sXe
abstinence
Sarah Chen’s eyes opened at 6:14, one minute before the alarm, and the first thing she felt was the warmth.
It started behind her temples, a gentle unfurling that moved down through her jaw and into her chest. Her NeuroBalance had begun its morning protocol: stored caffeine analogs trickling from the pituitary depot into her bloodstream at a rate calibrated to her sleep debt, her cortisol baseline, her circadian position. She didn’t think about any of this. She thought about whether she wanted oatmeal or eggs.
She chose eggs. The kitchen recognized her and adjusted the overhead lighting to 4200K, the spectrum her optometrist had recommended last quarter. She cracked three eggs into a pan, added peppers, ate standing at the counter while scrolling through overnight messages. Halfway through the second egg, a faint sensation of satisfaction settled into her stomach. Fullness, contentment, the clean signal that said enough. Her NeuroBalance had registered 340 calories crossing the intestinal lining and released a measured pulse of GLP-1 from the jejunal nodes. Sarah set down her fork, rinsed the plate, and felt good about her discipline.
The drive to Meridian Labs took twenty-two minutes on the expressway. Traffic was light. Sarah merged into the autonomous lane, then switched to manual for the last stretch because she liked the feeling of the wheel in her hands. As she took the exit ramp, her focus sharpened. Colors grew crisper. The brake lights of the truck ahead became individual points of data: distance, velocity, rate of change. Her adrenal glands had released a cocktail of low-dose nootropic stimulants, timed to her driving profile and the real-time risk assessment from the car’s external sensors. Sarah felt alert. She felt capable. She thought this was just how she always felt when driving, which was true in the same way that a fish is always wet.
She badged into Building 4 and settled at her workstation. The project was a sequencing problem, a protein fold that had resisted three different modeling approaches, and she’d been stuck on it for a week. She pulled up the holographic workspace, rotated the structure, stared. After ten minutes of staring, something shifted. The fold stopped looking like a wall and started looking like a door. Connections she’d missed leapt into relief, as if the problem had rearranged itself while she wasn’t looking. Sarah smiled and began typing. Her visual cortex was, at that moment, processing trace amounts of psilocybin derivative released from the pineal depot, dosed at roughly one-fiftieth of a recreational threshold. Her NeuroBalance had detected the characteristic neural signature of creative frustration and intervened. Sarah experienced this as inspiration.
By noon she’d mapped a viable approach and felt she’d earned lunch.
The cafeteria on the third floor had real windows, which was the reason everyone preferred it to the larger one in the basement. Sarah carried her tray to the table where Dev and Lina were already arguing about something.
“All I’m saying,” Dev said, stabbing a piece of synthetic salmon with his fork, “is that the historical record is pretty clear. They would just ingest things. Random plants. Fungal derivatives. Fermented grain water.”
“Ethanol,” Lina said. “They drank ethanol. Voluntarily. As a social activity.”
“That’s the part that gets me.” Dev shook his head. “A known neurotoxin. They had all the data. They knew exactly what it did to the liver, the prefrontal cortex, the whole system. And they’d just pour it down their throats in public. At celebrations.”
Sarah sat down and laughed. “Didn’t they also smoke things? Like, burn plant matter and inhale the combustion products?”
“Nicotine delivery,” Lina confirmed. “Through smoke. Into the lungs.”
“Barbaric,” Dev said.
Sarah’s NeuroBalance noted her social context, the elevated vocal patterns and relaxed posture of casual peer interaction, and released a measured 0.3 units of ethanol from her hepatic reservoir. Her social inhibition dropped by a precisely calculated margin. She leaned back in her chair, feeling loose, feeling easy.
“The thing I can never understand,” she said, “is why they kept doing it when they knew the harm. It’s like they just accepted the damage as a cost of living.”
“They were addicted,” Lina said. “Physically, psychologically. Their neurochemistry was completely unmanaged. They had no calibration, no monitoring. They were just running raw.”
“Running raw.” Dev repeated it like the phrase tasted strange. “Can you even imagine? Just letting your brain do whatever it wanted, all day, with no optimization?”
“Terrifying,” Sarah said, and meant it.
She took a sip of water. The ethanol in her blood hummed at its target level, holding her in the precise zone between reserved and gregarious. The psilocybin from the morning had been fully metabolized and cleared. The caffeine was tapering toward its afternoon decline, soon to be replaced by a gentle serotonin protocol for the post-lunch hours. Every molecule was tracked, timed, and titrated by a system so integrated into her biology that she had never once, in thirty-one years of life, thought of it as chemical intervention.
“Honestly,” Sarah said, “I just feel sorry for them. Living like that. Pumping themselves full of substances just to get through the day.”