The Normals | ✓

N I N E

After Lyra disappears through the door, I'm left in the house with Arden. I don't want to talk to him or apologize for the table, but at least I know Lyra will let me stay in the house for a while longer. I sit rigidly, looking everywhere but at him and the table.

He finishes gluing the leg and stands up, stretching his arms. "So, apparently Lyra has let you stay for as long as you want."

I nod.

"Hm. Well you're gonna have to figure out what exactly is your plan here, then. I'm not having you living here with no purpose."

"I'll think about it."

"Meanwhile, I have stuff I need to do and I don't want you staying here alone, so you're probably gonna have to come with me when I leave the house," he says. "We'll have to give you some new clothes or something though, because you'll turn heads going out like that. For now, just stay out of trouble until Gwen gets here."

I watch him climb the steps and hear a door upstairs close. Looking around, I contemplate what to do with myself. The living room is comfortably furnished, even though the sofa I'm currently sitting on takes up a big portion of the space. The house itself is fairly open without many walls separating the different sections, which gives the rooms a more spacious feel. Across from me sits a television mounted on a wall of bookshelves. Books fill said bookshelves, spanning from the floor to the ceiling. I get up and take a closer look at them.

Every single book -- and every single piece of furniture in the entire house, for that matter -- is grey. No colour. Not at all. But they vary in size, thickness, topic, and anything else I can think of. I pull one off the shelf. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the title reads. Interesting.

I open the cover and find the book is not what I had in mind. Instead of a story, I find numerous essays written by a neurologist called Oliver Sacks, on some of his patients' histories. The next few books I pick up (Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, The Great Influenza) are all the same. All medical books.

I stretch my arm and pull down a book from the far left of the shelf. How Not to Be Wrong, this one says. Intrigued, I flip the cover open only to find it's a book on math.

I put the book back in frustration. Is there anything actually interesting here?

I walk the length of the bookshelf, trailing my fingers along the titles. The farther left I go, the more the topics of the books stray to things like science and math. The farther right I go, the more I find books on things like architecture, history, and sociology. I pull down a book from the history section, now knowing the title is useless, and open it up.

In the year of two-thousand and forty-five, a deadly virus spread around the world, killing half the population. Billions of people died, and along with it, a third of the plant and animal life. The rest of the human population struggled to survive, and approximately twenty percent of the remaining population eventually died because of the long term effects of the virus. Symptoms included harsh coughing, painful sores on the body, lung and breathing damage, and if the sickness was serious, damage to digestive and reproductive organs. This suggested that a lot of the population were unable to have children.

I look up and around the room. This sounds familiar.

The remaining two billion or so humans started a new way of life. Gradually, building off of the technology from before, they developed new ways to live, and started over.

My mind races, searching through my memories. History lessons. Library classes. Simulations.

They figured out a way to grow humans without flaws using advanced scientific formulas, and built new, improved cities with different laws and methods. By the end of the twenty-second century, humanity had rebuilt itself.