Love Sync, System Link

Nichole Ulman and Shane Foster were put together three years ago to join two companies, and on the morning they go to finalise the divorce they end up somewhere else entirely. It is an old rural village in a famine year, and they arrive already married, already the parents of two small children who call them mother and father. Food in the village has run out. What they have is a dual supermarket system, linked to them both, that lets them sell antiques out of the household for gold coins and buy grain and supplies back. Staying married is the only arrangement that keeps the system and the household intact, so the divorce goes unmentioned. They feed the children, then the neighbours, and when a heavy snow comes down and closes the roads they get the village through the winter on stored food. The two of them live in one house and work the same problems every day, and somewhere in that the marriage they were about to end stops being a contract.