She was up in the middle of the night. Again. She came awake slowly but insistently. Trying to ignore it, she painstakingly rolled over but it was no use.

         “Soft lights,” she told the empty room. Almost immediately a gentle glow flooded the room from a tiny LED light in the corner. The one she couldn't see so well from the bed. It was practically a single Christmas light, just enough light for her to see but not enough to wake her up any more than she already was. It seemed to help a little bit on nights like this, at least.

         Taking a deep breath to brace herself, Amy began to push herself upright with her arms. It was quite a process these days, but she didn't mind it. She reminded herself of when she couldn't do it at all. Still, moving like this flashed her back to the weeks, months, of lying on her back and sobbing, unable to help herself. Unable even to do the most basic of tasks. She was never, ever going back to that. Being able to get up on her own was a sign of strength, of progress.

         When she was finally upright she paused a moment to take a few deep breaths, getting herself under control. Her breathing was erratic and it wasn't helping the pain at all.

         Eventually it slowed. Opening her eyes, she reached for the bottle of pain medicine that was always there, always present. Now, at least. She grabbed her glass of water as well, to help drown the bitterness of the medicine. It made her shudder as she swallowed a big mouthful.

         “Good night,” she told the room, and the lights went out again.

         She laid back down, nearly as painstaking a process as sitting up, and tried to relax, tried to will away the pain or will the medicine to work its magic. Any minute now. Any minute.

         In the morning her alarm went off, startling her awake. Her eyes felt gritty with exhaustion but she knew from experience that if she stayed in bed any longer she'd be in bed all day. She couldn't afford that. It would set back so much of her progress.

         “Good morning,” she told the room. Immediately the alarm cut off and the curtains began to swing open, flooding the room with light.

         Amy laid there in bed, simultaneously grateful for her electronic assistants and resenting their necessity. They allowed her to live as she did, to give her a modicum of privacy and independence. She still loathed them and the fact that she could no longer live without them. Or rather she could, but not without relying on other people. To do so wouldn't have been safe, though. It would only have led to heartbreak. The sad truth was that people couldn't be trusted. Not anymore. She didn't even entirely trust the people she lived with. She needed them, but she didn't trust them.

         Lying there, she suddenly got a whiff of something it was impossible to truly be smelling. Some mornings she missed the smell of coffee so much that she ached with it. There was a time when the “good morning” command had also started the coffee perking, but then they'd run out of coffee a long time ago, probably forever.

         She turned to look out the window. It was a bright, sunny summer day. Birds were chirping and flying about. She could even see insects. Perhaps one of the only good things to have come out of the last few years were the return of birds in such numbers.

         But they also brought plague, contagion. Just as with the devices she depended on she simultaneously loved and hated the birds.

         There was no help for it. She still had to get herself out of bed. As painstakingly as she had in the middle of the night, Amy pushed herself up to sit. “Pixel off,” she commanded the plug that charged her phone. She knew it would have chirped almost as loud as her alarm if there had been an alert or a message but she checked to ensure she hadn't missed any anyway. None, as expected.

         She pulled her new chair to the side of the bed and positioned it so that she could easily climb into it. Well, “easily” being a relative term. She tucked her phone into a little specially made pouch her friend Jaimy had made for her. It hung on the side of her chair and she tucked some earbuds in with it. It was one of the few perks to being so disabled, this cell phone. They were generally vestiges of their old lives, and most of them didn't work anymore. She had this one mostly for music, as one of her only forms of entertainment for all the lonely hours.

         She looked around her little one-room cabin and sighed. Independence. Her bed. A few shelves of books and mementos. And, naturally, her work setup. The thing that kept her motivated to get out of bed every morning.

         “Presto,” she said, and like magic the entire system came to life. Several screens powered up and the tablet that she used to monitor everything began glowing. She rolled over to the desk and put the headphones on, pressing a few buttons to bring up communications with the rest of the camp.

         “Good morning, Sunshine,” she heard.

         “Hey,” she answered around a yawn. “How are things looking today?”

         “Pretty good so far. How does the perimeter look?”

         Amy looked at the screen with a rolling view of all the perimeter cameras. “Nothing too bad. I—wait, it looks like there's a fence down. Blown over by the wind?”

         “Maybe. I'll send someone to check it out. Which fence?”

         She clicked on one of the images to expand it. “Looks like it's A14. North end.”

         “Thanks.”

         “Just doing my job.”

         “And you do it well.”

         Amy smiled. Trust Jack to say something so kind. Especially when he knew she'd rather be out there in the fields with the rest of them than stuck in this chair. He was the one who'd given her this job, as the de-facto leader of their “tribe”. He was the one who'd given her purpose to keep going. It was more for his sake than hers that she endured what she did and did her job as well as she did. He believed in her and she hated to disappoint anyone.

         When the world had gone to hell she'd managed to make her way here. Searching for refuge, she'd wandered over many miles. They'd found her outside the perimeter fence, dehydrated and malnourished. She'd become ill along the way from drinking contaminated water. They wouldn't tell her if it was naturally contaminated or purposefully. It didn't really matter. They didn't trust her and she didn't trust them any more than she had to. But she worked alongside them, putting up the tiny cabins that most of them lived in and tending the fields.

         Once upon a time she'd been a budding ecologist, barely out of school. Then the plague had swept through. People died and countries began to point fingers at each other. Resources became scarce as so many fell ill or died. Food shortages began and the governments that had been pointing fingers at each other began to point weapons instead. It devolved into chaos. Even within countries people fought. Turning weapons on one another for what they had, looting and rioting. Necessities became even more scarce. Amy had watched her family die one by one, lost to disease and famine and war. She hadn't been able to stay in the little suburb she'd grown up in, it wasn't safe enough. So she'd stumbled her way out to the country, not even certain what she was searching for. Every moment had been dangerous. But she'd found this group. People who were trying to rebuild. They'd welcomed her in her weakened state, but warily. She'd had to prove herself every day.

         There weren't many of them, maybe 25 including the few kids. An old man, practically a hermit, had been disgusted by what he was seeing in the world. He opened his home to a few friends and their families as a refuge. Amy had been the first one from Outside welcomed into their fold, though there had been several more since then, people like her who were in desperate need and obviously not a danger. Their numbers swelled to 30.

         Then the incident had happened. She'd survived but others had not. She hated to remember and turned her thoughts away.

         Jack had rigged up the system she now depended on, made her in charge of monitoring the perimeter so that nothing like the incident would happen ever again. They had scrounged up as many computer parts as they could, running them on the power they were able to produce themselves from stolen solar panels and homemade wind turbines. They had old golf cart and electric car batteries for storage. There wasn't enough power to go around, and she knew many resented that she got priority. Her cabin and the kitchen were the only places with consistent electricity—or as consistent as their jury-rigged system could make it. Everyone else was mostly back in the 18th century.

         She'd had to learn nearly everything she knew about computers since beginning this work. The data was the most important part. She had perimeter alarms and notifications in case something was getting too near. Predators were a particular problem for their livestock. They didn't have many animals yet, and what they had was desperately needed to ensure enough food for the whole group over the winter.

         It was a strange mix to have so much advanced technology and still be at the mercy of wild animals. Welcome to the future, she told herself.

         But the data. Amy had learned to predict the weather based on the data. She had identified their most common predators and potential ways to mitigate the harm they would cause. She was able to find inefficiencies and help the group work smarter. One guy, Tim, had been a computer programmer once upon a time. He'd come up with apps and systems for her to use that would keep everything running smoothly.

         In particular, she needed to keep the predators out. Human as well as animal. They were relatively hidden, in a remote area as they were. But bands of people made their way to the compound occasionally like something out of a horror movie, ready to steal or murder.

         It was easier for her to think of them as land pirates, less scary that way.

         “We've got eyes on that fence,” Jack told her through the headset. “It appears to have been cut open.”

         “Shit.”

         “Yeah.” They were silent for a moment. Amy was already frantically scrolling back through the logs to see when it might have happened. They didn't have enough server space or power to keep the video streams so she had to look through the text of what had happened during the night. She was looking for an anomaly in that text and it wasn't easy.

         Why hadn't one of her alarms gone off? Was there a breakdown in the system? Had someone figured out how to disable the alarm?

         And worst of all, were they still out there? Or even inside the compound, hiding?

         “I've already told everyone to be careful. We've got some people searching.”

         “Good,” she answered absentmindedly, still focused on the data and what it could tell her.

         “Update me when you find something,” Jack said. “I gotta go.”

         “Yep.”

         She stared at the screen with the night's text logs and didn't notice the passing of time as she searched through. Her stomach rumbled and she vaguely realized that she hadn't even gone out to get breakfast from the communal kitchen, but that wasn't important right then. Finding what time the fence was cut was all that mattered.

         “Got it,” she said at last, raising her hands in victory.

         It wasn't much to go on, but around three in the morning the alarm system had shorted out for a time. It had come back on within half an hour. Apparently the system hadn't thought to alert her to this, and she made a mental note to get Tim to fix that failure of the system. This couldn't happen again.

         That riddle solved, she turned her attention to the video feed. If someone was inside the perimeter fence then she'd add her eyes to the search. The cameras didn't show everywhere, mostly just along the fence. The main parts of their little “village” were also shown, and Amy had had to get used to being an inadvertent voyeur to some private moments. She'd learned to ignore those. As long as no one was being physically hurt it was none of her business.

         Still hunting through the video feeds she saw movement in one of them, someone hiding behind a tree.

         She called Jack. “Got 'im,” she said. “He's along the western border hiding in the trees. And Jack? It's a kid.”

         A teenager, maybe 15, peered out from behind the tree, obviously scared. He looked as everyone else had who came had, underfed and jumping at shadows. His clothes were ratty and hanging off of him. Even over the poor visual feed she could see that he was breathing hard. Was he sick? Poisoned? Or just terrified?

         That didn't matter. They would help him anyway. And maybe if he could disable the perimeter fence and the video feed he could help her make it better.

         “Presto off,” she called, heading out to meet their new recruit.