The Somnulence

“Boss! Boss! Anything I can get you?”

“Still no, Dexter.” Drenched in sweat and some indeterminate amount of vomit, Eleanor only needs the cold, friendly tiles of the bathroom floor. And for her attentive research assistant to go very far away. If only she could drift off to sleep, and spend the day unconscious on the floor, forgetting his annoying bird face, her pile of paperwork, and the meeting.

In time, though, she hauls herself up and restores some professional order. There is no avoiding this day. 

“Morning, boss!” Dexter meerkats out of nowhere as soon as she opens the door.

The surprise threatens to send her back to the bathroom, but she rallies in time. “Dexter, go get started on the tests for this afternoon.”

He hesitates, wanting to ask her again, but a look at her pale face sends him back to the lab. 

“He’s not going to let it go.” Maia says, once Eleanor finally drags herself to her office. 

“I know.” Eleanor flips open her planner to see what she has on for the morning. The afternoon’s agenda she remembers all too well. 

“It seems like it might be an interesting…”

“It’s not, Maia.” It comes out more forcefully than she intends. “I saw two similar projects in Munich when I was an undergrad and both failed completely.”

“Yes, but he…”

Bile rises and sweat blooms--she can’t handle this right now. “He needs to do what he’s told. That’s what being the research assistant is all about.” 

Maia is godmother to Eleanor’s daughter, can do every step of the single ladies dance perfectly, and certainly remembers that Eleanor indulged her every scientific whim when she was the new fish. There are ears everywhere. If only Maia would put it all together, but she clearly hasn’t. But she decides to lower her eyebrow and give her hypocritical, sweaty boss a break.

“Well I noted a few things that need your eyes this morning, and before you leave you need to sync up with Dr. Danaus before you leave or they’ll be hell to pay. And of course you have your special lunch meeting.” This last she says in the same high-pitched tone she would use for saying someone has a big date. Eleanor hasn’t said anything to her team about her condition, but with her puking her guts out every morning, and a meeting with a UWA representative on her calendar, there wasn’t much that she needed to say. Everyone has had the courtesy to maintain an ignorant facade, except for Maia, since they share everything. Or they used to.

“It’s crazy how different it’ll be this time.”

It was different, in ways that Maia would never be able to understand. Eleanor’s daughter Nina had been born 5 years ago, before the Somnulence. 

The Somnulence had stolen upon an unsuspecting world. First a couple of reports out of India and Turkmenistan. Then it became fodder for the late night hosts. It was a new sound particle weapon. Anyone in range of its beam fell asleep, immediately and deeply. They would be completely fine, but fully unconscious for 5 to 6 hours, and couldn’t be woken before then except by extreme medical intervention. In a world so full of death, the Somnulence felt beautifully benign. 

Eleanor’s doctoral degree was in static sound dilation, and she did quite a few rounds of interviews in those early days. New York, DC--if her male counterparts got more invites, well, that's the way things were then. One of the Countless Indignities that Nina would never know, and Maia would forget. 

Things changed when the Bank of London and Versailles were hit on the same day. And then a scientist in Bulgaria had figured out how it worked and, in an attempt to help, published a Youtube video. They took it down, but far too late. No one talked about those scary weeks anymore. The schools were closed, and Eleanor and Paul barely left their apartment even though Nina was screeching to go to the train museum. 

But then a small bank in Rouen was attacked. It wouldn’t even have made the news--it wasn’t in the top fifty attacks of that day, but when Lucrece Renard saw all of her colleagues drop she laid down as well. The thieves made their way to the vault, not one of them staying to guard the employees and patrons they were confident would be out for the next few hours, and she just got up. She walked out the door, down the cobblestone street to the police station. Many expensive medical exams later the doctors realized they had only needed a $10 drug store test--and that’s how Lucrece and the world learned that her boyfriend had lied about having had a vasectomy, and that pregnant women were immune to the effects of the Somnulence.

Quickly organizations sprang up to manage security systems with pregnant women. Every group was led entirely by women. It didn’t take long for the groups to merge into a global organization, the United Women’s Alliance. Within months, the world had completely changed. Worldwide universal healthcare, fully funded childcare, equal pay, but it went beyond that. The UWA’s mission was to completely end gender inequality. When Nina’s school held an assembly to review the new UWA-approved health curriculum, every mother cried. Eleanor had cried deep, hacking sobs, thinking about the world she had been about to blithely hand her daughter. She couldn’t help but remember the assembly she had gone to in high school, in which two actors did skits about abstinence. In one, the woman gave the man a box of chocolates for Valentine’s day, and he was disappointed to find a few of them had been eaten.

Those colleagues who had done more and more prestigious interviews, they were gone now. Eleanor never discussed it with anyone, not with Maia, not with her husband. But from the beginning she knew that the problem of the Somnulence wasn’t unsolvable. When the attacks first began, she started running calculations. But after Lucrece, after the rise of the UWA, she stopped. Because…because she stopped. 

Two of the most senior researchers in her field retired, quickly and quietly, in the first few months after the UWA was established. Then Yavan Kaiser, her old mentor in Munich was fired, for undisclosed reasons, and he never responded to any of her calls or emails. Two weeks later, his former partner who ran a lab in Switzerland was arrested for solicitation. The case, as outlined in the newspapers, was almost laughably airtight.  

Eleanor gets nothing done, how could she, and when she leaves the lab she avoids Dexter in the prep room. He’s only start in on his discovery again, and she can’t take it today. Every time he’s taken her through it, she’s stared at his face. She hasn’t known him long, and she can’t read him. He seems like such a good kid, a baby, really. Does he know what he has? If so, does he understand the implications? He’s never mentioned the Somnulence, but is that a calculated omission? But if so, does he think somehow she’d miss it?

The door snicks shut behind her, and she enters the central hub. Each lab shoots off it like a spoke. The interior wall is all windows, looking out onto a courtyard. There is a meticulously maintained green space, thriving and growing upwards, a heart of green surrounded by chrome and glass. Eleanor would usually eat her lunch out there, sitting on one of the benches that surrounded the trees, looking up at the windows high above at the rain or, more rarely, the sun. But not today. 

Instead she is shown to a table in the faculty dining room. Her dining partner was already there, a UWA representative she had until now only spoken to on the phone, Krishna. She was one of those women who was perfectly put together. You could put a TV camera on her, drop her in the middle of a dance in Vienna, or sit her in a boardroom with 100 executives, and she’d look the part. Her purple suit was tailored, formal, but the color had whimsy enough to put Elenor at ease, despite the nausea and ethical dilemma. 

Krisha launched into her spiel, congratulating Eleanor on her pregnancy, and taking her step by step through everything. She’d go on leave a month before her due date, or earlier if complications demanded it, and then have a year of parental time, as would her husband. Nurses would visit every few days to check on them once they returned home from the hospital, then a registered helper would come on a daily basis to cook, clean, and care for them for a few weeks until things were more manageable. Then for the last three months, if desired, she could start her child in childcare part time, and take on a special contract job--either do remote security from the comfort of her home, or they would put her in contact with a lab that needed some asynchronous research. This was how it was now. 

“Given that you have a clear number two, we’ll help you get everything ready for Maia to run the lab in your absence. Then when you return, she can be promoted to a more senior position, or we’ll help her find a lab of her own to lead.” Krisha continued. The sounds around them seemed, to Eleanor, too loud. No one was close enough to hear their conversation, but the words of their fellow diners were out of sync with each other--their cadence was wrong, like they were speaking in different meters. 

“Oh! And we’re piloting a new initiative. You can bring your daughter to any of your doctor’s appointments you want, and there will be age-appropriate resources for her to learn about childbirth and having a sibling! It’s really wonderful--I swear we’ll have more obstetricians than we could possibly need in about 20 years!” 

Nina would love that. Nina, who will not go through what Eleanor did, if indeed she does pursue science or medicine.

“Now do you have any questions for me?” 

Eleanor has no questions. She heaves a breath. “There’s a new researcher in the lab…” She searches Krishna’s face for reaction, for understanding, but there is nothing. If they were on Zoom, she would have thought she was frozen. But she’s flesh and blood. Somehow, without doing anything, her lunchmate projects an even deeper level of calm into the room. The discordant sounds of dishes become more melodious, and around them the tones of conversations order themselves correctly. 

Eleanor draws in a long breath, and looks down at the knotty wood of the table. “He’s made a breakthrough.”

There’s silence. Krishna tilts her head to the side slightly. “Well that’s very exciting! Your team must be coming up with new and exciting discoveries every day. I’m quite jealous of course. I’m always having meetings in the most glorious places like this, then it’s back to the desk! I’d love to hear more about it, but I’m afraid I have a few other meetings to get to today.” She stands, not in a rush, but moving with calm purpose, like a river. 

She reaches down and puts her hand on Eleanor’s, giving it a squeeze. Eleanor forces herself to look into her eyes. “Everything will be taken care of.” And then she’s gone.