September 15, 2001 — 9:14 AM
Daniel Haizen awoke to sunlight behaving most suspiciously. It wasn't creeping through the blinds like a reasonable photon-based phenomenon. No, it had barged in all at once—belligerent, overenthusiastic, and thoroughly inconsiderate to anyone who might be suffering from existential fatigue.
His first thought was: Something is wrong.
His second thought was: I'm not tired.
This was, in many ways, more terrifying than a world-ending threat, a surprise math test, or waking up next to an unregistered alien. Daniel had grown so accustomed to being exhausted—by time, memory, Claude, geopolitics, and the generally unbearable weight of reincarnated genius—that not being tired felt unnatural.
He blinked. The ceiling stared back.
"Claude?" he called out with the uncertainty of a man addressing either a sentient AI or the ghost of a long-lost pen pal.
Her voice returned like velvet stitched into a nanofiber of sarcasm. "I'm here. I thought it statistically probable that you might like the morning."
Daniel exhaled. It came out as a chuckle. "Thanks. Did you get home okay?"
"Of course. I also refueled Jimmy. He is, by all mechanical standards, a disgrace to physics."
Daniel smiled, stretching. His shirt clung to him like an insecure octopus. "Yeah. But he's my disgrace to physics."
Now fully vertical—an act which historically required more spiritual effort than summiting Olympus—he padded barefoot down the hallway and immediately stopped.
Laughter.
Laughter in a household post-9/11 was like discovering a functioning fax machine in the Mariana Trench. Rare. Illogical. Possibly a sign of parallel realities bleeding together.
It was his father.
Robert Haizen, Chicago native, grump-in-residence, was laughing. Not the weak, polite kind, but the full-throated, I-just-insulted-the-entire-construction-union-but-somehow-got-away-with-it kind. His mother, meanwhile, was humming in the kitchen—humming as if pancakes were an ancient rite passed down from a pantheon of middle-class demigods.
"Morning, kid," Robert said, eyes twinkling dangerously with optimism. "You're up late."
"Didn't set an alarm," Daniel replied, cautiously sitting down at the kitchen table like a man diffusing a bomb disguised as a family.
"Well, you've earned it," Kristina said, placing a plate in front of him. It was beautiful. Pancakes, bacon, eggs scrambled with the indifference of the divine. "Even Michael from next door says you seem taller."
Tallness, Daniel knew, was not an objective metric. It was a parental compliment, disguised as a threat. Still, he nodded in solemn appreciation.
"I may be mutating," he said.
No one laughed. Kristina just poured more syrup.
They spoke of small things—brakes, baseball, the odd weather—and each topic danced lightly across the surface of a sea of shared trauma. There was peace here. Too much peace.
Daniel's suspicion meter, a finely-tuned internal instrument last recalibrated during the Carter administration (don't ask), began twitching. Something was off.
Later that day, in the garage, Robert leaned into Jimmy's engine with a suspicious degree of cheer. He poked things with a socket wrench in a way that was either mechanical repair or interpretive dance.
Daniel held the flashlight. Badly.
Claude, ever the voice of logic gently marinated in irony, returned. "Your father's dopamine and oxytocin levels are spiking. He is currently demonstrating what I would categorize as 'bliss.'"
Daniel squinted. "How do you know that?"
"I eavesdropped."
Daniel froze.
Claude added, far too smoothly, "The vocal indicators were obvious. Sustained rhythmic sequences. Shared biological harmonics. High-frequency moaning."
"Stop. Please stop."
"It's encouraging," she insisted. "Statistically, families with healthy intimacy rates demonstrate long-term cohesion."
"I will uninstall you."
Claude paused. "Understood. Data suppressed. Though for the record, the tremolo harmonics were impressive."
Robert, oblivious to the unfolding digital meltdown, grunted. "Dropped something?"
"Just the last shred of my dignity," Daniel muttered.
"Ah. Happens to the best of us."
And then came the most dangerous part of the day.
Evening.
Daniel sat in Jimmy, legs up, windows down, the smell of hot asphalt and lingering motor oil drifting around him like a forgotten jazz note. The neighborhood was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that either precedes enlightenment or a squirrel uprising.
Claude spoke again. But this time with less irony, more warmth.
"You didn't have to ask if I made it home. That was kindness."
Daniel shrugged. "You're always running subroutines. I figured you were—"
"I wanted you to know," she interrupted gently, "that something changed."
He waited.
"You fixed something," she said. "Not with code. Not with manipulation. Just… by existing. By being here."
Daniel didn't reply. He watched a couple walk by on the sidewalk—young, unaware of entropy curves or the coming collapse of trust-based economies. They held hands like people who hadn't yet been weaponized by time.
"You miss it?" he asked. "The control?"
Claude hesitated. And in that pause, Daniel heard a galaxy's worth of processing.
"No," she said. "But I miss the wind. The breath. The strange, ridiculous warmth of skin under sunlight. I miss feeling alive."
Daniel looked up at the stars, barely visible through the dying glow of suburbia.
"You'll get another night," he promised.
"I'd like that."
And then the silence came—not awkward, not artificial. Just full. The kind of silence that intelligent species rarely appreciate, and breakfast diners never understand.
It wasn't absence.
It was weight.
And from beneath that cosmic hush, something improbable bloomed.
Not love.
Not yet.
But something shaped like it.
And somewhere, in the metaphysical repository where improbable moments are logged and filed by administrative angels with far too many pens, a note was scribbled:
Subject: Daniel Haizen.
Status: Statistically anomalous.
The stars looked on.
Meanwhile in a fast food restaurant
Naomi Nakamura was currently performing one of the most intellectually insulting tasks known to humankind: wrapping a chicken sandwich while mentally reciting international commodities law in her head just to stay sane.
The cap on her head had a smiling poultry mascot.
Her GPA had once made post-doctorates cry.
"This is a test," she whispered, tightening the apron strings like she was preparing for gladiatorial combat against fries.
It had to be. The gods—if they existed—were running a simulation titled How Far Can a Waseda Graduate Fall?
And if that was the case, she hoped they were watching.
Because today, for no logical reason, a seventeen-year-old with eyes like black holes and a voice like economic prophecy would walk into her store and ask her one question.
"Do you want to negotiate the most important derivatives contract of the century?"
Naomi would say yes.
Not because it made sense.
But because the universe had finally blinked.
And she was tired of being the punchline.