“Perfection,” the corpuscular, oscillating alias of Chairman Aung said, “is the ideal we may never attain but must constantly strive towards. Excellence is the means to that end, the path we choose to take, ever mindful of the destination.

At the first sign of light, a pink and yellow lightening of the ceiling, Felix’s eyes snapped open like rubber gloves. Sleep done before it had even started. He felt like he had been thrown suddenly out of a painless place and into a harsh, discordant one and lay there in disbelief that it was all starting again, and so soon. Unable to go forward or fully return he observed half formed thoughts clash as if in an empty arena. The lights brightened. He watched them till they were too bright to look at directly. A sweet smelling breeze swept the room, as if through open windows with white curtains, Alpine Day, or Mediterranean Mural. Veronica awakened without stirring. She stretched out her arms, yawned like a cat and threw off the light, lavender blanket. She sat up, gazed down at him with a warm smile and touched his chest.

Once Veronica began taking Paregane their lives returned to normal very quickly. It was almost as if nothing had happened. But something, of course, had happened. The world didn’t fit the explanations. It marked Felix in ways he was trying to understand and understanding eluded him.

Loopy with booze, Bryson sat back into the black foam seat and toyed with the radio. Clouds, enormous hunks of coal with little lightning forks leaping between them, approached from the north. The rest of the sky was achingly blue, in every direction. She passed over Seneca Lake. The land about was parched, the meadows bleached blond and copper, except for the woods, and the fringe of dark green that followed the shores and banks of lakes, streams and gorges, like veins of emerald. Lake levels were low and she could see the old northern shoreline of Keuka Lake, under water since 2130, a wavy, indigo Y discernible just beneath the brighter, bluer surface, which petered out in a large swamp over the lost town of Old Penn Yan.

The morning of the day his wife, Dr. Ruth Bryson, was to arrive Leonard Bryson awoke with an almost adolescent shudder of anticipation. He had not been a reflective man, more a sensation seeker bent on satisfying his own curiosity, a doer, but he had, since retirement, surveyed his personal conduct with a shock. It seemed that since his marriage there was rarely a time when he wasn’t sexually involved with a woman considerably younger than himself. Right at this moment he was sleeping with one of his neighbors, a thirty-year-old woman named Sky who worked a commune with her brother and sister and her brother’s wife and child...

Something, growing suspicion perhaps, propelled Dr. Ruth Bryson from Owen Bradlee’s apartment, down the elevator and into a Personal Commuter Pod station a block away. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth.

Veronica was much closer to death than the Medivac team had led on. They had gotten to her in time however and there was no permanent damage done to her brain or liver. The wounds to her arms were superficial and would heal, but without cosmetic surgery there’d be scars.

Sonny ‘Bop’ Molloy and Deb Shannon, of the Hudson County security forces, assigned to the town of Hartland, serving in the Rockland Precinct, landed their armored, four person hovercraft on the street outside of Felix and Veronica’s home and got out. Their faces were nearly invisible behind the thick globe of CellPack that encased their heads, the amber data stream cascading on either side of the visual field. Their silver armored suits seemed to glow a bit in the reflected hovercraft light.

As Felix unlocked his silver bike in a pool of blue street light filled with billows of mosquitoes and gnats he thought that he might as well go straight to Les Jardeen and call home from there. If Veronica wanted to join him for dinner (which he doubted) she could ride into town. Normally (whatever that meant) he preferred to shower and change before dinner but he was extremely tense and couldn’t face the scene at home. In public they would have to pretend nothing was wrong. A drink first would give him time to decompress. Anyway, the most likely outcome was that she wouldn’t join him at all. Lately she was going to bed early, another way of saying that she passed out by nine o’clock. So he mounted the bike and joined the others riding up the little hill, wooded on both sides, to Main Street, the village center.

The time bell went off and the screen shrank to a dot. He stood his lifeless body up, removed the squeaky skull cap of CellPack, reached for the ceiling, touched his toes and marched out the door to join the others. His bladder was backing up into his kidneys, poisoning his blood. Something was using a nerve in his lower back for a kick drum. The usual Friday crowd stood around outside the steel doors to the bathroom, nobody but a few jawbones talking.