Nadia wakes before her alarm, because the street outside her window is quiet and dark until dawn. That's the law now. She is a nurse in a river city, thirty-four, and for the first time in her working life she isn't tired before she starts.
On the free tram she glances at her exchange credits. Everyone's share arrived on the first of the month, the same for her grandmother in the hill villages and a fisherman on the other side of the world. Credits fade slowly if they sit unused, so nobody hoards them. Nothing she needs to live costs anything: not her flat, her food, the clinic or the tram. The credits are for extras, like concert tickets and the good coffee. Her brother left the warehouse job that was grinding him down and is training as a carpenter, because no one has to take work just to survive anymore. The student debt he carried for nine years was cancelled in the jubilee; his daughter will never carry any.
At the clinic, a traditional healer from the river nation works two rooms down from the doctors. They share patients and argue about some of them. The man who comes in shaking from withdrawal isn't arrested; he's given a bed, a counselor and a choice. Nadia remembers when that was a crime.
At lunch there's a letter: she has been drawn by lottery for the House of Lots, two years starting in spring, paid. Her first reaction is to laugh. Her second is to read the bill they'll start with, on where the new mine may go, and to notice that the river's three guardians have filed their objections already.
That evening she sits in a circle at the community hall with the boy who stole her bicycle in the summer, his mother, and a facilitator chosen by lot. He has fixed the bike himself, badly, and is embarrassed. She tells him the brakes still squeal. He offers to fix them again. Everyone in the room laughs; nobody goes to prison.
At home her phone stays quiet after eight; the platforms aren't allowed to pull at her anymore. She goes up to the roof, past the bee garden and under the solar canopy that powers the building. The honey on her toast this morning came from the meadows that used to be a cattle ranch outside town. Above the city she can see the Milky Way, which her mother told her she'd never see in a city. It isn't paradise. The mine argument will be hard and the tram was late. But the day belonged to her.