Into the Waveless Sea

Every nightfall she goes to the shore of the Sunsea to hack into a local network and talk with the platekeepers. They wait for and welcome her illegal chats which they have made a small legend among themselves. During their month-long shifts under the sand they endure many things: the attention-breaking chaotic routine of monitoring the vast fields of light-hungry plates and their clumsy robot maintainers, the ghostly echo of lonely claustrophobia the drugs keep barely in check, the constant awareness of the deadly heat simmering above their pods. But what they feel most oppressive is the Company’s censoring of personal communications, scrubbed by AIs to unbearable uncanniness. So she gives them gossip they know she makes up and in return they tell her pod-to-pod whispered rumors about her fiancee who went to a pod deep into the Sunsea many months ago. He’s well. He misses her. He’s doing back-to-back tours because the Company values him and he’s saving money for their first rent. He’s alive. She pretends to believe them, too. Every dawn before the heat makes the shore unlivable she cycles back to town until one day in the seventh month she goes the other way ignoring the platekeepers’ pleas until all she can hear is the sun.