The baby needs to be walked a lot. If she is not walked she yells. So Rebecca walks and walks and knows the hallway well enough to do it with her eyes closed, so she does it with her eyes closed because she's so tired, so she doesn't see the difference until she hears her footsteps on concrete instead of carpet.
As soon as the baby seems to be done nursing, a teenager will come by to collect it.
For the rest of the afternoon, Rebecca will be brought a baby occasionally for nursing and then allowed to sleep undisturbed. When the sun sets, Catherine is placed in her tent. Throughout the night, Rebecca has a sense that if she leaves the tent something horrible will happen.
"Okay, so the world became really confusing seven years ago," the teenager says, "and we think you got transported forward in time or spontaneously created with inaccurate memories or something. We're going to take you to Lev and he's going to figure out what's going on and explain everything to you. It's only a day's canoe away, and you can nap in the canoe if you didn't get enough sleep last night. --One of the consequences of the confusing things is that it is really important that everyone get enough sleep."
"Weird things," the teenager says, opening the tent flaps. "Dealing with weird things is way above my pay grade."
Now that Rebecca is less sleep-deprived, she may notice that the street has mostly disappeared under a carpet of grass, all the buildings are crumbling and covered with vines and moss, three or four people appear to be napping on the sidewalk, and a waffle bar is walking merrily along the street.
After some amount of canoeing and busyness on the part of the people on land, Rebecca can disembark and be greeted by a short, unnervingly skinny man with dark curly hair and an aura of extreme stress. He is probably older than eighteen but not by much.
"Hi, I'm Lev, I run Eros. I hear you're Rebecca?"
"So, seven years ago, in 2018, everyone aged 18 or older suddenly felt this overwhelming overpowering desire to take a nap. And if they did, they went to sleep and they didn't wake up. They don't need food or water, animals don't attack them, they stay alive remarkably well, they just... never wake up. We call this event the Bliss, because it seems like they're having happy dreams, and we call the unconscious people the sleepers."
Various music apps - tuner, metronome, keyboard, her actual music player. Games, some simple puzzles and some music themed and one task management themed around nursing. Phone, texting, three different chat apps. Bank, doctor appointment app, grocery coupon app, grocery list app. Maps, reminders, calendar, camera full of pictures of Catherine and (longer ago) various other people, some Rebecca's age and some older. A school app, a web browser, an app for a pizza place.
"We have the pope. He's sixteen. A bishop realized the Bliss was happening, called the Vatican, somehow was put through to the Pope, and received permission to ordain a nine-year-old a bishop immediately before the Pope blissed. The Catholics generally consider this to be a bona fide miracle, so there have been a lot of converts."
"I don't think it's against the rules, but I think it was kind of frowned on? I don't know, I didn't pay that much attention in Hebrew school. I just mean that one Jewish guy and ten Jewish women gets you more Jewish babies than the other way around, and if children have a non-Jewish father and a Jewish mother they're still considered Jewish, but not the other way around."
"The aliens aren't from our world. They're from a parallel world we call the dream world because it's-- dream-logic-y, the same way the forklifts and the waffle bars and the Something are. Using a special machine called the anima, we can transport ourselves from our world to theirs and travel through it safely."
"The dream world is weird. Places in the dream world correspond to places in our world but they're-- different. Space is warped. Sometimes you ride ten floors in an elevator and end up at the place you started. Sometimes things are, for no readily apparent reason, castles or theme park rides or pizza restaurants. There are people but they're all like NPCs in a video game-- they have three or four or five lines, but they don't respond to new situations. It's also shaped by the people who are in it. Some people get stunningly beautiful landscapes with mountains and glaciers, even in the middle of Cleveland. Some people get weirdly still and eerie dreamscapes. Some people get mazes that they can't escape from. One person got into theirs, screamed, and then refused to ever get in an anima again."
"Yep! The aliens themselves are awful though. They look like people you knew from the past-- your elementary school math teacher, your parents, your old crew leader. But when you look at them you know it's not them. And they have this-- aura of unthinkable horror. They're just-- wrong. And when you're around one it feels like you're moving through water, all your movements are slow, no matter how panicked you are and how much you want to speed it up."
"The pilot goes into the dream world. To protect themselves, they form a giant robot we also call an anima. The anima is formed out of your relationships with people you love. The chassis of the robot comes from a person we call the anchor, who also acts as mission control. But you can turn other relationships into-- guns, or sensors, or fists, or whatever you like."
"Since the robot is made out of your feelings for people, when a part of the robot is destroyed, it damages your relationship with them. People get-- insecure, or angry, or easily irritated. They start thinking about all the other person's faults, or their bad memories, and don't think about their virtues or the good parts of the relationship. If you get injured in the dream world, it turns into emotional problems in our world-- depression, or hearing voices, or anger issues, or anxiety."
"Yeah. If you're not a pilot it happens sort of randomly, but it's more likely to happen if you sleep too much or too little. We think that if you're generally happy and not too stressed it's less likely to happen. But pilots bliss a lot. Pilots with more powerful animas tend to bliss more, and so do pilots who have had bad breakups. Anyone who tries to pilot over the age of 18 blisses."
"What else-- oh, if fish swim through the air near the lake that's normal and it doesn't mean you're seeing things. If you're ever trapped somewhere and need to escape, you'll always be able to find a way out, even if you've been there before and you know there's no way to escape. And strange cats are often powerful and will try to protect you from harm."
"Our list of contraceptive methods is the pullout method, the rhythm method, homosexuality, not having penis-in-vagina sex, poisoning yourself in the hopes the fetus dies before you do, and natural family planning which no one can do because it requires so much paper to chart. All of these are unlikely to work for many people."
"That's really weird," she says. "Like, coming from a place where there's bitoxiphosphene. I haven't put Catherine down since she was born except when people here borrowed her so I could sleep, 'cause people kept telling me it would be better to give her up for adoption so she could have two parents, and stuff."
"Okay. I'll send you to Rebecca-- she's a pharmacist, she does all our medical stuff-- to get that sorted, and I'll send someone to ask around if there are any clothes in your size. If you need anything, you can write it with your name on the whiteboard outside my office, or use paper if it's private."
"...I guess they're alternate Earths but it's really weird that your Earth has a Tumblr and my Earth had a Tumblr and apparently they were founded decades apart? Social networking site, blue, extremely poorly maintained, allegedly an image-sharing site but mostly people used it for arguing about really dumb shit?"
"In the short term, we're trying to clear out the aliens from a larger and larger area. If there aren't any aliens in the area, there aren't any drones. In the long term, we're trying to figure out how to talk to them and figure out what they want and why they invaded and if there's a way we can negotiate, and we're trying to understand the dream world better so we can understand how to do things like wake the sleepers. Both of those require a lot of research in the dream world, which pilots do."
"It's your first week, so why don't you try helping out with Ada-- she's the teacher-- for a few days and see if you think you could handle the threes-fours-fives classroom, and do some singing at night to see if people will ask that that be one of your jobs, and if both of those don't work out you can garden?"