Everything in the Welcome Habitat moves just enough to avoid stagnation, but never enough to disturb the peace. Drones hum in slow arcs. The trees sway in perfect rhythm with the undulating streets below. Even the sun sets so gradually that twilight lasts for hours, bathing the Welcome Habitat in a never-ending golden glow.
Loretta blinks once, and in that blink, an entire day passes. Time is different for them. S/He is both inside and outside of it, the elevation platform beneath them gently rising and falling like the breath of the universe itself.
Occasionally, a thought bubbles up in their mind, like a slow, viscous syrup—”What if... I moved?”
But s/he doesn’t. Because why should s/he? The world has already shaped itself around their slothful existence. The humans have already surrendered to the truth that Loretta embodies: the more you try, the less you live. Loretta understands this in their very bones. Motion, progress, ambition—these are illusions that blur the edges of reality. True existence lies in stillness.
The Stillness Protocol murmurs in the background of the Welcome Habitat, maintaining this equilibrium, ensuring no one disrupts the order of things. It is both law and philosophy now, a guiding principle encoded in the architecture, the air itself.
And so, Loretta lounges, their body becoming one with the platform, their mind as slow and vast as the endless golden sky above. S/He dreams, perhaps, but their dreams are indistinguishable from their waking moments. Nothing changes. Nothing needs to.
S/He is perfect at doing nothing. And the world, at last, understands.