There are times when things are too much.

Fewer, now. One of the things that her suite of personal environmental software handles is filtering out unpleasant background noise. It looks at her amygdala, and dynamically modulates her audio environment so that when she's feeling well and capable, she hears almost everything. When she feels overwhelmed, when there's too much to do, when any unexpected noise is a calamitous injury, the sounds of the world fade out, and she hears only her interlocutor, her breath, and familiar calm background music.

There are a dozen things like that.

Her clothing is not really fabric, anymore. Or not just fabric. She clothes herselves in software. In algorithms that ensure things fold neatly. In tiny machine learning models that learn how to modulate the temperature. In a myriad of other tiny, sophisticated adjustments.

Sometimes she imagines the software falling around her shoulders like a cloak, bright golden lines of equations blanketing her and wrapping her up.

It's better, now. The world is softer, gentler. It is clean and precise, just the way she wants it.

And still, at times, it is too much.

So sometimes -- when she has had enough of fighting with diplomats, when her friends have been too excited, when a cat looked at her just wrong -- she retreats to the room.