Cassie 3.0

© Daniel Verastiqui

What Franco realized in the twenty minutes that he spent staring at the drapes of his bedroom window was that somehow it had just passed eight in the evening and he was without anything to do. Not one thing. The house was a mess, but that was to be expected. There was only so much he could do in a day before the aches started in his hands and back. Not that he was a weak man, but spending four hours assembling the most ill conceived storage system had taken its toll, if only for the repetition and frustration bred therein. It was too late to work on Cassie, she would need a few hours at the very least and his sleep cycle was set to kick in at ten. Never start something you can’t finish, words of wisdom from his father, a man who suffered a collapsed chamber during a 5K fun run. Irony aside, Franco soon came to believe that if you break that rule, you die.

He needed to do something, anything, to keep himself from simply existing, to keep...