“Hmm.” Sam’s eyelids fluttered closed and he pictured a scowling pugilist, tormented in the small hours by thwarted ambition and a history of concussions. What could a man like that possibly have in common with a six-year-old girl?
Sadiq said, “The thing is—and I know, Dr. Google is not our friend—but Noor did some rummaging around on the web, and there seem to be an awful lot of similar cases.”
Sam forced his eyes open. “The last time I looked, all I found were people burbling about their digital detoxes and their valerian enemas.”
“Yeah, and maybe this is nonsense too. But I’ll get her to send you a link, and you can make up your own mind what it’s worth.”
When Sadiq dropped him off, Sam opened the front door as quietly as he could, and made his way to the spare room where Laura had set up their shared home office.
“How was she?” he asked.
“When I picked her up at lunchtime,” Laura replied, “she said she wasn’t tired and she begged me to let her stay. And then she didn’t fall asleep until almost two o’clock.”
“That’s progress, isn’t it?” Sam hadn’t been keeping records of the time she woke; he’d been trying to leave her on her own until two a.m. or so, when she’d already been up for a while. But it did look as if the whole cycle was moving forward by about five minutes a day.
Laura seemed unwilling to raise her hopes too high. “What happened to the car?” she asked.
“I didn’t want to drive. I’m kind of wasted.”
“Okay. Why don’t you grab some sleep right now?”
“It’s my turn to cook dinner.”
“Forget it. I’ll order takeaway.”
Sam managed to stay awake just long enough to get undressed and crawl beneath the sheets. Three hours later, he was roused by the scent of fried rice. His caffeine binge hadn’t kept him from sleeping, but it had thrown enough grit into the clockwork that he emerged from the process out of synch with himself: ravenous as if it were morning, chilled to the bone as if it were three a.m., and afflicted with the kind of headache and parched mouth that brought back distant memories of nights spent clubbing, when he’d staggered home at dawn and woken at noon.
When he walked into the kitchen, Laura was taking the lids off the food containers, sending aromatic vapors wafting up from the table. Sam listened for any sound from Emma’s room, but there was nothing. “She loves Chinese food,” he said. “I don’t know how she can sleep through this.”
As he ate, he began to feel better. It was seven o’clock now; if Emma hadn’t slept until two, she might not wake until one, so maybe he could sleep again from ten until … three? Leaving her on her own for a couple of hours wasn’t torture, and if he didn’t start setting limits he’d end up either dead in a ditch or sacked for incompetence.
“How was work today?” he asked Laura.
“All right.”
“It’s not getting you down? Being stuck here?”
She frowned, thinking it over. “I probably get more work done in a day, even spending a couple of hours with Emma. It’s a bit numbing when I’m alone, though. Some of my colleagues are pretty annoying, but sitting at a desk in a silent house … when you’re focused, it’s fine, but when you stop and look around, it feels like you’re the last person on Earth.”
When Sam had cleared the table, he glanced at his phone. Sadiq’s sister, Noor, had emailed him a link.
Laura was in the living room, browsing the menus of the streaming services in search of something that would help her unwind. Sam walked down to the office and opened the link on the desktop.
Noor had found a long thread on a medical support group forum. Sam was generally skeptical of such venues, but at least this one was well-organized. The thread in question was dedicated to sleep-phase disorders where the sufferer had no family history or genetic markers, no psychiatric illness, no shift work or frequent long-distance travel, and no apparent brain injuries, tumors or lesions.
Despite this niche-like specificity, there were tens of thousands of individual posts. A moderator had helpfully pinned one entry to the top of the list, giving an overview of the results from a survey of the thread’s participants, to which more than three thousand people had responded. The sufferers seemed to lack any particular concentration by age, sex, occupation, ethnicity, or geography, compared to the demographics of the forum as a whole. People’s “phase at onset” spanned the full gamut, from twelve hours’ advanced to twelve hours’ delayed—but however things had started, nobody’s phase remained unchanged relative to clock time. It usually slipped forward by a few minutes a day, but for a fraction of the group it went in the other direction. And as the moderator noted, this scatter was more or less in line with the range of endogenous circadian rhythms reported by sleep researchers for healthy volunteers who’d been deprived of sunlight and social cues, leaving their body as the only time-keeper.
Sam scrolled down a little further and skimmed the highest-rated posts, expecting to find testimonials to some suitably fashionable cure. But if there was snake oil on offer here, it had been down-voted out of sight; the majority opinion was that nothing worked. People had tried everything from phototherapy and warm baths to melatonin and modafinil, but their body clocks just kept stubbornly cycling at their natural rhythm, close to but not exactly twenty-four hours, oblivious to every natural or pharmacological “zeitgeber” that might have been expected to jolt them back into synch.
A sidebar offered links to academic sources on sleep disorders. Sam followed the one on “free-running sleep” to a review article in a medical journal. The vast majority of cases where people’s body clocks ceased to be entrained by the outside world involved total blindness, where the patient had lost, not just vision itself, but the retinal ganglion cells that were sensitive to ambient brightness. Sighted people with the disorder were supposedly rare, and often had tumors, head injuries, or other detectable causes of damage to the suprachiasmatic nucleus that orchestrated the circadian rhythm. In one study, they’d also been found to have significantly longer cycles than normal—unlike the people on the forum.
He heard Laura approaching. “What are you looking at?” she asked.
Sam described what he’d read so far, trying to downplay the pessimistic conclusion. “I’m sure there’s a selection effect here,” he said. “Anyone with a problem that went away quickly probably wouldn’t post on a site like this.”
But Laura seemed intent on preparing for the worst. “If Emma’s a free-running sleeper now, how often will she fit in with a normal school day? To really be able to concentrate, she’d have to be awake by seven, but not up so early that she’s falling asleep before five. That’s a three-hour window to wake in, between four a.m. and seven a.m.—one-eighth of the clock. So for a five-week block in every forty she’ll be fine, but for the rest…”
Sam said, “If it really does come to that, I could always home-school her. But it’s only been a fortnight! Maybe she’ll just keep waking later and later until she gets back to normal—and then she’ll be so happy that she’ll slam on the brakes, and that will be the end of it.”
4
Sam arrived for the first class of the new term feeling sharp-witted and thoroughly prepared. The day had started as well as he could have hoped: he’d woken at five, found Emma still asleep, then spent the hour until she rose reviewing his lesson plans. But each time he turned away from the blackboard to gauge how well his line of exposition was getting through, his gaze was drawn to the empty chairs in front of him, and he lost his thread completely.
A third of the class was missing. A cynical part of him was tempted to attribute this to copycat malingerers, but that couldn’t be the whole story: two of his most enthusiastic students had failed to show up. When he asked a question, he still found himself reflexively preparing to deflect their responses to give someone else a chance to answer, and the silence that greeted him instead was unsettling. No one had died, or was even ill in any normal sense, but
the thinning numbers still felt like the sign of some terrible loss.
At lunchtime, the staffroom was less starkly depleted, but everyone in sight looked anxious. Sam joined one dispirited group.
“We need to start doing something more,” he said. “Sending students worksheets and hoping they’ll pick up what they miss from YouTube lectures at three in the morning isn’t going to cut it.”
“So are you volunteering to come in at three a.m.?” Gloria asked. “And if you are, who’s going to teach your regular classes?”
Sam said, “The overall numbers aren’t changing; there are exactly as many teachers per student across the district as before. We just need to reorganize things, matching up students and teachers by phase. I’m not free-running myself, but I’d be happiest following my daughter’s phase. If she could go to school when it suited her, I could work those hours, teaching any students in the area who were on the same schedule. My old classes would have to be merged with those from the closest two or three other schools—”
Sadiq cut him off. “That’s not going to work. The logistics for keeping the buildings open twenty-four hours a day would be unmanageable, let alone shuttling kids across three suburbs in the middle of the night. If students can’t make it in normal hours, we need to be flexible, but not like that. We need to use software, video lectures, whatever it takes to keep them up to speed. But they’ll have to do it from home.”
Tom regarded them both as if they’d lost their minds. “Whatever’s causing this,” he said, “it’s not going to last forever. In a couple of months, we’ll be back to normal.”
“You think it’s going to burn itself out, like a bad flu season?” Sam replied. “The way it’s spreading doesn’t look like an infection. Nor does the biology: there’s no inflammation, no antibodies.”
Tom snickered. “Yeah, well, if ninety percent of it’s ‘viral’ in a different sense, what would you expect?”
“Hardly ninety percent,” Sam retorted. “And even if you think that many kids don’t want to be here, most adults have nothing to gain by faking it; they don’t have enough paid sick leave or income protection insurance that they can lie in bed all day—and all it would take to prove that they’re frauds is one polysomnogram.”
Tom was unrepentant. “People manage to do shift work all the time. If a nurse can turn up for a graveyard shift, no one has any excuse not to show up when they’re needed.”
Sam was growing angry now. “Some people adapt better to shift work than others—but if they do, it’s because their circadian clock is responding to all the timing cues: they’re out of bed, moving around, eating, exposed to bright light. The whole problem for free-runners is that none of those cues affect them! It’s no different from being blind to sunlight—except you’re also blind to temperature, food, exercise, social interaction, and every jet lag pill ever invented.”
Tom didn’t reply, but he adopted the pained expression of a martyr badgered into silence. He knew the truth: anyone with a spine would grit their teeth and rise from their bed to meet their obligations.
When Sam picked up Emma, he watched the elaborate ritual of her parting from her best friend, Natalie. After the hug that was meant to finalize things and let them go their separate ways, they turned back to each other no less than five times, with afterthoughts and reminders.
“How was school?” he asked, as she approached.
She shrugged. Sam didn’t press her; he had no need to quiz her to see that she was perfectly alert. When she’d first resumed normal attendance, she’d spent half an hour telling him how happy it made her, but by now she was probably just taking it for granted. He hadn’t had the heart to warn her that the situation might not last.
“Olivia fell asleep before lunch,” Emma said, as Sam unlocked the car. “And Mitchell fell asleep after lunch. And Karen didn’t come until after recess because she didn’t wake up until then.”
Sam said, “Yeah, a lot of people are having the same problem as…” He cut himself off, unwilling to commit to any particular tense. As you had? As you have?
“But how will everyone stay friends if they can’t see each other?” Emma demanded indignantly, as if this whole state of affairs had been decreed by someone who just needed to be told what a terrible idea it was.
“People stay friends when their friends get sick,” Sam replied. “Or when they go and live somewhere else. You don’t have to see someone every day to be their friend.”
“No,” Emma agreed reluctantly. She adjusted her seatbelt. “But I want to.”
Sam pulled the door shut beside him. He said, “Do you want to stay friends with Natalie?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll stay friends with Natalie. Even if it’s hard, even if it’s complicated, you’ll find a way to do it.”
When they arrived home, Laura’s car was in the driveway. Emma ran inside, calling out to her mother; Sam had thought she was going to be on site all day, but maybe there’d been a change in the schedule.
He found her in the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall. Emma had stopped in the doorway, confused.
“What’s wrong?” Sam asked.
“There was an accident,” Laura said.
He turned to Emma. “Can you go and put your books away?”
Emma nodded uneasily and retreated.
Laura said, “One of the operators swung a crane into the scaffolding. Three people are dead, and five are in hospital.”
Sam bowed his head. It sounded like something that should have been impossible. “So was it equipment failure?”
“No,” she replied. “We’ve got video from inside the cab. The operator just kept his hand on the lever.”
“Why? Was he having a heart attack?”
“No. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.”
5
Halfway through the lesson on Al-Karaji’s triangle, two new students entered the room quietly, hung their dripping umbrellas over the bucket, and took seats at the back. Sam paused to greet them, then resumed, glad he’d managed to iron out the sound problems that had plagued his last few recordings, so they’d be able to play everything back from the start if they needed to.
The rain came down more heavily, slanted now, striking the window panes on the southern wall with tympanic effect, but he raised his voice and pressed on. “The number of ways you can get x cubed y squared in this row is the number of ways we got x squared y squared in the row above, six, plus the number of ways we got x cubed y, four, for a total of ten. Every time, we’re just adding two numbers from above to get the ones below and in between them. So we ought to be able to guess a formula for the numbers in any given row, and then prove it by induction.”
Hands shot up, gratifyingly, and Sam wrote each proposal on the blackboard. He glanced at the storm outside, and dared to marvel at the one small upside of the syndrome: not long ago, on a winter’s afternoon in a cozy room like this, half the class would have been dozing off, but even at two in the morning these runners seemed impervious to everything that might once have been conducive to a surreptitious nap.
At the end of the lesson, a group of students hung around, hunting for fresh identities between the binomial coefficients while they waited to spend a few minutes with their other-phase friends who were only now arriving. Sam walked down the corridor to the grade three classroom, where Emma was in the middle of a cross-temporal exchange of her own. She stood in a group of a dozen other girls, but it was easy to tell from their states of dampness that about half had just come in from the rain.
He kept his distance, reluctant to do anything to curtail the meeting, but after a couple of minutes the new teacher arrived and ejected everyone whose school day was officially over. Sam fished his phone from his pocket and checked the carpool app; he was scheduled to give three of Emma’s friends a ride home. “Sandra? Martin? Chloe?” he called out hopefully. No one responded, but the app showed him mug shots; he spotted the kids and corralled th
em toward the car.
As he drove through the rain, Sam concentrated on the road, but it was impossible to ignore his passengers’ conversation. “We’ll visit you in the hospital,” Martin promised Chloe.
“You won’t be awake for visiting hours,” Chloe replied.
“They should let us come any time!” Sandra protested.
But Chloe was resigned to the impending separation. “I won’t be awake when you want to come.”
When Sam had dropped off all three, he asked Emma, “What’s the time in your head?”
“Ten past three.”
He checked his watch. The second row of digits, which he’d programmed to follow her phase, was only two minutes out—and Emma never claimed greater precision than five minutes herself.
“So Chloe’s getting the implant?”
“Yes,” Emma confirmed. “Her parents aren’t rich, but her grandmother’s paying.”
Sam hesitated. “You know it’s not the cost that’s stopping us? We could probably get a loan to cover it. I just don’t think the safety record’s good enough yet.”
Emma said, “I don’t want it anyway.”
“I know. But in a couple of years, when the surgeons have had more practice and the technology’s improved…”
Emma sighed, irritated. “I told you, I don’t want it. Ever!”
As soon as they pulled into the driveway, Emma flung the door open. Sam watched as she ran to the porch; he could see her umbrella cinched in place in one of the net pockets at the side of her backpack.
He followed her, taking more care to stay dry, and by the time he was inside she’d disappeared into her room. He took his shoes off and trod lightly down the hall to the office. It was just after four, and Laura would be up at six; he could probably get most of his marking done before the three of them were due to have breakfast together.
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition Page 9