1 - THE OFFICE

On a cloudy Thursday Lamorna felt like her birthday couldn‘t get much worse. She had hardly slept the night before and watched her alarm clock tick minute for minute until it showed 6.30 a.m. Her back felt like she had been contorted, her neck ached as if she had been lightly choked and her head throbbed. As she tossed the covers aside and looked back at the bed she took a long look at the clock. Its long white hand crept towards the next minute, 6.31 a.m., then another, 6.32 a.m. Lamorna wished that it would already fast forward to 1.30 a.m. so that she could collapse into unconsciousness once more and the day would be over.

The pervasive desire to stay there all day wouldn’t fade from her mind and she wondered if anyone would notice if she followed through with it. Lamorna’s world was a closed loop, a fishbowl of an existence. Either she was at Optix, or cooped up safely in the functional pen of her small flat in the city. The lonesome bed was surrounded with worn and crumpled clothes, almost empty crisp packets and sticky shot glasses. The blatant necessity to clean her room was just one of the many things she was a master of avoiding. And it wasn’t as if anybody was going to notice. The steady hum of passing traffic punctuated by car horns reminder her that there were other people around.

Many a time she had used the covers as a kind of time machine to move the clock forward a few hours. And it wasn’t the first birthday where she could have used the trick. But today was a working day and she resolved to take baby steps and slowly get up. As usual she started by checking Platform: her phone lit up with a couple of messages from people she had never met in real life. Pepper, a young photographer was one such friend. She wondered if Pepper was a bot, that might explain why she answered so quickly and always got in touch. At least one person knew it was my birthday, she smiled and then opened her meditation app, downloaded on a whim and rarely used. The yellow glow of the screen reminded our protagonist of the garish morning television of her childhood. Half expecting a lycra-donned man of middle age to try to motivate her to do some improbable stretches, she swiftly closed the app and put on some music, something repetitive without lyrics. It was too early for words.

Lamorna begrudgingly heaved herself out of bed and made her way to the bathroom, where a bright neon explosion assaulted her senses. The penetrating hum and shrill brightness made her feel like she was being held in a black ops military facility, being interrogated at gunpoint. Her knees felt weak, creaky even, and she held her hand up to shelter her eyes, pained