Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Chen, “so the vestibule will clean us. Shut your eyes, please.”
    Outer door sealed , announces Sybil. Beginning decontamination.
    From somewhere deep inside the walls comes a sound like fans accumulating speed. Chilled air whooshes through Konstance’s worksuit and a bright light pulses three times on the other side of her eyelids and an inner door sighs open.
    They step into a cylindrical vault fourteen feet across and sixteen feet high. At the center, Sybil hangs suspended inside her tube.
    â€œSo tall,” whispers Jessi Ko.
    â€œLike a gatrillion golden hairs,” whispers Ramón.
    â€œThis vault,” says Mrs. Chen, “has autonomous thermal, mechanical, and filtration processes, independent of the rest of the Argos .”
    Welcome , says Sybil, and pinpricks of amber go fluttering down her tendrils.
    â€œYou’re looking lovely today,” says Mrs. Chen.
    I adore visitors , says Sybil.
    â€œInside there, children, is the collective wisdom of our species. Every map ever drawn, every census ever taken, every book ever published, every football match, every symphony, every edition of every newspaper, the genomic maps of over one million species—everything we can imagine and everything we might ever need. Sybil is our guardian, our pilot, our caretaker: she keeps us on course, she keeps us healthy, and she safeguards the heritage of all humanity against erasure and destruction.”
    Ramón breathes on the glass, puts a finger to the vapor, and draws an R .
    Jessi Ko says, “When I’m old enough to go to the Library, I’m going straight to the Games Section to fly around Flower-Fruit Mountain.”
    â€œI’m going to play Swords of Silverman,” says Ramón. “Zeke says it goes on for twenty thousand levels.”
    Konstance , Sybil asks, what will you do when you get to the Library?
    Konstance glances over her shoulder. The door they entered through has sealed so tightly behind them that it is indistinguishable from the wall. She says, “What’s ‘erasure and destruction’?”
----
    Night terrors come next. After Third Meal is cleaned up, after the other families retire to their compartments, after Father heads back to his plants in Farm 4, Mother and Konstance walk back to Compartment 17 and tidy the various worksuits waiting their turn at Mother’s sewing machine—here the bin for malfunctioning zippers, here the bin of scraps, here the loose threads, nothing wasted, nothing lost. They powder their teeth and brush their hair and Mother takes a SleepDrop and kisses Konstance on the forehead and they climb into their respective berths, Mother on the bottom and Konstance on the top.
    The walls dim from purple to gray to black. She tries to breathe, tries to hold her eyes open.
    Still they come. Beasts with glittering razor-teeth. Slavering devils with horns. Eyeless white larvae swarming inside her mattress. The worst are the ogres with skeleton limbs that come scuttling down the corridor; they tear open the compartment door, climb the walls, and chew through the ceiling. Konstance clings to her berth as her mother is sucked out into the void; she tries to blink but her eyes are boiling; she tries to scream but her tongue has turned to ice.
----
    â€œWhere,” Mother asks Sybil, “does she get it? I thought we were selected for higher cognitive reasoning? I thought we were supposed to have suppressed imaginative faculties.”
    Sybil says, Sometimes genetics surprise us.
    Father says, “Thank goodness for that.”
    Sybil says, She’ll outgrow it.
----
    She’s seven and three-quarters. DayLight dims and Mother takes her SleepDrop and Konstance climbs into her berth. She holds her eyes open with her fingertips. Counts from zero to one hundred. Back to zero again.
    â€œMother?”
    No response.
    She slips down the ladder, past her sleeping mother, and out the door, blanket trailing behind. In the