Digital

Captain Bryce Duncan wakes up at 5:14 a.m., approximately one minute before the alarm clock on his left-side nightstand is programmed to jolt him from his sleep. Taking advantage of the opportunity to spare his wife Julie the annoyance of having her own sleep interrupted more than two hours earlier than her own programmed alarm clock, Bryce disengages the alarm function and carefully extracts himself from his comfortable queen-size bed. Sneaking stealthily away from the bedroom, down the hallway to the tan-carpeted living room, Bryce performs fifty rapid but fully extended pushups in his underwear before going into the bathroom and grooming himself for work. After a light breakfast of Cheerios and milk, Bryce returns to the bedroom, puts on his uniform and kisses his wife on the cheek—who has been in and out of sleep ever since her husband moved out of bed. Bryce prays a silent prayer for his wife before kissing her once more and making his way to the garage, where he gets into the car that he will directly pilot forty-three miles across the desert to the Air Force base, where he will sit at an advanced computer station to indirectly pilot an armed aircraft over the desert skies of Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Pakistan, or Yemen, or—

Kevin Lintman wakes up at 6:50 a.m. to the sound of his mother’s stern voice and rapping knuckles on the other side of his bedroom door. He tries to ignore the disturbance and falls asleep for a further two-and-a-half minutes before his mother opens the door and commands him in an even sterner voice to remove his person from his comfortable twin bed. Kevin slowly extracts himself from the bed, his mind depressed with thinking of the monotony and social awkwardness he most assuredly will experience for the next six-and-a-half hours spent primarily at Grover Cleveland Middle School, located five blocks to the west of his home. With his mind processing remembered interactions from the previous day, meanwhile processing imagined interactions for the quickly approaching future, Kevin shuffles in his cotton pajamas down the hallway to the bathroom and perceives—amidst his simultaneously processing memories and imaginings—a physical dizziness more substantial than his typical morning drowsiness. Relaying this perception aloud to his mother, Mrs. Lintman hurries into the bathroom and proceeds to gauge her son’s temperature via thermometer. Having registered a body temperature of ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit, Mrs. Lintman makes the executive decision to excuse Kevin from attending classes, in the hopes that a day of physical rest will cure the boy of his ailment. Mrs. Lintman prays a quick spoken prayer before kissing her son goodbye and leaving the house for a day of work while Kevin boots up his Xbox 360 and begins to play a military simulation game that has him pretending to shoot terrorist insurgents and bomb pixilated enemy targets over Afghanistan, and Russia, and Brazil, and—

Amir Mohamed wakes up at 11:13 p.m. to the sound of a MIDI ringtone blaring from the Motorola cell phone he shoved under his pillow before laying down to sleep a little less than an hour ago. Agitated and annoyed, he nevertheless scrambles to answer the call and talks briefly to his uncle Rahim who has been giving him some easy work on the side delivering packages to his business associates around and about the city. Heeding the urgent and near incomprehensible tone of his uncle’s voice through the receiver, Amir scrambles from his comfortable white-sheeted mattress and tiptoes down the hall past the opened bedroom of his father—a bricklayer by trade who employs his son and disapproves of his brother’s dealings with the boy. Stepping into the warm night air, Amir jogs around to the alley behind the house, where he jumps onto the motorcycle that he pilots about two miles to his uncle’s mansion on the outskirts of the city. Along the way, as he darts among the thoroughfares and side streets, past scores of shuttered storefronts and silent residences, his mind replays a scolding received from his father, ponders the mysterious brazenness of his uncle’s recent behavior and his increasingly erratic schedule. When Amir greets his uncle with an enthusiastic apology for his delayed arrival, his kind words are met with curses and sarcasm. Rahim supplies his nephew with a large envelope, an address and a stern warning not to entrust the package to anyone other than a man bearing a certain appearance that Rahim describes and reiterates three times before sending Amir on his way. About three blocks from his uncle’s house, Amir looks again at the address and remembers delivering a package to the same location weeks earlier. It was a farmhouse about three miles outside the city proper, where the man of the house had two gorgeous daughters who both laughed at Amir when he nervously jumped aside as a large, friendly goat ran up to inspect him. Amir drives and imagines marrying the elder daughter and learning from his wife how to raise goats and teaching his wife how to drive a motorcyle. He thinks about all of the things he has failed to understand and experience by living all of his life within a city instead of on a farm. As he leaves the city streets for the country road, Amir begins to worry about finding his way. He looks for landmarks on the sides of the road but sees only an expanse of darkness under a moonless night sky. He turns down a road, still uncertain of his bearings and turns down yet another road he thinks is the one that leads to the farmhouse. When he gets to the end of the road he smells smoke. A plume appears to be rising from the spot where a house should be. Amir looks around and moves closer. He can feels the ground sloping in front of him and realizes he is descending into a crater. He touches the ground, which feels neither hot nor cold. Amir, frightened, runs back to his bike, which he pilots back in the direction of the city. All along the way Amir tries to reach his uncle, who is not answering his phone. Amir finds his way back to the city and his father’s house, where he sleeps for the remainder of the night. In the morning he wakes up early and hurries outside to his motorcycle. Amir realizes, for the first time, he has lost his uncle’s package. It being a weekend, Amir gets on his motorcyle and drives to an Internet café ten blocks away. In the hazy sub-basement building he sits at the computer station in the farthest corner of the room and scours the news for anything that might relate to his confusing experience. Mouse in hand, Amir follows link after link. He reads about current events in India, in Israel, in the United States. He gets distracted and searches for threads of information that lead to nowhere.