The notification arrived at three in the morning.
I knew it was three because I had been awake, which was not unusual in itself but was unusual in its quality. Most of my sleepless periods had a texture of anxious, restless circling of problems that had not yet resolved into solutions. This one was different. I had been lying in the dark with the particular stillness of a man who is not troubled but is thinking, turning the pieces of the Harren problem over in my mind the way you turn stones in your hand to understand their weight and balance.
And then the system spoke.
Not in sound. It never used sound, which I had occasionally found myself grateful for, imagining how difficult it would have been to explain a disembodied notification chime to Darius at three in the morning. It manifested the way it always did, as text at the edge of perception, readable only to me, visible only in the space between thinking and seeing.
