It’s hard to start new habits. I almost forgot to do this today.

He could hear the snoring of his neighbour across the wall. He hated these thin walls. The problem was that if he ever directed that hatred directly at the wall, the hatred would win. And his landlord definitely wouldn’t like that.

How can some people snore so loud? He couldn’t understand. How do they not wake up? How do they not wake up when even he can hear their snorts, as their own airways tried to suffocate them? To be honest, he envied that a bit.

Sleep was no easy task for him. It didn’t come easy but evaporated all the easier. He knew the watchers knew about it. On some especially sleepless nights, he’d even suspect that the snoring person next door wasn’t even real, and it was just the watchers testing his limits.

The watchers loved their experiments. They’d call it “augmented learning.” It was one of the most obvious points where their actions were past any common sense of morality. Imagine getting the filament of your light bulb snapped over and over again by something for days.

It was this trying to imagine the watchers, so tiny and so durable, squeezing into the vacuum of the light bulb just to test some unknown theory, that finally pushed him over the border into sleep.