Oxford — Sunday Morning, March 2046 POV: Julie

  Julie woke to the distant sound of a toy hitting something solid. Not smashing , just impact.

  The kind a two-year-old made when experimenting with gravity before sunrise. She checked the time.

  6:12 a.m. Unfortunately, on-brand.

  She pushed herself upright. Her body objected, but she ignored it. She had long ago adjusted her expectations: mornings were no longer a gentle transition but a controlled descent into the day.

  She heard another noise, the unmistakable thunk of wooden blocks being reorganized with the intensity of a small god reshaping the universe.

  Julie opened the door quietly. Down the hallway, the toddler stood in his pajamas, hair a soft storm, clutching a block in each hand. He looked at Julie with wide, immediate alertness.

  “Mama,” he said. Very awake. Very loud.

  Julie pressed a finger to her lips. He nodded, then dropped a block anyway. It hit the floor with a decisive clack.

  From Catherine’s room came a muffled: “Please no.”

  Julie scooped up the toddler before he organized another physics experiment. “Let’s go make breakfast,” she whispered.

  Isaac was already there, barefoot, staring at the coffee unit like he was waiting for it to justify its existence.

  His hair was flattened on one side. He blinked at Julie, then at the boy perched on her hip. “He’s wound up,” Julie said. Isaac grunted in a way that meant: So am I, but not in any helpful direction.

  The toddler spotted the cereal box and lunged toward it. Isaac caught it before it hit the floor—a reflex left over from a previous life of catching things much heavier than oats. Julie caught the boy before he launched himself next. They operated well as a team before full consciousness—years of practice in tight spaces.

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  The induction surface hummed to life. The toddler drummed his heels against the cabinet. No one else spoke.

  Catherine wandered in around 6:30, wrapped in a blanket, eyes barely open. She sat at the table without ceremony and put her head down on her folded arms. “I’m not awake,” she announced to the wood grain. “No one is,” Julie said, sliding a plate toward her.

  The toddler squealed at his older sister, delighted. Catherine didn’t lift her head. “Too loud,” she said into the table. The toddler squealed again, louder. Isaac handed him a banana in self-defense. He accepted it with enthusiastic joy and immediately attempted to peel it from the wrong end.

  Isaac gently corrected the boy's grip. The toddler, Levi, after Julies dad, shrieked not angry, just loud. Catherine: “Why is he like this.” Julie shrugged. “Upgraded circadian firmware. No patch yet.” Catherine groaned into her arms.

  Julie made tea. Isaac poured coffee. Both moved slowly, carefully, in small efficient motions that avoided setting off the boy's desire to “help.” The toddler climbed onto his chair, then off his chair, then onto the dog bed despite having no dog.

  Catherine finally lifted her head, hair flattened on one side, blanket slipping. “I can’t function,” she said. “No one expects you to,” Julie replied. The toddler dropped a spoon. Everyone winced, except him. “That was loud,” Catherine whispered. He beamed, proud of this achievement.

  Breakfast unfolded in a series of disjointed fragments. The toddler launched into a standard negotiation, insisting he wanted toast, then immediately refusing it the moment it touched the plate, only to dissolve into tears because he had successfully rejected the very thing he desired. He eventually accepted a new slice, though he eyed it with suspicious caution as if it were a trap. Beside him, the ten-year-old stared into her cereal bowl with a heavy, unblinking intensity, as if the floating oat circles contained the answers to existential questions she wasn't yet awake enough to ask. Isaac, meanwhile, ignored it all, holding his mug with both hands and drinking his coffee with the grim, mechanical focus of a man taking necessary medicine.

  Julie moved between them, catching spills before they hit the floor and redirecting the chaos with the practiced ease of a veteran. She maintained the thin, fragile membrane of order that held their mornings together, aware that nothing here was poetic or symbolic. It was just real—a tired family doing their best with the tools they had.

  By seven, the toddler had migrated to the living room with a stack of blocks and the boundless optimism of early childhood. Catherine finally sat upright, blinking herself into higher consciousness. Isaac’s shoulders relaxed an inch. Julie took her first full, deep breath of the morning.

  Small things. Normal things. A rhythm built from mismatched sleep schedules, patience, and survival instincts. A Sunday morning like any other, unremarkable, imperfect, and completely theirs.