She had the sense that as she gathered her forces, she approached the brink of some invisible precipice, inherent in reality, but usually buffered by the scatter and fuzz of her life before she entered the Container.

A grounded steel box, one of hundreds stacked like Legos behind a chain-link fence garlanded with loopy razor wire, a nameless ex-neighborhood in the lee of a massive highway interchange.

The organic structure of the city had been permanently disrupted here. Already marginalized people evicted, their houses stolen, bulldozed. This tear in the spatial fabric had partially rewoven, but never really healed.

The Veil was thin here.

She felt a momentum building in her, the break timer seeming to ring more and more frequently, strobing between hard cram and kinhin. She had barely started pacing, echoing the length of her steel box when the timer would fire and it was back to the text. Mid-sentence -- BEL -- back to the slow tentative walk, careful, like a physical therapy patient. A conscious effort to connect with the ground through the floor steel floor, the uninhabited container below.

It was critical she stay connected to the ground. The Knight of Disks, stuck to the far wall with blue painter's tape.

Every 28 cycles, a script submitted her grocery order. Zero Contact Delivery. "Please leave outside the gate." Zojirushi. Neuro-Fuzzy. Instant Pot. Nespresso. Jasmine rice, frozen vegetable medley, individually vacuum-sealed servings of frozen farm salmon. Tamari. A small handful of supplements she counted into a box grid like an advent calendar for a Lunar month. 4x7. Breakfast Lunch Dinner Bed.

There was no Bed.

Bed was Tank. Sleep was Tank. This whole apparatus of habit, code, careful incremental restructuring of her life into a support system for Tank.

Every 28 hours, she washed down her Bed pills with a double ristretto, brushed, flossed.

Stripped her soft grey clothes into the laundry bag, and climbed into the lukewarm amnion of Tank.

Her heart leapt.

When you're dreaming, you're alive.