Location: New Devon (formerly Exeter), Private Flat
Date: March 6, 2040
Thirteen Years Since the Collapse
They were sitting on the floor, backs against the sofa, finishing cold tea.
Dara was thirty-two. Max, thirty-five. They’d been together for four years, though sometimes it felt like they’d always been in each other’s orbit. Sometimes it felt like they’d met five minutes ago. The sense of time had changed. Everything had.
She traced a pattern in the carpet with her finger. “Do you ever try to remember what it was like? Before?”
Max tilted his head back, eyes half-closed. “Yeah. But it’s like trying to remember the smell of a dream.”
They had met the new way—on a compatibility matrix. Personality weighting, practical alignment, co-parenting goals, proximity preferences, medical history, dietary congruence. Neither of them minded. Neither had been looking for sparks.
“No sparks,” Dara had told her sister, once. “But no static, either.”
That had been the quiet selling point. In a world with no libido, no chase, no intoxication of the chase, everything slowed down. What remained was honesty, stability, intent.
Now, on the floor, Max reached for her hand—not with urgency, not with habit. Just gently.
“I remember once,” he said, “when I was fourteen, maybe fifteen. There was a girl in my school. I couldn’t stop looking at her.”
He frowned. “Or maybe I could. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve just built the memory.”
Dara nodded slowly. “I had something like that. A boy in a TV show. I think he had floppy hair. Or maybe it was the voice. I don’t know anymore. I watched the show again a few years ago and couldn’t understand what I’d seen in him.”
They weren’t sad. They weren’t reaching for something lost. They were just trying to place it.
Because once, a long time ago, something had stirred in them that no longer stirred.
And while they couldn’t remember the feeling, they remembered having had the feeling. Like an old scar with no pain left in it. Just the shape.
“We’re lucky,” Max said, almost absently.
Dara looked over. “Why?”
“We matched. We knew what we wanted. We wanted the same things.”
“A child?”
“That, and... just quiet. Companionship. No edge.”
She smiled. “Yeah. It’s a good match.”
Their daughter—Avery, nearly two—was sleeping down the hall. Conceived through local fertility services. Max had gone in, done the whole extraction thing. It had felt medical, but not cold. Clinical, but intimate in its own way. Like donating a part of yourself, not performing.
They loved her. Fiercely. Clearly. And the love wasn’t tangled up in anything biological or impulsive. It was chosen. Practiced. Strong.
Dara stood and stretched. “You coming to bed?”
Max nodded. “Yeah, just a sec.”
She padded down the hall in soft socks. Max lingered another moment, alone in the hush.
Outside, the sky was violet. The city hummed low, steady, unhurried.
People loved differently now. But they still loved.