The only electronics she’d brought with her had no data: her tablet carried a mirror of 50% of the library Econ section (the professors having partitioned everything they could of Robarts into program-specific collections that could be locally stored), her models and simulations and their databases, and a folder of every Touhou game. By the time she got on the caravan she had also run out of her own lithium prescription. She wondered if Whabouchi would even be producing for medical purposes when she got there, or whether electronics would take priority until shortages ended, which she couldn’t even complain about given they were the only thing she did on the way north. She charged at truck stops; everyone did; there were lineups. Which would be harder to deal with, life without lithium or without her tablet? She should have played more Farmville. With lithium, she could ‘wonder’ about these questions. Without it, she argued them with herself in voices that repeated in shorter louder broken phrases until her neighbours could hear her over their phone speakers. She kicked it around the trailer once and after that they didn’t even pretend to talk to her but respected her, and she felt worse because nothing got in the way of the words in her head.

Words, at least, not voices, although they had voices; it was hard to explain, and there was no one to explain it to. The sun didn’t seem to be getting any further away; if anything, it seemed to be consuming more of the sky with its whiteness, which was hotter than the sickly yellow she remembered through the Toronto wildfire smog. (Evening, when it looked like they were descending into hell, was no better.) Maybe it was following them. Maybe something was happening with the atmosphere that hadn’t been in the models, that would consume them in months or days, that she couldn’t read without a connection. Maybe her skin was just getting more sensitive, more recursively aware of itself, as her lithium brainfreeze wore off. She curled up where the window-glare couldn’t reach her and absorbed herself in danmaku, just like she had done when she had started taking it, when she felt like a caveman who had been brained with a big rock.

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