There was movement in the panels and it's how Daniel always knew that the morning was coming. It was by the sound of the solar array as it began its rotation cycle, it was a low mechanical exhale that travelled through the dome's outer shell and into the walls of every building pressed against the city's upper tier.
It was down through the floors and up through the bed frame and into the small of his back where he was still half asleep with his eyes already open.
There it is, He was waiting for it without even knowing he was waiting. He recognized the sound as he memorized it from before.
He finally got up from his bed, and he always tend to wake up before his mother did. He slowly walked to his window and just took his routinely stare outside in the city.
The window in his room faced east because it was designated as such, which is the same direction as the solar panels faced in the first phase of the day cycle, so that the light felt like the real thing and came at the right time when it finally came.
As Daniel stood there, he softly touches the window towards the outside watching the array move and you could see it from there if you looked at the right angle, past the residential block on the opposite side of the street and up along the dome's interior curve where the panels ran along the horizontal rows like the scales of something alive and enormous.
As they rotated in near - perfect unison the thousands of them were each tilting two or three degrees every few minutes in response of whatever calculation the grid management system was running that morning. The coordination of it was the thing Daniel had never stopped finding beautiful even though he had seen it every morning for as long as he could remember.
It's so cool how they can do that together without being aware of it. he thought as he wondered if that was what made it more impressive of less.
As he watched the light come gradually and the slow gradient of dawn came through and he stood there wondering if people even cared that it was stimulated anymore.
His father once told him that this was either a gift or a curse depending on the day it was. When he said that the two of them laughed as usual although Daniel was never sure whether his father was joking or not.
Below his window the street was empty except for a maintenance worker crossing toward the service access point on the corner. They were moving with the particular efficiency of someone who has been awake for hours and has stopped resenting it.
Daniel watched him and felt the low steady hum of the man's boredom without wanting to. He felt the mind running on routine and finally brought himself to look away because it wasn't for him to feel something like that and he knew that he didn't fully understand what it means.
The feeling of people arriving in his mind uninvited was happening to him more often than lately and the sensations weren't his own but were things that settled into his chest with a familiarity that it made it hard for him to push against them.
He didn't know what they were and he also didn't tell anyone about them.
He heard his father's alarm from down the hall; it was three short tones which were the Syndicate-standard wake cycle. Alexandre Ceaser III was his father and he had always set his alarm to match his work schedule for so many years that the rhythms had stopped being distinguishable from each other.
Daniel found that both admirable and faintly sad in a way which he couldn't articulate. The sound of a door, then water running with the addition of the cadence of his father moving through the morning with purpose.
He had the forward-leaning energy of a man who believed in the day before it had done anything to deserve it.
I'm pretty sure he's already thinking about thereview, Daniel thought unsure if whether he was guessing or knowing.
(Later that morning)
Breakfast was eggs and grain bread and the bitter synthetic coffee his mother pretended wasn't synthetic and the kitchen was warm in the way that kitchens are when someone has been up in them before everyone else.
Daniel sat down across his father and watched him read something on his Syndicate-issued tablet with the expression he got when he was processing rather than reacting. His face was still while his eyes were moving and one hand wrapped around his cup.
Alexandre was not a large man, but he occupied space differently than most people, with a kind of settled certainty that Daniel had spent his whole life trying to understand and quietly replicate.
His uniform was already pressed on and the junior council insignia on his collar catching the kitchen light was not particularly an impressive insignia yet, but Daniel looked at it the way you look at something that is in the process of becoming impressive.
You're up early,'' his mother finally utters as she's setting a plate in front of Daniel without looking at him.
''The panels woke me up''
''The wake everyone up.'' She adds subtly. ''You're just the only who got up.''
His father looked over the top of the tablet. He had a way of looking at Daniel that was different from how he looked at everything else, it was more direct and curious.
It was as if Daniel were a problem he was enjoying rather than solving. ''What were you doing at the window?''
''Watching the rotation of the array, and a ship that came in...''
''From Dome Arren'' Alexandre said without looking up. ''It's the syndicate delegation that has ''
Daniel thought about that for a moment. How the ship crossed four days of dead land to get her, the dome growing from a point of light on the horizon into something large enough to fill the sky with the ship carrying the dust of the in-between on its underside.
He finally said, ''I like how the panels all move together, but each one is just responding to its own, it's like none of them are aware of each other. Which I found interesting.''
His father was quiet for a moment, and Daniel couldn't tell if he was being considered or if Alexander was thinking about something else entirely.
His father finally said, ''That's either a beautiful thing or a warning,''
He picked up his tablet again and Daniel felt something warm move through him and he recognized as pride though it was the reflected kind, the kind you feel when someone you love says the same thing you were already thinking.
His mother sat down with her own coffee and looked between them the way she often did at the breakfast with the fond exasperation of someone who has long accepted these are going to do this forever.
''The two of you should eat.'' She finally said.
(At Daniel's school)
School was a twenty-minute walk through the streets that were clean in the way of places cleaned on a schedule. The corners were swept and nothing broken that hadn't been reported or assigned to a maintenance ticket, the regulated hum of the dome's infrastructure running beneath everything like it was a second heartbeat.
Daniel walked it the way he walked everything, being slow enough to notice things that someone who's walking quickly enough would notice him noticing them. And his mind was still half on the transit ship, on the four days of dead land it had crossed and on to other domes out there in the pale expanse.
Arren to the northeast, Tessik further than that, the southern cluster that the Syndicate governed under a different administrative code, each one being a sealed world full of people who had never been everywhere else and mostly didn't think about that.
How did we end up here as a civilization? He thought as he stepped around a maintenance drone trundling along the pavement. Now I the only thing I have of the outer world is from reconstructed footage that's led by assumption.
The thought arrived and settled as he didn't know what to do with it, so he just left it within himself to wonder.
The building here were mid-height and mid-quality as they were also functional and lasting while the design was to be forgotten. It was a working residential and was preferred by the Syndicate to be so.
Meanwhile above, through the elevated walkways the upper district had taller buildings with cleaner grass and better lighting. They were closer to the dome's apex, and the solar allocation up there was written differently in the grid's distribution code.
Below it was Daniel who didn't look down often, but when he did, he could see the service-level structures with the lower and darker building in the dome's foundation ring. It was where light barely reached after filtering through everything that was above.
It's always such a pity looking what's down there he thought and immediately felt like he'd touched something he wasn't ready for.
He arrived a few minutes before the bell rang and he went straight to his usual place. Which was in the back row second from the window and also sightline to both the door and the rest of the room.
He never thought consciously about why he always chose that seat; it was just the one that felt right.
The room filled around him, and he let his attention got loose in the way it did when he wasn't directing it anywhere specific, it was just open and receptive. He took in the texture of the room rather than its detail and in the middle of that, which was nothing really, Seren sat three rows ahead of him and that's where it hit him like cold water moving through cloth.
She was crying, or she had been crying or she was working very hard to no let herself cry. He couldn't see her face clearly from here and that didn't matter, because he could feel the weight of it.
It was a dense sense of grief, specific on arriving on his chest without his approval, but he knew for sure that it was completely hers and Daniel pressed both of his palms flat against the desk and took a breath.
This was something he didn't know how to stop, and he was still trying to figure out how he could stop it.
Not mine, he thought, this was how he figured he could deal with these. These aren't meant for me, so just get them out of me.
It didn't leave and he watched her straighten her spine and fold her hands on the desk while looking forward.
Whatever was happening it was something she decided to put it somewhere it wouldn't be shown, and that's something he respected, even as he sat behind her feeling everything, she'd tried to put it away.
The teacher started the lesson and Daniel listened with most of his mind and gave the rest of it to the strange quiet work of carrying someone else's grief across a room and not knowing what it meant that he could.
Not knowing what it meant seemed to be getting easier and not knowing which of those things he was more afraid of.