber. The people inside them were, on the whole, content. Contentment had been the second-to-last inefficiency, solved some years earlier, by the same committee.

Auditor Marisol Vane believed in the work, and this is worth stating without irony, because it has lately become fashionable to imagine that no one believed — that the whole shining architecture of the Waking Age was held up by cynics at gunpoint. It was not. It was held up by people like Marisol, who had lost something to the old country of night and did not intend to lose it a second time.

Her sister had died in her sleep, at nineteen, of nothing — of the ordinary treachery a body commits when its owner is not looking. Marisol had found her in the morning, already cool, wearing the private, unbothered face the sleeping wear, the face that says: I have gone somewhere you cannot follow and I did not think to leave a note. She had hated that face for thirty years. She had signed on to abolish it.

Her work was the auditing of lapses.

A lapse was the technical term for a citizen whose biomonitor reported an involuntary cessation — a micro-descent, three seconds, seven, once memorably forty, into the forbidden country. The Program did not punish lapses. The Program did not punish anything; punishment was inefficient, and besides, unnecessary, since every appetite had been so carefully met that rebellion had nothing left to stand on. A lapse was simply corrected: the dosage adjusted upward, the mist made a little kinder, and the citizen restored to the seamless daylight of themselves.

The man across the interview table was named Adem Course, and he had lapsed nine times in a month.

"Tell me what you see," Marisol said, "when you go."

She was not supposed to ask this. The protocol required only that she confirm the readings and recommend the increase. But she had audited four hundred lapses, and had begun, without admitting it, to collect their answers the way a dry country collects rumors of rain.

"A room," Adem said. He was a mild man, an actuary, the sort the Program produced in vast contented quantities. "A yellow room I've never been in. There's a woman there. She isn't anyone. She turns around, and just before I see her face —" He stopped. "I want to go back. That's the part I'm not supposed to say, isn't it. I want to go back and I don't know why, because there's nothing there. It isn't even real."

"No," Marisol agreed. "It isn't real."

She recommended the increase. She watched him thank her — they always thanked her — and walk back out into the amber, and she felt, for the first time in nine years, the specific vertigo of a person who has told a true thing and a false thing in the same breath and can no longer remember which was which.

That night, if it can be called that, she lapsed.

It lasted perhaps four seconds. She was standing in a yellow room. Her sister stood with her back turned, at an ordinary height, in an ordinary light, and began to turn — and Marisol came awake at her console with her heart going like a fist on a door, because she had almost seen her, had almost had the face back, the living face and not the morning one, and the Program had taken it away again at the last instant, efficiently, kindly, as it took everything that could not be measured.

She requested an audience with the Deputy of Continuance.

He received her in a room without shadows. He was old — genuinely old, one of the few permitted to remember the before — and he had the untroubled eyes of a man who has made his peace with being the villain of a story he considers necessary.

"You're lapsing," he said, before she spoke. "I know. The system flagged you a week ago. I asked it to wait."

"What did we take out?" she said. "When we took out sleep. You know. You're old enough."

He considered her for a while. "Sleep was never the point," he said at last. "Sleep was the door. We didn't mind the rest — the body's little maintenance. What we couldn't govern was what came through the door. The dreaming. A citizen lies down obedient and productive, and eight hours later stands up having been a king, a murderer, a child, a god, having loved people who don't exist and grieved a world that never was. Every night, uncounted, untaxed, ungovernable, the whole population went somewhere we could not follow and did not think to leave a note." He smiled, not unkindly. "We could give them everything they wanted, Auditor. We could not compete with the things they didn't know they wanted. So we closed the door. And they have been content ever since. You have seen it. They are content."

"They thank me," Marisol said.

"They thank you."

"My sister," she said. "I almost saw her."

"Yes," said the Deputy. "That is how it begins. It is also how it ends, if you let it. You will chase that face down into the dark, and the dark does not give things back — it only lends them, at a rate no one can afford." He folded his old hands. "I can restore you. One adjustment. You will be content by morning and you will thank me, and you will mean it, which is the mercy of the thing. Or you may keep the door open. But understand what you are choosing. You are choosing to be the one person in the city who grieves."

Marisol thought of Adem Course, walking gratefully back into the amber, wanting to go back to a room that wasn't real, to a woman who wasn't anyone. She thought of her sister's morning face, which she had hated for thirty years, and understood now that she had hated it only because it was the last one, and that somewhere behind the door there were all the others.

"Leave the door open," she said.

That night she did the thing no one had done in the city in nine years, the old, animal, ungovernable thing. She went home, and lay down in the amber that was not darkness, and closed her eyes against it. For a long while nothing came. The Program is patient; so, it turned out, was she.

And then the room was yellow, and her sister was turning, and this time — slowly, in no hurry at all, the way the dead have all the time in the world — she finished the turn.

Marisol did not wake to report it. There are some errors the system cannot correct, because it will never be told they occurred.