It turned out to be a surprisingly beneficial way to combat time. He was assigned to an indoor protean farm. For the first few days he was fascinated by the watching the system work. His job was to pull the full protean pouches from the grid and replace them with empty sacks. If any tubes gave a pressure alert all he had to do was go to where the tube had turned bright red and either undo the kink or squish out the blockage. Ultimately it was simple, mind numbingly dull work, but the facility had not yet been fully automated and so it required this one bit of human interaction.
Apparently mind numblingly dull repetitive work was what his mind needed to regain its creative drive. By the end of the first week he was a chapter into the only writing he had done in more than five years. His weekend disappeared into delivered food and the constant clacking of his keyboard. His mind only barely gave in to the biological needs of his body and by the time he was due back at work he felt the toll it was taking, but he didn't care. He grabbed a tablet, got dressed and went to work.
And that's how P.H. Turner wrote his final work. using every spare moment he could find while working at a Protean farm helping to create supplies for a journey he would never take.
It was over a month into the draft before his kids could get away to visit him. They had scheduled their breaks so they had two days off together to catch up. Mew arrived home not long after P.H. had gotten home from the farm. She rang the door bell out of politeness but then let herself to find him sitting at the kitchen table, typing like a man possessed, still in his dirty farm clothes. She saw what he was doing and couldn't help but smile. "I was going to ask how you were holding up but considering the fact that your writing again, I'm going to say that things are going slightly more than well." She patted him on the shoulder lightly before walking into the kitchen.
He didn't respond with anything more than a non-committal grunt. She opened the refrigerator and saw that it was nearly empty. "Let me guess, you've been living on takeout and junk food." She sighed. "Dad you could have said something, I would have come by sooner." She whined.
"Uh-huh." He offered, totally absorbed in his writing.
Mew shook her head with a knowing smile. She hadn't seen him like this since she was a teenager and she was happy to see him so absorbed again. "Ok well, I'm going to go shopping for food and things for the weekend, you just keep writing." She said watching his hands blur over the keyboard as he worked.
"Ok honey, you have fun." He offered automatically. She nodded and left the house.
