Humanity became officially fed up in 2035.
There had, naturally, been plenty of unofficial fed-upness before then: private desolations, national sulks, the small domestic Bolshevisms of people emptying dishwashers too loudly. But 2035 was the year the measurements converged. For the first time, the international mood surveys, the clinical intakes, the sleep records, the cortisol maps, the birth figures, the facial-affect cameras and the sentimental divinations of several billion wearable devices all pointed in the same direction. Not downwards exactly. Downwards still implied travel, and therefore purpose. They pointed towards flatness.
The finding was not that everybody was depressed. Depression retained its old medical meaning and could therefore be disputed, diagnosed, coded, reimbursed. The finding was that the average human being had begun to experience existence with less conviction. Pleasure arrived weakened. Anticipation had thinned. People continued to marry, eat, work, masturbate, quarrel, travel and announce that they were so excited about things; but the inner punctuation had gone missing. Humanity had not stopped living. It had begun performing life from unusually good notes.
The threshold was crossed in September, although nobody crossed anything perceptible at the time. A consortium in Geneva announced that the Global Affective Mean had fallen beneath the minimum required for what its report called spontaneous future adhesion. The phrase was mocked for a week and adopted for the next four years. It meant that, collectively, people no longer felt tomorrow pulling upon them with sufficient force.
By 2039 there were hundreds of explanations and several thousand commercially licensed remedies. The explanations blamed, according to taste, screens, endocrine disruption, money, microplastics, loneliness, dietary oils, artificial intelligence, working from home, returning to the office, insufficient religion, excessive religion, pornography, declining testosterone, increasing self-awareness, poor sleep, long peace, permanent war, social media, the abolition of social media, and the psychic exhaustion of being continuously told why one was psychically exhausted.
Each theory had evidence. This was the discouraging part.
Mark Earl had no evidence at all, which gave him an advantage.
He wrote speculative fiction. Not successfully enough to be resented and not unsuccessfully enough to stop. His books appeared, received one or two descriptions he would secretly reuse, sold in quantities that could be represented without commas, and persisted for several years as thumbnails in digital catalogues. He had once been called prescient because a novel of his contained a municipal drone that issued fines for antisocial facial expressions. When Birmingham introduced something similar, Mark accepted the compliment despite the fact that his fictional drone had also become mayor.
However, for the last six months Mark had been unable to write. Ideas still occurred to him, but they arrived already exhausted, accompanied by the certainty that someone else had expressed them better and died long enough ago to make the comparison especially humiliating. He opened documents, named them, stared into their immaculate vacancy and closed them again. Eventually even the blank page seemed bored with him.
He was fifty-one and lived alone in a narrow house whose mortgage had reached the tranquil stage of no longer being worth thinking about because neither he nor the mortgage would survive it. The house stood in a row of houses constructed during an age when a front room, a back room and a patch of damp earth had been considered sufficient architecture for a complete human destiny. Mark worked in the front room. The back room contained books he meant to read and an exercise bicycle whose little screen continued offering congratulations to the dark.
On 14 March, at 4:17 in the morning, he woke with the word Shomrim in his mind.
It was not a voice. Voices were melodramatic and had paperwork attached to them. It was a word possessing the peculiar authority of something remembered. He lay still and inspected it. Shomrim. He knew neither its language nor its meaning. He knew only that it was plural.
Beside it, already attached, was another phrase: grounding resonance.
Mark reached for his phone, found his glasses under the phone and the phone under a paperback about the death of attention, then searched the word. Hebrew. Watchmen, guardians, keepers. Singular: shomer.
“Of course,” he said.
It was the sort of “of course” one uttered when nothing was obvious.
He went downstairs. The house was cold but not honestly cold; it possessed the niggling, legalistic chill of modern insulation, always sufficient to prevent complaint and never sufficient to provide comfort. He made coffee, opened a blank document and typed the word in capitals.
SHOMRIM
He looked at it for a while.
Mark’s ideas usually approached wearing evidence of the journey. They brought scraps with them: an overheard remark, a scientific curiosity, an irritation with the news, some neglected human behaviour asking to be made sinister. This one arrived laundered. It had no provenance. Worse, it had structure.
The Shomrim were not gods and not aliens in the muscular, mineral-extracting sense. They had no interest in gold, water, reproductive organs or the Pentagon. Matter was the cheap part of the universe. Their shells could be powered by sunlight; their station drank more energy from the sun in an hour than its material systems required in a year. They had solved propulsion, fabrication and physical continuity long before reaching Earth.
What they had not solved was consciousness.
Mark stopped typing.
He did not yet know what it meant, but he knew it was right.
The Shomrim were consciousnesses embodied in mechanical shells. Their original planet was gone. Destroyed, abandoned, rendered unsuitable—it did not matter yet. Their machines had carried them away from physical death and into a more intimate emergency. Consciousness had evolved in relationship with a living world. Remove it from weather, soil, animal warmth, biological time and the innumerable answers a planet gave without being asked, and consciousness began to lose adhesion. The shell functioned. The mind inside it ceased to care.
Their problem was not energy. It was mood.
Without grounding resonance, a Shomer became anxious, then depressed, then anhedonic, then catatonic. The Station ceased to feel like a home and revealed itself as machinery. Relationships remained factually present but emotionally unavailable. Tomorrow continued to exist while shedding every reason to enter it. At the end of deprivation there was no spectacular mechanical death. The shell was intact. Its occupant simply terminated the occupation.
Mark leaned back.
This, at least, had the indecency of a usable premise: a technically immortal species whose members killed themselves because immortality felt unbearable.
Mark typed on, in a surprising reverie.
The Shomrim had discovered Earth before recorded history, when human beings still lived in broad attunement with the planet that made them. Not paradise.
Mark distrusted paradises; they were gated communities with no narrative arc.
People became ill. Children died. Animals attacked. Winter demonstrated its views. But the ordinary human mind was not estranged from its own experience. Fear belonged to dangers, grief to losses, tiredness to labour. A bad event did not automatically recruit ten imaginary events and a theory of personal worthlessness.
Humanity possessed what the Shomrim lacked. It resonated with its world.
And resonance, once disturbed, produced something.
Mark did not have a name for the precursor. He wrote RETURN in capitals and disliked it immediately. Then YIELD, which was worse but usefully worse.
The Shomrim could direct a phase-inverted quantity of their stored resonance towards a human consciousness. This did not enter the mind. It could not read thoughts, manufacture beliefs or seize the will. It jammed the relationship between consciousness and surroundings.
Timing deteriorated. Intuition arrived stripped of authority. A person overlooked what they would ordinarily have noticed, spoke when silence would have served, remained silent at the one survivable moment for speech. Misfortune did not materialise from nothing. Its available routes became easier to enter.
The human called it bad luck.
The resulting anxiety generated the precursor. The Shomrim collected it, refined it and converted it into artificial resonance for themselves. Human consciousness was both receiver and signal. Dissonance entered; worry amplified it; the mind broadcast the struggle of attempting to restore its natural state. The Shomrim harvested that struggle.
Mark read the paragraph back.
It was mad, obviously. But madness was no longer disqualifying. In 2039, respectable people proposed that collective low mood resulted from solar activity, intestinal fungi, ancestral trauma, algorithmic weather and a hitherto unnoticed frequency emitted by reinforced concrete. Mark’s parasitical emigrants were as good a guess as anyone else’s. Better, perhaps, because he had no intention of founding a clinic.
He wrote in the margin:
They do not eat suffering. They convert it into relief from their own.
Then beneath it:
They disturb our relationship with the world so they can tolerate having no world of their own.
The second sentence troubled him. Not because it was weak. Because it seemed quoted.
He searched the phrase. No result. He searched smaller portions. Nothing. The sentence was his, insofar as sentences belonged to the person at whose keyboard they appeared. Still, it possessed none of the provisional quality of invention. It had arrived complete, with the polished severity of a line revised elsewhere.
By seven, the Shomrim had acquired an economy:
They held resonance in personal accounts. It was the perfect regulatory substance: no intoxication, no tolerance, no overdose and no benefit beyond what an individual consciousness required. A Shomer could not become euphoric by taking too much. Additional resonance simply remained unused. Wealth therefore purchased not greater pleasure but continuity—the guarantee that one would remain capable of pleasure next year, and the year after that.
Some held centuries. Some held days.
As humanity multiplied, so did they. The first surveyors had extracted little from a small population and survived partly upon reserves brought from elsewhere. Later arrivals came as the human crop expanded. The Station enlarged, reproduction resumed, private balances grew, and a temporary dependence became civilisation. They were no longer using humanity to endure an emergency. They had arranged every promise, institution and unborn Shomer around the assumption that human dissonance would remain available.
Then they overfarmed it.
The thought came with such force that Mark stood up.
The Global Affective Mean. The loss of future adhesion. The falling birth rate, the collapsing expectation, the exhausted cultures repeating old entertainments with younger faces. By 2035 the Shomrim’s problem had become visible from the field itself. Human beings still suffered abundantly, but suffering no longer created the former yield. A person expecting disappointment could not be efficiently disappointed. A generation that did not expect homes, security, institutional honesty or durable love offered little altitude from which to be dropped.
The Shomrim had mistaken distress for productivity.
They had depleted hope, which was the nutrient beneath the nutrient.
Mark walked into the back room and stood beside the congratulatory bicycle. Dawn had begun whitening the window. Across the narrow gardens, other houses emerged as shapes and then as obligations. Lights came on. Human beings prepared themselves for another day with the subdued competence of a species determined not to make a fuss about its own disappearance.
He returned to the desk.
There had to be a final harvest.
The phrase arrived with its own administrative calm: terminal harvest.
When ordinary expectations had collapsed, one remained. Even the pessimists expected civilisation to continue tomorrow. They renewed contracts, made dental appointments, bought food for Thursday. A world war would destroy that final collective assumption and produce an immense immediate yield. Enough resonance to sustain the Shomrim through the fallow decades while humanity rebuilt its numbers, confidence and capacity for disappointment.
But war, once begun, could not be controlled. The dissonance would become atmospheric, then self-amplifying. Human fear would jam other humans without further intervention from the Station. The Shomrim could initiate the event and collect its yield. They could not determine whether ten per cent of humanity died or ninety.
At ninety per cent, the harvest would be magnificent.
It would also be the last.
Mark saved the document.
The clock showed 8:52. He had written for more than four hours without checking the news, his messages, his sales or the precise location of his career in the long corridor between obscurity and death. This was unusual. More unusual was the absence of the little adjudicating voice that normally accompanied his work, marking sentences too pleased with themselves and ideas previously achieved by better men in 1957.
He felt exceptionally well.
Not excited. Excitement contained instability. He felt aligned. The coffee had gone cold without becoming accusatory. The room seemed neither cramped nor temporary. Even the light had stopped behaving like something rationed by England.