Write a short story based on Huxley's Brave New World, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Orwell's 1984

The Approved Weather

On the morning his mother died, the ceiling informed Emil that he was happy.

“Your restfulness is ninety-three percent,” it said. “Your civic affection is exemplary. Outside, the weather is approved.”

A blue tablet waited in the bedside dispenser.

Emil swallowed it.

“Thank you,” said the ceiling.

He learned about his mother halfway through breakfast. Her face appeared above his porridge, pleasantly younger than he remembered.

YOUR FAMILY UNIT HAS COMPLETED ITS SERVICE.

Below this:

BEREAVEMENT CREDIT: SIX HOURS OF COMPLIMENTARY ENTERTAINMENT.

He selected an underwater musical. By the second song, he could no longer remember what had interrupted breakfast.

Emil worked at the Municipal Recovery Furnace.

Most of what arrived was harmless: defective furniture, unfashionable clothes, toys whose voices had begun asking questions outside their permitted range.

Paper required special handling.

Unlike a screen, paper did not know when it was wrong. A statement printed yesterday remained there today, contradicting whatever had replaced it. Whole warehouses had once been necessary to contain the resulting confusion.

Now there were furnaces.

At eleven, a sealed crate arrived bearing his mother’s residential number.

Emil checked it twice.

The supervisor’s camera turned toward him.

“A personal association?” it asked.

“My mother’s effects.”

“Would you prefer an operator substitution?”

Substitution was considerate. Substitution also entered a concern in your employment file.

“No,” Emil said. “I’m happy to help.”

“Of course you are.”

Inside the crate were slippers, a cracked cup, three unauthorized buttons, and a book.

The book was small and green. Nothing was printed on its cover.

Emil opened it beneath the inspection hood.

There was his name.

Not on a form or in the neat lettering of an official certificate. His name leaned across the page in his mother’s handwriting.

Emil, age four. Asked whether the moon followed people who were bad.

He turned a page.

Lost his first tooth. Swallowed it. Furious with me for laughing.

Another.

Today he said he didn’t need me to walk him to school. I waited until he turned the corner.

The supervisor’s camera clicked.

“Classification?”

“Domestic record,” Emil said.

“Historical accuracy?”

He looked at a sentence halfway down the page.

They gave him his first tablet today. He stopped crying before I had finished holding him.

“Unverified.”

“Then you know what to do.”

At lunch, Emil did not take his tablet.

He closed his hand around it when the dispenser chimed, lifted the hand to his mouth, and slipped the tablet into his cuff.

For twenty minutes nothing happened.

Then the room became unpleasant.

The soup was too salty. His chair pressed against a bone in his back. Across the table, his colleague Dena was describing a holiday she had purchased but not yet experienced.

“We remember arriving at sunset,” she said. “Apparently it’s beautiful.”

Emil began to cry.

Dena stopped speaking.

He touched his face, astonished by the amount of water.

“Something in the soup,” he said.

She glanced toward the ceiling. Then she pushed her untouched napkin across the table.

“Mine tastes strange too,” she said.

Neither of them looked at the other again.

He had hidden the book inside his furnace glove.

At home, he took it into the bathroom, where the camera displayed only a modest outline of his body. For safety, the microphone remained active.

He sat on the toilet and read silently.

His mother had written little things. A burnt cake. A quarrel. The afternoon she had wanted to be alone and sent him outside in the rain.

There were pages about people he did not know. Some entries contradicted others. She had loved his father; she had hated him; she had loved him again on a Tuesday because he brought home pears.

Emil had never read anything so badly organized.

He read until the bathroom light brightened.

“Extended inactivity detected. Do you require assistance?”

“No.”

“Your voice indicates distress.”

He looked down at the final entry.

He visited today. We watched the comedy hour. I wanted to tell him about the garden we had before he was born, but there was never a quiet moment.

The ceiling offered him music.

He said no.

After a pause, it offered him his mother’s voice.

In the morning, two welfare officers waited outside his apartment.

They were gentle. One carried a medical case. The other carried a bag for the book.

“Will I remember it?” Emil asked.

“You’ll remember your mother appropriately.”

He held the book out, then drew it back.

“May I read one thing first?”

The officers exchanged a glance.

“One,” said the woman with the case.

Emil found the page about the tooth. He read it aloud.

He had expected the words to do something enormous.

The officers waited.

He tried another sentence, but the woman put her hand over the page.

“That’s enough.”

Then he noticed the younger officer. The man was pressing his lips together.

“What?” Emil asked.

“Nothing.”

“Did you swallow yours too?”

For a moment, nobody moved.

“Yes,” the young man said. “I thought it would grow back inside me.”

The woman turned toward him sharply.

Emil laughed. It hurt his throat, and he was still crying.

Outside, the weather was approved.