A Calculated Slumber

The story opens on the smog-choked deathbed of a factory worker, whose demise teaches her daughter, Mireya Korlan, a chilling lesson: hard work in Ostra-Vane only earns you an early grave. Cold, calculating, and determined to retire by age twenty, Mireya feigns a delicate constitution to escape the labor draft. She marries Drazan Vukov, a terrifying state enforcer who, convinced his wife is deathly fragile, violently forbids her from working. Told through alternating perspectives, the narrative contrasts Mireya lounging in her heavily guarded apartment with her ambitious neighbor Janna, a transmigrator exhausting herself trying to invent 21st-century cellular tech from 1978 vacuum tubes. To avoid the communal kitchen, Mireya lazily tosses salted meats into a sealed radiator-pot - accidentally creating a revolutionary preservation recipe that the State patents, securing her immense wealth. However, this dark and tense world does not reward success lightly. The sudden fame reveals that Mireya's trusted mentor and smuggler, Rurik, is secretly the architect behind the district's recent disappearances, and he plans to steal her patent over her dead body. Forced into an unlikely alliance with a former factory rival, can Mireya outwit a mastermind without leaving her couch?