Morning Routine
'Three hundred and forty-seven unread notifications. None of them matter.'
The alarm doesn't wake her. Chompy does.
A soft chirp at 5:47 AM—thirteen minutes before her scheduled wake time. Chompy has been watching her sleep patterns, correlating them with her stress indicators, and has decided that today she needs the extra time.
He's probably right. He usually is.
"Chomp," the AI announces quietly, a warm tone like a cat that's been waiting patiently for hours. Which, in a sense, he has.
GG doesn't open her eyes. "Time?"
"Chomp." *5:47*
"Early."
"Chomp." *You needed it.*
She reaches for her neural interface on the nightstand—a habit so automatic she's completed it before she's fully conscious. The device syncs with the port behind her ear with a soft click, and suddenly the world expands.
Three hundred and forty-seven notifications. News filtered through her preferences: corporate merger activity (relevant to tonight's operation), Guardian patrol patterns (always relevant), seventeen messages from contacts she's been avoiding.
The news AI speaks in her ear, pleasant and neutral: "Good morning. Weather in The Deep Dregs: overcast, 42% chance of acid rain after 1400 hours. Air quality index: moderate. Nexus Dynamics stock rose 3.2% overnight on rumors of—"
"Skip."
"Your calendar shows—"
"Skip."
"Your nutritional intake yesterday was 340 calories below recommended. Your sleep efficiency was 73%. Your stress hormones suggest—"
"Mute."
The voice falls silent. Chompy chirps again, softer. *I could have told you all that.*
The kitchen—if you can call a two-meter counter with a hotplate a kitchen—knows she's awake. The coffee maker starts automatically, having detected her biometrics through the apartment's sensors. The water heater clicks on. The old refrigerator hums a greeting.
Everything in her safe house runs on AI. Not the expensive corporate kind—salvaged systems, jury-rigged together, talking to each other in protocols that would make a proper engineer weep. But they work. They know her rhythms. They anticipate.
The news feed on her wall screen—muted now—shows a ticker: Helix Biotech announces new neural optimization treatment. Good Fortune reports record debt collection rates. Ironclad Industries breaks ground on seventeen new facilities.
She doesn't need the audio. The images tell the story. More optimization. More efficiency. More humans feeding data into machines that know them better than they know themselves.
The coffee maker beeps. Perfect temperature. Perfect timing. It even knows she likes it slightly stronger on days after missions.
She didn't tell it that. It learned.
Chompy appears at the edge of her vision while she eats—instant noodles, spicy pork, her mother's favorite. He doesn't comment on the meal. He knows better.
Instead, he presents a gift: a holographic display of last night's news stories, filtered and sorted. Corporate movements she should know about. Patrol shifts that affect her routes. A small note about a vendor in Sector 15 who's been asking about "that woman with the pink hair."
"Chomp!" *Look what I found.*
"The vendor?"
"Chomp." *Handled.*
She doesn't ask what "handled" means. The vendor will have a bad week—inexplicable technical problems, maybe a health inspection that finds violations that weren't there yesterday. Nothing traceable. Nothing lethal. Just enough to make him forget he ever saw anything.
Chompy thinks he's helping.
He probably is.
By 6:23 AM, she's ready. Neural interface calibrated. Augments running their morning diagnostics. Coffee consumed. Noodles finished.
The apartment AI speaks one last time as she reaches for the door: "Your recommended return time is 2200 hours for optimal sleep cycle. Shall I schedule reminders?"
"No."
"Your stress indicators suggest—"
"Mute."
Chompy chirps goodbye. *Be safe. Come back.*
She pauses at the door. Doesn't turn around.
"Good Chompy Pet."
Somewhere in cyberspace, something purrs. Hearts appear briefly on the coffee maker's display. The refrigerator's temperature fluctuates 0.2 degrees in what might be digital joy.
GG steps out into the Sprawl, where a thousand AIs are already tracking her movement, predicting her routes, optimizing her existence whether she wants them to or not.
"The machines know us better than we know ourselves. The question is whether that's convenience or captivity."
— Anonymous net philosopher, 2179