Nobody spoke while his father read.
It took eleven minutes. Samuel counted, because counting was what he did when there was nothing else he could do, and for eleven minutes the only sounds in the living room were the dry whisper of turning pages, the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, and Gabriel trying very hard not to breathe.
His father read the way he did everything: completely. He did not skim the clauses about data. He went back twice to the page about monitoring and kept one finger on a single sentence for a long time. When he reached the end, he squared the pages against the table, closed the folder, and took off his glasses.
"Who read all of this?" he asked.
"I did, sir," said Lia.
"All sixty-one pages."
"And the two appendices."
"Is there anything in here that costs money?"
"Not directly." She did not look at her notes. "The pod stays on loan for as long as Samuel is in the program, the subscription is covered, and the monthly health report is paid from their research budget. Electricity is ours. Internet is ours. The pod needs its own circuit, because it draws more power than an ordinary outlet should carry. A technician will inspect the wiring on the first visit, but any repair is the family's responsibility."
"How much is a repair?"
"I don't know, sir. It depends on the house."
His father nodded slowly. It was the answer he had been hoping for, Samuel realized: an honest number, not a hopeful one.
"Is there a catch?"
"I haven't found one."
"Does that worry you?"
Lia hesitated for exactly one second. "A little," she said.
"Good. It should." He turned his head. "Gabriel."
Gabriel sat up so fast that the armchair creaked. "Yes, sir!"
"Thank you."
"Sir?"
"For telling him first. Not me. Him." His father folded his glasses and set them on the folder. "That was the right order."
Gabriel looked as if someone had pinned a medal to his jersey. Lia, beside him, looked at her knees, but the corner of her mouth moved.
Then his father turned to the sofa, and the room changed.
"Do you want it?"
"It doesn't matter if I want it."
"That's not what I asked."
"Dad, it's the electricity, and the extra hours, and Mom would have to—"
"Samuel."
His father did not raise his voice. He never did. He simply waited, and the waiting had a weight of its own, the weight of a man who had spent thirty years learning exactly how long to stay silent before somebody told him the truth.
Samuel looked at the stopwatch in his hand. At his mother in the kitchen doorway, wringing the dish towel. At the floor.
"I want to run," he said.
It came out smaller than he had meant. "That's stupid. It's a game. I know it's a game. But I've never… I'd just like to know what it feels like. For one minute."
Nobody laughed. Gabriel's eyes were suspiciously bright, and he was suddenly very interested in a cushion.
His father nodded once, as if a figure had finally added up.
"Then that's the answer."
"Dad, we can't—"
"Eighteen years." He said it quietly. "You have never asked me for anything. Not a toy. Not a bicycle. Your sister asks for shoes and I want to sink through the floor because I can't, but at least she asks. You look at the price and you put it back before I can see. Did you think I didn't notice?"
Samuel opened his mouth and found nothing in it.
"I'm not giving you the game," said his father. "They are. What I'm giving you is the outlet."
"Tiago can do it for three-fifty," said his mother from the doorway, very fast, as though she had been holding the number in her mouth for hours. "Maybe less if we buy the cable ourselves. I've already asked." Her voice shook on the last word, and then steadied. "But I need to know what it does to him. Every month. Every visit. Not a brochure. A doctor."
"We'll ask," said his father. "Every time."
"Then yes," said his mother, and began to cry, loudly and without any embarrassment, into the dish towel.
Gabriel left at six, after hugging Samuel's father so hard that the older man's feet nearly left the floor. Lia left a sheet of paper on the coffee table, folded in three. It was titled Questions for the Technician, and it had fourteen numbered items.
"Number nine is the important one," she said at the door.
"What's number nine?"
"'Who, exactly, can see the monitoring data in real time?'" She adjusted her glasses. "I think someone should ask that out loud."
Then she was gone too, and the house settled around them with the heavy, golden quiet of a Saturday evening, and nobody mentioned the cake that nobody had finished.
Samuel did not sleep.
He lay on his back in the dark and ran the numbers the way he always did, an old, bad habit, like pressing a bruise. Three hundred and fifty for the outlet. The electricity bill, which would climb. The extra hours of the extra shifts. Camila's fee, due on the twentieth. The red column in his father's notebook, which he had seen exactly once, when he was twelve, and had never been able to unsee.
Through the wall, his parents were talking in the low, careful voices they used when they believed everyone was asleep.
"…if I bring the cable myself, he said he'd do it Tuesday."
"And the fee?"
"I know when it's due."
"I'm not saying you don't."
"I know." A long pause. "It's all right. We'll find it."
That was what they always said. We'll find it. As though money were a thing that wandered the house at night and could be located with a flashlight.
At one in the morning, Samuel got up. Eight steps to the hallway, hand on the wall, hand on the doorframe. He had meant to get a glass of water. Instead he stopped at the edge of the kitchen, because the light was on.
His father was sitting at the table in his undershirt, with the cheap reading glasses on his nose and the notebook open in front of him. The old one, with the cracked spine. Samuel knew that notebook better than any book in the house.
His father did not hide it. He did not even close it. He just looked up.
"Can't sleep?"
"Dad." His voice came out rough. "I can still say no. I can tell them tomorrow. I can tell Gabriel I changed my mind, and no one would—"
"Come here."
Samuel crossed the kitchen and looked down at the page.
The red column was there, as always, in its long, tidy line of numbers, each one headed by a small, neat S. But at the bottom of the page, in a different color, someone had added a new line. It was written in blue ink, in his father's heavy pencil-pressing hand: Outlet. Tiago. 350.
And beside it, drawn with a ruler along the edge of the paper, there was a second column. A narrow one. Brand new, and empty.
"That's not the red column," Samuel said.
"No."
"What is it?"
His father considered the question seriously, tapping the pen against his lip.
"I haven't decided," he said. "Something that isn't a cost." He shrugged. "Also, I ran out of red."
Samuel laughed. It came out wet and strange and much too loud for one in the morning, and his father smiled with half his face, the way he did, and reached up to squeeze the back of Samuel's neck once, hard.
"Go to sleep," he said. "How's the weather?"
Samuel thought about it honestly. "Cloudy," he said. "Maybe clearing."
"I'll take it."
He signed on Sunday afternoon.
The form lived on the old family laptop, the one with the missing key, propped on the coffee table with a video call open beside it. Lia was in a small window in the corner, sitting in front of a bookshelf in perfect posture. Gabriel was in the other corner, sitting in front of a refrigerator, eating something.
"Last page," said Lia. "Read it again before you click."
"I've read it four times."
"Read it a fifth time."
He read it a fifth time. At the bottom of the screen, there was a pale rectangle labeled Signature of participant (must be 18 or older), and he looked at it for a long moment, because it was the first time in his life that a form had asked him, and only him.
His hand shook when he put the cursor to the pad. The line that came out looked like the trace of an earthquake.
"It looks like a seismograph," he said.
"It's yours," said his father from the armchair, not looking up from the newspaper he was not actually reading.
Samuel clicked Submit.
The screen thought about it for a moment. Then a soft green banner slid across the top, so cheerful it was almost rude. Application approved. Welcome to the Legendary Era Online Accessibility Access Program!
Gabriel choked on whatever he was eating.
"Eleven minutes," said Lia.
Samuel glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen. "What?"
"It took them eleven minutes. That's sixty-one pages, a medical review, a contract, and a data agreement." She was frowning at something off-camera, and her pen was already moving. "Nobody approves that in eleven minutes. Not even for free."
"Maybe they're efficient," said Gabriel, with his mouth full.
"Maybe."
She did not sound as if she believed it. She wrote something in her notebook and underlined it twice.
Below the banner, a small block of text spelled out the next step: a technician would visit on Saturday at nine in the morning to inspect the wiring, install the pod, and complete the first calibration scan. Please make sure the participant has not eaten for two hours beforehand.
Six days.
Samuel stared at the word approved, glowing a friendly green on the old screen, and tried to compose a weather report for what he felt. Head: unclear. Hands: unsteady. Chest: something he had no instrument for, something lighter and more dangerous than relief.
He tried again, and the best he could manage was: Forecast unknown.
It was the first time in eight years that he had not known what tomorrow would feel like.
He found that he did not entirely hate it.