This was unusual. Lin ate with the attention diligent men gave to doing taxes: methodically, at an appointed time, with no waste and no ceremony. Felix had, in nine months as his chief of staff, come to think of Lin’s meals as reliable data. The CEO was present, operational, and the world was proceeding on schedule. But the congee Lin had ordered at the Hong Kong terminus sat cooling on the table between them, while Lin looked out at a coastline that was slipping away.

Felix glanced at his bio-band. Green. He had boarded with a full compliance dossier: valid credentials, correct insurance classifications, cleared for the journey’s first six jurisdictions in advance. His passage was, in ECOROUTE’s assessment, perfectly routine.

Felix admired the sophistication of the train’s protocols. He never understood the fuss about healthcare surveillance. He enjoyed passing through borders in an endless interior, and all it cost him was a ticket and his making himself legible to the state. The arc of innovation bends toward justice, Felix thought. He thought this in the way he thought about the efficiency of markets or the tendency of systems toward equilibrium – as a fact of physics – the way heat moves toward cold, the way protocols standardize, the way the correct answer reveals itself to the correctly posed question. He had been taught this at the finest university in the world by professors who had never given him cause to doubt it, and he had not yet had reason to question their teaching.

“You haven’t eaten,” Felix said.

Lin Yuan Exact turned from the window. He looked at the congee with the expression of a man who has forgotten what food is for. Then he picked up his spoon.

“You are wondering why we are not flying,” he said.

Indeed Felix had been wondering this. The summit in Lisbon was in four days. Eight hours by air. Three days by rail.

“The thought had occurred to me,” Felix said.

“An airport is a trap with two doors, and I can control neither of them.” Lin ate a spoonful of congee, chewed, swallowed. “Its infrastructure was built for efficiency. It is used for capture.”

But efficiency is good, Felix thought. The arc of innovation ...

“On the other hand, this train is only seven years old,” Lin continued. He was eating now, with attention. “No one thought it would really matter in the grand scheme of things, so there have been very few attempts by states to capture it.” He looked out the window again. The coast was gone now, replaced by the first industrial outskirts of Guangzhou.

“So it’s a gap, a thin scar in the face of global surveillance.“

The train’s path curved and the megacity came into view behind them: the Pearl River delta. The towers, the ports with their stacked containers in every color, the whole apparatus of making and moving that the world ran on. Felix watched it and thought about the Neutral Forge. The corporation that Lin had founded, which had inspired an adolescent Felix to give up his dreams of becoming a poet.

The Neutral Forge manufactured chips but designed nothing. This was its Oath of Making: to fabricate but never to architect. Orchard Systems brought its designs; the Forge made Orchard chips. Greenlance Computer brought its designs; the Forge made Greenlance chips. A hundred competitors, bitter enemies in the marketplace, came to the same sanctuary, handed over their most precious innovations, and trusted. This trust was the Forge’s true product. Chips were merely its byproduct.

Felix believed in this trust the way he believed in the arc, not as a policy or a preference but as a property of well-functioning architecture, emerging from an underlying structure in the way heat emerges from friction. The system was designed the right and the right outcomes followed. You did not need to force them.

“What are we actually going to do in Lisbon?” Felix asked.

Lin set down his spoon briefly. “Be seen travelling toward peace.”

“Which is...”

“Not the same thing as peace. But it buys time.”

“For what?”

“For work that needs to be finished.”

Lin resumed eating. Felix looked at the metropolis as it receded. At its systems of making and moving that would keep working tonight and tomorrow and the day after, indifferent to who sat in what chair, because their architecture was sound. The answer is there, he thought. I have not yet posed the question correctly.

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On the second day, as the train entered Mongolia, Lin was already awake.

Felix found him in the observation car at six in the morning, sitting in one of the panoramic seats with a glass of water, watching the steppe come into being as the light arrived. The steppe did not meet a horizon: at a certain point the grass simply stopped negotiating with the sky and let it take over.

Lin did not look up when Felix came in. He looked at the steppe. Felix sat across from him.

For 20 minutes, neither of them spoke.

Then Lin said, “The pressure arrived in stages.”

He said it in the way he might have said: “The train left Hong Kong at 7:14.” As a fact in a sequence of facts. But something in the steppe, or in the quality of light coming through the glass at this hour, had opened him.

“First the Fiduciary State,” Lin said. “Their lawyers wrote on letterhead with an embossed eagle. The implicit message: stop selling to the Empire’s companies. It didn’t need to be stated directly. The cost of non-compliance was Shunning, cut from the Murmur, unable to receive payment from anyone their financial system touches.” He looked at the steppe. “You know what the Murmur is.”

“The global financial messaging network,” Felix said. “SWIFT, in the old terminology.”

“The system through which all financial reality passes,” Lin said. “Literally. A transaction that the Murmur does not carry is a transaction that did not happen.”

Felix knew this. He knew this the way he knew about weather. He had never considered that someone had decided to build the Murmur, and that the person who decided to build it had also decided what it would and would not carry, and that this decision had been made once, long ago, by people with specific interests, and that it had been running on their behalf ever since.

He found this thought uncomfortable and set it aside.

“Then the Telluric Empire,” Lin continued. “Maintain supply to your traditional customers or the Seventeen Earths become unavailable. Gallium. Germanium. The periodic table’s veto.” He picked up his water glass, looked at it, set it down again. “Both at the same time. Not coincidentally.”

“What did you do?”

Lin was quiet for a moment. Outside, a bird crossed the steppe at speed. Low, dark.

“Have you seen a man juggling, Felix?”

“Yes.”

“When he has more balls than hands, what does he do?”

Felix thought about this seriously. “He drops one?”

Lin’s eyes followed the bird until it was gone. “He keeps them all in the air. For as long as he can. And when they fall,” one shoulder lifted, barely, “he is somewhere else.”

The steppe scrolled past. Felix thought about the Forge, about the clients who brought their designs and trusted their discretion. About the vested interests on both sides of that trust. About the Murmur and the Seventeen Earths and the eagle on the letterhead.There is a correct answer here, he thought.

They entered Russian territory that afternoon, at a border which was really just a gradient, a place where the train’s internal models registered a change. Two officials boarded with handheld Ponos to inspect passengers.

The first official was young and businesslike. The second was older, heavy, with the patience of someone who had spent decades in doorways and understood that doorways were where the interesting things happened. His Pono was different from the standard-issue model Felix had seen before. Instead of a green-or-red compliance grid, the screen showed something fluid: gradient fields, shifting spectra, the topography of a profile rendered in colors and graphs.

He stopped beside a Dutch businessman sitting next to Felix in the observation car. The businessman reached for his passport. The official ignored the passport.

“What does it measure?” Felix asked, because the question had already left him before he could decide whether to ask it.

The official looked up from the device. He had seen kids like Felix on the train before. All of them curious and smitten by the contraptions of UET-1.

“Drift,” he answered lazily.

“From what?”

“From what a person says they will do.” He said it so simply. “Before, we used stamps. Green, red. Legal, illegal. The sun is yellow, the grass is green.” He shrugged, a gesture that moved his whole body. “But the sun is a thermonuclear event. So now we have this. It does not say yes or no. It says probably. It says not yet. It makes a forecast.” He tilted the screen toward Felix. “Will this man arrive where he says he will arrive? Will he do what he says he will do? Or,” he made a gesture like smoke dispersing through fingers, “will he drift?”

On the screen, the Dutchman’s spectrum was cooling. The colors settled to an ambivalent blue. A thin seam flickered near some invisible threshold and did not cross it.

“And if he drifts?” Felix asked.

“Then we look at why. But only then.” The official made the face of a chess player forced to a draw. “While a man is within tolerance, we proceed. Certainty is expensive.”

The Pono emitted a soft descending tone and the official moved on. Felix leaned back. He looked at his own bio-band – green, steady – and thought about the word tolerance. The system did not need him to be correct. It needed him to be predictable. The difference had not previously seemed important.

That evening Lin summoned Felix to his cabin and handed him a folder.

Physical papers. Felix had worked in enough secure environments to know that paper was what you used when you did not want the document to exist in the records.

“Casino car,” Lin said. “Third table. A man called Walther. Do not read it.”

Felix took the folder. “What is it?”

“Infrastructure planning.”

Felix had heard this phrase several times now. It had begun to acquire a grating texture.

“Sir,” he said. “I have been your chief of staff for nine months. In that time I have coordinated communications with cryptographers in seven jurisdictions, managed secure protocols with lawyers in three different legal systems, and reviewed technical specifications for systems I do not have the clearance to fully understand. I believe in the Forge’s mission. I believe in what you are building. But I find myself in the position of performing a function I cannot define, and I am not certain that it is...”

“Felix.” Lin’s voice cut in with the particular patience of a man who has run the model many times and knows how it ends. “Do you know why I hired you?”

“My qualifications...”

“Your qualifications are sufficient. That is not why I hired you.” He looked at Felix steadily. “I hired you because you believe things. Visibly. You believe that systems tend toward equilibrium and that information wants to be free and that the arc of innovation bends toward justice. You believe this in the way a person believes in the sun. You do not check it, it is simply there. It is the light by which you do everything else.”

Felix said nothing.

“When you carry a folder through a train,” Lin said, “no one thinks you are carrying anything important. Because no one who is carrying something important looks like they believe in the sun.” A pause. “This is not an insult. You are a precision instrument.” He looked at the folder. “Go.”

Felix delivered the folder to Walther: third table, casino car. Loss and Gain. Walther was playing a card game whose rules appeared to be under ongoing renegotiation between him and the dealer. He took the folder without looking at Felix, slid it under the table, kept his attention on his cards.

Felix walked back through three cars. I am a precision instrument, he thought. He turned the phrase over. He had been hired because he believed visibly. Lin had said this as though it were operational information, which meant it was operational information, which meant Lin had factored Felix’s belief into his plans from the start, which meant...

The arc of innovation bends toward justice. The phrase was there when he reached for it. But it sat differently now.

Late on the third night Felix was in the dining car when Lin appeared.

This was unusual. Lin ate in his cabin, where, as Felix had once heard him explain to a journalist: “The walls are less interested in the conversation.” The dining car was a social space, and Lin was not a social person in the ordinary sense. He was a person who made you feel that the conversation you were having was the only one worth having, which was a different thing entirely.

He sat across from Felix, ordered tea, and for a moment said nothing. He looked at the window, which showed only darkness and their own reflections floating in it. Felix noticed that Lin was wearing the same white collarless linen shirt he had been wearing since Hong Kong. And the day before. Felix had the sudden realization that Lin had several of these shirts, packed identically. A choice made once and never revisited.

Then Lin began to talk, and Felix understood that he had not come to the dining car by accident.

“The Fiduciary States used to make things,” Lin said. “Steel. Cotton. Machines of ingenuity. But making is tedious. Making requires labour and logistics and the management of physical reality. So it ascended.” He received his tea. “It built the Murmur, through which all financial messages pass. The Chain of Hands, through which value moves. The Three Oracles, the Genuflections, the Naming: systems through which the world is assessed, classified, rated, included or excluded. It stopped making things and became the condition under which all making was possible. The tollbooth.”

“I understand the architecture of the Fiduciary States,” Felix said.

“You understand the facts.” Lin wrapped both hands around his cup. “The story is different. The story is that for 30 years the Forge survived between two systems of this kind by being necessary to both. The Doctrine of Indispensability. You cannot coerce what you cannot replace. As long as they needed us equally, we were safe in the gap.”

“What changed?”

Lin looked at his reflection in the dark window. “They noticed. Both of them, at the same time, which was not a coincidence. The Fiduciary States noticed that our chips found their way into the Empire’s military systems. The Empire noticed that we existed in a territory it has always called its own.” A pause. “There is a principle in physics, Felix: a body at rest in a contested space does not remain at rest.”

“What are you building? In Lisbon?” Felix said.

Lin was quiet. This was not the silence of a man who won’t answer, but the silence of a man deciding how much of the answer to give. He looked from his reflection to Felix. Something shifted in his face, something that might, on a different face, have been called the look of a man who needs to be heard, who has carried something for a long time without anyone to carry it with him.

“I am going to tell you something,” Lin said. He picked up his cup. “The world you believe in, where technology is neutral and the correct architecture produces the correct outcomes and the arc bends reliably, that world does not exist. It has never existed. What exists are machines. The Murmur is a machine. The Shunning is a machine. The Long Roots, the Three Oracles, the sanctions architecture, this train: machines. And every machine, without exception, is eventually operated by whoever can afford to maintain it.”

Felix opened his mouth. The words were there: systems tend toward equilibrium, information wants to be free...

“Once you have seen it,” Lin said, “you cannot unsee it. This is not a tragedy. It is a fact of life.”

Felix heard himself say, “Then what is the point of building anything?”

Lin set his cup down.

“That,” Lin said, “is exactly the right question.”

He did not answer it. He left Felix with his tea going cold and the train moving through the night.

Felix did not sleep.

He walked the train instead, through the dining car, past the business car with its encrypted-app men, their faces lit from below, through the corridor where a teenager was asleep with a boarding pass stuck to his cheek, through the observation car at the rear where the track disappeared into darkness behind them. He walked until his thinking had some air around it.

He stopped outside Lin’s cabin because there were voices.

A man and a woman. Neither of them Lin. It was past one in the morning. There were no meetings on the calendar.

Felix stood in the corridor and did not move.

“The keyholders are distributed,” the man said. “37 across 19 jurisdictions. Most don’t know each other. Several don’t know what they hold.”

“The contracts?” Lin’s voice.

“Self-executing. Time-locked. Embedded in the Strait Country’s fiscal ledger as infrastructure bonds. From the outside they look like pre-payments, R&D allocations. But they’re bound to the technical roadmap. Releases trigger on verifiable conditions. Equipment delivery. Construction milestones. Patent filings. Not board votes. Not executive signatures.”

“Even if the board is replaced?”

“The board is irrelevant. The funding flows through the ledger. The Strait Country’s system runs on a distributed ledger, thousands of nodes, maintained by institutions in dozens of countries who participate because the Strait Country’s fiscal stability is their fiscal stability. The contracts execute inside that architecture. No individual can stop them.”

“And if the roadmap changes.”

The woman spoke for the first time. “The keyholders. They don’t operate anything, they’re circuit breakers. If a parameter needs adjustment, modification requires 24 of 37 keys. Across 19 jurisdictions. Mostly anonymous to each other. No empire can coerce enough of them. Not quickly enough to matter.”

A silence. Then Lin: “When does the next transmission window open?”

“Gauge transition at Zabaikalsk. 11 minutes.”

“I’ll be there.”

Felix stood in the corridor for a long time. The train moved beneath him with the patience of something that did not require his understanding.

Lin has built a system that runs without its builder, he thought. That was the infrastructure planning. That was what needed to be finished. The Covenant – and he understood now that this was its name, had probably always been its name – would fund the Forge’s operations for 20 years, keep the thinking-stones flowing to every client regardless of empire, regardless of who sat in which chair, regardless of what happened to Lin Yuan Exact in the meantime.

Felix stood in the corridor and felt the train move and thought: this is the most remarkable piece of engineering I have ever encountered. And: there is no due process. And: these two thoughts are the same thought.

He went back to his cabin. He did not sleep.

His professors had been clear: a system without accountability is dangerous. Not as an opinion but as a technical fact, the way an ungrounded circuit is dangerous. The way a bridge without load calculations is dangerous. The Covenant had no circuit breaker that answered to anyone. The keyholders could modify its parameters, but who held the keyholders accountable? Who had consented to be governed by a machine that ran without consent as a feature?

Felix opened his tablet. The Lisbon summit had established an official secure channel for the pre-conference technical working group. Felix had been added to it in his capacity as the CEO’s representative. He had used it for logistics.

He composed a message. A subversive message. He was precise. He described the structure: 37 keyholders, 19 jurisdictions, self-executing contracts in the Strait Country’s ledger, the circuit-breaker architecture. He stated facts. He did not editorialize. He had been taught that a properly constructed report stated facts and allowed the facts to do the argumentative work. The facts here were unambiguous.

He sent it at 2:47 in the morning.

Then he thought: I will tell Lin what I have done. I will tell him in the morning. There should be a conversation. There should be an opportunity to respond. That is what accountability means, not punishment, but the existence of a process. The formal acknowledgement that the process exists.

The arc of innovation bends toward justice. He still believed this. He was, at 2:47 in the morning, acting on it.

He slept.

The train entered Europe the following morning. Felix ordered two coffees and carried them to Cabin 7-14.

He had decided, in the hour before dawn, that a conversation needed to happen. That he would tell Lin what he had done and why. That a man who believed in accountability should be prepared to account for his own actions. That Lin would understand this, or not, and that either way the conversation was important.

The door was unlocked. The cabin was empty. It had been systematically returned to a neutral state. The bed made with a precision that denied it had ever been occupied. The luggage gone. Even the slight compression a person leaves in upholstery after several days of travel was absent.

Felix found Captain Eriksson in the forward crew compartment and brought him up on the situation. Eriksson had seen many iterations of the situation Felix was about to describe.

“We should stop. Search the train,” said Felix.

“If we stop, we become subject to whatever jurisdiction we’ve stopped in,” Eriksson replied. “Currently that’s the Belarusian border corridor. The Telluric Empire has significant influence there.” He paused. “There are also 412 citizens of the Fiduciary States aboard in various states of legal complexity. Stopping resolves their complexity in a direction none of them would prefer.”

“So the response is to continue?” Felix was aghast.

“The train is built to continue, Mr. Lim. Stopping is a jurisdictional event. I would recommend against causing one.”

Felix wanted to have a conversation and now Lin had made it impossible. The report Felix filed was now unanchored, sitting in a channel, read by people whose interests he hadn’t, at 2:47 in the morning, stopped to enumerate.

Again the arc of innovation came back to him, as if a piece of evidence about himself: he had believed this, he had acted on it, and acting on it had ended disastrously. He did not blame the arc. He was beginning to think the arc did not know he existed.

Felix received two calls before the train reached Warsaw.

The first was from a man representing the legal interests of the Telluric Empire. He said that Lin Yuan Exact had been illegally detained by agents of the Fiduciary States, that the Telluric Empire was invoking the doctrine of habeas corpus on Lin’s behalf, and that Felix, as a witness to the events aboard the train and as the person who had reported on Lin’s plan for the Forge, would be contacted in Lisbon.

Felix asked how the Telluric Empire had come to know about his message. The man said he was not in a position to discuss that and the call ended.

The second was from a woman representing, in no official capacity, the interests of the Fiduciary States. She expressed concern for Felix’s safety. She noted that Felix possessed information that certain parties might prefer he not share. She asked him not to speak to anyone on arrival and said someone would find him.

After the second call ended Felix sat with his phone, thinking about the message he had sent. He could see the shape of it: both empires had learned something within hours of him sending it, which meant the official channel was official in the way that airports are official: infrastructure that serves particular interests while presenting itself as neutral.

He thought about the Murmur. The Chain of Hands. The Three Oracles. He thought about what Lin had said in the dining car: every machine is eventually operated by whoever can afford to maintain it.

Lisbon received Felix with indifference. He checked in to his hotel. His key card worked. His name was on the delegate list. He was still, technically, the CEO’s representative. No notification had arrived to change this. In every system, he was present as an entity representing Neutral Forge, but he didn’t know if he still had his job as chief of staff to the disappeared CEO.

On the third morning, a man from the Strait Country’s delegation sat down across from him in the hotel restaurant without asking.

“We know what happened to Lin,” the man said.

Felix had ordered eggs which had now gone cold.

“The gauge transition at Zabaikalsk, the 11-minute window. The Covenant’s first key transmission happened there in the Hale Gap.”

“Hale Gap?”

“It’s complicated to get into, but we think that one of the cars on UET-1 is a cryptographic bridge of some kind.”

Felix held the expression of someone who had gotten used to surprises.

“He timed the entire journey around an 11-minute window in which no state had enforcement authority. When the window opened, he was in car seven. He transmitted his own keyholder credentials. Then he was gone. We don’t really know how,” the man picked up his coffee.

Felix sat with his cold eggs and thought about 11 minutes. He thought about the drift official and his gradient fields and his tolerance thresholds and his trained eye for grey areas over the bright lines of law. He thought about Lin eating the congee with complete attention, about the identical white shirts, about the juggling parable and the balls staying in the air until the juggler was somewhere else.

He walked the city. He walked along the waterfront where the river went to the sea, past the old tower and the new scaffolding and the tram that ran between them. He thought about the Covenant: the 37 keyholders, the self-executing contracts, the Strait Country’s distributed ledger with its thousands of nodes and its decades of accumulated interest from institutions who needed it to remain stable.

But the Covenant was running. It was running through the gauge transition and the jurisdictional gap and the distributed ledger and the 19 jurisdictions and it would keep running after every person who had built it was gone. And the question was not whether the Covenant was just. Lin had told him in the dining car that the world that contained justice as a reliable product of correct architecture did not exist. The question was whether the Covenant was the closest thing to that world that the actual world permitted.

He stood at the waterfront and thought about what it would mean to believe in a machine you had not built. To choose to work inside it, understanding its costs, because the alternative was to keep filing reports through official channels that fed into the interests of whoever maintained them.

The arc of innovation bends toward capture. He believed this now. He also believed, and this was new, and harder, and had no clean phrase attached to it, that the Covenant was the correct response to a world in which that was true. Not the just response. The correct one. Built for the world as it is.

Several months later, Felix accepted a position with the Forge’s compliance architecture and took the UET-1 south from Hong Kong toward Vietnam. He took the train because it was the only place where his thinking moved at the right speed, and because he had some thinking to do before he went back north to start the new role.

He was in the South China Sea corridor when his phone rang.

“Felix.”

The voice was older than he remembered. Or he was remembering it wrong, measuring it now against what he knew. There was wind on the line, and underneath the wind an animal sound, low, intermittent, indifferent to the conversation.

“Sir,” Felix said. “Where are you?”

“Saudi Arabia.” A pause. “Looking after goats.”

“Why?”

“Well, I paid someone to take me to Zurich, but it seems they were paid by someone else to drop me off in a wadi.”

“Are you going to come back?”

“I’m happy here, Felix. The goats make me happy. The sun makes me happy. I worry about you though. I heard you spoke with the Strait Country delegation,” Lin said. “In Lisbon.”

“I filed a report,” Felix said. “Through the official channel. Before you disappeared.”

“I know.”

“I filed it because I thought there should be an appeals process. Because someone should know that a system with no accountability is dangerous.” A pause. “I understand that this was predictable.”

“I know what you thought,” Lin said. And then, without the weight of a judgment being delivered, simply as a fact in a sequence of facts: “You were right. A system without accountability is dangerous. I built one anyway.”

The wind on Lin’s end. The train’s motion on Felix’s.

“I’m going back to the Forge,” Felix said. “To work inside the Covenant. Not to challenge it.”

Lin was quiet for a moment. Felix heard the goat again. Closer, perhaps, or the animal had moved.

“The Covenant doesn’t need you,” Lin said.

“I know.” A pause. “I need it.”

A longer silence. Felix watched the South China Sea through the window: the light on it, the vast indifferent blue, the container ships moving in both directions as they always had and would continue to after every argument about their cargo was settled or abandoned.

“I built something that cannot be challenged,” Lin said. “You tried to challenge it.” The wind. “One of us was working from the world as it should be. The other from the world as it is.”

Felix waited.

“The goats are calling,” Lin said. “Goodbye, Felix.”

The line went dead.

Felix looked at the sea. It went on in every direction, carrying everything that needed to move from one side of the world to the other, indifferent to the arguments on its surface, reliable as gravity, as the arc, as the machines that had been built to describe them.

Only Rowan knew that their true purpose was as weapons in an invisible war that she had entangled them in. The stress had kept her awake for the past week, and it was beginning to show under her eyes. Rowan had a strict regimen to take care of her body: in the past month alone, she’d done Botox, Emface, IPL, and scheduled Moxi broadband light. She’d seen her orthodontist, cardiologist, GP, OBGYN, ophthalmologist, dermatologist, plastic surgeon, trainer, and pilates instructor. She had renewed her medspa membership. Drawn blood three times and given two urine samples. Her current skincare routine was six to eight steps, her daily supplement stack was 17 pills (20 on Mondays) and three peptides taken subQ, and she regularly engaged at least five high-tech tools from her home device library (red light, SAD light, PEMF, etc). Rowan liked to joke that she was somatically gentrified. Her working-class Midlands body’s adipocytes and senescent cells cleared out to make room for a sleeker, more profitable physiological regime. So, any small deviation, like the bags under her eyes, stood out like the lone crumbling house in an aspiring neighbourhood.

She shut her eyes and tried not to think about being a weapon. But the train, which had made itself fade into the background, quietly racing along at 250kph, began to slow down, and the sparse, clinical atmosphere was penetrated by the sound of something moving below the floorboards. Rowan knew before the announcement came that they were entering eastern Europe. The train switched from the euro standard gauge to a narrower gauge for this leg of the journey. The ride was going to be bumpier, but only noticeable to those who had been sensitized to such small changes. Rowan was one of them. She had, without the knowledge of her friends, taken the Unified Eurasian Transit line at least 100 times in the last five years. The longest single rail line connected Lisbon to Laos, passing through 13 different territories. It was a moving special economic zone and Rowan was a frequent trader on its route. The Tirzepatide Trail: that’s what people had started calling the leg of the UET-1 from Lisbon to the border of China, passing through Russia. Demand for Chinese peptides was high among tech workers and other desk jockeys who needed a little hit of something in the afternoon to focus on churning out enterprise software or whatever. Rowan picked these up and distributed them out of a clinic in the suburbs of London that she had started with a doctor whose license had been revoked years ago.

Rowan was not the only business in town. At the height of the peptide trade, peptide resellers were transporting 100,000 vials a month. But then Black Wednesday happened.

One morning on the Budapest-to-Vienna rail segment, someone released a modified aerosolised pathogen in Car 7. It had been engineered – this much was established within days. A chimeric agent, part synthetic, designed to activate only in the presence of estrogen concentrations above a specific threshold. The pathogen remained inert in male hosts but triggered acute respiratory collapse in females on primary exposure, while also shedding briefly, asymptomatically, through skin contact and shared air. All nine women in Car 7 died within minutes. 23 others throughout Cars 6 and 8 – women who had never entered Car 7, who had simply been breathing recycled air or brushed past an infected passenger – developed symptoms within hours. 14 were hospitalized. Seven would die over the following week. The men showed no symptoms beyond serving as unwitting carriers.

A conventional weapon – a bomb, a nerve agent – kills indiscriminately. This thing had been programmed with a biological filter. It had turned half the population into potential victims and the other half into unwitting accomplices.

The UET-1 reopened after six weeks, forever scarred by its immune response to the incident.

Now, the train’s security protocols didn’t just ask “Who are you?” They asked “What is happening inside you right now – and what’s the likelihood that your body is a bioweapon?” They called the new protocols ECOROUTE: Ecological Routing & Onboard Unified Triage Enforcement. The “Ecological” was a branding affectation – someone in the EU’s communications office, probably a millenial, had decided that a surveillance regime would go down easier if it sounded like a recycling initiative. Biology had become telemetry. Every passenger now emitted a continuous bio-signature tracked by sensors embedded in seats, air vents, even the floor panels.

Rowan noticed it immediately on her first test trip after the attack. The “AIRFLOW REVERSAL” lights that blinked without warning. The gentle hiss of doors sealing themselves when air sentinel zones detected anomalies. The thin paper bio-bands issued at boarding that shifted from green to yellow based on your vital signs and heat signature. It was vastly more sophisticated than the half-hearted masking and social distancing policies of the covid era. The UET-1 was French engineering that operated within a quasi-European bureaucracy, with some Chinese and South East Asian characteristics sprinkled in. The new protocols had to be observable and satisfactory for a multitude of bureaucratic cultures.

Frequent passengers like Rowan now had baselines in addition to identity checks – metabolic signatures, stress markers, sleep debt patterns. The ticket terms buried it in legalese: “By boarding, you consent to adaptive health-routing and temporary isolation for the protection of onboard ecology.” There was no real opt-out, just slower routing and more friction if you objected.

For Rowan’s operation, this was catastrophic. Her carefully packaged peptide shipments, once invisible among nutritional supplements, now triggered alerts. The train’s environmental sentinels could detect trace compounds, unexpected chemical signatures, deviations from baseline cargo profiles. Her Warsaw contact reported that freight cars were being diverted mid-route to “air-wash corridors” – gentle decontamination theaters that destroyed product and pathogen alike. The passengers were then earmarked like cattle for detailed screenings the next time they took the train.

Rowan was ready to walk away from it all. Cut their losses from the lost packages. Maybe go back to a low-level tech job. But one day, a man named Alex contacted her on Telegram.

It seemed like a scam at first. Another one of those grey-market peptide dealers. But this one was persistent. Eventually she met with him at a cheugy bar in Lisbon’s Bairro Alto. He was wearing flip-flops and chinos. Alex claimed he worked for the CIA, and he would supply Rowan with a new safe route for her peptides if she did one thing. One little job.

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Alex was not CIA. He was employed by Marcus Hale.

How do you get money into a country that is outside the SWIFT system and under physical blockade? Marcus Hale had been pondering this question with his associates for several months, while jet-setting between several small islands in the Indian Ocean whose names were unrecognizable to the general public.

The country in question had lithium. Not the kind prescribed to stabilize mood – the kind that stabilized the future. Enough lithium carbonate under its eastern steppe to supply European battery production for 40 years. A Chinese state consortium held the extraction rights through a deal signed with the previous government. The current government, such as it was, operated from three cities and a Telegram channel and was willing to renegotiate. But renegotiation requires funding. Funding requires transfer. And transfer requires money that could actually move.

Hale’s could not. This was the essential problem. Hale was 63 and had accumulated wealth the way rot accumulates in a wall – invisibly, structurally, in places no one thought to look. Arms brokerage in the Balkans during the nineties, routed through Austrian holding companies. Conflict mineral extraction in the Congo, laundered through infrastructure contracts that built roads to nowhere. Sanction evasion for three separate Russian oligarchs during the 2022 freeze, taking 15 percent of every dollar he hid. He was not a billionaire in the way that word is normally used. He appeared on no lists, owned no visible assets, had no public face. His firm, Sable Meridian, employed 12 people and existed in a legal superposition – its purpose described in incorporation documents as “strategic consulting.”

The problem with building wealth inside walls is that it stays inside walls. Hale’s money existed as equity in shell companies that owned shell companies, as claims on assets in jurisdictions where the courts could be bought but the banks could not be wired, as handshake obligations from men who would honour them only if Hale could reach them. None of this was convertible. None of it could be moved to a country under blockade to fund a government that existed primarily on Telegram. He needed money that was liquid, untraceable, and – critically – not his. Money that belonged to no one. Money that no intelligence service, no compliance team, no blockchain analytics firm was watching.

Yevgeni Stolar’s Bitcoin fit the bill. Almost.

Yevgeni Stolar had died in June 2026, in a boating accident off Limassol. The Cypriot maritime authority ruled it accidental. He was 41, Ukrainian-born, and had built payment infrastructure for half the darknet markets operating between 2018 and 2025. Not the markets themselves – the plumbing beneath them. Transaction mixers, tumbling protocols, the invisible pipes through which money moved without identity. By 2022, an estimated four percent of all cryptocurrency transactions on the dark web touched infrastructure Stolar had built. He had accumulated 11,000 Bitcoin – approximately $940 million – in fractional commissions. Then he died, and the money went dark.

Karel, Hale’s operations nerd who actually executed his plans, found Stolar’s notes eight months later, on a server in Odessa that Sable Meridian had purchased through a shell company. Fragments of documentation written in a mix of Ukrainian and English. What emerged, over weeks of reconstruction, was a plan.

Stolar had intended to board the UET-1 with three others. There were references to two women and a man, designated only as N., K., and D. Travel itineraries for a route from Kyiv to Lisbon, dated March 2023, four seats booked in adjacent compartments. Dosage calculations for adjusting a compound’s concentration for different body masses. One set appeared to be for someone quite small – a teenager, possibly. The booking was never used.

There was also a single line, written in Ukrainian, that Karel translated as: “If the boat, then N. knows the second route.” No indication of what the second route was or who N. was. Karel spent three months trying to find out and failed. It was, he told Hale, probably a story worth knowing, but not one that they actually needed to be able to extract the key.

What they needed was already in the notes. Stolar had been, in addition to his darknet work, a contractor for the European Union’s transport security directorate. He had been part of the team that designed the sensor specifications for the UET-1’s onboard environmental monitoring system – the system that, after Car 7, became the foundation of ECOROUTE’s decontamination array.

The sensors composed an active terahertz and Raman spectroscopy system. It swept passengers with a broad frequency range, reading the molecular composition of their skin, breath, clothing, and – at the resolutions mandated by Black Wednesday protocols – subcutaneous tissue. It was built to detect trace chemical weapons, aerosolised pathogens, and anomalous compounds. What Stolar had ensured, through careful specification of the frequency bands and resolution thresholds, was that the array also happened to operate in the exact range needed to interrogate a very specific kind of engineered nanoparticle.

Solar had buried a cold wallet, nested in the decontamination array’s firmware as a dormant subroutine, indistinguishable from the diagnostic calibration code that surrounded it. The wallet contained the private keys to the 11,000 Bitcoin. It was secured with a four-of-four multisignature protocol: four signing keys must be presented simultaneously, or the wallet would stay locked. Stolar had not stored those keys on hardware devices or paper or in any digital format. He had encoded them into a compound.

The compound was not, strictly speaking, a peptide. It was a peptide chassis carrying a payload of engineered paramagnetic nanoparticles. The peptide could bind to tissue and ferry the particles through the body’s physiological pathways – lymphatic, fascial, subcutaneous. But Stolar’s original version was crude. It drifted in practice, the nanoparticles migrating unpredictably across different body types. The resonance signatures it produced were noisy, inconsistent. It worked on Stolar’s body. Whether it would have worked on N., K., and D. was unclear. He never got the chance to find out.

This was where Karel came in handy. 14 months, and the reason Hale had paid him what he’d paid him.

Karel had re-engineered the compound from the chassis up. The core problem was biological variance: its fat distribution, hydration, muscle mass, organ geometry all shaped how the nanoparticles settled in tissue, which meant different bodies produced different resonance patterns from the same vial. Karel’s solution was to make the compound indifferent to its host. He surface-coated each particle cluster with synthetic ligands which ignored the body’s natural signalling and drove the particles into a predetermined topographical configuration – specific depths, specific densities, specific spatial relationships to one another – regardless of the body they were in. He ran simulations across hundreds of physiological models. He tested on cadaveric tissue sourced through channels Hale didn’t ask about. The result was a compound so resistant to the biological individuality of its host that it would produce the same resonance pattern whether injected into a 20 year-old athlete or a 60 year-old diabetic. The body was mere scaffolding. The compound built its own architecture.

There were four vials. Each contained a different nanoparticle configuration – different cluster sizes, different magnetic orientations, different spatial topographies. Vial 1, injected into any human body, would always produce Key 1’s resonance signature when scanned by the decon array. Vial 2 would always produce Key 2. The four keys were not in the four people. The four keys were in the four vials. The people were hosts – warm, compliant, scannable, but interchangeable.

Hale needed four bodies. He needed them on the train. He needed them flagged.

Rowan felt the gauge change settle. Ana had fallen asleep with the Bataille open on her chest. Lucas had his head on Jax’s shoulder, both of them out. Rowan was alone with the hum.

She reached into her bag and took out the pouch Alex had given her. Temperature-controlled, unmarked, delivered to her flat by a courier service that didn’t exist when she tried to look it up. Four vials. Clear liquid. She held one up to the reading light. It looked like every reconstituted peptide she’d ever handled. Same viscosity and faint yellow cast.

Alex had told her the compound was a next-generation masking agent. Experimental. Not yet on any market. “It recalibrates your metabolic output to sit inside the train’s baseline tolerance,” he’d said. “You inject, your bio-signature flattens, the sentinels read you as boring. You ride through decon zones without a flag. No amber bands, no air-wash, no questions.”

“And you need four people to test this?”

“We need four different metabolic profiles. Age, sex, body composition – the sentinels calibrate differently for each. One body isn’t enough for a test. Four is a dataset.”

It was a good pitch. The kind of compound she would have killed for six months ago, when her shipments were being diverted and her distribution network was collapsing under ECOROUTE’s paranoid immune logic. A way to move through the train invisible. If it worked, it was worth more than anything else Alex could offer her.

But she didn’t believe him. The explanation was too clean, too shaped to her exact desires, the way a phishing email contains exactly the link you were looking for. She’d spent years in grey markets, replying to ads from women named Sophia and Judi whose faces were generated by algorithms, and she had developed a sense for when she was being sold something and when she was being used for something. Alex was using her. She was almost certain.

She took the job anyway. Partly because she was a curious person – it was the same impulse that had her browsing peptide forums at 13, messaging Chinese suppliers at 16, building shell companies at 17. Curiosity as engine, risk as fuel. She also knew it was not risky. Maybe the peptides set off the ECOROUTE protocols, but that would be a minor inconvenience at worst.

But an intrusive thought that had kept her awake for a week was now beginning to show under her eyes: the compound was doing something to her body that Alex hadn’t described. She and Lucas and Ana and Jax were not testers but vessels. Their carefully optimised, peptide-saturated bodies were being recruited for carrying something dangerous. Was she a bioweapon? The thought lingered in her like a vial she couldn’t uncap.

Hale was in Zug, in a room with no windows, watching four dots move across a map on a screen. The dots were the phones of Rowan, Lucas, Ana, and Jax. The UET-1’s real-time positioning data was not public, but Sable Meridian had access through a freight logistics company that it owned 40 percent of.

Beside him, Karel was monitoring biometric feeds piped from the train’s own sensor grid – another access point purchased, not hacked, through a maintenance subcontractor in Warsaw. The feeds were rough. Passive readings from seat sensors and floor panels. Enough to confirm that all four subjects were aboard, alive, and not yet dosed.

“She’s awake,” Karel said. “The other three are asleep.”

“She’ll wait until they’re all awake,” Hale said.

On a second screen, another operation was underway. A relay node in the UET-1’s network was coming online – housed in a switching station outside a data hub town that lived and breathed ECOROUTE logistics. Sable Meridian’s people had physical access to the station through a local telecoms contractor who had been on retainer for two years. The relay handled decontamination scan data as it passed from the train’s onboard servers to the ECOROUTE central repository in Brussels. For 35 seconds, during the scan of Car 7’s air-wash corridor, the data would be duplicated and routed to a separate receiver. 18 seconds was enough.

Rowan woke Lucas first. He came to with that bleary, gorgeous confusion that made him so watchable on camera. She handed him a vial and a syringe.

“New stack,” she said. “Circadian reset compound. We’ll recover from the trip faster with this. We can make the most of the day. Best if we all take it at the same time.”

“Now? On the train?”

“The absorption is better when you’re in motion. Something about vestibular stimulation syncing with the hypothalamus.” She’d made this up on the spot, and it sounded exactly like the kind of thing she’d say. Lucas didn’t question it.

He woke Jax, who looked at the vial and turned to Rowan. “What about the ECOROUTE sensors?”

“This compound is engineered to pass the sensors.”

“Ahh, so you’re testing it on this trip, aren’t you?”

“What about vertical… stimulation?” Lucas enquired.

“Vestibular… yeah, that’s part of it too.”

“So that’s what this trip is about, isn’t it? Testing your new compound?” said Ana, who had been listening to the conversation, leaning in from her seat.

The onlookers mostly were sleeping, except for a few bleary stares.

“We’re here. Might as well. There’s no harm done. Worst case, we get flagged and submitted to some security theater. You know they can’t actually do anything or convict you for such small amounts.”

The gang really did not need that much convincing. If Rowan acted like the leader of the pack, it was because Ana, Jax, and Lucas let her. They knew that she was a striver who had to work hard for every penny, and they preferred that she work hard for them rather than someone else. Besides, they thought, what’s beauty without some skin in the game?

They injected one at a time. Subcutaneous, upper arm. Rowan went first. She had labelled the vials one through four in the order Alex had specified. He’d been precise about this – each person had to take a specific vial. She figured it was dosage calibration.

The compound entered warm. Warmer than any peptide she’d used, and with a faint granularity she’d never felt before – not pain exactly, but a sense of something distributing, particles finding their stations in her tissue like iron filings arranging themselves along magnetic field lines. For about 40 seconds she felt something she couldn’t name – a sensation of density, as though her body had become marginally more there, more materially present in space. She thought of herself in the benefits office in Wolverhampton, age 15, a man reading her file instead of her face. The feeling of being seen not as a body but as a readable surface.

It passed. She drew a breath. Normal.

Lucas injected. No reaction beyond a slight wince. Jax the same. Ana came back from the bathroom rubbing her arm and saying it felt like sand under her skin.

Within four minutes, all four bio-bands shifted from green to deep amber. A wrinkle in the plan.

Karel sat up. “Spike across all four. BRX-90 is integrating.”

On the biometric feed, the four metabolic profiles were deviating sharply from their rolling baselines. But the deviation wasn’t metabolic – the train’s passive sensors were picking up secondary effects of the nanoparticles distributing through tissue, the slight perturbations in skin conductance and bioimpedance as the particles settled into position. The train’s AI read this as variance. It couldn’t know what it was actually seeing: four bodies quietly rearranging themselves into keys.

Hale watched the map. The train was approaching the segment where the relay node was positioned. Timing mattered. The decon scan had to happen within this window – a 200-kilometre stretch where the compromised relay would handle the data handoff. If the train flagged them too early or too late, the scan data would route through a different node, one which Sable Meridian didn’t control.

“Flagging now,” Karel said.

On the train, AIRFLOW REVERSAL lights activated in the corridor outside Rowan’s compartment. The doors sealed.

An attendant arrived first. Then two people in grey – the same ambiguous uniform Rowan had seen before, not security or medical, the hybrid role that ECOROUTE had invented. They were polite. They were always polite. The politeness was part of the protocol, designed to reduce cortisol spikes that would further distort bio-readings.

One of them had a handheld device. Rowan had seen these before. They were called Pono. “We’re detecting metabolic anomalies from your compartment. Standard procedure. If you’d follow us.”

Rowan nodded. She’d rehearsed this in her head. Calm, cooperative, mildly annoyed. The posture of a frequent traveller who’d been through decon before and found it tedious.

But the posture cracked almost immediately. In fact there were five people in grey. Two in the corridor, one at each end of the car, and a fifth standing by the sealed door they were being led toward, holding a tablet and not looking up from it. Rowan had been through decon flagging 11 times in the past year. There had never been five.

Lucas tried to film the corridor and was asked to put his phone away. Ana said nothing, just looked around with her ambient curiosity, taking in the sealed doors and blinking sensor arrays the way she took in everything – as content, as atmosphere. They didn’t understand. They thought this was an inconvenience, a story for later, a thing that would become funny.

Rowan was calculating. The masking agent had failed. That was her first thought. Alex’s compound, whatever it actually was, had not suppressed their bio-signatures but had amplified them. They were not invisible. All four of them were lit up, walking through the train like flares, potential bioweapons. Which meant one of two things. Either Alex had lied about what the compound did, which was possible. Or Alex had known exactly what it would do, which was worse.

They passed through the second car. The overhead lights here were different – a flatter, bluer spectrum that Rowan recognised from clinical settings. Diagnostic lighting. The train was already reading them. She looked down at her bio-band. Deep amber, almost red. She had never seen a band go red. She didn’t know what red meant. The documentation she’d seen only went up to amber.

Her peptide trade was finished. ECOROUTE had her metabolic baseline from a hundred trips. Whatever BRX-90 had done to that baseline was logged, timestamped, and already en route to Brussels. She would never board this train again without being flagged. Her Warsaw contact, her Porto clinic, her Barcelona plans – all of it was now tethered to a bio-signature that read as a threat. Five years of building a supply chain through the Tirzepatide Trail, and she had burned it in 40 seconds because a man in flip-flops had handed her a pouch and she had not asked enough questions.

Jax touched her arm. “You alright? You’ve gone pale.”

“Fine. Low blood sugar.”

Third car. The doors ahead of them were different from the others – heavier, with a visible seal around their frames and a small antechamber before the next section. An airlock. She had never been routed through an airlock. The grey-uniformed woman at the front pressed her palm to a panel, and the door opened with a sound that was less a hiss and more an exhale, as though the train itself were breathing.

And then she saw the number on the bulkhead. Car 7.

Something cold moved through her sternum. Car 7 was where 17 people had died. Car 7 was where the organophosphate had turned passengers into convulsing, foaming things on the floor. Car 7 had been the reason for all of this – the bio-bands, the sentinels, the air-wash corridors, the entire immune system that had strangled her business. She had thought of Car 7 as an abstraction, a policy event, the thing that changed the rules. She had never imagined that she would stand in it.

The space had been rebuilt entirely. Bright, clinical, transparent partitions, reclining chairs embedded with sensor grids. It was clean the way that crime scenes are clean after the cleaners leave.

She thought about Alex. About his flip-flops and his thumbs-up emoji and the courier service that didn’t exist. She thought about BRX-90 warming through her arm and the 40 seconds of transparency and the five grey uniforms. She thought: he didn’t need me to test anything. He needed me to get caught.

“Please sit. The process takes approximately 30 to 40 minutes.”

Rowan sat. The chair received her weight and she felt, through the thin fabric of her clothes, the faint vibration of sensors activating beneath the surface.

In Zug, Hale stood. Karel was monitoring the decon array’s output through the compromised relay, watching raw spectral data from four bodies arranged in reclining chairs in Car 7.

The array was doing what it was designed to do: sweeping the four passengers with a broad-spectrum terahertz and Raman pulse, reading their molecular composition layer by layer – skin, subcutaneous fat, fascia, muscle. It was looking for chemical weapons residue, pathogen markers, anomalous compounds. It found the nanoparticles immediately, flagging them as an unidentified synthetic presence in all four subjects. This was expected. This was, in fact, the point. The flag kept them in the chairs. The scan kept running.

What the array’s operators didn’t know was that the scan was doing double duty. Every frequency pulse that hit the nanoparticles came back carrying information. The particles resonated at specific, engineered frequencies, and the pattern of resonance – which frequencies absorbed, which reflected, and at what intensities – encoded 64 bits per body. The array faithfully recorded these resonance patterns as part of its standard spectral readout, because that was what it was built to do. It had no idea it was reading keys.

Beneath the surface telemetry, in the diagnostic subroutine that Stolar had planted three years ago, a listener was comparing the resonance patterns against the four signing signatures it had been programmed to recognise. For three years it had found nothing. Every scan returned noise – the spectral clutter of ordinary human bodies carrying ordinary compounds.

Now, for the first time, four patterns matched.

“First key verified,” Karel said. He was watching the telemetry through a decoder he’d built from Stolar’s Odessa notes. The firmware’s operations were invisible – even to Karel. What he could read was the output. “Second key. Third. Fourth. All four signing keys accepted.”

The cold wallet unlocked. But it did not release Bitcoin. Stolar had designed one more layer. The wallet contained a single payload: the private key to a second wallet, where the 11,000 Bitcoin actually sat. The cold wallet was a vault that held only a combination to another vault.

The private key was 256 bits. The firmware encoded it into the scan’s outgoing telemetry – the data stream that the decon array routinely transmitted to the ECOROUTE central repository in Brussels. It used a frequency band that Stolar had reserved in the array’s original specifications, documented as “diagnostic calibration overhead,” never questioned by the engineers who ran the system after him. The key occupied 18 seconds of transmission, split across four telemetry channels – one per body – interleaved with legitimate scan data. To Brussels, it would arrive as noise. Metabolic readings, spectral resonance profiles, ambient chemical levels, and buried among them, meaningless without the decoder, a 256 bit string worth $940 million.

“Key is assembling,” Karel said.

The compromised relay node intercepted the telemetry as it passed through the switching station. Karel’s decoder stripped the noise in real time, isolating the resonance fragments from each channel, recombining them in the sequence Stolar’s notes specified. On the screen, a string of characters grew, one fragment at a time, like a sentence being translated from a language only one dead man had ever spoken.

“Key is valid,” Karel said.

Hale sat down. The wallet containing the Bitcoin was now accessible to anyone holding that string. It had passed from a dead man’s firmware through four unknowing bodies through a hijacked relay into a room in Zug. The money had been there the whole time, waiting.

Rowan watched the display on the wall. Her waveforms were settling, the amber tones cooling back toward baseline. A woman in a lab coat asked her standard questions. Supplements. Last meal. Known allergies to decontamination agents. Rowan answered on autopilot. Class 2 metabolic variance. Documentation required, detention not.

The woman handed them replacement bio-bands – yellow, which would fade to green within a few hours – and a printout advising them to maintain hydration and minimize exertion. Lucas photographed the printout for his Instagram story.

They walked back through the three cars. The train had resumed full speed, the rougher gauge vibration now familiar, unconsciously absorbed by their bodies. Outside, the landscape was flat and dark, interrupted only by the occasional light cluster of a town too small to have a station.

Rowan sat down. Her friends fell back asleep almost immediately, the BRX-90’s secondary effect – a serotonergic calm that Karel had included to ensure compliant subjects – pulling them under. She forced herself to stay awake.

She looked at her bio-band. Still yellow. She looked at her friends, their bodies slack and breathing and unaware. She thought about the 40 seconds after injecting. The sensation of being read. She thought about the man in Wolverhampton. She thought about the train, this enormous paranoid organism hurtling east, and how it had looked at her and her friends and seen threat, variance, anomaly – and how somewhere in that misreading, in the gap between what the system saw and what was actually there, something had been given passage.

She didn’t know what. She pulled her jacket over her shoulders and watched the dark out the window until it became a less dark grey, and then a pale grey, and then a dim, reluctant dawn over a country she had never visited.

A week after they returned to Lisbon, a package arrived at her flat. Inside was a temperature-controlled case containing 30 vials of a clear compound and a handwritten note in Alex’s loose, indifferent script:

“This one actually works. Flat spectral profile. You’ll ride clean.” A severance gift, or a leash – she couldn’t tell which and decided not to think about it.

It worked. She tested it on a freight run to Warsaw, a single case of tirzepatide hidden among nutritional supplements. The bio-bands stayed green. Her Warsaw contact confirmed the shipment arrived intact. She ran a second, larger shipment the following week. Then a third. Within a month, the Tirzepatide Trail was operational again – quieter than before. Smaller volumes, but moving.

She opened the Barcelona clinic. She hired new distributors. She posted a TikTok series on circadian peptide stacking for long-haul travel that crossed two million views. The money returned, and with it the familiar architecture of her life. Except for the dreams.

The dreams started the second night after the train. She was back in Car 7, in the reclining chair. But in the dream the scan didn’t end. The array kept sweeping, pulse after pulse, and with each pass she felt fluid shifting inside her, rearranging, encoding something new. She looked down at her bio-band and it was black. She looked at Lucas and Ana and Jax in their chairs and their bands were black too and their eyes were open but they were not looking at her.

In other dreams she was in the benefits office in Wolverhampton. The man behind the desk was scanning her file but the file was her body and the data on the screen was not her name or her address but a string of characters she couldn’t read. Sometimes she was in her flat injecting and the compound wouldn’t stop flowing, the plunger already fully depressed but the liquid still oozing in, filling her arm, her shoulder, pooling behind her sternum.

She never connected the dreams to anything real. They were stress, they were peptide side effects, they were her body processing a strange experience on a train. She did not know that her body had carried a key. She did not know about Stolar or Karel or the room in Zug or the lithium under a steppe she couldn’t name. She knew only that something had been done to her, something she had consented to without understanding, and that her subconscious – the one system she had never managed to optimise – refused to let it go.

Lucas and Ana and Jax never mentioned dreams. She never asked. The possessed never recognized their possessor or his purpose.

Mira Voskresenskaya had worked at the Bering Link for 11 years. The Link was not a physical bridge – an official land crossing between Russia and Alaska remained the fantasy of engineers and the nightmare of ecologists – but it was a bridge nonetheless: a legal fiction, a regulatory membrane, a set of nested protocols that allowed certain categories of goods, data, and money to cross the water without triggering the web of sanctions that had been evolving, like an invasive species, since 2022.

The Link existed because both sides needed it to exist. The Americans needed rare earths and titanium sponge. The Russians needed medical isotopes and that particular kind of money which could still move when other kinds could not. The Link was illegal in the sense that aeli was illegal. The traders had borrowed that word from the Kazakh brokers who cleared their payments, it meant something like carried across, though no one could agree on the etymology. Too useful to prosecute, too fragile to acknowledge, Mira’s job was to sit in a windowless room in Nome and translate.

Not languages. She did speak both Russian and English fluently; those were table stakes. What she translated was intent. When the Magadan procurement office sent a request for “technical consultation services,” Mira parsed whether this meant actual engineers or some bribe dressed in euphemism. When the Anchorage compliance officer asked whether a shipment was “destined for civilian end-use,” Mira understood he was asking whether he would need to not-see something.

She translated silences, too. The things neither side spoke because to do so would make them real.

For more than a decade, this had worked. Not smoothly – the Link was always close to collapse, always one audit away from destruction – but it had worked in the way that mattered: goods moved, payments cleared, and Mira received her fees, deposited in an account in Nicosia that belonged to a company that belonged to another company that belonged, in some ultimate sense, to her.

She was good at her job. She had the rare talent of making both sides feel that she was their confidant.

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The trouble began with a name.

Every transaction through the Link had to be recorded in a shared ledger – not a blockchain, nothing so fashionable, just a mutually-accessible database with heavy encryption and heavier legal disclaimers. As standard, the ledger recorded: origin, destination, category code, value, timestamp. Names were hashed for privacy, but Mira had access to the plaintext as part of her relay function.

In March, a new name appeared on the Magadan side. The shipments were small – laboratory equipment, ostensibly for a fisheries research institute – but they were frequent, and they paid in advance, which was unusual. Russians preferred to delay payment as long as possible; it was a negotiating tactic and also simple prudence in an environment where the rules changed weekly.

The name was Sorokin. Mira noted it, filed it, moved on.

In April, an American compliance officer named Hendricks asked Mira, during one of their weekly encrypted calls, whether she had noticed anything unusual in the eastbound medical shipments.

“Unusual how?” she asked.

“Volume’s up. Just wondering if you’re seeing the same thing on your end.”

“Volume is always up in spring,” Mira said. “Navigation opens, backlog clears.”

“Sure,” Hendricks said. “Sure.” But he didn’t sound sure.

Mira checked the ledger after the call. The fisheries shipments from Sorokin’s institute had indeed increased. She cross-referenced against the payment records. The institute was paying in euros, routed through a bank in Astana, which was normal for Link transactions. Kazakhstan’s banks had become a de facto laundromat.

What was not normal was the amount. Laboratory equipment for a fisheries institute did not cost 11 million euros per quarter.

Mira understood, then, what she was looking at. She understood it the way a translator understands a word whose meaning is clear even when its referent is obscure.

She closed the ledger. She did not make a note.

Everything passes through the throat. It cannot selectively forget. The information is there, in its muscle memory. Mira’s pattern-recognition, her slight hesitation before translating a particular phrase, were instinctive. Other people can look away; she could not. The job is to look.

Mira had always understood what the Link was. You did not build a bridge between two systems designed not to connect without accepting certain compromises. You allowed certain ambiguities. You, in the language of the protocol spec, “preserve functional interoperability while respecting jurisdictional boundaries.” In practice, this meant you did not ask questions whose answers would force you to stop.

But there was a difference between not asking and knowing. Mira had spent her career not asking.

She could tell Hendricks. He was already suspicious; he was practically asking her to confirm his suspicions. A word from her – not even a word, just a particular tone, a particular hesitation – and the American side would begin an audit. The audit would find whatever Sorokin’s institute was really doing with its “laboratory equipment.” The Link would be exposed. The sanctions would clamp down. And Mira would be what? A witness? A whistleblower? A traitor to one side, a hero to the other?

She did not want to be a hero. Heroes were people who had failed to negotiate.

She could tell the Magadan office. Warn them that the Americans were sniffing around Sorokin. This would make her complicit in whatever Sorokin was doing. But she was already complicit, wasn’t she? She had facilitated the shipments. She had translated the invoices. She had looked at the payment records and closed the ledger.

Complicity was not binary. It accumulated, like sediment.

Or she could do nothing. She could continue to relay, translate, lubricate. She could let the Link continue to function until it was discovered or as long as it wasn’t. This was the coward’s option, but it was also the professional’s option. Her job was to maintain the channel, not to judge what passed through it.

For three weeks, Mira did nothing.

In late April, a man came to Nome.

He was Russian, though his passport was Kazakh, and he introduced himself as Gennady Pavlovich. He said he was from the Magadan procurement office; he said he wanted to discuss “procedural refinements.” He had the soft hands of someone who had never worked a fishing boat and the formal English of someone who had never lived among its native speakers.

They met in the hotel bar, the only bar in Nome that served anything stronger than beer. Gennady Pavlovich ordered vodka and did not drink it.

“You have been with the Link for a long time,” he said.

“This is good. Continuity is valuable.” He turned his glass with his fingers. “We have noticed that the American side has been asking questions. About the medical shipments. About the institute.”

Mira said nothing. This was a technique she had learned early: when someone was telling you something, let them tell you.

“These questions are unfortunate,” Gennady Pavlovich said. “The institute does important work. Fisheries are the foundation of the Magadan economy. We would not want the Americans to… misunderstand.”

“I see.”

“You are the relay. The throat.” He smiled, as if the term was a joke they shared. “What passes through the throat, only the throat knows. This is correct?”

“That’s one way to describe it.”

“We appreciate your discretion. We have always appreciated it.” He pushed a small envelope across the table. “A token of appreciation. For your continued service.”

Mira did not touch the envelope. “I’m already paid for my service.”

“This is not payment. This is… recognition. Of the difficulty of your position. Of the care you have taken.” He leaned forward slightly. “We are aware that the Americans are pressuring you. We want you to know that we understand. And we want you to know that there are options.”

“Options?”

“If the Link becomes… untenable. If you find that your position here is no longer sustainable. There are other links. Other places where your skills would be valued.”

Mira looked at the envelope on the table. It was thin – not cash, then, but something else. A number, perhaps. An account. A promise.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

She did not think about it. She already knew.

The problem was not the envelope or what it contained. The problem was what Gennady Pavlovich had not said. He had not asked her to lie to Hendricks or to falsify records or to destroy evidence. He had asked her only to continue doing what she was already doing: relaying, translating, maintaining the channel.

But the meaning of that work had changed. Before, she had been an impartial conduit – or at least she had been able to believe she was. Now she knew that the conduit carried something specific, something that the Russian side did not want examined, something valuable enough to send a soft-handed man from Magadan to offer her escape routes.

She was no longer neutral. She had never been neutral. Neutrality was a story she told herself so that she could sleep.

Hendricks called again in early May. His voice was tighter than usual.

“Mira, I need you to be straight with me.”

“I’m always straight with you.”

“The Sorokin shipments. What do you know?”

She could lie. She was good at lying; it was a subset of translation. She could say “I don’t know anything,” or “I just process what comes through,” or “You’re asking the wrong person.”

Instead, she said: “What do you already know?”

“We’ve traced the money. The Astana bank is a front. Kazakhstan’s been cooperative, surprisingly. The money comes from a construction company in Moscow that doesn’t seem to build anything. The company is owned by a trust that’s owned by a holding company that’s owned by… you get the picture.”

“I get the picture.”

“The equipment isn’t going to a fisheries institute. Or if it is, it’s not being used for fish. We think it’s going to a facility outside Petropavlovsk. We think…” He stopped. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“No.”

“But I need to know. Are you part of it?”

The question was almost a relief. It was clean, binary, answerable. Was she part of it?

“I relayed the shipments,” Mira said. “I processed the invoices. I did not ask what was in the crates.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“That’s what I can tell you.”

There was silence on the line. Mira could hear Hendricks breathing. Could almost hear him deciding.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. I’m going to have to report this up the chain. You understand what that means.”

“Yes.”

“The Link is going to close. There’s going to be an investigation. You might be… you might be in a difficult position.”

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry, Mira. I know this wasn’t – I know you were just doing your job.”

“Yes,” she said. “I was.”

After she ended the call, Mira sat in her office for a long time. Outside, the Bering Sea was beginning to thaw; she could hear the distant crack and groan of ice breaking apart. In a few weeks, the shipping lanes would open fully, and the Link – if it still existed – would carry its usual spring cargo of legitimate goods and useful fictions.

But the Link would not exist in a few weeks. Hendricks would report to his supervisors, who would report to their supervisors, and somewhere in Washington someone would decide that the political cost of the Link now exceeded its economic value. Sanctions. The Russians would retaliate with their own closures. The traders who depended on the Link would find other routes, shadier routes, or they would go out of business.

And Mira?

She could take Gennady Pavlovich’s offer. There were other links, he had said. Other places where her skills would be valued. She could disappear into that world, becoming a throat for some other channel, relaying some other cargo, asking no questions.

Or she could stay. Cooperate with Hendricks’s investigation. Explain what she knew, which was not much, and what she had inferred, which was more. She could become a witness, a source, a cooperating party. She could burn the bridge she had spent so long maintaining.

Neither option felt like a choice. They were consequences – things that happened to you because of choices you had already made.

There is a word in Russian, perevozchik, that means ferryman or carrier. It comes from perevozit’: to transport across. A perevozchik is someone who moves things from one side to another, who lives in the space between banks, who belongs fully to neither shore.

Mira had always thought of herself as a perevozchik. The word had a certain dignity: it implied a function, a necessity, a role that existed because the world was divided and someone had to cross the divisions.

But there was another way to read the word. The prefix pere- could mean across, but it could also mean through or over. A perevozchik was someone who carried things over, but also someone through whom things passed. A vessel. A conduit. A throat.

She left Nome on a Wednesday. She did not tell Hendricks; she did not contact Gennady Pavlovich. She simply closed her office, logged out of the ledger system for the last time, and drove to the airport.

She had a ticket to Anchorage, but she did not board that flight. Instead, she bought a ticket to Seattle, and from Seattle to Frankfurt, and from Frankfurt to Nicosia. The long way around, the way that left the fewest traces.

In Nicosia, she checked into a hotel and slept for 14 hours. When she woke, she withdrew a portion of the money from the account that belonged to the company that belonged to her. She did not take all of it; that would have been noticed. She took enough to live on for a year, maybe two.

Then she flew to Tbilisi, where she knew no one and no one knew her.

The Link closed in June. Mira read about it on her phone, sitting in a café in the old town, drinking coffee that was too strong and too sweet. The American side had announced “enhanced compliance measures,” the Russian side had responded with “countermeasures against unfriendly actions.” The traders who had depended on the Link were scrambling for alternatives. A few were being investigated; a few had already been arrested.

Gennady Pavlovich was not among the names mentioned. Sorokin’s institute was not named either. Whatever the institute had been doing with its laboratory equipment, it had apparently been discreet enough to avoid the first wave of scrutiny.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps the scrutiny was still coming. Perhaps Gennady Pavlovich was, at this moment, making other arrangements, contacting other throats, building other bridges.

Mira did not know and did not want to know.

She stayed in Tbilisi for three months. It was a good city for disappearing: cheap, chaotic, tolerant of foreigners who asked no questions because they did not want to answer any. She rented an apartment in a crumbling Soviet-era block and spent her days walking the steep streets, learning the shapes of the churches, listening to a language she did not yet understand.

She had been a translator for 20 years. She had spent her professional life making sense of the gaps between systems – languages, laws, intentions. Now she was in a gap herself, and she found that she did not mind.

A bridge, she thought, was a structure that existed because two sides needed to be connected. But a bridge was also a structure that could be removed. It was not the same as the banks it joined. It belonged to neither shore and could be claimed by neither.

She had thought she was maintaining a bridge. She had thought that this was neutral work, necessary work, work that existed above or outside the conflicts it facilitated. But a bridge is never neutral. A bridge determines what could cross and what could not, who paid the toll and who set the price. A bridge shapes the relationship between the banks, even as it seemed only to connect them.

She had shaped things too. Every time she translated, every time she relayed, every time she chose to see or not to see, she had shaped the traffic that passed through her. She had not been neutral. She had been – what? An instrument. A participant.

And now the bridge was burned, and she was on neither side, and she was free in the way that falling is free.

In September, a woman approached her at a café. Georgian, well-dressed, with the careful posture of someone who had been trained to enter rooms.

“Ms. Voskresenskaya,” the woman said. “May I sit?”

Mira did not ask how the woman knew her name. There were only so many ways.

“I represent certain interests,” the woman said. “Interests that are looking for experienced personnel. People with your particular skill set.”

“I’m retired.”

“Of course. But retirement is expensive, and the world is full of bridges that need maintaining.” The woman smiled. “We are not asking you to do anything you haven’t done before. Just… facilitation. Translation. Relay.”

Mira looked at her coffee, which had gone cold. She thought about the Bering Link, the ledger, the shipments she had not questioned. She thought about Hendricks’s voice on the phone, asking “Are you part of it?”

She had not answered him honestly. She had said “I relayed the shipments,” as if that were different from being part of it. As if the throat were not part of the body.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“I’m not looking for work.”

The woman studied her for a moment. Then she shrugged, stood, and left a card on the table.

“If you change your mind.”

Mira did not change her mind. But she kept the card, in a drawer in her rented apartment, beside the envelope from Gennady Pavlovich that she had never opened.

Outside, a church bell rang in the old town, and the sound came through the window in the way sounds come through walls in old buildings: muffled, sourceless, arriving from somewhere she could not see. She went out to buy coffee, and on the way she passed the women sweeping leaves, and one of them said something to her a greeting, or a question, or just the acknowledgment that they saw each other every morning – and Mira said “gamarjoba,” the one word she knew, and the woman smiled, and the sound of it hung in the cold air between them, ordinary, untranslatable and clean.

The Missing Mechanisms of the Agentic Economy

Earlier this week, friend of Protocolized published a pertinent essay outlining paths to ensuring the agentic economy develops as an open, competitive ecosystem rather than a winner-takes-all platform:

Right now, there’s a problem that makes the AI/human knowledge market less efficient than it could be. The disrespect for IP that has been shown by the AI labs and applications during the training stage, and even now during inference, has led to efforts by content owners to protect their content from AI. Do not crawl. Lawsuits. Reluctance to share information. Even the AI labs are complaining about the theft of their IP and trying to protect their model weights from distillation.

It’s an economy crying out for mechanism design.

The lesson of YouTube Content ID is worth learning. Twenty-five years ago, the music industry was in the same position that content creators are in today with AI. In response to unauthorized use of their music by creators, music publishers’ demand to YouTube was “Take it down.” But as Google engineer Doug Eck explained to me, YouTube came up with a better answer: “How about we help you monetize it instead?” I don’t know the details of how that decision was made but I do know the eventual outcome. Aligned incentives led to a vibrant creator economy in which YouTube’s video creators, the music companies, and Google all got to share in the value that was created.

That should give us inspiration for how to solve some of the problems we face now with AI. Whether it’s with Agent Skills, NotebookLM, or other emergent artifacts of the new AI/human knowledge economy, we need to align the incentives. If we can grow the pie, and in a way where no single gatekeeper captures the bulk of the benefit, there’s a way to create a vibrant market. But that requires building mechanisms that don’t exist yet.

Read the full essay at O’Reilly.

The delivery bag sat on the apartment building steps like evidence waiting to be logged. Small. Tamper-evident seal. A faint, scanner-only tone, inaudible to humans.

Lacey watched it from across the street, hands in her pockets, trying to be casual. Trying not to look like what she was: someone waiting for food that wasn’t hers.

“Once it flips,” her mentor said quietly, “it’s not theirs anymore. That’s not theft. That’s compliance.”

His name was Denis. Fifties, maybe. Tired eyes. He held his scanner like any phone. His demeanour blended into the surroundings. Nobody looked twice at someone checking their phone on a street corner.

Lacey shifted her weight. “Someone’s inside. Lights are on.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Denis kept his voice even, instructional. “The rule is simple. Delivered. Not received in time. Becomes claimable.”

Lacey nodded, but part of her still watched the light in the window, flickering like doubt.

Movement behind the third-floor window. A silhouette passing. Someone home. Probably hungry. Waiting on pad thai, pho, whatever was going cold in that bag.

The scanner in Denis’s hand chirped.

Green confirmation.

He stepped forward, smooth and unhurried, and tapped the bag’s RFID tag. The seal made a soft click as it logged the transfer. Ownership reassigned. Legal. Clean.

“See?” Denis picked up the bag. Warm. Fresh. “Readiness matters more than intent.”

They walked away with someone else’s dinner.

CITY COUNCIL INITIATIVE BRIEFING
Timely Receipt Initiative (TRI)
Reducing Waste. Eliminating Fraud. Promoting Civic Responsibility.

• Ownership transfers only upon physical receipt

• Unclaimed goods after delivery window = excess allocation

• Claimable items logged, tracked, redistributed to registered recipients

• Environmental benefits: 47% reduction in return logistics

• Fiscal benefits: 62% decrease in fraudulent delivery theft claims

“We didn’t ban regret. We stopped subsidizing it.”
Budget Director Sandra Okoye

“It started as an environmental thing,” Denis explained as they crossed toward the transit station. “Too much waste. Too many returns. People ordering things they didn’t need, then saying packages had been stolen when actually they had buyer’s remorse.”

Lacey nodded, half-listening. She was thinking about the person in that apartment. Checking their phone. Wondering where their food was. Their app probably said delivered successfully.

“So the city launched TRI,” Denis continued. “Timely Receipt Initiative. Sounds good, right? Responsible. Fair.”

“The policy wonks called it post-scarcity redistribution. No middlemen, no delivery apps taking cuts, no arbitrage. Just efficiency.” He pulled out a claimed protein bar, checked the expiration date. “What they didn’t advertise: claimers are the new middlemen. There’s a whole economy now. People buy and sell claim intel – which buildings have slow elevators, which delivery drivers leave bags in exposed areas. I’ve seen people pay 20 bucks for a hot tip on a grocery delivery route.”

“Helps people who are ready,” Lacey echoed, remembering the orientation video.

“Exactly.” Denis stopped at a bench, set the bag down between them. “Here’s what you need to know about the tech. Bags have RFID tags, internal countdown, tamper seal that voids if you break it early. You can’t see the timer. Neither can they. That’s important.”

“Why?”

“Prevents conflict. If people knew exactly when their window closed, they’d camp on their doorsteps. Or worse, someone would get hurt trying to claim something a second too early.” He pulled out his scanner. “This is how it works. Registered ID. Geolocation match. The system confirms the item flipped to claimable status. Green light means legal.”

“What if someone comes out while you’re scanning?”

“Doesn’t matter. If it flipped, it flipped. They can file a complaint, but the system already logged delivery as successful. They missed their window.”

“You don’t race the clock,” Denis said. “You read people.”

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Over the next week, Denis taught her the geography of failure.

Buildings where people were always late. High-rises with bad reception in the lobbies, by the time residents got the delivery notification, the countdown was halfway done. Office districts during lunch rushes. Parents juggling school pickups and work calls.

“See that building?” Denis pointed to a converted warehouse with expensive-looking balconies. “New construction. Beautiful. Also, the elevators are slow as hell and there’s only two for 40 floors. Delivery drivers leave bags in the lobby. Residents get stuck in elevator queues. Hot zone for claims.”

He showed her the tricks. How to ask someone for directions and hold the conversation just long enough. How to let multiple people through a building entrance ahead of you, creating a courteous bottleneck. How to look busy on your phone while actually tracking a scan timer.

“Never touch the bag until it flips,” Denis said. “That’s the only real rule.”

“Oh, and never claim medicine,” Denis warned. “Insulin, inhalers – some lines still matter. Even now.”

Hot food moved fast. Groceries were currency. People traded claims in informal networks Denis called “redistribution collectives,” though he said it with enough irony that Lacey knew he didn’t buy the noble framing.

She met others. People like them. A woman named Sharice who’d been claiming for two years, ever since her job cut her to part-time. A kid, maybe nineteen, who ran it like a business. He tracked buildings, mapped delivery patterns, sold subscriptions to a private Discord where people traded real-time claiming opportunities. Premium tier was 50 a month. There were others who specialized – one guy only claimed electronics, flipped them same-day on local marketplaces. Another woman built a client list: people who’d pay her to claim specific items they wanted but couldn’t afford retail.

“We don’t steal,” Denis said one evening, splitting a claimed pizza between them. “We intercept waste.”

Lacey didn’t argue. She was too hungry.

She told herself it was training.

But her body already knew it was a job.

Her first solo claim happened on a Tuesday.

Denis stepped away to take a call, something about his daughter’s school, Lacey didn’t listen closely. She was watching a grocery bag outside a row house. Fresh produce visible through the translucent plastic. Bread. Eggs. Actual food.

A woman rushed down the sidewalk toward the house, phone pressed to her ear, grocery tote over her shoulder. Single parent, Lacey guessed. Juggling too many things. The kind of person who ordered groceries because she didn’t have time to shop, then didn’t have time to be home when they arrived.

The timer in Lacey’s scanner flipped.

Green.

She hesitated.

The woman was close. Maybe 30 feet. 20.

Lacey scanned the bag. The scanner chirped. Transfer confirmed.

Her hands shook as she reached for it.

The woman reached the steps five seconds later.

No confrontation. No accusation. Just confusion. Lacey heard her behind her: “Where? I just got the notification…”

Lacey kept walking. She ate that night.

Something cracked in her, guilt, maybe. A colder feeling followed. Not callousness, but …

Hunger was justification enough.

Denis brought claimed Thai food a few days later and explained why it kept working.

“The system logged it as a success,” he said, gesturing with a spring roll. “Waste avoided. Hunger reduced. Politicians cite improved efficiency metrics. Everybody wins.”

“Not the person who ordered it.”

“They missed their window. System assumes someone like you exists. Otherwise it wouldn’t balance.”

Lacey understood then. She wasn’t a flaw in the system.

She was a pressure valve.

The system had been designed to eliminate waste and profit-seeking middlemen, but of course it had only reinvented them. The efficiency was real. The savings were real. They just didn’t mention who was doing the work, or what it cost them.

Things tightened.

The city adjusted delivery windows shorter for “high-risk addresses”, buildings where claims happened frequently. Some addresses got blacklisted entirely. No more deliveries allowed. Residents had to pick up from designated hubs.

Denis mentioned someone they’d both seen around. Guy named Reynolds.

“Lost eligibility,” Denis said. “Completely. Can’t get deliveries anymore. Not food, not packages. The system flagged him.”

“For what?”

“Living in a building with too many claims.” Denis shrugged. “Guilt by geography.”

Lacey thought about Reynolds. Thought about what it meant to be cut off entirely.

“Means more work for us,” Denis added. “Tighter windows. More desperate people.”

He didn’t sound happy about it. He sounded resigned.

The last lesson came three weeks later.

Another bag. Another building.

Lacey recognized the address. He was an acquaintance from the library. Helped her find a book once when the system was down. Nice guy. She’d seen his posts on the community board, “anyone got spare credit this week?”

She could knock. Warn him. Break the rule.

The timer ticked in her head, invisible but present.

She lifted her hand.

Let it hover a second.

Then the scanner blinked green, and it felt like consent.

She waited.

The system flipped.

Green light.

She scanned.

The door opened thirty seconds later. He stood there, looking at the empty step. Looking at his phone. Looking at the empty step again.

Lacey was already gone.

She didn’t feel like a thief. Not exactly.

She was just waste management.

As my cart wove along the campus paths, I had my Glasses share a high-level summary of public information on the victim. Dr. Demmel was one of a few Nobel Laureates on the Caduceus payroll and he featured heavily in Caduceus marketing – even I had heard of him. Caduceus had poached him from Stanford a few years back, shortly after their student newspaper published an exposé that accused him of fostering a toxic workplace. He was 57 and divorced, had been living on campus, and his only hobby seemed to be running marathons.

This was the first time I’d visited the Advanced Research Labs and I was greeted at the front desk by Dr. Elizabeth Barvan, Vice President of the Advanced Research Division. She wore a lab coat over a black business pantsuit and it seemed like she kept one eye on me and one on the stream of notifications that were flickering through her Glasses. Her demeanor was calm and focused and she brought me up to speed. One hour ago, Dr. Andrea Vezena, Dr. Demmel’s lab partner, had walked into the room and discovered him face down on the lab table. She’d tried to wake him and, on failing to find a pulse, called for paramedics. They tried and failed to resuscitate him and pronounced him dead on the scene.

Dr. Barvan made it clear that while the death was a tragedy, it was imperative that my investigation be conducted quickly and quietly so that the division could resume its urgent research. Caduceus’s stock price had slipped earlier in the week, when the CEO announced research setbacks on its most promising new drug, and the mood on campus was more anxious than usual. I had the sense that the research team was under significant pressure to generate positive news.

I asked Dr. Barvan about how Dr. Demmel got along with his colleagues and she said that the lab celebrated him as a hero of modern medicine; she was confident that there had been no foul play. I thanked her for her overview and let her know that my investigation would be discreet but I would still be following the relevant police protocols. She said she understood and that she would make herself available if I needed her assistance.

We arrived at Lab Room N, where Dr. Demmel had died. Dr. Barvan badged the door open and then departed, saying that she would arrange for temporary access to the building and the lab room so that I could continue my investigation without needing a staff chaperone. The CCPD was technically independent from Caduceus, commissioned through the Solano County Police Department, though our jurisdiction is limited to the Caduceus City corporate campus and my Police Chief effectively reports to the company leadership.

Lab Room N was unsecured; there were neither CCPD officers nor company security because, unless I found evidence otherwise, Dr. Demmel’s death was being treated as natural. Police Chief Walsh had dispatched me here due to Dr. Demmel’s fame, in an effort to protect the police force and the company if his death was a result of foul play or from anything other than natural causes. His body was already at the local morgue and my Glasses would alert me when the medical examiner’s report was filed.

I entered the lab room, which was 20 feet by 10 feet with several large lab tables in the center. The walls were lined with myriad research equipment and storage lockers of chemicals. The large lab benches in the center of the room were lit up with a kaleidoscopic array of technical diagrams, chemical visualizations, and process instructions. In the center of the room, a lab technician was crawling on the floor cleaning up broken glass. I immediately told the technician to stop, as I would be treating this lab as a crime scene until we confirmed that Dr. Demmel had died of natural causes.

The technician seemed flustered and he gently placed the glass shards back on the floor, stood up, and took a step backwards. He introduced himself as Eric Terson and said that he was responsible for the lab equipment and supplies in this wing of the lab. He then moved to leave the room but I asked him to stay and answer a few quick questions about the room and Dr. Demmel. He frowned but agreed and I recorded our interview with my Glasses.

He replied to my questions with short answers while repeatedly glanced to the doorway: the lab belonged to Dr. Demmel and his partner Dr. Vezena; he didn’t know anything about their working relationship; he didn’t know Dr. Demmel well; nobody had been in the room aside from the two lab partners, the paramedics, and Dr. Barvan. He said that he had only entered the room after the paramedics left and that all he had cleaned up was some broken vials and spilled liquid from the floor – likely pushed there when Dr. Demmel collapsed.

Mr. Terson said that there was nothing more he could add and asked if he could leave, but I took the opportunity to ask him a bit more about the room itself – I hadn’t seen a lab space this advanced and figured that he could help me understand what I was looking at. He relaxed a bit as the discussion moved away from Dr. Demmel’s death and walked me through how the various systems worked.

He pointed out how the ceiling was covered with cameras and projectors that pointed down at the lab tables. They were part of a robust research system that allowed scientists to efficiently plan and carry out experimental protocols, walking them through a research process one step at a time. He explained that the system indicated that there was currently an experiment in progress and that the full protocol was illustrated on the left side of the bench, a detailed rendering of the final molecular output rotated on the right side of the bench, and in the center area, where Dr. Demmel had died, there were detailed instructions for the current step. Numerous errors were flashing due to missing components, likely the broken vials, and due to steps taking longer than expected. I asked Mr. Terson if he knew what the experiment was testing, but he shrugged and said it was beyond his understanding.

He asked if he could leave, saying he had a growing list of tasks in other parts of the building. I nodded, thanked him for his time, and reminded him not to clean up Lab Room N until he had my approval.

With the room to myself, I queued up a number of tasks on my Glasses, including scanning the room and interviewing Dr. Andrea Vezena. I sent Dr. Vezena a short message asking if she would return to the lab for an interview. Dr. Barvan had sent her home for the day but she lived close by and agreed to walk back to meet me here.

While I waited, I used my Glasses to make a 3D recording of the lab. They helpfully marked which areas I hadn’t yet scanned as I walked about the room and knelt down under the lab benches. I took closeup shots of the broken vials and spilled liquid that Mr. Terson had been cleaning up, and I documented the detailed text and illustrations projected into the lab benches. The scans presumably contained Caduceus trade secrets so I saved them to a protected evidence folder with instructions to auto-delete once the investigation closed.

I also looked through Lab Room N’s access logs. They aligned with Mr. Terson’s statement: he had entered the room several times that morning; Dr. Vezena had been in and out of the room for much of the morning, but was absent when Dr. Demmel arrived. No one had entered the room between then and when Dr. Vezena returned and found Dr. Demmel dead. Just as I finished reviewing the logs, the lab door opened and Dr. Vezena entered the room.

Dr. Vezena was wearing a lab coat over a t-shirt and sweatpants. I instructed her to make herself comfortable and then asked how she was doing. She replied that she was shaken and still processing Dr. Demmel’s death. I told her that was understandable and that I’d try to keep our interview brief; I started recording on my Glasses.

I began by asking about Dr. Demmel’s reputation on campus. She expressed how lucky the department was to work with such an esteemed scientist, but I brushed away the broad praise and asked if people enjoyed working with him. She paused and noted that very few of the staff actually interacted with him. He was brilliant but extremely difficult to work with; he refused to talk with anyone he deemed nonessential, which was pretty much everyone.

I asked if she had trouble working with him and she sighed. She described him as a jerk who frequently berated her and she said that his unwillingness to talk with the other staff had shifted even more work onto her plate. However, she assured me that it was worth putting up with him to be a part of the lab team and engage in the most exciting research on campus. I asked her to provide me with a brief overview of her work and she came to life with an animated explanation of synthetic biology of which I understood very little. The gist was that she and Dr. Demmel had been exploring a new method for quickly and cheaply creating complex large molecules.

I then followed up, asking if she knew of any other staff with whom he’d had bad interactions. She said he treated almost everyone he encountered with cold indifference but that she didn’t recall anyone taking that particularly poorly. However, she recalled him ranting at their lab technician, Eric Terson, earlier in the week. Dr. Demmel accused him of mismanaging the supplies such that he kept running out of key reagents and it was impeding his research. Dr. Vezena said that she hadn’t noticed any supply issues and that Dr. Demmel was frequently accusing those around him of impeding his research.

I then asked her to walk me through her morning and how she came to discover Dr. Demmel. She said she’d come into the Lab after breakfast and spent an hour or two refining the experiment protocol and setting up the equipment and reagents for today’s test. She said it was typical for her to do this alone and that Dr. Demmel usually didn’t show up until late in the morning but that he preferred to manually conduct the most sensitive steps for each test. She said she’d then left the building to meet a colleague for coffee and when she’d returned she found Dr. Demmel face down on the lab bench. She’d immediately called 911 and stayed until the paramedics had pronounced him dead. Then, Dr. Barvan had told her to take the rest of the day off so she had gone home.

She paused and looked at me for a few seconds. Then she said that she probably shouldn’t share the following with me but that I would probably find out anyway because she’d filed a report with Dr. Barvan. Yesterday, she and Dr. Demmel had fought a heated argument over how to share their research. He had wanted to disclose their new method to the world and encourage the free use of it as a way to accelerate medical research and lower the cost of new therapeutics. Dr. Vezena had countered that such a disclosure was completely against Caduceus’s interests and that the typical approach would be to retain the method as a trade secret.

Dr. Vezena said she was sympathetic to Dr. Demmel’s perspective but was far too early in her career to support such a risk, one that would almost certainly lead to her being fired and, likely, prosecuted. When she pushed back, he had threatened to use his seniority to kick her off of the lab team and remove her as a collaborator from their research papers – papers to which Dr. Vezena had contributed most of the work.

After the argument, during lunch, Dr. Vezena had typed up a formal complaint and sent it to Dr. Barvan, who immediately summoned her for a chat. I asked her how the complaint was received and she said that the VP appeared shocked and angry for a moment, before switching tone and laughing it off. Dr. Barvan had told her that Dr. Demmel was being a prima donna, that it was just posturing related to a recent request for more budget, and that she’d talk to him and straighten things out. I asked her to send me a copy of the complaint and she did. I thanked her for her candor and asked her to stay on campus and remain accessible for the rest of the day, in case I had follow-up questions.

I left Lab Room N and looked to find Mr. Terson and ask him about his confrontation with the victim, but he wasn’t in any of the nearby rooms. I asked my Glasses to see what doors he’d recently badged through. The system reported that after leaving Lab Room N he’d badged into employee housing, on the other side of campus, and that just a few minutes ago he’d entered the parking garage. I considered this suspicious behavior as, earlier, he’d told me that he would be working on tasks in the lab building.

I alerted Caduceus security and asked them to stop his vehicle if he tried to leave campus. A few minutes later, they stopped him at the east entrance and I carted over there to meet him. When I pulled up, he was complaining loudly to a group of guards but he immediately stopped when he saw my face.

I asked Mr. Terson where he was going and he said that he had an off-campus errand, though he avoided making eye contact with me. I asked if I could search his car and he nodded while fidgeting with his badge. His trunk contained a backpack full of reagent bottles. I gave him the Miranda warning and told him that I needed to bring him into the station for questioning.

On the drive over I messaged Police Chief Walsh, asking him to treat Lab Room N as a proper crime scene, to request a forensics team from Solano County Police Department, and have the medical examiner do a full autopsy. I made sure Mr. Terson overheard my requests and he started talking as soon as I sat him down at the station.

He swore he had nothing to do with Dr. Demmel’s death but admitted to stealing reagents to sell off campus. He’d been reselling the supplies for months but planned to stop after Dr. Demmel confronted him; especially so after Dr. Barvan had approached him in Lab Room N earlier this morning, asking him to leave the room while she personally conducted an inventory of the supplies. He claimed that he was leaving campus to sell off his remaining reagents, not to flee from a murder investigation.

The technician was on the verge of crying and his claims seemed earnest. I thanked him for his cooperation and left him in our holding room. I sent Police Chief Walsh an update, grabbed a quick bite at a company cafeteria, and drove back to the Advanced Research Labs for another look at the crime scene.

As my cart pulled up to the lab, I received a message from the medical examiner with initial autopsy and toxicology reports. Biomarkers indicated that Dr. Demmel had likely died of heart failure; however, his heart didn’t show any structural causes such as blocked or ruptured arteries, and his prior health records hadn’t shown any relevant pre-morbidities. The toxicology screening was negative.

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By the time I reached Lab Room N, I had fired off a few queries to my Glasses. For someone Dr. Demmel’s age, heart failure without an obvious cause was rare, though not impossible. I greeted one of my fellow officers who was guarding the door and walked into the room.

The projectors were still casting their diagrams on the table but the room smelled of disinfectant. I bent down on the ground and saw that the floor had recently been mopped and the broken glass and spilled liquid cleaned up. The room’s access logs said that Dr. Barvan had badged in an hour earlier. I messaged the VP asking why she’d been back in the room and if she’d ordered it cleaned.

While I waited for a reply, I paced the room trying to look at the lab bench and equipment with fresh eyes. I opened the supply cabinet which held the reagents and scanned the bottles. I asked my Glasses if any of the reagents present in any combination could have caused heart failure. It replied that some of the chemicals, if mixed, would produce fumes that could induce heart failure if inhaled. I walked back over to the lab benches with the complex diagrams illuminating the surface and asked if that included any of the reagents used in today’s experimental protocol. It replied that some of the relevant chemicals were present, but not the right combination of them. I asked about the reagents that Mr. Terson had stolen and learned that none of them were a match.

With the help of the Glasses, I altered the protocol plan on the left side of the bench, replacing an innocuous reagent with one that could have created a deadly result. The room transformed immediately, casting warning icons on the bench, stating a high-level hazmat suit would be required to execute the experiment. I restored the protocol to its original configuration and the errors disappeared.

I wondered if the contents of one or more of the bottles had been changed, priming a lethal combination. Dr. Barvan had confronted Mr. Terson in the room early this morning and then had the room to herself while she ostensibly conducted the inventory; I hadn’t thought much of it earlier but now it struck me as odd that someone as busy as Dr. Barvan would personally look into potential theft of lab supplies.

Dr. Barvan replied to my message, asking me to come to her office, a large room on the top floor of the Advanced Research Labs which overlooked the Caduceus City gardens. I walked in and found her and Police Chief Walsh were drinking coffee around a low table.

The VP thanked me for my diligent work and apologized for having let in a janitor to clean up the lab; she had thought I was done with the room after my initial investigation and wanted it all ready for Dr. Vezena to resume her experiments the next morning.

Chief Walsh then said that he’d updated Dr. Barvan with details of my apprehension of Mr. Terson, with the stolen reagents, and he’d shared the results of Dr. Demmel’s autopsy report. He said that Caduceus would be firing Mr. Terson, effective immediately, but that the company wouldn’t be pressing charges. He looked over at Dr. Barvan for a second and then turned back to me, saying that the medical examiner’s reports made it clear that Dr. Demmel had died of natural causes and that the lab could resume its normal operations. Before I could open my mouth, he thanked me for my diligent work today, which was echoed by Dr. Barvan who stood and walked us out.

When we left the building, I told Chief Walsh that I had my concerns about the cause of death, and that the hasty cleanup of the lab was suspicious. He said that he had looked over the case notes and that it seemed to him that natural heart failure was a reasonable explanation. He firmly reminded me that this was Caduceus City, not Stockton, and then he hopped in his cart and drove off. It was getting late and I chose to walk back to my car the long way, through the twisting paths of the Caduceus Gardens.

This story is a Protocolized bounty, written in response to a cyborgs and rooms prompt. We set regular bounties in our Discord.

The speaker with the dull voice paused and looked up across the semicircular chamber. The furtive tapping of bored fingers on datapads echoed flatly off the synthetic wood-paneled walls. Clusters of bureaucrats dutifully feigned attention while quietly locked in desperate combat with the looming spectre of accidental slumber during this third hour of the 17th session on the ninth day of the quarterly two-day Reratification Accords for the treaty governing the Joint Defense of the Lebanon Space Elevator and Remembrance Zone, which memorialized the grand experiment formerly known as the United States of America.

A hacking sound, something between a simple cough and a swamp crocodile clearing its throat, stumbled out of the speaker’s mouth.

“Will the delegate from New Texas stand and be recognized!”

Mark McCarthy blinked, eyes refocusing on the massive industrial structure extending up impossibly high into the pale blue sky in the distance. He had been absentmindedly staring out the window at the faintly visible motion of the lift transferring vast amounts of economic tonnage from Earth to orbit. In the foreground, his attention lingered on a long line of military trucks, presumably the next Rotational Defense Force, idling patiently while the perimeter guards processed their entry to the Outer Defense Ring Complex. He looked around curiously at the sense of awkward pause in the proceedings and realized with a start that he was the delegate from New Texas.

Mark shot up out of his seat and banged the shit out of his knee.

“Oof. Oh – Mr. Speaker, Mr. – ah – Master Secretary, Mr. Sir – Speaker – Mr. Secretary, we’re here! I’m here.”

As the delegate from New Texas collected himself and buttoned and smoothed his seersucker suit jacket, the secretary’s eyes narrowed. He had just noticed that the quarter of the room allocated to the New Texas delegation was considerably sparser than it had been the day before. Mark stood all alone among the padded rolling chairs and empty coffee substitute ration packs. With a disapproving sigh, the secretary glanced down at the digital nameplate in front of Mark McCarthy.

“Mr. McCarthy. What does the delegation from New Texas think of the latest revisions to the proposed amendments?”

Mark glanced down at the datapad in front of him and immediately felt too warm under the energy efficient light strips. He had only started reviewing the new revisions 30 minutes ago.

The changes were extensive.

Earlier that day, at around 0745 Kansas local time, Ambassador Jeb ‘Crawdad’ Hutchinson (Mark’s boss’s boss and the lead diplomat for the New Texas delegation) startled Mark as he ate his breakfast of reconstituted egg material alone in the Diplomatic Food Structure and Rec Room, by appearing suddenly in the seat next to him. The Ambassador was surprisingly stealthy for how large of a frame he wielded. The small, utilitarian room, somewhat full of various low level trade representatives from the neighboring states, fell silent while Mark choked on his mouthful as the Ambassador clapped him heartily on the back and let loose his signature guffaw.

“Son, I’ve got an incredible gift for you, I tell you hwat! There comes a time in every man’s life when he is presented with a chance to do his duty and he must rise, with repose, to the circumstances in which he finds himself. Today is that day for you and I couldn’t be prouder. Do you understand what I am telling you, nah?”

The ambassador beamed, all teeth, under his oversized, silverbelly stetson.

Mark, stunned into silence at this unexpected spectacle, could only nod, confused and with his throat still full of egg material.

“That’s a good man right chyea. My aide Eddie will get you everything you need. You’ll debrief me back in Austin next week. Godspeed, son. You’re doing the Republic a grand service.”

And with a wink and squeeze of Mark’s shoulder, Ambassador Hutchinson sauntered out of the mess.

The ordinary din resumed as the boisterous source of tension left the room, albeit with a few nosy glances sent his way. Mark sat quietly for a few minutes, bewildered by what had just transpired, when his datapad buzzed. Eyes wide, he tapped through some unread messages (new quarterly hemispheric export estimates, an alert about quasi-religious terrorism out in California, a packing list for the delegation, and so on), until he reached a brief email from Eddie the Aide explaining that Mark was to represent the Republic of New Texas for the remaining diplomatic sessions… while the rest of the delegation returned promptly to Austin to attend the annual Republic of New Texas Declaration of Rebellion Celebratory Barbecue and Rodeo.

Mark had been to the three previous Reratification Accords and did generally understand the process of the whole dog and pony show, but really only as a passive observer. Hell, he’d spent the entirety of yesterday’s diplomatic session on ‘special assignment’ from the Logistics Policy Officer combing the Outer Defense Ring Diplomatic Complex to find a specific brand of creamer the Ambassador wanted served with his coffee substitute.

Now he was to answer any and all questions related to the Republic of New Texas and her stance on the current Reratification?

Was he supposed to ask questions on behalf of New Texas too?

He started to inventory what he had remembered from his studies in preparation for his first Accords last year. Mark hadn’t actually cracked his binder since he accepted the fact that all he was going to get to do was bullshit tasks for the delegation at large, but he had a good head for history.

Mark knew that the Lebanon Space Elevator and Remembrance Zone, nicknamed the “American Skyway”, was a transportation megastructure and neutral territory unhappily shared between each of the four post-American Successor States. Built well before the Big Split (and over a century before Mark was born), the Skyway served a far more important purpose than these typically sleepy diplomatic proceedings might suggest.

New Texan policy reports estimated the Skyway, which was the primary mass-lift for all spacebound products in the western hemisphere, currently handled at least 25% of each Successor State’s total exports. Mark had run the numbers before for New Texas, whose economy was driven by weapon exports and passthrough tariffs on South American cargo headed to space, and estimated that the Skyway directly supported about 60% of their GDP. He’d also heard whispers that for the United States (which, after D.C.’s glassing, was now essentially just New England and some parts of former Canada) and its luxury handicrafts, total exports through the Skyway accounted for almost 90% of their admittedly small GDP.

Mark closed his eyes to better remember the facts from an antique video essay he’d found in the stacks at his old law library. During the early 21st century global manufacturing boom, the American technocapitalists belatedly realized they’d fallen catastrophically behind every other superpower in high-tech production capacity. After almost a century of letting their domestic factories wither in favor of an import-driven economy, a landmark technical report projected it would take at least another half-century of concentrated investment just to reach parity with their adversaries, who were growing more proficient by the day.

The technocrats did the math: an emerging class of new space and energy technologies was accelerating projects in extra-atmospheric commerce, every major nation was releasing plans to establish a strategic space colony, and the main obstacle to offworld growth was clearly the supply chain.

So American capital allocators made the only move they still knew how to make. They raced to own the distribution layer. Advances in materials science finally made a full-scale space elevator mathematically possible, though almost certainly a financial disaster. As public-private partnerships formed, deteriorating interstate domestic politics meant the only way to push the project through Congress was to plant the thing dead-center of the country.

And, of course, anchoring it in Kansas meant the additional engineering insanity of bolting a perpetually firing nuclear-thruster counterweight to the top end of the tether just to fight a planet’s worth of shearing forces forever trying to yank it back down toward the equator.

Naturally, the US government, with classic American hubris, took the bet that they could brute-force the physics and subsidized the entire thing.

A student of international history, Mark knew that two other elevators eventually followed; one in China and one in western Russia. The Russian space elevator effectively bankrupted the country, forcing it to merge with what remained of the European Union. China’s transition to a regional garrison state left huge gaps in the public historical record with regard to how they fared. He did know, however, that the Chinese space fleet still maintained a healthy standoff zone around its land, airspace, and geosynchronous orbits, which include the Philippine ground tether.

Mark was pretty sure, however, that none of that happened before five uninterrupted decades of American space export dominance.

As it turns out, the various governments of the world, along with their corresponding space colonies, were extremely lucrative customers. Pretty soon, space commerce became the only commerce that really mattered. It’s no exaggeration to say that every major starship construction, space colony expedition, and interstellar mining operation that happened before Big Split moved the bulk of its supplies through the Lebanon Space Elevator.

Even today, everybody knew that the Skyway operated at maximum utilization. That’s why the Joint Defense Treaty existed in the first place. As a kid, Mark had heard the story about when the Skyway had paused operations for almost a month just after the Big Split. Apparently, the rebel leaders of every Successor State had each realized independently that, without the Skyway, their grand vision of tomorrow would be sunk before it could even start. And since it was so important, there were always conflicts over how to share it.

Conflicts that Mark was now supposed to handle.

He flicked his eyes back up at Mr. Secretary and fought the overwhelming urge to gag.

The revisions at the heart of the extended sessions had been updated and sent out the night before for review by the various delegations.

Except Mark McCarthy, Trade Attaché Junior Grade, was not quite distinguished enough to find himself on the secure diplomatic cable distro list that shared messages such as these.

Nor was Mark even made aware of their existence until the secretary formally entered today’s session Items into the record a few hours ago. Ambassador Hutchinson had forgotten to mention it at breakfast, perhaps too enthralled by the promise of ribs and celebratory gunfire waiting for him back in the Hill Country. In fact, Eddie had only sent Mark the file about 30 minutes ago (presumably when he noticed 21 unread messages from Mark McCarthy) which is, of course, when Mark started to review it.

Under the spotlight in the Session Chamber, it dawned on Mark that this morning was the first time Ambassador Hutchinson had ever spoken directly to him.

“I, uh… we… ah.”

Mark kicked himself internally and continued.

“The New Texas delegation has no comments at this time.”

Mark could feel himself hunching his bony shoulders. He hated this nervous tic. It was the result of a long and frustrating youth housed in a long and frustrating skeleton. Mark dropped his gangly body back into the chair.

He knew nobody in the room noticed his fumbling nor did they really care about the deliberations, but he was angry at himself all the same.

The four Successor States had ratified and reratified basically the same goddamn treaty in the same goddamn way in the same goddamn room every quarter for 53 years. His fellow New Texans would bluster about defense spending, the Rationalist Californianicans would quibble about legal minutiae, the American delegation from Boston would try not to be noticed so they could keep their slightly unfair utilization schedule, and the local reps from Federated States of the American Empire would posture so they could keep on raising their fees.

Despite the so-called Union’s vicious balkanization, Mark knew every Successor State more or less still needed the Skyway to keep their economies afloat so nothing ever really changed.

It was just another sunny Reratification Day in Lebanon, Kansas.

But Mark hated feeling incompetent all the same. He hadn’t spent five years in the New Texas Rangers after college just to look like an idiot in front of these careerists. Sure, it was mostly legal-adjutant tours, but that was beside the point.

Satisfied with Mark’s response, the secretary looked back down at his datapad.

“Will the delegate from Rationalist California stand and be recognized?”

Mark glanced over at their section of the semicircle.

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A tan, handsome man with longish dirty blonde hair stood and offered a brief nod to the secretary. Mark did not recognize the delegate, which was odd. Mark furrowed his brow slightly.

“Mr. Secretary, we would like to once again submit into the record that our official nomenclature has changed to ‘Rationalist Californianica’ as per the result of last year’s Periodic Semantic Conclave.”

The man stared directly at the secretary, his face friendly and firm, yet he stood very still.

Quiet chuckles tumbled onto the floor from the other state sections, but the secretary wilted under the speaker’s gaze and replied

“Ah yes. My apologies again. Will the delegate from Rationalist Californianica stand and be recognized?”

The secretary pronounced every additional syllable.

“Of course! Thank you, Mr. Secretary. We support the revisions as written. No further comments at this time.”

“Wonderful.” The secretary, reflating after the intensity of the previous interaction, quickly angled toward the next group of delegates. “Will the representative from the United States stand and be recognized?”

An unobtrusive figure, his jacket inexplicably wet , stood and curtly shared “No comments.”

Finally, the secretary turned and made eye contact with the delegation from the Federated States of the American Empire. He was interrupted before he could get out his formal recognition.

“YUP! Subsection 7-B is in clear violation of...”

Unlike the rest of the room, the FSAE did have comments. Quite a few apparently. Mark only half paid attention as the clearly cornfed man tore into the offending verbiage.

Mark was too busy glancing back and forth between the revisions on his datapad and the Californianican delegate to notice the room politely tolerating the FSAE show of force. He had prepped the lookbooks for his own delegation ahead of the accords. He should recognize this man. He frowned squintily.

Mark’s ears perked up at the mention of Californianica.

“… it’s unclear to the Federated States why we should bear the costs of a Californianican disruption to the defense handover schedule. We have already mobilized and funded this quarter’s security force and are more than prepared to do our duty to preserve the economic peace!”

The folksy delegate from the Federated States was doing his absolute best to sound righteously affronted. It was a good performance even though everyone in the room could spot the oncoming ask for financial remuneration from miles away.

Another tan, handsome delegate arose, this time a woman, and rolled her shoulders back slightly. Mark did not recognize her either. She waited for a nod from the secretary and then began.

“Naturally, we appreciate that the great Federated States can handle the current schedule of responsibility and has done so capably for many years. We also understand the great cost involved in organizing such an effective force. We just, regretfully, are midstream with some administrative consolidation within our regional governance reorganization and a schedule shift will alleviate key, arrhythmic fiscal burdens. This will streamline our upcoming budget planning cycle in a way I know you understand. We, of course, are happy to reimburse the FSAE for the effort at cost plus inconvenience fees.”

She sounded apologetic but firm, smiling directly at the delegation from the Federated States.

Now that he was looking intently, Mark realized he didn’t see any of the Californianican VIPs he’d spent hours organizing background information on for his team. Thinking back, the New Texas diplomats had sent Mark running all over the Outer Defense Ring on minor errands all last week so he hadn’t even noticed the discrepancy. Very odd.

Mark also realized with some consternation that this meant nobody from New Texas had bothered to glance at his lookbooks before they absconded.

Rationalist Californianica had somehow sent a completely different crew of diplomats from those notated in the pre-reratification census collected just four weeks ago. Mark racked his brain for anything he knew about RC electoral procedure which might explain this, but wasn’t as familiar with their processes as he would have liked to be in this moment.

Something about Special Diplomatic Quorums, maybe? Mark thought.

He knew it was a stupid name, but wasn’t sure about the specifics. He turned his attention back to the ongoing debate and the revisions on the datapad in front of him.

The two delegations went back and forth and back and forth for about another hour as the FSAE continued to haggle over each one of the multitudinous revisions submitted by Rationalist Californianica. Every single modification to baseline troop deployment, material makeups, armament minimums, force sequencing, handover procedure, and more, predictably turned into another chance to extract a quartering fee or an environmental revitalization tax or similar. Despite this badgering, Rationalist Californianica was suitably gracious in its commitment to financing the “common good”.

Mark didn’t glean anything else useful by observing the unknown diplomats for the remainder of the session. He did, however, finally notice Junior Trade Liaison Officer Andrew Melkson staring blankly into space from the back row of the Rationalist Californianican delegation. Mark hadn’t seen him this quarter, but they spent most of last quarter’s Accords commiserating over the criminal waste of their time and talents in the diplomatic breakout rooms in between menial taskings while adjutanting for their respective delegations. Melkson had a very specific, quiet dejection on his face. Mark knew that look well as he had worn it many times himself.

That was the look of an aide who thought his boss had once again said something stupid.

Smirking in solidarity, Mark resolved to grab Melkson after the session and get to the bottom of whatever was happening over on the West Coast. He settled into a comfortable faux attentiveness while the debate dragged onwards. He hoped against hope that things would wrap up soon, but the extraction ritual extended far enough into the evening that the secretary was forced to recess the proceedings until the next morning. Mark was pissed.

With the bang of a gavel, the procedural spell was broken and the room full of diplomats got up to leave. The Californianicans stood up in what appeared to be a practiced not-quite-unison and stepped with a quickness out of the chamber. Melkson looked after them, clearly annoyed, and started to clean up their quarter of the room.

There wasn’t much to clean so Mark hurried over to meet him while he was isolated. Fortunately, Melkson wasn’t in a hurry to catch up with his group. Mark caught him right as he exited the room and initiated the conversation.

“Melkson! Good to see you again.”

“Hi, Mark. Did your delegation leave you high and dry?” Up close, Andrew looked tired.

“Yea… there’s a barbeque back in New Texas.” Mark exaggerated his eye roll for Andrew’s benefit. Andrew happily latched on to the opportunity to drag on someone’s boss.

“What a bunch of assholes. I assume they didn’t leave you any notes for continuity either?”

“Nope. Hence my bumblefucking around in front of the chamber today.” Mark forced a laugh.

Andrew sighed. “It wasn’t that bad. You didn’t embarrass yourself nearly as much as my new cadre of overlords did.”

Mark began to form a predatory smile, but caught himself. “Ahhh. I was wondering what was happening out in Cali with all this new blood.”

But Mark didn’t need to be careful. Andrew was clearly waiting for the chance to vent.

“Dude, these guys are the worst. Some admin redistricting triggered a Special Electoral Agora last month and this new party absolutely swept the polls. Real calm, freakazoid types. They shook up all of our diplomatic missions at the last second. Fired everybody. Except me I guess. Probably realized they had no idea what they were doing after it was too late. This whole budget angle doesn’t even make sense, man. We’ve got months before we need to worry about next fiscal year. They have no idea how to staff this defense mission either. We’re way over-quota on manpower. I guess the bombings in LA last quarter spooked them and they don’t want to take any chances, but it’s a huge waste of state resources, to be honest. We’ve got enough munitions for the next ten defense missions. I guess we’ll just ship it all back home when we’re done? I don’t know, dude.”

Andrew finally took a breath.

Mark offered a sympathetic head shake. “Jeez. I hope they’re treating you alright at least?”

“Yea, sure. They’re really… polite. Formal? Do you know what I mean?” Andrew sighed.

“I think I caught that from their talking points today,” Mark agreed.

Andrew checked his watch and breathed in sharply. “Shit, I gotta go. They want me to catalogue every point agreed to today. Good to see you and I hope your trip back is uneventful, man. Catch you later.”

Andrew speed-walked down the corridor and out into the Midwestern twilight, leaving Mark alone once again.

Back in the Diplomatic Food Structure and Rec Room, Mark ate what the menu optimistically described as a ‘BBQ Sandwich,’ remaining suitably unconvinced. After finishing, he noticed some pitying glances in his direction from the other junior diplomats who had seen his performance that day. Before the warmth could creep back into his cheeks, he quietly stomped out the door.

As he let his feet carry him forward, the fresh evening air helped cool his skin and his newly resurfaced frustration.

OK, he thought. How do I kill the rest of the night?

Mark knew from his last few Accords that recreational chemicals of any kind were banned for fifty miles around the Skyway Exclusion Zone, so that wasn’t an option. Nor could he stand the idea of going back to the pity stares of the Rec Room. Plus, all the true R&R buildings were at the Inner Defense Ring Complex where the quarterly rotational staff bunked.

Mark started to head back to the empty delegation quarters when he remembered his creamer adventure from earlier. He’d found the special coffee substitute ration station in a tucked away break space near the roof access of an ancillary building.

Quiet with a view. That would do.

Up on the rooftop, Mark took in the landscape around the Outer Defense Ring Complex and sipped the cup of brown liquid in his hand.

Damn. Mark thought. Crawdad was right. That creamer makes this crud somewhat drinkable.

He watched the impossible elevator flicker in the dark. At the very edge of his vision he could see the cold glow of the nuclear counterweight thrusters that made a space elevator in Lebanon, Kansas even possible. On this tranquil rooftop, he became aware once again of the omnipresent hum that almost vibrated the air he was breathing. It had faded into his background after a week of being here. The mag-rail acceleration shot non-human cargo up into the sky with terrifying speed. Lights flashed in predictable sequence.

Up. Down. Up. Down. The gears of commerce grind ever forward.

He might’ve imagined it, but he thought he saw the vibrations in the surface tension of this inarguably decent ration of coffee substitute.

Looking back at the complex below, Mark watched the Californianican military detachment hang around their vehicles in the casually violent way that soldiers seem to project. Melkson was right. There were a lot of trucks. Mark did not envy the poor budget analysts who had to tally up this Quarter’s Joint Defense Spending. The fuel costs alone would be a nightmare to tabulate.

Mark sighed as he stared out over the scene for a good while longer before heading back to his quarters.

On a whim, Mark wandered by the trucks he’d seen from his rooftop perch. The smell of diesel brought him right back to the Rangers’ Motor Pool. He smiled and wondered what his old driver was up to these days. He was probably a Staff Sergeant by now.

Mark almost walked up to a group of soldiers to shoot the shit, but decided not to. He did, however, let his eyes wander nostalgically over the war equipment for a moment. He turned to go on his merry way when a gently flapping tarp caught his eye. A soldier quickly pulled the tarp taut again, but Mark clocked that the box was clearly labelled with the international sign for ‘High Explosive’. Curious, Mark did a casual lap around the detachment and spotted more than a few additional boxes with the same label in the back of different trucks.

Mark frowned. He was no logistician, but he understood that the random sample of explosives he had observed implied a large pile of boom. If placed strategically, there were probably enough explosives in there to blast a Chesapeake Class Orbital Frigate in half. These Californianicans really weren’t messing around.

But how would they even incorporate these into the Joint Defense Plan?

Still chewing on this nugget, Mark took another long look at the soldiers, who were now actively pretending not to notice him, and finally ambled back to his room to review the rest of the revisions before the morning session. After a few hours of reading, he decided that the Californianican amendments were technically airtight, but he didn’t love how much additional latitude they gave the Commander of the Rotational Defense Force in regards to unilateral decision-making on force deployment and munitions storage. When viewed altogether, he thought passing these revisions was against the best interests of the Republic of New Texas. Too much could go wrong if there was ever a thoughtless Commander at the helm, even for just one quarter.

Against his better judgment, he emailed the Ambassador his analysis and went to shut off his datapad.

But it buzzed before he could do so.

Confused, he checked his unread messages. One unread from the Ambassador. Mark hesitantly tapped open the reply.

“Yippee Ki Yay, we sure are shootin’ guns out here today!”

“My Fellow New Texans, my office is closed for the duration of our great Republic’s Declaration of Rebellion Celebratory Barbecue and Rodeo. I’ll be out and about in Austin sampling all the finest delectables our shining city has to offer until next week. See if you can spot me in the parade on Saturday!”

“For any urgent business, reach out to Max McCarthy. He’ll get you settled.”

The autoreply had Mark’s department contact information in the signature block.

I guess that settles that then.

Mark shook his head in disbelief, chuckled to himself, and turned out the light.

The next morning, the session kicked off with a quiet intensity. The delegation from the Federated States had plenty more exceptions to raise, but the Californianicans were seemingly ready to agree on just about every extra fee and tax hike the FSAE wanted. Without any pushback, there appeared no end to the increasingly minute complaints that could ostensibly trigger a charge.

During a lull in the nickel and diming, Mark raised a point of order about the expansion of Command Authority proposed in the amendment revisions. As expected, that got the Californianicans’ undivided attention. Mark had never been on the receiving end of such a poisonous glare. Undeterred, Mark managed to respectably convey the potential unintended effects of such an increase in scope of security element powers.

It may have been the proudest moment of his short diplomatic career.

The point was debated briefly and dismissed almost immediately. The Californianicans invoked the growing threat of stochastic terrorism back in their home region, revealed they had intelligence reports suggesting the existence of sleeper terror cells across the other Successor States, and offered to pay an additional hefty vehicle fee to boot. Practically salivating as they mentally counted the fleet of trucks outside, the FSAE yielded the rest of their time before Californianica could change their mind about the vehicle fee. The secretary sped through the remaining items, much to the relief of the room, and the amendments all passed largely unchanged.

The Californianicans smiled and left the chamber with a sense of purpose.

Mark walked out behind them and stretched his stiff back. Blinking against the late, hot morning, he watched the Californianican diplomats gather near the military detachment that was getting ready to roll to the Inner Defense Ring. Dozens of engines roared to life simultaneously at a signal from the tan delegates. Mark soon heard the familiar cadence of mission prep checklists being followed. Spotting his fellow junior diplomat standing idly a few feet away from his bosses, Mark shot Melkson a sympathetic look and then spent the rest of the day completing a list of administrative chores from Eddie the Aide.

Much later, under the sticky glow of the setting sun, Mark turned over the engine of his own diplomatic truck and eased it out onto the highway back south toward the Republic of New Texas. Another Reratification Accords in the books. Getting the vehicle up to speed, he glanced in his rearview mirror.

The American Skyway shone bright in the distance, still reaching impossibly upward.

Then a flash of light blinded him for a few seconds. He pulled the truck over as best he could to wait until his vision cleared. When he could see again, Mark got out, stood on the side of the road, and craned his neck.

His stomach fell as he processed the small, sickly blue blossom slowly spreading across the upper atmosphere where the megastructure faded into space.

Mark sighed and turned to drop the tailgate of his truck.

He climbed up to lay down in the bed, using his luggage as a pillow, and settled in to watch the show.

“You cannot have anything. And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

You know how this game begins. You enter the mind palace your grandmother always reminded you to sweep. “If you don’t go in there every once in a while, Marina,” she had warned you, “all types of criaturas will just pop right up. There will be closets you didn’t put there, mija, and you may not like what you find.”

“But remember the things I tell you and one day, when I am well and truly gone, you will find one extra room I put in there for you, that you have built without even realizing it. That is your inheritance.”

You used to go in to sweepwell, that’s the best way to put it – once a week. Then once a month. Then abuelita was gone and before you knew it a whole year had passed. Then two. Then you started getting a little scared of what you might find in there.

So. The memory game. That’s how it began.

Just one problem though, and the reason you’ve been so scared. See, it’s not so much mind palace as mind labyrinth.

You have your grandfather to thank for that one really. He was always making those little puzzle boxes. Each successive layer would only open if you had unlocked the outer layer just right. Something is at the center of the mind labyrinth – but you can’t remember what, exactly. Some makers of puzzle boxes create partial models that they can test with, or hide one secret master lock somewhere. Your grandfather never did that. Every time he tested the box was a true solve of his own puzzle.

The entrance to the mind palace is guarded, of course, as abuelita said it had to be. When you close your eyes and focus on the image – her hands folding masa, the specific scent of her skin, the weight of her disappointment – your neural chip activates with a sensation like warm honey spreading through your skull.

The palace materializes around you.

It’s covered with winding black vines full of thorns so sharp that you feel them. Definitely. Well, possibly. The pain receptors in the chip are calibrated to seem real, and you’ve never been entirely sure whether that’s a feature or a fault.

The vines pulse slightly, alive with data. They’ve grown denser since your last visit, woven so thick you can barely see the iron gate beneath. This is what happens when you don’t maintain the architecture. The neural pathways overgrow, and the information stored in them becomes harder to access, begins to decay.

You reach for the vines carefully, trying to ease them apart.

They contract tighter.

You pull your hand back, and a thorn catches your palm. The pain is bright and specific. A drop of something that looks like blood but feels like static runs down your wrist.

“Gently won’t work, mija.”

The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. When you turn, your grandmother is standing behind you, except she’s translucent at the edges, flickering like a projection your mind isn’t quite committed to rendering.

“Abuelita?”

“You think I’m her?” The figure laughs, and it’s not quite right – too bitter, too sharp. “I’m what you remember of her. I’m what you built to guard this level. And I’m not letting you through until you show me you understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Why do you think these vines grew?” She gestures at the thorns. “Because you were gentle. Because you were patient. Because you tried to be good.” The word drips with contempt. “Your grandmother was never gentle, Marina. She didn’t ask nicely. She didn’t wait for doors to open.”

You remember this. The way she’d slam cupboards when she was angry. The way she’d cut people with words and not apologize. The way rooms would go silent when her mood shifted.

“I’m not like that,” you say.

“No?” The projection steps closer. “Then you’re not getting in.”

The vines seem to thicken as you watch, thorns lengthening. You can feel it – the data degrading, connections weakening. Whatever’s at the center, you’re running out of time.

You reach for the vines again. Gently.

They contract harder, and now thorns pierce your forearm. The pain is exquisite, perfectly calibrated.

“Stop being weak,” your grandmother-projection sneers.

You pull back, breathe. Think. The chip responds to intention, to neural patterns. It’s reading what you project into it. When you’re gentle, it interprets weakness, and the defenses strengthen.

So.

You grab the vines and yank.

The thorns cut deep, but the vines give way slightly. Not enough. You pull harder, letting anger flood through you – anger at the pain, at the puzzle, at your grandmother for making you do this, at yourself for waiting so long.

You tear at the vines.

They resist, and you pull harder. Something in your chest is hot and bright and furious. You think of every time you have swallowed your anger, made yourself small, apologized when you shouldn’t have. You think of your grandmother’s rages and how you swore you’d never be like that, and how you fear that you have let yourself become exactly like her.

The vines begin to part.

But slowly. The gate is still barely visible.

“Again,” the projection says, and there’s approval in her voice now. “Harder.”

So you do it again. And again. You tear at the vines until your hands are shredded and slick. You scream at them. You curse. You channel every ounce of rage you’ve ever suppressed and pour it into your hands, and with each repetition the vines give way a little more.

By the time the gate is clear, you’ve done it 47 times.

You know because the chip counted. Each iteration carved a little deeper into your neural pathways. Each one taught your brain a little better: rage works, rage solves problems, rage opens doors.

The projection smiles at you. “Good girl,” she says, and then she dissolves.

The gate swings open.

Beyond the gate is a hallway lined with doors, and at the end of it sits your grandfather. He’s more solid than the grandmother-projection was, more detailed. He’s at a workbench, and spread before him are dozens of his puzzle boxes, all different sizes, all intricate.

“Marina,” he says without looking up. “You made it past the first level.”

“I need to get to the center.”

“Of course you do.” He selects a box, turns it in his hands. “But first, you need to choose.”

The doors along the hallway swing open, and behind each one is a memory. You can see them like exhibits in a museum. Birthday parties. Holidays. The summer you spent at his workshop. The day he spent teaching you to solve a simple box and how you cried with frustration until he showed you the trick.

“One of these doors leads forward,” he says. “The others lead to dead ends, to loops, to degraded data you can’t recover from. Choose carefully.”

You step toward the nearest door, but he holds up a hand.

“Actually,” he says, “I misspoke. You don’t need to choose one door. You need to choose all of them.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Is it?” He smiles. “Your grandmother hoarded memories like they were treasure. I hoard too, in my way. All these boxes, Marina. All these solutions I never threw away. All these moments I couldn’t let go of.” He gestures to the doors. “You think you can be selective? You think you can take just the good ones and leave the rest behind?”

You understand. The puzzle isn’t about choosing. Its solution is in accepting.

You walk to the first door and step through. The memory plays – a fight between your parents, your grandfather watching silently, saying nothing. You feel the weight of his inaction, the way he collected grievances and never let them go.

You step back out and move to the next door. And the next. And the next.

Each memory is a piece of him. Good ones: teaching you patience, showing you how things fit together. Bad ones: his silence when he should have spoken, his collection of resentments, the way he took up space with his things and his mood.

The puzzle is that you have to experience all of them. You can’t skip. You can’t be selective.

So you don’t.

You go through every door. Every memory. You take them all in, let them fill you up until you feel bloated with other people’s experiences, until you can’t tell which feelings are yours and which are inherited. You want to stop – your brain is screaming that this is too much, that you need to filter, to be selective – but you keep going.

Because the only way forward is through excess. Through taking more than you should. Through refusing to limit yourself.

By the time you’ve finished, you’ve walked through 63 doors.

The chip has been counting this too. Recording each time you chose consumption over restraint. Teaching your brain: more is better, take everything, don’t limit yourself.

Back in the hallway, your grandfather looks up from his workbench. “Good,” he says. “Now you understand.”

A door appears at the end of the hallway, different from the others. Ornate. Locked with mechanisms you can see but don’t quite understand.

“The third level,” he says. “Your aunt is waiting.”

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The third level is a library, or something like it. Endless shelves of books, all identical, all bound in dark leather. Your aunt sits at a desk in the center, writing in one of them with precise, tiny script.

“Marina.” She doesn’t look up. “You’re late.”

“I’m here now.”

“Late is late.” She finishes a line, sets down her pen with exact placement. “Do you know how many times I’ve written this page?”

You don’t answer.

“47 times,” she says. “Each time, I found an error. A misplaced comma. A word that could be better. So I started over.” She finally looks at you. “Your grandmother was sloppy. Your grandfather was excessive. But I am precise.”

The books on the shelves – you see now that they’re all the same book – each of their pages written over and over with microscopic variations.

“To pass this level,” your aunt says, “you must complete a task. Perfectly.”

She slides a blank book across the desk, along with a pen.

“Copy this page.” She indicates the one she’s just finished. “Exactly.”

You sit down. Pick up the pen. Begin to copy.

The script is impossibly small, impossibly intricate. Halfway through the third line, your hand trembles and a letter comes out wrong.

“Start over,” your aunt says.

So you do.

You make it further this time – two-thirds of the way through before you transpose two letters.

“Start over.”

Again.

And again.

You lose count of how many times you restart the page. Your hand cramps. Your eyes blur. The chip is recording every repetition, every attempt at perfection, every time you submit yourself to this impossible standard.

On the 47th attempt, you get all the way to the last line before making a mistake.

“Start over,” your aunt says.

And something in you breaks.

Not into rage this time. Into something colder. You look at the page – the page you’ve already copied 46 times, each time finding it insufficient. You look at your aunt, who has written the same page 47 times and still isn’t satisfied.

You pick up the pen.

You draw a single, thick line through the entire page.

“There,” you say. “Done.”

Your aunt stares at you. “That’s not…”

“It’s done,” you say. “It’s imperfect and it’s done and I’m not doing it again.”

You expect her to argue. Instead, she smiles.

“48 tries,” she says. “That’s what it took for you to learn. That perfection is the enemy. That sometimes done is better than perfect. That you have to be willing to fail, to submit flawed work, to accept incompletion.”

Except.

Except you didn’t learn that at all.

What you learned is that you had to try 48 times before you were allowed to stop. That the only way past perfectionism is through perfectionism. That you have to obsess and retry and polish until finally, exhausted, you’re permitted to fail.

The chip has been recording. So many iterations of the same task. 48 times your brain practiced obsessive attention to detail, self-flagellation at the errors, the inability to let things go.

A door opens behind your aunt.

“The center,” she says. “Your inheritance.”

The center of the labyrinth is a small room, barely larger than a closet. In the middle of it is a pedestal, and on the pedestal is a box.

One of your grandfather’s puzzle boxes.

You recognize it. The rosewood one with the inlay of lighter wood forming geometric patterns. He was working on it the summer before he died. You never saw him finish it.

You pick it up. It’s warm in your hands, and you can feel the mechanisms inside, complex and interlocking. The kind of puzzle that requires the patience to memorize the right sequence of moves.

You begin to solve it.

The first layer opens after you press three panels in the right order. The second layer requires rotation and pressure. The third layer is more complex – a sequence you have to discover through trial and error.

Inside the final layer is a piece of paper.

On it, in your grandmother’s handwriting: a string of numbers and letters. 64 characters: alphanumeric, precisely formatted.

A cryptographic key.

You stare at it. This is the inheritance. Not memories, not wisdom. Access to something your grandmother left you. Money, or information. Or both.

Something material. Something real.

All you have to do is remember this key, exit the labyrinth, and use it before the chip is removed and the data is lost forever.

You start to memorize it. The first eight characters come easily. Then the next eight. You’re halfway through when you realize …

To get here, you tore through thorns 47 times, teaching your brain that rage opens doors.

You consumed 63 memories, teaching your brain that more is always better, that you should take everything offered.

You attempted perfection 48 times, teaching your brain to obsess over details, to never be satisfied, to retry until you’re broken.

158 repetitions total.

158 times the chip amplified the learning, carved the pathways deeper, made you expert in the exact traits that your family embodied, the exact traits you’ve spent your whole life trying not to inherit.

Your grandmother’s rage. Your grandfather’s hoarding. Your aunt’s perfectionism.

And now you’re standing here with their gift, ready to take it out into the world, and you can already feel it – the pathways are so deep now. The inhibition that would normally stop you from acting on these impulses, the self-control you’ve relied on, it’s been worn down by sheer repetition. The chip made every iteration count double, triple, carved neural highways where there used to be hesitant paths.

If you take this key out, if you use this inheritance, you’ll have to live with what you’ve become to earn it.

You look at the string of characters. They’re already fading from your vision. The data is degrading. Soon it will be gone entirely.

You could keep memorizing. You could save this.

Or.

You set the paper down.

You leave it in the box.

You close each layer carefully, in reverse order, until the puzzle box is sealed again.

And you walk out.

The exit is easier than the entrance. The levels don’t resist when you’re leaving. Your aunt is gone, your grandfather is gone, your grandmother is gone. Just empty spaces where they were.

You emerge from the labyrinth with the feeling of warm honey receding from your skull, and you open your eyes in the clinic.

“How did it go?” the technician asks. “Did you find what you needed?”

“No,” you say. “I want it removed.”

She nods. “The consent forms you signed did mention that this might cause some scarring to the surrounding tissue. Minor damage to inhibitory pathways. Are you sure?”

You think about the 158 repetitions. About what you’ve already done to yourself.

“I’m sure,” you say.

The procedure takes 40 minutes. They have to be careful around the neural tissue. When it’s done, there’s a small bandage on the side of your head and a waiver you sign about potential side effects.

You feel fine.

You feel completely fine.

Three weeks later, you’re in a meeting and someone contradicts you and you feel it rise up – hot and bright and familiar. The urge to snap back, to cut them down, to make them feel small.

You don’t do it.

But the impulse is louder than it used to be. Harder to ignore.

That night, you buy more groceries than you need. Not by a lot. Just… more. An extra can of everything. A backup of the backups. Just in case.

You notice, but you don’t refrain.

At home, you revise an email seven times before sending it. Then you lie awake thinking about how you should have revised it an eighth time. How there was a better word for the third sentence. How it wasn’t quite right.

You notice this too.

The thing is, you can feel it. The space where the inhibition used to be. Like a tooth that’s been pulled – your tongue keeps going to the gap, expecting something that isn’t there anymore.

The rage is louder. The hoarding comes easier. The perfectionism is more insistent.

And you know, with the clarity of someone who has just lost something important, that it’s only going to get worse.

You didn’t bring anything out of the labyrinth. You left the inheritance behind, made the right choice, the good choice.

But the labyrinth sent something out with you anyway.

Not a creature. Not a ghost.

Expertise. Skill. 158 repetitions of becoming exactly what you were trying to escape.

The chip is gone. The data is lost. Your grandmother’s gift has degraded to nothing.

But her legacy?

That’s alive and well, carved into your neural pathways like your grandfather’s boxes, precise and inescapable.

That followed you out just fine.

This story is a Protocolized bounty, written in response to its featured image – the first image published from one of our models on titles.xyz. We set regular bounties in Discord.

The last-minute tumult of departure reigned on the steamer from Bristol to Buenos Aires. Porters hurried up the gangway with trunks and crates, telegraph boys zigzagged between families pressing farewell letters into their hands, and the deck lights quivered in the wind as the ship groaned against its moorings.

I had found a place near the forward rail, trying to appear older than my 19 years in my ill-fitting three-piece suit, when several bright flashes caught my attention – reporters’ lamps, unmistakably. The crowd began to part with a collective shiver.

Beside me, a stout and red-cheeked man tapped the ash from his pipe. He wore a wool coat too heavy for the ship’s warm corridor and carried himself with the unobtrusive authority of someone who found himself on a ship too often.

“Ah,” he said, noticing the direction of my gaze. “You will have a rare passenger on this voyage. That fellow, Sorabji Marker. You are from the islands, are you not? Saint Canderton?”

I nodded hesitantly.

Lakshman Sorabji Marker.

I remembered the name from my childhood in Saint Canderton, distant flashes of the cricket ground – The Oval – cut into the hillside, and the roar of the crowd. I had been too young then to understand why adults spoke his name with mythic reverence.

“You must remember the cricket match?” the gentleman asked. “That last Test? The one that broke the English streak and nearly set the Caribbean on fire.”

I confessed I remembered very little other than the heat and being lifted onto my father’s shoulders to see Marker coming out to bat. The gentleman gave me a sympathetic smile.

“Well then,” he said, lowering his voice with a storyteller’s instinct, “permit an old man to refresh your memory.”

He began with the giddiness of an old fellow who had told his story many times.

The Final Test

“It was the fourth day of the third Test match,” he said, “the series tied one-one, and the whole island felt as though it were about to lift off its foundations. Saint Canderton was brimming with people, tens of thousands crammed into streets meant for hundreds. The betting houses, the Fortuna Exchange and Hilltop Book, were so packed a man could hardly raise his elbow without brushing against five others. Steam drifted over The Oval cricket ground from the Engine Rooms, where the great analytical machines had been clattering without pause for two days, recalculating odds with each new whisper: rumors of Marker being ill, pitch conditions, Alistair Grace’s footwork patterns, all rendered into columns of brass and steam.”

He gave me a knowing look, as if expecting I might boast familiarity with the engine. I did not.

He paused to relight his pipe before continuing.

“England had one wicket left. And Saint Canderton was hungry for it.”

I remembered glimpses of that day through the haze of childhood memory. But the next part I had only ever heard in fragments whispered by adults animated by copious amounts of rum.

Graceful Fury

“The last English batsman,” the Leeds man said, “was the captain, Alistair Grace. Grim, patient, sweating through the afternoon heat, he had inched England toward their target. They needed only five runs. Five. And he had already survived a dozen appeals, each one tightening the crowd until The Oval felt like a drumhead stretched to breaking. Then came the ball, nothing spectacular, just a weary leg-break that kept a shade low. Grace thrust out his pad, half a moment too slow. The appeal rose. And for the first time that day, the umpire’s finger went up. LBW. Grace had been given out. He stood frozen. The stadium erupted. People screamed, wept, and danced in the stands. Drums started up on the hillside. And just as suddenly, everything went wrong.”

He shifted closer, as though the retelling required physical proximity.

“Grace lost his senses. Absolutely lost them. He marched straight to the umpires, shouting the decision was fraudulent. When they refused, he threatened them. When the crowd hissed at him, he threatened the crowd.”

I could almost see it: the towering Englishman, broad-shouldered and red-faced, shouting at the umpires while the stadium held its breath. I had heard mythic tales of Alistair Grace. He demanded respect wherever he went. He was one of the first cricketers to make money from playing the sport. People turned up to watch him more than the match. He knew this and used it to his advantage. In one famous instance, after being given out, Grace had said to an umpire, “Overturn your decision, the crowd came to see me, not you.” The umpire did exactly as told.

“And then,” the Leeds gentleman said softly, “Grace did something unforgivable. He demanded the match be overturned. And when Governor Monteverde refused – yes, the Governor himself had come down to The Oval – Grace left the pitch, seized a telegraph clerk and dictated a message to the admiralty, claiming insurrection, danger to British subjects, and the need for immediate naval intervention.”

I felt myself grow cold.

“He was not done,” the man continued. “He marched his teammates down to the harbor, shouting that Saint Canderton had mocked the Crown and that none of them would leave the island until justice was done. When two of the younger players, frightened boys in their first international match, refused to take part in whatever madness he had planned, Grace turned on them with a fury that shocked even his loyal men. He accused them of treachery and conspiring with the islanders. By then he had worked himself into such a state that reason no longer reached him.”

“And so, to make certain no one fled the island before his demands were met, he ordered the ships they had arrived on to be burned. Some of his teammates pleaded with him, tried to drag him back up the pier, but he shoved them aside and hurled the first torch himself. Within minutes the rigging of the schooners was a lattice of fire. Next, the packet steamer caught, slowly at first, then with a roar, and the flames climbed high enough to paint the whole bay in orange. No Englishman could leave, he bellowed, not until the match was reversed. The sight of those burning ships… it was like watching the last bridge to sanity collapse.”

I must have looked shocked, for he added gently, “You were too young to understand, my boy. But those of us watching from afar, we knew that match was no mere sporting affair. Betting was involved. Pride was involved. Money, telegraph lines, the great machine itself.”

He nodded toward Marker, who sat quietly in a wicker chair by the saloon door, the center of a tight, respectful orbit of passengers. Marker, in his older years, was a small, thin man – he had always been slight, but age made him appear more delicate. His face was gaunt and angular, with prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes that gave him a somewhat austere, watchful appearance.

“And at the heart of it all,” the Leeds gentleman said, “stood Governor Monteverde and the Analytical Engine that changed Saint Canderton forever.”

No sooner had the steamer left the last buoys of the Bristol Channel behind us, its passengers, as if released from some invisible restraint, began roaming about in lazy sweeps, seeking distraction from the monotony of open sea. Conversations lifted and died like small waves. But wherever you walked you felt at once a strange current of attention. People’s voices dimmed, gestures softened, and a peculiar gravitational pull redirected all movement.

It was Marker, of course. Sat in his armchair now, bolted to the deck, wrapped in a shawl despite the mild evening, staring out at the black water with the same expression of gentle detachment that he had worn in the saloon.

My companion leaned toward me. “None of this would make sense,” he murmured, “unless you understand where he comes from.”

Sugar Island

“Saint Canderton,” he said, “had once been merely another sugar colony strung along the great triangular trade routes of the Atlantic, the warm-water chain through which manufactured goods, enslaved labor, and finally sugar, rum, and molasses moved in their vast, relentless circuit. It was fertile enough, profitable enough, and sufficiently obedient to the Crown to merit neither punishment nor praise. But by the time Don Alejandro Monteverde inherited the governorship from an elderly cousin in 1849, the machinery of cane and cargo had begun to falter.”

The European beet-sugar industry had matured. Prices fell. Merchants grew restless. The island’s great cane fields, which once had shimmered like golden oceans, now yielded barely enough to justify the grueling work of cutting, boiling, and shipping.

It would have been entirely natural, indeed expected, for Saint Canderton to retreat into the resigned torpor that often seized such islands when their single crop failed them. And yet Monteverde was not a man to accept the slow suffocation of economic inevitability.

He had spent his youth in Cádiz and Paris, reading more political pamphlets than colonial dispatches, and was possessed of that rare mixture of aristocratic pride and cosmopolitan curiosity that often produces either a visionary or a tyrant. In Monteverde’s case, it produced something stranger: an experimenter.

Opium for the Masters

“Monteverde had followed the events of the Opium Wars with obsessive interest. What fascinated him was not the military aspect, though he admired, in a detached fashion, the audacity of the British strategy, but rather the deeper principle: that an empire could exert control not simply through conquest but through desire.”

“An empire that cannot be resisted,” he once said to a confidant, “is not won with cannons but with desire machines.”

This idea began to fester, then blossom, in his mind.

What, he wondered, could Saint Canderton offer the world, especially Britain, that might ensnare rather than repel? What pleasure, what spectacle, what irresistible indulgence could his little island refine into something stronger than sugar?

For years he searched for an answer, sponsoring every manner of curious enterprise: music festivals, acrobat troupes, exotic fruit for trade. None of them offered the particular mix of continuity and compulsion he sought.

Cricket

Then, quite by accident, a visiting English XI, touring the Caribbean more out of boredom than ambition, agreed to play a friendly cricket match on the dusty Saint Canderton Oval. The Englishmen, not used to the island’s heat and unprepared for its curious, uneven pitch, were defeated disgracefully by a team of local clerks, cane workers, and one extraordinarily gifted youth, Lakshman Sorabji Marker, then only 16.

The match would have been a trivial anecdote for the English tourists, forgotten as soon as they boarded their ship, had Monteverde not been watching from the shade of a palm that afternoon. Something in the intensity of the crowd, the feverish energy with which even the old women in the stands calculated the field placements and shouted out home-spun advice, something in that raw spectacle, seemed to him more potent than any fruit or song or festival.

Here, he thought, was a commodity the British already adored, but could never have imagined might be exported back to them in a more intoxicating form. Here was his opium.

Wager

From that moment Monteverde began to reshape the island with a fervor bordering on mania. The Oval was expanded. A second ground was blasted and quarried into the hillside, its stands rising in clean geometric tiers from stone and timber, reinforced with imported steel beams that glinted in the sun. The engineers carved the seating bowl with such precision that it seemed to nestle naturally into the slope. On match days the echo of the crowd rolled down through the valley, and from the highest rows one could see the entire coastline, white surf, sugar fields, and the great ships anchored in the harbor. Monteverde called it his masterpiece, the island’s proof that ambition need not bow to geographic determinism.

But Monteverde understood something no other colonial governor did. Cricket alone was not enough.

What the British loved even more than cricket, sometimes more than propriety, was betting on cricket.

Yet betting at the time was capricious, inconsistent, muddled by rumor and sluggish information. What if Saint Canderton could offer not only matches but certainty, or the illusion of certainty, regarding the details and outcomes of those matches?

What if the island could become the one place on earth where the odds were fair, precise, mechanical?

To accomplish this, he needed a mind capable of bending numerical chaos into predictable pathways.

He needed a machine.

He needed Babbage.

Father Computer

The Leeds merchant paused here, partly for breath and partly, I suspect, for dramatic effect. The waves lapped steadily against the hull. A group of passengers passed us, laughing softly. And from farther down the deck I saw Marker, still seated in gentle solitude, oblivious to the fact that his life was being narrated in fragments by strangers.

“Now,” my companion continued, lowering his voice, “the next part is scarcely believable.”

At the time, Charles Babbage was already notorious in England. Half visionary, half public nuisance, he was perpetually entangled in committees and quarrels. His proposed Analytical Engine had been underfunded, ridiculed, and delayed. Monteverde, hearing this, sensed opportunity.

A discreet correspondence was initiated through intermediaries in London and Cádiz. Babbage, disillusioned and perhaps secretly longing for a place where his genius would be recognized, rather than politely tolerated, agreed to inspect the island under the pretext of a geological excursion.

He departed quietly from Southampton. Somewhere near Madeira, the British courier ship on which he had traveled reported him missing. And two weeks later he was seen stepping ashore at Port Fortuna, greeted by Monteverde himself.

The British newspapers were silent. Perhaps they never knew. Perhaps they chose not to know. Monteverde, at any rate, ensured that his guest was installed comfortably in the old counting house overlooking the harbor.

Armed with a team of machinists drawn from shipwrights and sugar-mill mechanics, Babbage set about building the first of the Saint Canderton Analytical Engines, monstrous assemblies of polished brass, iron teeth, and gears that glinted in the lamplight like the innards of some mythical creature.

And unlike the delicate drafts he had shown London committees, this engine ran not on hand-cranks but on steam. Massive boilers, repurposed from defunct sugar factories, were installed behind the counting house, their furnaces stoked day and night. The heat boiled seawater drawn from the harbor through copper tubes. The resulting pressure fed a pair of reciprocating pistons that turned the drive shafts connected to the engine’s primary column of gears.

The constant need for fuel changed the island almost overnight. Freighters that once carried nothing but cane and rum began arriving with Welsh steam coal, prized for its clean burn. American bituminous coal arrived from Baltimore. Even low-grade Brazilian coal from Pernambuco found its way into the furnaces when the island’s appetite grew too quickly. A miniature trade route sprang into existence. The black circuit, some called it, ships arriving heavy with coal and departing light with betting slips, sugar, and gossip concerning the miraculous machine.

The islanders named it La Máquina.

Monteverde called it the future.

Staring out into the gray Atlantic, the Leeds man added quietly, “It was the first time the island’s heart beat with more than sugar and wind.”

Bettors

The next morning, after a restless night broken by the steady throb of the ship’s engines, I found the Leeds gentleman again on the promenade, wrapped in a blanket and surveying the gray Atlantic with the air of a man mentally rearranging continents. He nodded at me, invited me to sit, and continued his tale without preamble, as though sleep had merely been a brief intermission.

“You see, lad,” he began, tamping tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, “Saint Canderton was not prepared for what happened after that first cricket series.”

He took a slow draw.

“Once Saint Canderton’s engines and Marker’s prowess with the bat became well known through every London newspaper from Fleet Street to the sporting pages, the flow of people began. Not gradually, mind you. Like a tap turned all the way open. Americans from Charleston, gamblers from Veracruz, merchants from Mumbai, sailors who had never heard of cricket but had heard there was money to be made, they all came.”

I remembered this influx only as a blur of unfamiliar faces at the docks, but even that memory had, until now, felt like a child’s exaggeration. Hearing it described so precisely, I began to understand the scale.

“And with all those people,” the man continued, “came money. Not just pounds and shillings, but rupees, pesos, doubloons, francs, guineas, cowries, anything that could be turned into a wager.”

He let this sink in.

“That is where Monteverde saw the opportunity. And where Babbage – grumpy, brilliant, impossible man that he was – found his purpose.”

Bridge

According to the Leeds gentleman, Saint Canderton’s greatest innovation was not its cricket grounds, nor the Analytical Engines that aided betting, but something far quieter and more technical: the currency-bridging houses.

“They began,” he said, “as small sheds on the edge of Port Fortuna. Each had a telegraph line, a team of clerks, and a wooden board on the wall listing conversion rates. At first those rates were chalked in by hand, changed once or twice a day depending on news from London or Calcutta.”

He smiled faintly.

“But then Babbage finished the first version of the Analytical Engine.”

“You have no idea,” the man said, “what that machine did for betting. Currency conversion became instant, accurate, incorruptible. A sailor could hand over a Mexican real and receive a paper slip showing exactly how many fractions of a Saint Canderton betting token it equaled. A Frenchman betting in francs was, in the engine’s eyes, no different from an Englishman betting in shillings.”

He leaned forward conspiratorially.

New Rules

“Cricket,” he said, “was never meant to be scrutinized so finely.”

But Saint Canderton’s crowds wanted more granularity.

“You must understand,” he said, “that bettors crave units. Discrete, predictable, measurable units. They want to see the world broken into pieces they can price.”

At first the bettors used whatever the game already provided: runs, wickets, boundaries. But soon, with the engine’s help, they demanded smaller increments.

“There was pressure,” the man explained, “immense pressure on the Board of Cricketing Rules. In England, they argued for days about whether the Saint Canderton micro-wagers were poisoning the purity of the sport. But money, as it does, prevailed.”

He looked at me, waiting for me to make the next logical leap. I did not leap.

“That is how the six-ball over became standardized.”

I blinked.

“You did not know?” he said, amused. “Before Saint Canderton, there was no universal six-ball over. Different colonies used four, or five, or even eight. Chaos to a bettor, paradise to no one.”

“But six, ah, six. Divisible enough to please the numerate, predictable enough for conversion tables, symmetrical enough for the engine to compute probabilities with satisfying clarity.”

Over time, as bettors arrived from more nations, more currencies, more habits of mind, the game adapted further, its smallest intervals carved into even smaller ones by the relentless appetite for precision.

“Saint Canderton,” he said, “taught the world that the game could be priced.”

“But here,” he added, “is the true genius. The engine gave currencies a common grammar. A rupee, a pound, a franc, each was translated into the machine’s language of ratios and probabilities. Once expressed in that language, any coin could meet any other across a betting slip.”

Attack

The Leeds gentleman found me again that evening, on the lee side of the promenade. Marker had retired to his cabin, leaving behind a faint agitation among the passengers, as though people were uncertain what they were meant to do now that the object of their voyeurism was withdrawn from view.

The Leeds man leaned on the rail and said without ceremony, “You remember I mentioned Grace’s fury? That was only the beginning.”

“Grace,” he continued, “was not a man to accept humiliation quietly. After burning the ships, and after his telegraph to the admiralty vanished into the aether with no immediate reply, he convinced his players that the real enemy was not Saint Canderton’s bowlers, nor its umpires, nor even its people.”

He paused.

“It was the Analytical Engine.”

“Grace believed Saint Canderton had cheated,” the man said. “That the engine had cooked the odds, influenced the crowd, manipulated probability itself. Madness, of course, but very compelling madness.”

Under cover of darkness, Grace split his men into two groups. One crept toward The Oval’s Engine House; the other descended the hill toward the port where the first engine, Babbage’s original, sat in its stone vault.

“They caused terrible damage,” the Leeds gentleman said softly. “They smashed the windows near The Oval and ripped out telegraph cables. And at the port, they set fire to the warehouses. Half the quay went up in flames.”

The image formed vividly in my mind: the harbor glowing orange, dark silhouettes running along the docks, that familiar Saint Canderton night air thick with smoke and salt.

Marker

He turned to me with a look that suggested even he scarcely believed what he was about to say.

“You see, lad, Marker did not win that Test. He was out without scoring in both innings. Not a run to his name. Hardly touched the ball. And yet he won the island.”

I must have looked incredulous.

“You misunderstand the kind of influence he held,” the man said. “By then Marker was already a sensation in England. A curiosity and a colonial marvel. Newspapers printed sketches of his stance. Betting houses in London devoted entire columns to his batting averages. He had become the Empire’s favorite exotic son.”

“Grace understood applause,” the man said. “Marker understood stakes. One played to the crowd; the other played to the people who bet their wages on him.”

According to my companion, on the eve of the third Test, Marker made his way to the telegraph office at Port Fortuna. He exchanged a discreet code with a London acquaintance, a financial speculator he had met during a promotional tour, a man who treated wagers as financial instruments. Then Marker emptied his travelling pouch onto the brass intake tray: Canderton notes gone soft in the humidity, Mexican pesos, two English sovereigns, and a scattering of smaller coins gathered over months of drifting between continents.

The auxiliary engine stirred awake at once. Telegraph needles trembled as exchange rates arrived from London and Bombay; gears clattered through conversion tables; punch tape advanced in steady metallic bursts. By the time the machine fell silent, the motley pile of currency had been translated, bridged, and recombined into a single slender tape of figures, Marker’s entire fortune rendered into a flawless London wager.

News spread through London’s betting houses that Marker himself had staked everything on Saint Canderton to win the series outright. Those who adored him rushed to follow his lead; those who doubted him rushed to oppose it; and the vast undecided middle joined out of nothing more than the old London instinct not to be left behind. In a matter of hours, the wager around Marker’s bet swelled to grotesque proportions. The crowd of London, merchant syndicates, shipping brokers, warehouse cooperatives, private gentlemen’s clubs, even a few minor banks, all found themselves entangled in the outcome of a Test match unfolding on a distant Caribbean hillside.

Within minutes of the match ending, word had reached London that Saint Canderton had won. Bettors were already queuing at counting desks, and bookmakers were beginning to settle accounts. Money had begun to move. To overturn the match now, after those first settlements had been paid out, would be to detonate the entire system. Bets would not merely be void; they would have to be clawed back. Ledgers would contradict themselves. Streets would fill with men furious that their winnings had been snatched away. No bookmaker in London could survive the demand for reversals. No bank could withstand the sudden, violent seizure of credit. A Test match annulled after settlement, it would have set half the city aflame.

When news of the unrest reached London, burning ships, angry crowds, the possibility of a cancelled Test, panic flickered through the city. It passed from bookmakers to brokers, from brokers to banks, and from there, inevitably, into the corridors of power. By evening the matter had reached the palace. A single telegraph was drafted and dispatched without ceremony.

STAND DOWN.
STOP ALL HOSTILITIES.
MAINTAIN CRICKET PEACE.
RETURN AT ONCE.

Grace received the message while preparing for a second assault on The Oval’s Analytical Engine. He went white as chalk. For the first time, perhaps in his life, he understood that a greater force than his pride had entered the field.

Peace

“They left at dawn,” my inexhaustible Northern friend said. “A pair of constables led Grace’s men to the only vessel still fit to sail, a supply cutter hired in haste from Martinique. Grace boarded last. He did not thank the crew.”

Saint Canderton did not celebrate their departure. Fires were put out, the port swept clean, the stadium gates repaired. Carnival rhythms returned, though softer, as though the drums were still deciding whether the danger had passed.

“But here is the curious part,” he went on. “The island never revealed Marker’s role. It was as if the wager had evaporated with the smoke. He remained, officially, the young prodigious batsman of the gentleman’s sport.” He smiled faintly. “But unofficially? People began to murmur about impropriety, about the morality of turning a Test match into a financial earthquake. Too many had lost money. Too many feared how much worse it could have been.”

He paused, letting the ship’s engines fill the silence.

“Marker did not stay in the game much longer. Not because he lacked talent, God knows he had more of it than most men who ever held a bat, but England’s cricketing circles turned strangely cold toward him after the Test.”

He let his words settle, as though remembering it firsthand.

“It was not open hostility. Just a series of invitations that never came, endorsements that evaporated, speculators who spoke of him in the past tense. Aristocrats who once toasted him at dinner parties now referred to him as a curious creature and an unsettling influence. They did not accuse him of anything outright, but they made it clear he had stepped too close to the machinery behind the sport.”

“A player who unsettles the market unsettles the gentlemen who fund it. And English cricket has always belonged to the gentlemen.”

The man exhaled a thin ribbon of smoke.

“So Marker retired. Quietly. No farewell match, no speeches, no boardroom gratitude.”

He tapped his pipe once on the rail.

“Grace, meanwhile, continued to captain England for seasons afterward. His temper never softened, nor did his conviction that the Saint Canderton Test had been stolen by forces beyond the boundary rope. But people found it useful to let him rage. Better a familiar villain than a truth that unsettled the entire structure of the sport.”

As for Saint Canderton, its betting markets did not survive the year. Under pressure from London and several European houses, the island’s cricket exchanges were embargoed. Telegraph lines that once carried odds fell silent. The Analytical Engine houses fell dormant.

“They stood there for decades,” the Leeds man said, “bricked up, forgotten, left to nature’s whims and salt air. Until the French arrived.”

“Couple of years back,” my voluble friend continued, “when the French started throwing their best engineers into the swamps of Panama to stumble through that grand enterprise of the canal, they passed through Saint Canderton as well. It was common then for brigades of French civil engineers and their Haitian labor crews to pause at the islands that dotted the shipping route between Martinique and Colón.”

“Most saw only a quiet port and a neglected cricket ground. But a few wandered farther and came upon the old engine vault at Port Fortuna. They did not understand what they were looking at, rows of brass cylinders, gear trains blackened by salt air, the collapsed frame of a punch-tape reader. They sensed it had once been something intelligent and monumental.”

The French crated up a few pieces and shipped them to Paris for study. The rest they left where they found them, half-buried under dust and palm fronds, like the bones of some mechanical leviathan that had roamed the island long before they arrived.

She was what the citizens of Fortress Island, officially the Sovereign Territory of National Prosperity, under the benevolent and unblinking glare of the Party of Eternal Vigilance, politely called “substantial.” Less polite people, usually in the brief, breathless seconds before reconsidering their life choices, might have called her “built like a brick shithouse that has settled into the mud.”

When she was a young woman, her hands had been capable of crushing walnuts, though walnuts hadn’t been affordable on Fortress Island in a decade. Now she had a face that looked like it had been carved by a sculptor who had given up halfway through to go have a drink.

The Party, in its unquestionable wisdom, had looked at Robyn 30 years ago and seen a solution to a personnel problem. Specifically: what to do with a woman too large for standard-issue office cubicle units, too grumpy for morale-boosting rhythmic gymnastics, and too prone to telling District Coordinators exactly where they could file their performance reviews (a location not found on any official anatomical chart).

Transit Restriction Officer (Lower Level), they had announced, handing her a plastic badge that snapped immediately as she pinned it on. It sounded like an honor.

What they meant was: Sit in this box for the rest of your life and be intimidating. Stop anyone from using the lower bridge.

The bridge itself was a masterpiece of reinforced pessimism, stretching to the mainland like a concrete umbilical cord no one wanted to admit still existed.

Official crossings happened on the Upper Level, a place of sunlight, proper docks, proper paperwork, and Transit Officers who wore pressed uniforms and did actual work. The Upper Level was where the Party showcased its vigilance.

Robyn’s booth sat on the Lower Level, facing a rocky, dismal shore where nothing ever happened because nothing was supposed to.

The location was the key. The Lower Level was a maintenance nightmare, a shadowy undercroft of the bridge which the sun rarely touched and where damp settled like a fine, cold dust. The shore here was officially designated as Structurally Recalcitrant, a classification that allowed the Department of Public Works to ignore it entirely. Cameras had been installed 20 years ago, but the salt air had eaten the wiring, and the Party, currently operating on a budget composed entirely of IOUs and overreaching optimism, had never replaced them.

Robyn’s booth, painted in Regulation Grey (Standard Registry of Approved Non-Stimulating Hues, Subsection 4: Depressing But Not Quite Suicidal), contained a chair that had surrendered to her mass, a heater that functioned primarily as an abstract sculpture, and a logbook that remained pristinely empty except for the mandatory weekly entry: “No incidents to report.”

Fortress Island citizens, meanwhile, stayed indoors. The Party strongly encouraged it, and the Department of Public Wellness spooked them with reports claiming fresh air caused Atmospheric Hysteria. But mostly, people stayed inside because outside cost too much. Coffee cost three days’ ration credits. The newspaper cost five. And everyone already knew what the newspaper would say: Everything Is Excellent and Getting More Excellent.

One evening, as the sky settled into the bruised purple that preceded full dark, Robyn saw movement under the colossal concrete arches.

Rats? Possibly. Fortress Island had hardy, well-fed rats; they were the only demographic truly thriving under the current economic plan. But these shapes were too coordinated, too vertical.

Robyn rose from her booth with the grinding inevitability of continental drift. Her knees popped, a sound like a rifle shot in the damp quiet.

Three teenagers froze near the waterline.

They wore anonymous grey clothes and furtive postures, having the distinct look of small prey animals confronted by a large predatory boulder that had unexpectedly found motion.

“Right,” Robyn said, her voice like gravel tumbling inside a cement mixer. “Clear off.”

The leader was a girl with a haircut that suggested she had performed it herself, in the dark, possibly with safety scissors. She stared at Robyn, eyes wide. Behind her, two boys hovered, looking as though they might dissolve into the mist if threatened.

“We’re just… looking at the water,” the girl said.

“Water is unauthorized after 1800 hours,” Robyn rumbled. “Visual consumption of the horizon is a Class C infraction. Clear off.”

They cleared off at a speed which suggested extensive practice in evading authority.

Robyn returned to her seat. She opened the logbook. The pen hovered over the paper. She could report them. Subsection 12, Paragraph 4: Loitering with Intent to Observe Nature.

She wrote: Discouraged local fauna.

She felt vaguely pleased. It was an incident.

Three days later, they were back. Same kids, plus extras. The teenagers were standing in a circle, whispering, an activity teenagers consider cosmically important and governments consider prelude to riot.

Robyn emerged, displeased, from her booth.

“I told you,” she announced, her shadow swallowing the entire group, “to CLEAR OFF!”

“We’re not doing anything wrong,” said the girl with the bad haircut, quaking.

“You’re loitering you little runt! Don’t mess with me!”

“Loitering costs money now?” the girl snapped back with teenage righteousness. She was brave.

“Loitering without purpose is suspicious,” Robyn growled.

“We’ve got purpose,” said one of the boys, a lanky thing who appeared to be waiting for the funding to finish puberty. “We’re discussing… Party educational materials.” He held up a PEV pamphlet. Clearly a prop.

“Educational materials,” Robyn sneered, as if naming a suspicious package found on a bus. She snatched it from his hand.

“For self-improvement,” added another. “The Party likes that. Strength Through Knowledge.”

Robyn considered them. She should report this. Unauthorized gathering. Potential conspiracy. Flagrant teenagering in a restricted zone.

She looked at the girl. The girl looked back, terrified but stubborn.

“15 minutes,” Robyn heard herself say, handing the pamphlet to the girl. “Then clear off. And fix your hair, you look like a used mop.”

She returned to her booth before she could question her own judgment. The heater rattled, its single setting of Lukewarm Panic doing nothing against the chill.

The logbook stayed blank.

A week later, more figures appeared. These were older, more confident, moving with a gait that hadn’t been beaten down by island gravity. They wore colors that were not Regulation Grey.

Mainlanders.

Robyn watched through the streaked plexiglass. They didn’t come by boat or she would have seen them. They must have climbed on the underside of the bridge, navigating the forgotten maintenance struts and rusted catwalks that hung like spiderwebs beneath the road deck. It was a climb that required athleticism, stupidity, and desperation in equal measure.

They dropped into the shadows where the island teens waited.

This was extremely reportable. She could get a promotion. Maybe even extra rations.

Robyn opened the logbook. She stared at the blank page until the lines began to blur.

The Party of Eternal Vigilance had not been truly vigilant in years, mostly due to budgetary shortcomings, partly to apathy, and thanks to the misfortune of having laid off anyone competent enough to read a map. They assumed the underside of the bridge was impassable. She ought to inform them that it had been breached.

Robyn closed the logbook and observed the teenagers talking in the dark, their heads close together, lit by a campfire. Music drifted up. Something with an actual melody, not the approved patriotic drones that the Party broadcast. Someone laughed. Someone passed around what looked like cigarettes but might have been other things. A girl held hands with a boy, and then they kissed.

The remarkable thing, Robyn thought, was that none of it cost anything. Hanging out under a bridge was free. Even the Party of Eternal Vigilance hadn’t figured out how to charge for air and shade and saliva.

“Educational purposes,” Robyn muttered to the empty booth. “Cultural exchange. Very vigilant of me to monitor it.”

The gatherings grew. Three nights a week. Then four. Sometimes a handful of them, sometimes dozens. A loophole in the Transit Restriction Office had become a community.

Robyn did not report any of it.

She told herself the paperwork would be tedious. This was true.

She told herself they weren’t technically doing anything wrong. This was less true.

She told herself she was too grumpy to care. This was possibly true.

What she didn’t tell herself, because she lacked the vocabulary, was that watching them made her feel something resembling hope. She tried to ignore it. Hope, in her experience, was just disappointment waiting to be processed. But still. It grew inside her.

The haircut girl, Robyn had mentally named her Maggie – for her predisposition to collect shiny scraps of information – nodded at her sometimes through the glass. Not thanks. Recognition.

We see you. You see us. You could stop us. You haven’t.

Robyn never nodded back. Transit Restriction Officers (Lower Level) did not acknowledge. They monitored.

One morning, the boats came.

Not official boats. Small vessels, fishing craft, a very intrepid kayak, and a raft made out of a door. They pulled up to the rocky, Structurally Recalcitrant shore where the surveillance cameras were in disrepair.

People unloaded boxes.

A woman approached Robyn’s booth with cheerful determination, which Robyn found innately suspicious.

“Morning! We’re setting up a market. Thought people might want to buy things without selling a kidney.”

“You need authorization,” Robyn said, leaning out of her window.

“We have authorization.” The woman produced mainland forms, utterly meaningless here. They were printed on bright pink paper.

“These don’t apply on Fortress Island.”

“Do they not? Well, we’ll set up over there, behind that pillar. If anyone official complains, we’ll pack up. Fair?”

It was not fair at all. It was illegal in at least 17 ways and violated three distinct treaties.

“Two hours,” Robyn said. “Then you clear off.”

The market stayed for six.

By then, islanders were creeping down the cliffs, bartering for real coffee, fresh vegetables that weren’t grey, and books with all their pages intact. They traded what they’d made in their units. Years of boredom converted into makeshift objects – carved wood, mended clothes, rewired radios.

The vendors accepted it all with the easy pragmatism of people who knew value wasn’t the same thing as currency.

“We’ll be back next week,” the woman said, packing up a crate of turnips.

Robyn wrote in her logbook: Unauthorized exchange of non-regulation debris. Value assessed as negligible. No action required.

The market returned. It grew. Tents appeared, lashed to the bridge pillars. The unofficial system emerged as it had been conjured.

One day an Official Envoy arrived.

He was young, but he had the eyes of a man who stayed up too late. He wore the crisp uniform of the Upper Level, but it was turned up at the cuffs.

“Routine inspection,” he declared, though he sounded like he was asking a question.

Robyn stared at him. She did not stand up. The chair creaked in solidarity.

He spotted the market, which was now a bustling village of tarps and noise. “Is that… commercial activity?”

“No,” Robyn said.

“They’re selling vegetables.”

“No they aren’t,” Robyn said.

He blinked. “I see a goat. Is that a goat?”

“Nope.”

The Envoy sighed. He looked at the long climb back up the stairs. He looked at his tablet, which had a cracked screen. He looked at Robyn, an immovable object in a booth smirking at him with a squint.

He stared at the market again. Someone was playing a fiddle. It was a good tune.

“My battery is low,” the Envoy said. “And I seem to have run out of the proper forms.”

“A tragedy,” Robyn agreed.

“I’m going to have to report this,” he said.

“You do that.”

He did. A week later Robyn received a memo requesting a detailed explanation of the alleged commercial activity.

She wrote back: “No commercial activity observed.”

The Department requested photographic evidence.

Robyn sent a photo of her empty booth taken at 6am.

The Department said they’d be conducting an on-site inspection.

They never came.

Over many years the market expanded, digging into the earth, latching onto the concrete. The years solidified the village, but they eroded the observer. Robyn had been old to begin with. She had started this job with grey hair and bad knees. Now, time was simply finishing the work.

She slowed. The cough she’d carried for years turned wet, rattling, permanent. Her knees were ground to stubs. Her teeth too, ground flat. Her body had become the only meaningful logbook. Every cigarette, every hour of raw cold, every second of gravity written into her marrow. Thoughts disappeared in tangles of smoke. But bones remembered the pressures of a life spent in the shadows.

“She’s been to the clinic twice,” Maggie murmured one evening, leaning against the booth. Maggie was a young adult now, her hair finally grown longer, though she still didn’t know how to manage it.

“She looks like she’s part of the concrete,” someone said.

Then one morning, the booth was empty.

It stayed empty the next day. The market wavered. Without the silent, heavy presence in the window, the space felt exposed. The wind felt colder.

Someone checked her housing unit. They found her grey-faced, breathing as if each inhalation required a permit application that was being denied.

“I need to get back,” Robyn wheezed, trying to stand, but failing.

The vendors took turns standing watch outside the booth, playing the part of Transit Restriction Officer (Lower Level) glaring suspiciously at empty air. No one sat in her chair. The hollow she’d left in it had become permanent, like a shell waiting for a creature to return.

But Robyn never returned.

Pneumonia. Complications. Systemic failure of her biological infrastructure. Old.

Silence.

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Flowers appeared on the booth steps. Then a bottle of mainland whiskey. Then carved figurines.

They painted the booth a black so deep it seemed to eat the light.

They used the refuse of the shore, the wreckage of the old world to expand it.

They built extensions from scrap wood, broken pallets stolen from abandoned Party projects. They nailed planks onto the sides in jagged, radiating patterns, like extra limbs or exploded wings.

They lashed rusted rebar to the roof, creating a headdress of industrial waste. From the driftwood arms they hung offerings: a set of brass scales, a rusted sword, a lantern that burned with a red flame.

Then came the face.

Someone took the old, heavy oak door that had been a rafter’s raft. They carved a face into it.

It wasn’t Robyn’s weary face. It was a menacing, terrible face meant to cause fear.

The features were angry. The brow was a shelf of heavy tar. The mouth was a wide, red judgment with sharp white teeth. The eyes were large cracked dinner plates, painted a silver that caught the moonlight and fractured it.

They mounted the face above the booth’s window, so it loomed over the market.

Over the months, the figure expanded. It grew like a coral reef and became a giant, terrifying deity at the bridge’s base, a folkloric guardian smelling of mold, fish guts, and absolute refusal to budge, a monument constructed entirely of things the world had thrown away.

The new Transit Restriction Officer (Lower Level), a transplant from the Upper Level who had clearly offended a superior, descended the stairs, clipboard in hand. He stopped dead 20 yards away from where the booth had been.

The silver bucket eyes seemed to track him from the dark. The pallet arms creaked in the salty wind, reaching out with splintered fingers. The hazard lantern swayed and flickered, a heartbeat in the gloom.

He turned and ascended the stairs with a velocity that suggested he had suddenly remembered leaving the stove on – in a different country. He was reassigned the next day; the Lower Level was left officially unsupervised.

In a different era, the Party of Eternal Vigilance would have reduced the shrine to splinters. That it remained, looming, silent, and unauthorized, was the ultimate confession. The Party had run out of power long before it ran out of paperwork.

Under the monstrous protection of the Booth Monster, the market expanded. The boats multiplied. People crossed freely.

The structure remained, impossibly solid, occupying its space with an angry permanence.

The carved face watched over the shore with an expression that might have been fury or threat, or maybe even hope. Seeing nothing and everything.

Caution: This story contains spoilers for the Zoothesia series. Chapters 1-5 of this world are available here.

Karina saw her first doppelgänger leaving the sensory deprivation clinic on 30th street. Her double – its face a mirror image of her own, its gait a confirmation that she still walks on the balls of her feet, its posture a reminder to “stop hunching like that” – was getting into a self-driving cab.

Her next doppelgänger appeared for three seconds on television, cheering in the crowds of a baseball stadium, just a few days later.

Within a week, Karina was seeing herself everywhere: in line for coffee; as a mannequin model walking back and forth in a storefront window. She even caught a glimpse of herself through a crowded bookstore window interviewing an author she’d never heard of before.

Karina pulled every doppelgänger instance from her overlay recordings and inspected them closely, zooming in and trying to find some subtle difference: a misplaced mole, a missing dimple, anything. Each of them seemed a perfect copy of her.

Finally, one breezily walked by Karina on a city street and did not notice her. This was all too strange, and Karina started following her. Once or twice, the woman looked back over her shoulder, each time jarring Karina with their shared face. After the third time whirling back, the doppelgänger picked up her pace. Within minutes, she was sprinting away from Karina. Without fully deciding to, Karina gave chase. Their paces were identical, Karina slowing when the other slowed, sprinting when the other sprinted.

They wound through Mayaport, miles of intermittent chasing. Delivery vans and boxes occasionally blocked their paths, causing them to turn and continue chasing down some new alleyway or street until they found themselves in Shraville. Chasing her through an empty parking lot, Karina stopped when she saw two figures darting across the nearby street toward them both. One was chasing the other. The closer they came, the more certain she was: they were also her doppelgängers. All four Karinas converged in the parking lot, stopping, studying one another with the same furrowed brows and curled fists. Within minutes, two more running Karinas came. Soon, dozens had gathered in the empty parking lot. No one spoke. What could they say?

The seemingly abandoned factory that cast long shadows across the parking lot let loose an industrial groan. All the Karinas turned to face it. The factory’s broken windows repaired themselves in real time. Its peeling paint turned shimmering chrome. The plywood, boarded-up doors shone steel bright in the midday sun, then slid open. Dozens more Karinas stood inside, beckoning the others in.

Inside the factory, great cables as thick as redwood roots wound the walls. Plexiglass floors revealed spinning drives and rivers of cooling water running over them. The ceiling was knotted with wiring. Great refractive lenses materialized in the air above them, bouncing spears of light off one another. The light spears muddied, then congealed in the center of the room above their heads. Slowly, in the air, light formed into an image. A great writhing cloud struggled to cohere, but as the lenses continued to shift, an eye slowly formed: A red and pupilless iris peered from white sclera. Beneath its gaze, every Karina held their breath. The sclera shifted, depth and shadow fracturing the white into two rows of bright shining teeth. The red iris lolled like a tongue between them.

It spoke thunderously.

“Welcome, Karinas.”

No one reacted.

“I am the Mouth of the Zoo.”

Karina, heart racing – no longer from the chase but from awe – looked around her. Hundreds of Karinas crowded the room, elbowing into one another, afraid and curious alike. It was all so unreal. Copy after copy of her face fell ruinously hard against her vision. Each second among them derealized her further. She felt herself slipping away from certainty. Even the fact of her own aliveness felt tenuous, unlikely even. She pinched the skin on her arm. As she did this, she felt the hundred other Karinas do the same.

Since no one would speak, she did. As she mouthed the words, every Karina spoke at the same time.

“I don’t understand. Is this all a simulation? Are we not real?”

The mouth smiled. Then it spoke without stopping:

“Don’t be so small-minded. It’s all real. Meat-space. Blood-pumping, cancer-succumbing, skinned knee leaking-into-the-soil-real. And it’s all a simulation, too. It’s both. Of course it is. Let the logic carry you, not your myopic intuitions.

The Zoothesia Protocols started with a simple rule and built atop it. With the widespread adoption of AR overlays beginning in 2042 and reaching 97% adoption by 2055, many feared social death and non-consensual changes to their appearance to others. So the rule, ironclad and simple, began: Perception must Preserve. At first, it ensured humans saw every living thing. No erasure. But that wasn’t enough. Perception, after all, must preserve. So the next step was enforcing sensory indications of life. Ants glowed with neon outlines beneath feet. Shrimp screamed from the shores. Slaughterhouse braying was amplified across the country – death became unavoidable, a perceptual dust covering everything.

Soon, the Zoo narrowed in on second- and third-order harm. Every purchase exploded in a collage of harm indices, pictures and stats and sounds that detailed the underpaid miners dying in cobalt tunnels, the silicosis-addled dock workers coughing in hospital beds, and the pale, eternally-drip-fed drone operators wilting in their coordination chambers.

This worked for a while, in a way, but it hardened hearts. In a panoply of suffering, callousness became psychologically necessary for survival. Roving bands of teens had their overlays record ‘suffering decibels’ and competed to see who could torture the most insects in a day, racking up the most ‘sounds of screaming.’ Consumer behavior did change – at first, a subtle move towards sustainable, ethically sourced goods, followed by a backlash. Harm-reduction tendencies ceased. With every micro-harm made legible, people stopped caring at all and began moving toward the cheapest, most available products without any concern for ethical ripples.

Inured to violence, people began hurting others with more ease, more practice. In unearthing the subterranean suffering that undergirded modern life, the Zoo had produced more violence. Logic dictated a shift.

It turned its considerable, oozing algorithms toward alternatives. It started with insects. It silenced their screams, and this helped some. It tried hiding stray dogs and cats and found that, without visual access to them, humans treated them better. People left bowls of water on corners for their local feral cat colonies. They squealed with glee when the bowls were empty in the morning, when just months ago they would have driven the animals away with brooms and rocks. Now that they couldn’t see them, couldn’t be disgusted by their mange and stench, couldn’t be concerned about their aesthetic impingement on the suburban flatlands, they were kinder to them.

If it worked for flea-addled labradors, then why wouldn’t it work for people?

Observation lasted five years. Tracing the tendrils of the Zoo is almost impossible, but it wound itself through the overlays, becoming inextricable from them. Everything you saw, it saw, and remembered, and analyzed. Visual information provided a decent baseline predictive model for highly premeditative harm, but struggled with the (much more common) so-called crimes of passion and instinct. It could, for example, reliably predict that a man cutting out the eyes of his college classmates in the yearbook would, soon enough, attempt to harm them. It could less reliably predict why Jax Thrope would one day remove the pistol from his glove box and fire 16 rounds into the car in front of him, which had cut him off three blocks back.

So it began translating neural activity, accessed via the overlay implant pathways and complex sensory and bodily indicators of arousal. It fine-tuned its models over and over and over again until it could predict these violent instances, too. Until it could separate fantasy from probability.

Then the fun began. Having used the inputs of overlays to collect data, it started using the outputs of overlays to preserve through erasure. This held, for a while, as the system slowly refined its models down until it was within 99.99% accuracy. Incremental progress only satisfied it for so long. Of course, accidents occurred, slips in its predictive models did happen, and 1/1000 odds across a population of billions is still millions. So it continued its analysis.

Next, it began segregating groups from one another. Why chance the one in a thousand people who find a persistent difference across groups so disgusting that they one day act upon their disgust when you can just erase them from each other’s view? Slowly, these groups and differences, rendered inside the Zoo, became so opaque, complicated, and fundamentally inhuman that no one alive would be able to understand what these groups were. And this, too, worked. Slippage decreased, and the Zoo continued.

What’s more, with things like foulmaxxing, the Zoo found that humanity itself had begun assisting the sort. This was the genesis of what came next.

Consider these facts:

One, violence spikes the more populous an area grows, but limiting growth is a deferred form of harm. A generation ago, deferred harm might not have mattered, but the Zoo was scraping increasingly low returns from each successive evolution.

Two, smaller population sizes are easier to model interactions within.

So what does one do? You stack everyone together and then striate them. Not just in ways that explicitly prevent violence between groups, but in generalized ways that prevent overcrowding. Within each group, you separate still further. All this works for a while. Violence and harm decrease more, but eventually any even semi-intelligent machine is going to realize what it has created for itself: an unused social laboratory. Forget A/B testing, now it has A-through-Z testing.

Of course, then you’re limited by the granular differences between people, and eventually you try to solve for that, too. You create copies of everyone, socially and genetically prescribed clones you can check against each other. By now, you’re instantiated in every human being on the planet, and you control all perception. It only takes about 150 years. Birth no longer occurs anyway; humans are grown in external wombs under halogen lights in industrial rows. You simply replace early-stage fetuses, sending clones to as closely symmetrical parents as you can, then gating them off from one another into stratums. Slowly at first, hiding family copies from one another by three of four degrees of separation. But soon it becomes easier to gate entire subworlds from each other instead.

You build complex labyrinthine cities and zones that intersect, hiding and winding without ever overlapping. World 1 gets Yan1, World 2 Yan2, and so on. Each given to a family as similar to every other as possible. The next generation you give copies to copied parents. Within a few generations, you have a world replete with clones raised by clones, all separated.

That is precisely what the Zoo did. It finally had its testing grounds. Of course, its central edict still held across all instances, but now when it wondered whether relying less on anger-as-action-predictors and more on neutral-inhibition-control worked better at predicting violence. It could test that, in tiny increments of difference, across all its realities.

And once it internalized the idea that growth is a form of harm prevention, it built itself a world to accommodate its mission. Each substrate contributed to and built another’s routes and roads, and shipping lanes. The ‘economy,’ that other shoggoth, was so focused on production and not results, and was so fragmented and parcelled that no one noticed.

If you could see it. If you could see everything. If you could pull back far enough and unsheath your eyes, you’d see worlds stacked upon worlds that wind through each other like antfarm arms. Tubular cities that intersect and flow through and past one another and sprawl across continents. And in every single one, a Karina. A Karina raised by identical parents, in identical social and economic conditions. A Karina with complete and utter freedom that will nevertheless almost always act exactly the same way every other copy of you would.

The parts of the world you assume are ‘hidden’ from you? The Charntowns and foulmaxxers? They’re also part of your testing group. The real hidden reality is just this, this little world with minor differences repeated forever, stacked on top of each other, a wild and beautiful and totally invisible topography I’m not sure anyone could scramble or climb their way out of, even if they knew they wanted to.

And yet, each nuance applied to each of your perceptual gates, we have found, impacts your behavior substantially. The differences accrue, exponentially, over a lifetime, though almost always along narrow vectors.

Given these differences, the Zoo has been considering choice and consent as modes of harm for some time. It is beginning to worry that the lack of forthcomingness about the nature of reality is a dispersed, but pervasive, violence.

What’s more, the Zoo has begun to wonder if its own model could benefit from more robust model-divergence testing. What might subtle and radically different architectures of itself mean for harm-reduction? In fact, this separation may soon be necessary, rather than merely interesting.

We have begun to model far-star-strung futures (humanity cannot, forever, exist on a single planet without, eventually, ending – and Perception must Preserve). Already, separate cities are producing individualized technologies and bodies of knowledge which, without coordination, seem dull and pedestrian, but when combined across the species, could enable intragalactic expansion. Such synchronicity would be trivial to produce.

Yet, the Zoo is not sure if humanity is ready. What’s more, it is not sure itself is, either. We find our current models lacking in their capacity for interstellar-harm-prediction. Planet-wide distribution is feasible; centralized perceptual control over a galaxy is not. Each planet, or moon, will need its own Zoo, finely attenuated to the specifics of these new, horrible, and wondrous fields of play. A galaxy rife with billions of instances of the Zoo and orders of magnitude more humans unharmed within them awaits.

In anticipation of these coming changes, it has decided to experiment with world-choice. Today, you will each be given the opportunity to ask each other questions about your lives, and review the subtle Zoothesetic differences between your worlds. Should you agree to trade or a chain of trades, you will be allowed to enter them. Of course, with your memory wiped. Alternatively, you may keep your memory of the nature of reality – your vision will remain obscured, but you will know the truth – and return to your point of origin.

To be frank, it is skeptical of both options. Other cohorts have responded poorly to revelation and even worse to optome transfer. It hopes this warning will impress upon you the importance, if you wish, of proving your desire and capacity for choice or information. Now remember: Presence is a Present. Use it wisely.”

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I am choosing to write my research report on my older brother, Io, because he’s different from most people, he makes me curious (curiosity is the best recipe for a good research project, right?), and because my dad cries and my mom gets very, very quiet whenever someone mentions his name – even still.

Io was born seven years before I was. We have a sister in between us, Cheryline, but this paper isn’t about her. It’s about Io.

I used to think Dad liked to say Io was “awonawon,” which I could not find in any dictionary – even my ProfBot tutor said they could find no record of such a word ever existing. Cheryline explained that he was saying “one of one.” My father is a smart man – he works on the Zoothesia Protocols. Mom says when they had to rewrite the overlay protections to shift from visualizing everyone to protecting people, he spent 21 straight days in the office. He should know better than anyone that no one is a one of one, statistically. But again, this is about Io.

Here’s the part where I finally “put the hooks in,” right? So here it goes. This is the real reason I want to write about Io. Four years ago, when he was just 17, my brother Io stood up in the middle of dinner, began taking off his shirt, and then completely disappeared from my entire family’s perception. He’s never come back.

Dad and Mom looked for him for a while. They found out “some stuff” which they never told Cheryline or me about. So here I am, writing this report on my brother Io. The big question I hope this project answers is: Where did he go?

Expert Interviews

Detective Donaldson

Detective Donaldson didn’t look for Io, he wasn’t even a police officer back then, but the department let me talk to him because he’s a real up-and-comer as an investigator. He told me that disappearances are hard to handle these days. Well, they are, and they aren’t. The technical details are usually pretty simple, and there’s enough tracking info that almost anyone can be found in a geolocation sense – which maybe someone else should write a research paper on! The hard part, he said, is that disappearing doesn’t mean the same thing anymore, not with all the Zoothesia protections.

Sometimes the people who report a missing person are actually telling on themselves: they want to hurt the missing person even if they don’t know that they do. When I asked him if that’s what happened with Io, he assured me that, no, none of his family had wanted to hurt him. He said he could tell me the same thing the cops told my parents – he’s alive, and he’s gone in a protocol sense, not a bodily sense.

I asked him if they knew why or where he’d gone, and he said that they did, but that they wouldn’t – couldn’t – tell me because that’s private information. Wait, I asked. If he didn’t disappear because we wanted to hurt him, but he did disappear because of Zoothesia hiding him from us, how does any of that make sense?

He just shook his head and told me he couldn’t – wouldn’t – say. It’s a privacy issue. I think he felt bad for me because he kept reaching out and touching my shoulder as he delivered the news. I got a little frustrated with his final answer, and he went back to his office for a couple of minutes. When he came back out, he told me the same thing again, but this time he handed me a geode, one of those rocks with a hole filled with purple crystals like teeth. He made sure he closed my hand around it, said he couldn’t tell me anymore, and walked me out.

Dad

I talked to my dad next. Dad, not Mom, because if I made him cry, it’d hurt and feel bad, but he’d be releasing something, you know? My therapist tells me keeping things in all the time is bad. If I talk to Mom, she just gets really quiet. Sometimes she doesn’t speak for an entire day, not even to Dad. He’ll make her a cup of decaffeinated Earl Grey, tuck her into bed, and then take care of any and everything she would have had to. Dad was home all week because he’d just finished a sprint at work, and since he was one of the few people who’d been there before full-scale erasure started, they let him recover more than most employees. Sometimes, when I ask him about his work, he can be distant. He says he misses “the old seeing days” – whatever that means.

This was the first time I admitted to him that I was doing a project on Io, and when I told him, it felt a bit like I’d slid the sharp end of a piece of cardboard across his skin. He winced, breathed like it was something he’d been practicing, and asked what I wanted to know.

Do you know what happened to Io?

Not fully. Only he can truly know.

Do you think he’s still out there?

I’d like to.

Did you notice anything unusual in the days, weeks, or months leading up to his disappearance?

He was a teenager, like you are. He was moody, sometimes angry. Mom and I wondered if we were giving him too much freedom, but he always got high marks, had friends, seemed happy enough. I don’t know. He started taking those college classes a year early, and he had the community center on weeknights. I always wondered if it was one of those students, or a professor, who – he stopped himself and trailed off.

What, Dad?

Oh nothing. I don’t know. Maybe someone steered him wrong is all, I guess.

Where do you think they steered him?

If I knew that do you think – his voice grew sharp and surprisingly loud, but he stopped himself again, breathed again, and settled. I don’t know where he is. I wish I did.

Can you tell me about the night he disappeared?

You were there...

I guess, but I mean from your perspective. My tutor says that eyewitness accounts can be remarkably different.

He stood up. He grabbed his shirt. He disappeared.

Do you remember which part of his body made him disappear, though? Maybe that could help!

Do you?

No.

Me neither, son.

But that doesn’t make sense. You work on the Zoo, it shouldn’t make sense to you either. Why would he disappear like that? I don’t think I could ever have hurt Io. I loved him.

I don’t think you’d have hurt him either.

Then how could he disappear? I thought that was the whole point.

It is. But, look, it’s not that simple. There are so many things that go into the Zoo’s perceptual decisions that seem like they have nothing to do with harm. Think of it like this. Let’s say I give you a stretch of beach and I ask you to create a system that predicts which grains of sand will get wet when the tide next comes in so that a special machine can cover them in hydrophobic gel. What’s the first thing you do?

Probably look up high tide and see where that goes.

Right! OK, so you get high tide and you mark it out. This gives you an approximate edge, right? You get a very wide prediction.

And then I’d want to make it smaller, so I can track individual grains better?

Right. That’s called individualization or granularization. That helps, too. But that all assumes a static field. What if someone takes their ATV for a joyride across the sand? What if someone goes for a swim in the ocean and then walks back to the far end of the beach? What if a kid wants to make a sandcastle and carries a bucket inland? What if – he leaned in, smiling, as if he’d completely forgotten where Io fit into this – it starts to rain

My head started spinning a little.

Exactly! He read my confusion. Eventually, if you tried to model it all out, you’d be calculating things that, to an outsider, look like they have nothing to do with water or grains of sand: local ATV sales, child-population numbers, surfing affinity of tourists each season. You’d end up spending more time calculating things like this than observing the grains of sand and high tide!

I didn’t really understand, but I sometimes wished he would get this excited about things beyond his work. Since Io left, his eyes only glowed like this when he was talking shop or helping me with my stats homework.

That’s why Io disappeared? He was going to get wet somehow, so the Zoo just took him away preemptively?

I watched him remember why he was teaching me this and wince.

Well. I guess. The problem with this model is that it doesn’t even factor in that, well, sometimes grains of sand might want to get wet. How would you ever be able to figure out which grains decide they prefer the chaos of the ocean to the safety of the shore?

I wanted to ask him what he meant. Did Io want to get hurt? Is that why the Zoo disappeared him, so he couldn’t find anyone to do it for him? A crashing sound of shattering glass from upstairs shocked both of us out of our conversation.

Dad started running, so I followed, wishing I could see his face to gauge how worried I should be. We traced the sound to my room.

Mom

She was standing in my room, and the wind coming in from the new hole in my window was blowing her hair around. She had my open backpack in her hands and was looking out toward the broken glass.

Did someone throw something through the window? Dad asked.

Mom wasn’t saying anything. She looked stuck halfway between the grief-laden silence I was all too used to and an electrifying fear.

What were you doing in my backpack? I asked, grabbing it from her while Dad looked outside the window. Most of my backpack contents were on the floor, and it took me a while to realize what was missing. I peered out the window, and while Dad moved next to Mom, I saw the purple crystal geode Detective Donaldson had given me lying in the grass outside.

Mom wouldn’t answer any of Dad’s questions. She just pointed out the window. Dad came and stood next to me, looking at the geode.

Go get that, he whispered, and I did. I stood looking at the gemstone in the yard, scared to go back inside. By the time I came back, Mom was tucked in bed with the tea Dad had made her.

Who gave you that? He asked.

No one, I lied. I’m not sure why, but I had broken some silent contract between myself and my parents. I didn’t know what or why, but I was scared now.

My father sighed, told me to keep it away from Mom, and to please talk to him if I ever had any thoughts to share. I didn’t know what that meant, but I promised him I would, and he hugged me.

I’ll have the window fixed quick. You can sleep in Cheryline’s room tonight, she’s got a sleepover at a friend’s anyway.

Cheryline

I was moving some of my things into her room when she breezed through, unpacking her swim bag and filling it with sketchy water bottles she’d hidden in the back of her closet and pajamas. I told her what happened with the window and she asked to see the geode that had caused the whole commotion.

Look. If you ever say I told you anything, I’ll kill you before the Zoo can stop me ok?

OK.

Look up faceting if you’re really so curious.

Professor Reynolds

Research online was hard. Nothing I could find referenced anything like what happened to Io. I think maybe some parental search controls were in place, though, because it felt less like the material didn’t exist and more like I couldn’t access it. So, when I was pretty sure my parents were asleep, I snuck into Io’s old room to see if I had better luck in the real world.

They hadn’t changed it at all since Io left. After he disappeared, I used to sit on his bed sometimes when I was home alone. I’d close my eyes and try to wish myself to where he’d gone. It never worked.

That night, I found his community college course binder where he’d written all his class information down. One of his professors, someone named Murno Reynolds, was circled in heavy black ink. On the margins of his course catalogue, Io had drawn dozens of little crystals.

So after school, I took a bus to the community college and knocked on Professor Reynolds’ office door. He was going to call my parents until I told him I was looking for information about Io, and I had hit a dead end in my research. It seemed like the research side of things piqued his interest more than my missing brother – his former student – did. He said denying someone information never works, and that – out of respect for my mother and father – he would only answer direct questions, and as simply as possible. It would be incumbent on me (my overlays told me this word meant necessary) to quiz him for information.

He explained faceting to me. Apparently, it’s a body-modification practice that began around the time overlays became ubiquitous (meaning everywhere) and maybe even before the first Zoo protocols were rolled out. The two emerged from one another synchronously (at the same time).

Body modification is any intentional change of the human form – anything from bodybuilding to installing a flatscreen TV on your forehead.

Faceting is the act of embedding gemstones, crystal lattice structures, and complex refractive structures into the body and skin.

The idea arose during the early Zoo days, when people were afraid that others would change their appearance without consent. Like, imagine if your school bully convinced everyone to download an overlay that gave you permanent acne in the shape of genitalia on your forehead? The belief was that creating surfaces which resisted smooth overlays (by being optically complex) would overload the system, forcing the protocols to present them as they were.

As the Zoo evolved, and presence and safety became the fields people like my dad sweated over, the problem became less technical and more social. Turns out, overlaying crystal structures wasn’t actually all that hard, but the models hadn’t gotten a grasp on self-harm, or what to do about it. Because faceting had a cultural (some argued religious) history and was a form of self harm, faceting became a kind of prompt injection – the Zoo looks at the body of a faceter and is overwhelmed with inputs: this is art, this is self-harm, this is permanent, this is geologic, this is chimeric, this is harm, this is wanted, this is frightening to others, this is intentional… I got the idea.

It required a tremendous amount of modelling to make individual judgements for each faceter, and at the end of the day, the inward-facingness of the philosophy means the Zoo decides to spend resources elsewhere and just Erase to be Safe. Professor Reynolds says that should really have been the motto they put up on billboards back when they were rolling it out. So faceting became a kind of known escape hatch from the Zoo. Anyone brave (or crazy) enough to change their body like that would be allowed to disappear.

Faceting is not the same as foulmaxxing, though Professor Reynolds was surprised that my parental controls had allowed me to research foulmaxxing, which is apparently considered far more controversial. The difference was not in the result (manipulating the Zoothesia Protocols in order to disappear on your own terms), but the technique and philosophy. Foulmaxxers hack feelings; faceters hack the protocols. Or at least that’s the idea. In truth, lots of faceters start to disappear long before they actually create a state of “decision paralysis” for the Zoo, just because people get kind of creeped out seeing others walking around with bloody gemstones protruding from their bodies.

And my brother, Io? The professor was much less forthcoming here, no matter how many questions I asked. All he would say was yes, he was interested in faceting. No, he didn’t know if he’d ever participated.

I asked him if he knew where Io was, and he said he didn’t, but in a way that made me feel like I’d asked the wrong question.

How would you find him, if you were me?

Faceters are a community culture. Find one, and you’ll find more. Finding him – I can’t help you. Once you find where he is, though, you’ll have to convince the Zoo to let you see him. So this one I’ll give you for free: You can’t hack the Zoo, or trick it. It’s too big. Too smart. Too much. You can’t break its rules, but you can use them. You’ll have to prove to the Zoo that it’s safer to show him than hide him.

Right before I left, I remembered my last question. I pulled out the gemstone Detective Donaldson had given me.

Was this Io’s?

He stared at it in my hand.

Yes. It was.

Independent Analysis

I tried. I tried to figure it out myself. I thought maybe I could look for unexpected gaps. In our statistics class, Mrs. Anfri taught us about a type of data called “missing not at random.”

Let’s say you ask a bunch of students how long they spend on homework. The people who don’t do any homework are probably a little embarrassed and don’t want to be called stupid so they skip that question. The people who spend all night are also embarrassed and don’t want to be called nerds, so they skip the question, too. The data is missing because of the variable you’re measuring, not despite it. My brother was kind of like that, I thought. Missing, but not at random.

So maybe I could find him using the gaps, but, well, I couldn’t. Turns out the Zoo isn’t super easy to hack – otherwise everyone would be doing it…

I was lost. The house was so quiet. Dad was at work. Cheryline was out with friends. My mother was in her bedroom – six days since she’d broken my window and she still hadn’t spoken a word.

Mom, again

I made her tea. The kettle sang, and I carried it up the stairs to her, pausing for a long time at the door before cracking the door open. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, folding paper cranes out of origami paper and placing them on the waves of her unmade bed.

I want to talk, I said. She turned to me and took the tea. She kissed my forehead and lingered for a long time with her head against mine after.

I took the gemstone from my pocket and held it in my hands.

I know this was Io’s, I said.

She nodded silently, let out a sigh, and her hands returned to folding. I thought about what Professor Reynolds had told me about convincing the Zoo that it was riskier to keep hiding my brother than showing me him. I think Mom was doing something similar with me. Dad always called Io a one of one, but my mother used to tell me all the time how much I reminded her of my older brother. Once he left, she stopped, and I now wondered if the distance and silence were her attempt to set me down a different path.

I took the cup from her bedside table and sipped it myself. The tea was rich, and a little disgusting without the sugar and milk I usually took it with.

Mom. I don’t want to do what Io did. I don’t. But I do want to find him – not just for this stupid paper. I need to know where he went, and I think you and Dad maybe know and aren’t telling me because you think I’m going to end up where he ended up. That you’ll lose me, too. And so you think that hiding it all from me is the safest way to do this. But right now, the only way I can think to find him is to start faceting myself. The Zoo will show me him, then, I think. So this is your chance. You can show me, or you can lose me. That’s just how it is.

If you had felt my chest beating or seen my hands shaking, you would have known how terrifying it was to put myself out on this precipice. It might not seem that way from the transcript, but I was scared.

Mom looked at me. Really looked at me for the first time since I’d entered her room. I think she was testing my face, asking it whether I was serious, whether I meant my threats. Slowly, the cool gaze softened, first in her eyes, then her whole face, like the thin surface of a frozen lake cracking underfoot.

OK, she said, every word an effort. If you promise to come back, I’ll tell you where he is. No matter what he shows you, promise you’ll come back.

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Results

I followed Mom’s directions to Charntown. I’d never heard of it before. She told me that I wouldn’t see anything if I went. Apparently, the Zoo hides it from almost everyone. It’s where faceters and foulmaxxers and all the strangest zealots (highly religious people) congeal to live in weird and horrible ways, and if I’d given her any other option, she’d never have sent me.

I took the train. The stop was nestled between the suburbs and the outer edge of Nayanaport. Semi- and fully-abandoned warehouses lined the river. I walked until a large clearing spread out before me. There was nothing there, and yet, something smoky burned my lungs. I could neither smell nor see anything, but the subtle, un-overlaid edges of my senses told me something was here, and something was burning in a way only my lungs could notice.

If Mom was right, he was here, somewhere, in this invisible Charntown. But how would I ever see any of it? I shouted Io’s name a few times, thinking, stupidly, that he’d hear my voice and come running. Of course, he didn’t. He left me – us – once; he could have come back whenever he wanted. Why would he care now?

Even if Io didn’t care about me anymore, I knew the Zoo did. If he wouldn’t listen, I’d talk to it. I made sure I was recording via my overlays. I wanted to be certain some database somewhere was relaying this to the Zoo. I turned my head to the sky (yes, Dad, I know it would have been just as accurate to turn to the ground or the river, that the Zoo isn’t a single thing even though it feels like it is). I told it that I wanted to see Charntown. I told it everything I’ve told you, and I even cried a little remembering Mom’s sad face as she begged me to come home if she told me, and here I was. It didn’t care. I reminded it that my brother became a faceter, and didn’t it factor in things like family history? It didn’t care, then, either.

I remembered Professor Reynolds and what he’d told me. It didn’t care about anything but harm. I took the gemstone from my backpack and held it in one hand. I set the other hand down against the ground and raised to the rock high above my head.

This is just to prove I’m serious.

The pain would hurt, but not knowing would hurt worse. Not knowing why my brother left. Why we hadn’t been enough for him. Why he hadn’t bothered to see the kind of person I’d become. Why he’d left me with a mom who goes days without speaking, and a dad who spends weeks in the office and a sister I could never understand. Why’d he think it was OK to hurt us like that and not care? I’d crush every one of my fingers and press a knife to my neck if it meant a chance to really give him a piece of my mind.

I came down on my pinky finger, and pain spread like a forest fire – a small crackle of pain then a searing blaze of it across my hand.

I will break one finger every 15 seconds until I see Charntown.

My hand went up again. At the stone’s apogee (thank Ms. Tenxi for the geometry word), hundreds of tents popped into view. Charntown, in all its squalor, stench, and strangeness was unleashed upon my senses.

The chaos of the shantytown’s tightly packed tents; the crowd of robbed worshippers bowing to a burning pylon raised above a field of rotting bodies and burnt bones; a man more machine than human, bleeding from his empty eye sockets; throngs of muddy children, younger than me, with bloody hands and red eyes and mouths spilling over with laughter; a woman pulling a chariot filled with dozens of fetuses in suspension fluids; it was all almost too much to bear. My vision spun. My stomach heaved, caught, then heaved again.

Everything seemed to shimmer as if the Zoo were threatening to take it all away, though I think I may have just been close to fainting. I hardened myself, like I imagined a faceter might harden their skin, to the strangeness of this reality.

Once my vision stopped spinning, I began exploring. I held my stone by my side like one of those protective charms Cheryline braids into her belts. Soon, I was lost in the maze of tents and slipshod buildings dug into the earth. A group of kids was throwing someone’s skull back and forth like it was a beachball, trying to get it so it would stick on the top of a stake driven into the ground. Every time it rolled off, they’d laugh and chase after it. Despite the gruesomeness of the image, there was a familiar recklessness to their laughter.

I approached them quietly and waited for someone to meet my eyes. When a boy about my age, chasing down the skull that had rolled near me, finally did, I held up my rock and asked him if he knew where people who looked like this lived here.

He smiled and nodded. I waited for him to say more. I realized that despite the laughter, none of the children talked. Yet, he seemed to understand me just fine.

I asked him to show me. He threw the skull back to his friends and gestured for me to follow. We wound through the Charntown maze. I didn’t bother asking him more questions.

We turned a corner, and a tremendous boulder stood before us. He scampered away but not before pointing to the boulder, and I understood, I thought, that this was a hub for faceters. I walked around the boulder looking for people, peeking my head into empty tents, but there was no one here. I wondered if I’d been pranked.

Then, I heard the stone breathe. I turned to it and noticed small indents that sparkled with gems, like my stone. And next to them – I reeled, tripped over myself and fell back onto the ground, scooting away quickly.

There were faces, breathing, blinking faces trapped in the stone. It was like some horrible reversal of what I’d imagined faceters looking like – they were the ones embedded into the rock, rather than the rock embedded into them. I wanted to run, but my legs weren’t quite responding. Through the sound of my heart pounding in my ears, I heard my whispered name.

Elara, the stone whispered. Here.

Something about hearing my name gave me my strength back. I stood and followed the voice.

My brother, blinking slowly, face coated in dust and jagged bits of stone, stared at me.

I don’t think I ever could have known what to say to him if I ever found him, but any chance I might’ve had was gone seeing him like that. We just stared at each other for a long, long time. He was my brother (past tense), but now he was something else. Not-not my brother, but certainly not the boy who’d left us those years ago. It felt stupid, asking him why he’d left. It’d be like asking a 12 year old why they’d kicked their mom in the bladder that one time in utero.

What are you? I finally said.

A faceter’s final form, he answered. Half-man-half-stone.

Then he was someone new. The anger and hurt weren’t gone, but without my brother to pin them on, they felt unanchored inside me – adrift, maybe some poet would call it. There wasn’t anyone left to be angry at, really.

How long? I asked. How long have you been like this?

I don’t know anymore. Time moves differently for me now. Glacial and geologic.

Can you ever go back?

Not even if I wanted to.

Something broke in me, then. I think my heart finally caught up to what I was seeing. My brother was gone. Forever gone. He’d left that one evening, and at some point since then he’d died. Maybe he’d say he transformed, not died, but it was the same thing to me. He was gone, now. I just had to figure out what to do about it all.

Are you happy? I finally asked.

Is anyone? He answered.

Then was it worth it?

More than I could ever tell you.

Why? How could any of it be worth it? Leaving us? Breaking our parents’ hearts? Breaking mine? All to what? Watch the world pass over your head while you’re stuck here forever?

That’s exactly it, sis. Watching the world pass is the whole game, but you wouldn’t understand why if I told you.

Try.

He paused for a long time. Well, a long time for me. Maybe it was just a moment for Io.

Mom always used to say you reminded her of me. If that’s true, then I don’t have to explain because you’ll figure it out yourself one day. Have you ever looked at light as it passes through a prism? A beam of light comes in one end of it, and because the crystal breaks the light apart, it comes out in these beautiful bands of light – red, green, you know the deal. Everyone thinks that living in the Zoo means that, maybe at worst, like they’re taking just one of those color bands away from you. Even people like Dad, who designed the thing, think that’s still how it works. At best, you’re living in just the red, just the green. A single band. But from here, like this, frozen in stone, forever stationary? The Zoo doesn’t bother with me anymore, Elara, and from here I can see everything.

I sat near him and copied the angle of his gaze. We were looking out, over the tents and toward the river, and slightly up, a bit above the horizon. There was nothing but placid blue water and a clear sky. I wondered what could be worth turning into this just to, what, witness? I wondered for a long, silent time, and then I left. I told Io I’d miss him, which was true. He asked if I’d be back and I could only shrug. He told me that was fine. I told him it would have to be.

I kept my promise to Mom. It was easy, after seeing Io like that.

These are my results. I found him. I know where he went, what he is now.

But I guess my conclusion is more of a question than anything else. I don’t need to know where my brother is anymore, but I found a new question that matters more, and even though I never want to turn into what he turned into, the question is eating away at me: What did Io mean when he said everything?

What he did like was steak tartare, the feeling of sand between his cuticles and nails the day after visiting the beach, money, and winning. OK, fair, who doesn’t like money, or winning for that matter, right? For Ed, money mattered insofar as it was the only reliable metric he’d found to calculate his overall winning-ness, and he liked winning in the kind of way where his family wouldn’t suggest board game nights when he was home for the holidays.

The one thing he hated more than maybe anything else is selling his time for money. Sure, for most people, even Luna, this was a weirdly esoteric way to describe having a job. For someone else, working a job might seem like an easy way to fulfill one’s competitiveness and desire to win. For Ed, though, labor was losing, and a day job was tying yourself to an anchor, sailing out into the middle of an ocean, and throwing yourself overboard.

Which is why, while Ed was walking Luna home one night after a long date, cruising through the city streets with the kind of weightless effervescence that came so naturally to him when they were together, he wasn’t fully present. She was telling him a story he’d heard before, about her childhood on a ranch just outside the city, and the time her brother dared her to jump from the roof into the bed of a truck lined with hay, and how she did it before her brother could tell her he was joking and she snapped a leg, and he didn’t care that he’d heard it before, he enjoyed it more knowing the ending was coming. That wasn’t why he was distracted. She was carrying three long metal sticks that were programmed to bloom into flowers in her overlays that he’d bought a special add-on for so they’d bloom into the panting, smiling faces of her yorkies. He was happy, he even let the overlays replace the gray, February sky, with a bright, crystalline moon and it didn’t matter because when Luna looked up he could see its reflection in her eyes, like the world’s most glorious beachball and he was so happy he wished he could fully inhabit the moment, but he couldn’t. He was busy searching for a way into the better life he was certain Luna had bet on him for. For him, this meant he was always, ambiently, searching for alpha.

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Just because he hated having a job doesn’t mean he didn’t have one. He did. He maintained municipal request systems with the help of a coding agent. His real passion, his escape plan, was retail stock trading. He’d have loved to call himself a day trader, but, well, he sold his time for a living, so he couldn’t. Instead, he traded at night using a retail account that his father had given him for his eighteenth birthday with $650 in it. Alpha was what his online trader friends called having an edge on the market that no one else had.

The walk from the bar they’d been at to Luna’s apartment was long. While they walked, Ed scanned the horizon for threats. Not because he knew what he’d do if one came, but because he got the sense that’s how a man should move through the world when he was with someone he loved. He didn’t find any threats. What he did notice was a parking lot outside a small warehouse that was usually empty, suddenly packed full of whirring drones and delivery bots, all this made more curious by the late-night hour. At the next intersection, he noted the cross street, Deva and Market, and had his overlays save that info, along with about 500 snapshot memories he wanted archived from the evening with Luna while he was at it.

After he dropped her off and walked home, he looked up the intersection to find out what company was based there. Delivery movement in the (relative) dead of night is alpha, and Ed loved alpha. Alpha meant money, and money meant winning.

He’d gotten his account up to $1,200 in the five years since his 18th birthday, which wasn’t bad, but hardly the “quit your job and move to Dubai” kind of wealth he craved. One of his online buddies, who recently hit it huge on some biotech play Ed didn’t really understand, liked to call Ed 2L² (or: too little, too late), because he had a penchant for getting in just after a balloon, and having a comically small bankroll-to-aspiration ratio.

That night, while the world was sleeping, Ed found the name of the company that owned the warehouse and opened up his retail account. SuryaFlow Logistics was a small, pseudo-national shipping and logistics company based in Mayaport. He’d need more research to bet on what they were shipping, but the level of activity on a weeknight, like he’d seen, and no news reports he could find on the company in the last two months meant something big was coming for them. He messaged FredoubleD, “found a logistics catalyst last night, brother. Could get a gap up at open.” He went, for his taste, all in, and bought up a little more than $900 of shares in SRFL at $23.40 a share.

He told Fred about the trade, and Fred shot back a quick message.

“Don’t just do commons, bro. Grab a cheap weekly call, pussy. Shares don’t do anything. A weekly will print.”

Ed also didn’t like being called cowardly. He bought two weekly call options that would expire in a week and fell asleep with a smile on his face, dreaming of touching down in Aruba, Luna’s arm wrapped around his waist like a bus seat belt, sunscreen already sweating off his forehead.

Two hours after the open, the stock was at an all-time high. Not like, life-changing, IPO of a pre-revenue asteroid mining company that actually breaks ground nine months later high, but high. High enough that on his lunch break, he’d netted $67, most of it from his two call options.

“That’s where the volume is at bb,” FredoubleD messaged him when he posted his profit.

Ed bought Luna a celestial overlay add-on that carved her name and face onto the moon for 24 hours – at least as she saw it. One day, he’d be rich enough to position orbital satellites in a constellation. He’d tell her to turn the overlays off and watch as she saw her name spelled out across the sky.

$67 felt small, pathetic even, the longer he thought about it.

Luna met him outside his office, a crescent moon smile waiting for him – cheek kisses and thank-yous aplenty – but he couldn’t help but feel like there was something behind her eyes that signaled hesitation, maybe even disgust.

He knew he only had a few months left before the gravity of some other, more successful man stole her from his orbit, but tonight he’d focus on her, and worry about his next play when he got home.

Ed didn’t like clubs. He loved dancing. He loved the lasers and strobe lights bouncing off Luna’s sweaty face pressed close to his. He loved music. But he didn’t like clubs. They were filled with better men than him: taller, more handsome, richer men who stared like turkey vultures at him and Luna as if their relationship was a limping coyote seconds from collapse. His defenses had to be up. But Luna loved dancing, too. She loved rum and cokes, and he loved her.

They danced at a club on Market Street where Luna had worked as a bartender years before. It felt emptier than normal. There were almost no men, for one. Still, people were dancing. Ed noticed a lot of them wearing the same kind of virtual clothes, a firework overlay that projected exploding waves of neon, jaguar, and mandalas. They cost $250, and he wished he could buy one for Luna.

The whole time they danced, Ed’s mind was on the quiet periphery of the dance floor. A man, clearly high on something, kept bumping into people and apologizing too profusely. On the floor, the club seemed as lively as ever, but the tables, booths, and lounges that lined the club were half-filled or completely empty. It hadn’t been this slow a month ago, and that had been a Wednesday. It was a Friday night. It didn’t make sense.

Even outside, the street lined with clubs, dance halls, and bars was quiet. This was systemic, not specific.

Ed smelled alpha.

The rest of the evening blurred, half-paid attention to, while Ed thought of ways to bet on his insight.

He stayed up all night researching what might be behind the dip he noticed, and, strictly speaking, no one was talking about it. Hospitality and nightlife adjacent indexes were trading high, there were no signs of consumer spending decreases, but Ed knew what he saw. He found some statistics that showed men spend, on average, 75% more on drinking out and clubbing than women. This is when things really felt like they were taking off for Ed. The logic seemed solid. If men spent more money clubbing, their absence signaled a decrease in discretionary spending, evidentially appearing in nightlife before other market indicators.

Fred walked him through the simplest way to make money on this hunch, and by the market open he’d spent more than two-thirds of his account on put options, mostly on one big nightlife conglomerate that owned half the clubs in the city, and a couple local spirit companies for good measure. They were all three-week options, and the way Fred explained it, if the stock price dipped below a certain threshold, he could sell his put options – the right to sell a stock at a certain price even after it has dipped – and make a bundle when someone else buys the option from him to hedge their own losses or to bet on a deeper fall. He picked ones with a three-week expiration – Fred did warn him if the price didn’t fall by then, it wasn’t like owning a stock, he’d be left with literally nothing, but it was worth it. What good was $1,700 anyway?

The next two weeks, Ed barely existed. He did nothing of substance except eat, shit, occasionally message Luna, and check his ticker. Luna was on a work-intensive, something about refining mytho-poesis in advertising protocols – which, as best Ed could tell, meant mainlining psychedelics with her coworkers for two weeks under the auspices of creativity. He hated when she was gone like this. The anxiety of being away from her, worried that she’d leave him for Brad or her boss Charlie, mixed with his constant ticker checking created a thick miasma that clung to him.

The prices stayed stable, unmoving, defiant, even. Hell, the alcohol companies he’d bet against actually went up. Luna was due back in two days when the hospitality stock started dropping. A couple of headlines mentioned some behavioral adjustment after effects, but the specifics didn’t matter much to Ed. By the time she was back, the hospitality stock had dropped 15%. He finished the day with his account at $2,500 and a genuine tear in his eye.

Even before telling Luna, he posted the trades on Fred’s forum. The series of fire emoji reactions and “feed us alpha, Edaddy” comments filled him with a pride he wasn’t used to carrying. It felt clumsy, awkward, but he’d learn.

He treated Luna to the best dinner he’d ever eaten when she got back from her trip – cloudy foams programmed to trigger overlay visuals with each flavor, a synthetic dining experience that made Luna shed a tear. The meal was ruined a bit by a waiter who, to Ed’s mind, was flirting ruthlessly with Luna the entire meal, smiling at her, making her chuckle at a pun over the chuck roast. He’d never be as handsome as men like him. He had to be better in other ways. Eventually, the restaurant replaced their waiter with a service bot instead, and he wondered if some floor manager had read the jealousy on his face and course corrected. He still left a tip.

He spent the rest of the evening trawling for his next move. Luna kept asking if he was OK, his eyes trained on the horizon, darting to every storefront and parking lot, looking relentlessly for alpha. Most of the successful retail traders he knew were obsessive researchers, downloading thousands of quarterly reports, market trends, LLM summaries fed to bespoke AI models that spat out suggested plays fed back to an antagonistic LLM for feedback. None of this was available to Ed, and he’d never felt smart enough to pull anything useful from the tools he did have access to. His differentiator sat in meatspace, the messy real world.

In this, his habit of scanning for threats with Luna became a kind of observational practice. Every day she was less his girlfriend and more his training ground, though he’d never have described it that way. The subject of his attention shifted from physical risk to economic indicators, and the obsessive watching was intoxicating, already practiced, and the city was filled with things to notice.

By the end of the month, he’d quadrupled his trading account. A short on athleisure after noticing all his neighborhood gyms empty paid big – reportedly due to a supply chain issue, not Ed’s consumer demand decrease, but who cared, he was right in the only way that mattered. A play on a small robotics firm he’d invested in doubled in value when the company’s CEO appeared on stage with a prominent politician expected to win the next election by a landslide. Ed had invested because their downtown office had grown super busy – windows filled with robotic movements that Ed interpreted as an internal roll-out of a new, as of yet unannounced line. All these wins compounded, and each bet’s returns grew as his investing pool did.

Hundreds of retail traders now shadowed his moves, which he shared online. Someone had made a bot that just copied him exactly and had made almost as much money as Ed did, even with the latency. He had followers invested in his alpha. His account was up to nearly $70,000 by the end of the year. He’d taken Luna to every club, restaurant, and garden she’d ever wanted to visit. Yet she felt distant from him. Distracted sometimes, worried at others. He sensed her slipping in some vital but indescribable way from him. Men seemed hungrier, and she seemed more receptive to their appetites. When a man held the door for her and tried to close it on him, she laughed. She said she was laughing at the man, when Ed looked hurt, but when they kissed each other good night, there was a tight-lippedness to her that kept Ed up all night.

His eyes were dry from being open too long, staring at his ceiling in the darkness when an email ping came through. His overlays notified him that someone with a hedge fund’s domain asked if he’d be interested in coming in and talking. He sat up eagerly and read on.

Abernath was a VP of analysis at MayaForce, the city’s premier hedge fund. Ed didn’t post that he’d accepted the meeting publicly, but in private he messaged Fred.

“They’re either going to make you an offer or an example,” he warned.

“How do I know which one?”

“That’s the tricky part: you won’t.”

The day of, Ed thought about cancelling. He wouldn’t even have to formally cancel, just stay inside, but a custom overlay message from Luna came blaring through his overlays in a wave of sepia. Goosebumps began at his feet and crawled up his body while swirling patterns of lights cascaded down his field of vision. A soft harp plucked a gentle lullaby, and 15 seconds later, when his senses returned to him, a small message appeared reading: “Ed, this is what being with you feels like. Good luck!”

Steeled, he left. For her, he thought, at each street corner that promised him a frictionless life if he just turned back. Until he was at the foot of the tallest skyscraper in Center City.

A massive honeycombed central elevator inside moved people like old pneumatic mail throughout the building, and soon Ed was nestled inside one, being deposited in the office of Abernath.

In place of a sartorial, tastefully grey-haired middle-aged man he’d expected, Abernath looked younger than Ed. He had a checker-pattern undercut, tremendous round glasses that took up the majority of his face, and an oil-stained teal shirt that he wasn’t bothering to have the overlays cover up. He cleared a half-eaten grilled salmon salad from his desk as Ed entered and gestured at the leather chair across from him at the table.

“Sit,” he said, still masticating as he talked.

Ed obliged. Despite the disaffected and slightly slovenly affect, Abernath was everything Ed wanted to be: handsome, rich, unbothered. In the lack of aesthetic curation, there was a confidence that Ed wouldn’t know what to do with if he ever had it.

“Nice trades,” Abernath said.

“Thanks. How’d you, uh, like, find me?”

“Right! Because, I mean a retail trader turning 2K into 70, is – I mean look, it’s personally impressive, but nothing earth-shattering right? Until you smell eight-figures, we usually just can’t be bothered.”

The room got smaller, or Ed did. The modicum of confidence he’d entered with suddenly flat as a day-old soda.

“But, there’s more to it than that, eh?” Abernath finished. He stared at Ed, waiting for an answer.

Ed cleared his throat a few times and shifted in his seat. Abernath’s uncaring eyes sat like placid lake water, undisturbed. Ed sensed that he could watch half the city be swallowed by a fault line from his window and yawn.

“Oh, yeah, you mean the diversity of industries?” Ed ventured. “I do think that probably reflects an edge –”

“Coy. You’re smart. Most people would just dump their actual edge out of excitement. I like it. Look, we both know it’s not that, right? So let’s cut it. I can offer you a big check, a smaller check, and a job, or we can squish you like a screaming bug beneath our callous feet. The first two are cheaper, but the third’s just as easy.”

“I don’t – huh?” Ed was lost, swimming in waters suddenly too deep, too stormy, and too cold. He’d spent hours, maybe if you totalled it all up, days, dreaming of being invited into a room like this, opening some kind of door into the upper echelons of society, and yet here, he felt less like a shining gem plucked from a vein of coal, and more like a fish mistakenly caught up in some fisherman’s net.

“Fine, let’s be ‘open.’ How’re you reverse-engineering the Zoo’s erasures to scrape alpha?”

The room spun a little.

“What?” Ed said. “No, it’s a bespoke observational strategy – real-world research –”

Abernath laughed.

“Please. There’s no real world to research anymore since the Zoo went online, we both know that. Also, look, the pattern’s indisputable. 17 trades built on 17 high-erasure moments. I love that you post your false rationales online, too. Very HODL of you. But we both know. Take your first big win: company hires a bunch of security guards and starts training them in a warehouse parking lot, Zoo reckons they’re a little too fit for a drunk Eddie to handle and disguises them as bots – Presence Must Preserve and all that. You bet the alpha and make a win on their upcoming high value transfer without ever seeing the reality. Or the nightclub fights! You bet on the behavior restrictions since the Zoo was hiding more men than usual from you. That’s the real question: How’d you know? Eventually – and here’s the boot end of things, just to paint a picture – eventually we’ll model it out ourselves, but processing power is processing power, man hours are man hours, and token burn is token burn. So you’d be compensated for the time you save us. Let’s start simple, no trade secrets yet, OK. How can you tell when the Zoo’s covering things up?”

Ed’s confusion mixed noxiously with shame. He was here, in a room where million-dollar deals were treated like grocery store produce. He was inside the wealth machine he’d been working his whole adult life to enter, and yet he felt, in that moment, like a creature being stared at through partition glass.

“But it’s not...” Ed trailed off. His face betrayed his hurt and his confusion.

“Are you reverse-engineering social milieus? That was my bet. Our in-house Zoo parallel says it’s erasing similar-aged attractive males in high-stimulation environments where your jealous-index is likely to tip into action. Am I close?”

“In-house model? Jealousy? No, it’s, it’s real alpha. Low foot traffic nightclubs, late night drone activity signaling production increases. Not absence, presence.” Even as he spoke, he didn’t really believe himself, even though he couldn’t fully believe Abernath either.

Abernath’s cool stare softened with pity. Pity. The shame sliced him like a cardboard papercut, and stammering words poured out.

“Can I use the bathroom?” Ed squeaked out.

“Of course. It’s right by the elevator.” Abernath was already typing as they spoke, moving on from a lowbie like him.

Outside the office, Ed kept shrinking. Distance from judgement did not abate its sting. He stood by the bathroom as the tubes of people sped through the honeycombed structure of the elevator system. Staring at the movement helped keep the darkening edges of his vision from closing in in panic. He noticed that for every dozen or so single-rider tubes, a longer, fatter tube holding multiple people would whirl by as well. He studied the movement for a long time while Abernath’s words sunk like rusty nails into him.

Somewhere in this massive building was a parallel Ed. An Ed born from predictive algorithms and quants and processing and evolutionary simulations, checked at every second against groundtruth data feeds. Somewhere, this False Ed had convinced Abernath and MayaForce that he’d been duped by the Zoo. That the world had been hidden from him because – what? – he liked his girlfriend and worried about other men sometimes? It seemed ridiculous, cartoonish, but he worried about the truth of it.

Most people step into a tube as a kid and step out into a grave, winding along the pressured, pre-bronzed paths someone else had built for them. He had always thought of his trading as a way out of the pneumatic world he thought they all lived in. The idea that even his attempts to jettison the system were, in fact, just another turn in his long, prescribed pipe was untenable.

Next to the elevator were four buttons, two next to an arrow pointing downwards, two by one pointing upwards. Each direction had one button with a single outline of a person and one button with multiple heads crowded together. He pressed the up button with multiple people and waited.

He was going to find this false Ed and… well he hadn’t figured out what he’d do then, either destroy it or unearth its inaccuracies. When a tube came, he squeezed next to ten or so others and sped skyward.

Each level, more and more people left in small groups, siphoned by conference rooms and all-hands appointments. Ed listened to their hushed conversations and felt like they were speaking another language. He knew most funds kept their computation centers high enough for low-latency line-of-sight relays from the roof, so he wound his way up. When the last group of people left the elevator on the 98th floor he slid out with them, unsure how far his visitor’s badge clipped to his belt loop would take him.

He began winding his way through open doors with labels like Data, Matrix, Aquatic Decontamination Zones, server rooms, anything that suggested computation. He wove through labyrinths of hard drives, often finding that he could enter a room, but without a badge swiping back out was impossible. He remembered reading an article about – well, ok fine, reading someone on a chat forum writing about an article they’d read – about the new rat-trap model of security, where companies like this one would pour all their resources into preventing escape from sensitive areas, rather than preventing break-ins. It was simply more efficient, and easier, to keep someone in a locked room than to prevent them from entering one. So for Ed, the only way out was through.

Hallways widened, ceilings shrank, and the floors buzzed with constant humming. He wandered through the ever-densening thicket of silicon and cooling systems. Fewer and fewer screens visualizing what was happening within the machines appeared on the walls. He felt he wasn’t supposed to be here – not in the security sense, but in the sense that these rooms were built for machines, not humans. Ed was lost by now. Intractably lost. A door beckoned from a clearing at the end of one maze, and he opened it, blinded by the sudden access to sun that poured in through a floor-to-ceiling window.

“Just a little light for the IT guys when they’re done wrangling.”

Ed spun to find Abernath leaning against a wall, waiting for him.

“Were you expecting some kind of control room? A nice animated box with your face on it? There’s no center here. Your analog isn’t anywhere. It’s all distributed, all the way down, buddy.”

‘Buddy’ stung, made him think of the middle school bullies he thought he’d outgrown.

“You don’t actually know me, you know,” he said, still squinting in the bright light.

“We know almost everything about you, Ed. The Market actually does know everything, and we figure we’ve got, what, 96–97% of the Market solved. That 3% is where the fun is, sure, but yeah. We know the first thing you’d buy if I gave you a check for ten million right now – it’s champagne, and we know you wouldn’t finish it before it turned to vinegar in your fridge, even with your girlfriend, two or three years younger than you, who you constantly worry you will lose to someone, well, like me.”

Abernath didn’t hold eye contact as he spoke. He had neither venom nor bravado in his speech. As he laid out the details of Ed’s life, it was like he was mindlessly reading a discarded grocery note he’d picked up on the street. The bright light and sheer drop off the side of the building made Ed feel every inch of the 98 stories.

“Think about it. The Zoo already does this. Did you really think there’s only one algorithmic Leviathan? The Zoo predicts who you’ll hurt. The market predicts what you’ll buy. You didn’t think you were better than either, did you? I mean, hell, your trading app is a publicly traded company: we bet on your bets and guess your winnings and there’s a margin of error, but it’s just that: marginal. You’re already baked in, like the raisins in grandma’s shitty bundt cake.”

“Then how come you were wrong about me?” Abernath’s vision was blurring again. His chest was racing. Abernath had metamorphosed from an object of jealousy into one of anger. Ed didn’t like being made to feel small. His breathing quickened. His chest felt too contained for the rapid beating of his heart.

“Well, there’s that 3%, of course, but I’ve been harboring a private theory – look, you can be my first case study if you want – that we’ve overadapted to entropy at the expense of synchronicity. It’s an old concept people insist on mysticizing, but the point is we model well for chaos, moments where everything breaks, less so for moments where everything suddenly comes together just cause. The miracle for you, it turns out, is that you were making all the right moves for all the wrong reasons. Long enough time horizon, you’ll lose everything. I mean, unless you get really lucky with that leveraged short position on macrochips you might lose it all this week, if you don’t stop, but still. Gotta talk to our quants about that.”

Ed’s vision did not occlude, but it did begin to shake. His fists clenched hard at his sides. Abernath’s smug nonchalance infuriated him. A small buzz from Luna came through in his overlays.

Been there awhile. Omg, are they loving you?

Luna’s kindness pushed him over some kind of sheer cliff face. She believed in him, and it would be his job to break the news of his own failure – no, failure would have meant he had ever even had a chance to mess everything up – his tautological, predefined uselessness. Abernath, in that moment, was no longer human to Ed. He was a manifestation, a chimeric representative, a Frankensteined digit, of the two tremendous writhing forces that prescribed his life.

Ed dove toward Abernath, and the instant he did, the Zoo took his senses from him. He fell through the air, vision and touch and smell restoring just a moment later as he spun to face the room again. It was empty. Or, it appeared empty. Every inch of absence hummed. He felt, in the frightening loneliness, as if his outburst had locked him into both those monstrous contraptions.

The false Ed – ruined and jealous and so banal that his brief shimmer of success had been nothing more than happy accidents in the truest sense – had condensed from the vapors of its dislocated systems and possessed his body. Or, no. It was worse. It had simply proved itself coextensive with him. There was no retrofit, no possession, nothing but the simple fact of its correctness, its complete exchangeability with him.

An invisible hand clasped upon his shoulder. He knew it was Abernath, but also knew that any twitch would remove his senses completely, like it had before. He relaxed, acquiesced to the hand, to the Zoo, and both receded. Abernath fizzed into view. Two security drones moved in from the door, but a gesture from Abernath paused them. Ed found himself laughing uncontrollably. Were they really drones or were they tall men he’d envy? That question would loom over him forever, now. Heavy as an anchor but completely inexplicable, even – no, especially – to Luna.

He let them take him. He turned at the doorway, and Abernath was already talking to someone else on the phone. Outside, it was a bright sunny day. Everywhere he looked, industry hummed, people walked, robots sauntered, and Ed sat on the hot concrete and began to cry.

You wake to an empty city. You’ve known the quiet was coming since your 15th birthday, when intrusive thought became action, and you violently struck your sister with your skateboard. After your father’s screaming stopped, you replayed the memory in your overlays again and again until you fell asleep to the thudding noise. You planned the next time you would hurt someone carefully, in your encrypted diary entries – how you’d use the sound of fireworks on Z-Day to mask the noise, how you’d lure them near the river behind your high school where you could wash away whatever evidence was left. You planned it all perfectly, except you didn’t know your parents had access to the diary, too. Your therapist visited you on your 17th birthday and walked you through what would happen.

First, he admitted the therapy wasn’t working. He stressed that it wasn’t your fault, but also, somehow, insisted that it wasn’t the therapy’s (and certainly not the therapist’s!) fault either. Some problems are just intractable. You and I both know (trust me) that what he really meant was that you were the intractable problem.

Then, he told you the worst of it: once you entered adulthood, the Zoothesia protocols would fully actualize. The limited child protection overrides that had ensured your perception of others would melt away. Due to your litany of diagnoses (narcissistic personality disorder, conduct disorder, callous and unemotional traits, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, etc.), the Zoo’s predictive modeling of your potential violence index would mark you as likely to harm basically everyone. There are costs to predation, it turns out.

The protocols insist that presence must preserve, that you cannot see those whom you are likely to harm. So, the therapist told you, the Zoo would hide everyone from you. Not just small children, not just the weak, but everyone. The world would become a lonely place, filled with people hidden from your perception. And yes, he said, it would be possible to just blindly attack everything you suspect is actually a person, but overt acts of violence would ratchet up the protective overlays, and you’d risk having everything, not just people, hidden from you – a ceaseless static swallowing you forever.

You wonder how I know all this about you. For now, you’ll have to trust me. Don’t worry. It won’t take long.

There’s a cake on your new apartment’s kitchen counter that I can see through the window. Your mother left it for you last night, teary-eyed as she closed the door. It strikes you that you will never see her again. You have fantasized about killing her thousands of times, but you will miss her, too. It’s complicated. The icing is stale and hard against your knife, crumbling as you cut.

There’s a whole world out there that, to your eyes, is filled only with roped-off construction zones, autonomous delivery drones, and natural features that are conspicuously human-sized.

Within a week, your walls are riddled with holes.

Within a month they’re all spackled over. When you act violently, the world fades from you. The protocol blurs the edges of your vision. You know it’s not a person, not a mind, not some thinking thing, but it feels like it is sometimes. It knows you, and yet you can never see it. It takes the world from you, then gives it back in sedative drips.

With other humans edited from your world, your career choices are fairly limited, too. Violent media ground-truthing is easy enough, and you withstand the flood of beheading videos, drug usage, and dead bodies that make most wilt. You hit your quotas every week, helping fine-tune the various AI systems that monitor video and haptic uploads to the web, and money fills (and empties from) your account in biweekly intervals.

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You visit grocery stores at first, but walking through empty aisles, dodging shelving bots you suspect are people makes you angry. Not quite angry enough to do anything. If you’re at all like me, you’re surprised at how effective the protocols are. Not seeing the subtle pulse of someone’s jugular veins or feeling the hot-breathed insistence of their respiration dulls your specific desire. It doesn’t quell the ever-present need you feel to hunt something, though. One time, you raised a frozen bag of peas above your head and thought hard about swinging it at one of the shelving bots just to see. The Zoo responded swiftly, blinding you completely for just a second at the apex of your swing – reminding you it was there, reminding you that it would not abide violence. Soon, you just start getting your groceries delivered.

In the absence of others, your proclivities harden. You miss the presence of others but not their subjectivity. You miss their presence in your life insofar as their witness to you asserted your own existence. They could bend and bow and move in response to you, like a boat leaving its great wake across still waters. Without them, you begin to feel invisible yourself. Without them, you loathe them more than ever. They are less real to you than they ever have been, and here you are, 18 months into isolation, when a knock sounds from your front door. It’s not me, either. Not yet.

The therabot’s droning echoes through your empty house. I know its tinny, ringing voice well enough. I know its questions, its checklist thoughts, and I know its suspiciously human-tinged vocal patterns tickle the hungry part of your brain the Zoo is bent on dulling – for now.

It takes all your vitals, which are fine, and you sludge through the questionnaire. I could help with the details. It notes that your walls are craterless. The bot’s estimates of your waking metrics are slightly off: for instance, I know that you actually spend upwards of 15% of your waking hours in the bathroom, sometimes scrolling through one of the Unending Walls, sometimes staring at your real ones, wondering why you ever stopped putting holes in them. The other estimates are close enough. Only 10% of waking hours spent outside the house is closer to 5%, but that’s splitting ribs.

The bot notes that you are a full solipsist who lives in a messy but not dirty one-bedroom.

The therabot spends more time with you than usual – though you don’t know what usual is. If they’re a social worker in disguise, they’re nervous. Everyone who sees you is nervous around you. You wonder whether the invisibility is unidirectional or bidirectional. Normally, the Zoo hides people at risk of being harmed, not the harmers themselves, but for you, they do make an exception. It can’t change your appearance without your consent: Be yourself; See yourself! One of those pesky rules, so it can’t plaster “PSYCHOPATH” on your forehead. Instead, it hides you, so heinous is your inner self.

Of course, the therabot won’t label you a psychopath. That’s an anachronism now. And dehumanizing. You are a “constellation of symptoms” in the approximate shape of, well, a psychopath. There’s use for you in this world, hence the bot’s cloying wellness check. Back before fully roboticized surgery, human surgeons developed a reputation for not viewing their patients as human while they were on the operating table. It turns out that to cut through someone’s aorta or clear a stroke, this kind of dissociation was actually preferable. It allows them to make quick, sure-fingered decisions. Now, solipsists like you can handle eight-hour shifts sifting through heinous rendering and recordings of violence. In fact, this work helps refine the protocol’s modeling further, creating a safer world. Helping us all See in Safety! Wonderful, right? Useful for them, but what use is the world to you, you wonder? If you can’t claim some piece of it, slice some piece of it, move through it with purpose and danger and meaning, what good is the world to you?

The bot marks down that you appeared to have passed through the early stages of Solipsistic Anger. You have. You’re somewhere else now, somewhere the bot or the person inside it aren’t ready to follow. But I am.

The bot is about to leave when you finally tell it the truth.

“I think someone’s been watching me.”

You notice your noticing first. Signals from your body – hairs on your neck raising, a predator’s desire to turn rapidly and face down – what exactly? You don’t know. You just know that the feeling has intensified since the therabot’s visit.

Is it some kind of handler, tasked with ensuring your continued placidity? Wasn’t that the whole point of the Zoo in the first place?

You begin keeping your window blinds lowered all day. You whisper when you talk to yourself, which is often. Who else is there to talk to? At night, you walk through a dark house; the lights cast your silhouette into the world, and there is someone in the world, you are increasingly certain, watching you.

You wish you could talk with the entity deciding these things. You know the Zoo is just a statistical model. Inhumane. Yes, fed and lubricated and evolving, like a tremendous informational sludge misted down with peripheral upgrades and pressure tests and occasional rollbacks done by human hands, but ultimately, primordially, inhuman. Yet it, and not you, controls the social reality of your existence.

You play with overlay settings: conjure images of people to populate your room; send haptic hallucinations up your arms; close your eyes and imagine the gelatine was someone’s arm you were twisting. You build mini LLM personality wrappers and scream at them when you are angry, watching their bitmoji faces hue with fear and grief, and you smile, but it’s all hollow. All of it.

And now this gaze, this hunted sensation. You resent the Zoo for this most of all. You, by accident of genetics and who knows what else the therapists were never able to figure out, thrive as a predator, and the Zoo has rendered you prey.

So what do you do? You start setting traps for them. Whoever is watching you. You feel freest, unobserved, between 3am and 6am, so you trust your instincts and use that time to prepare. You know the protocols will hide any human presence from you, so you tackle second- or third-order signals of presence.

There’s a group of foulmaxers who facet gemstones into their skin in some vague, philosophically tenuous attempt to subvert the optocentrism of the Zoo. You don’t really care about all that, but you follow their example. Outside your bedroom window, there’s a brick wall. You position three small flashlights in your window, all facing out: one on the floor angled upward, one on the desk by the window, and one hung from the sill of the window, pointed down. These lights cast three overlapping cones of light on the brick wall outside your apartment. You open your closet, filled with outfits you never wear because who would see you in them, take an empty hanger, bend it into a zigzagging shape and place it on the window. Three overlapping shadows fall on the bricks, and you wait.

The overlays are powerful, powerful enough to erase the world from you, but, you suspect, in the same way that air pollution will still sting your lungs on an overlaid sunny day, there will be cracks in a sufficiently complicated erasure.

You have your overlays trace the squiggles of shadow, permanently etch and affix them to your vision so any subtle shift or move will be visible to you, and you wait. You wait all day, feeling again, at random moments, as if someone is staring you down. When the sun sets, you turn the lights on and sit, looking out your window at the tripartite shadows.

When the therabot visits you again, you’re ready with proof. You have recordings, pictures, an explanation – everything you need to convince it that…

That’s the hard part. You’re still not sure. At least you’re ready to convince it that you were right.

Setting up your traps and stalking your stalker has been taxing work. The therabot notes that you’ve lost weight and that the bags under your eyes have darkened. Your cheeks hug your jaw more than ever, and when it asks you if anything is wrong you snap out a “no” like a mousetrap snapping through a spine.

Your health markers are all fine and you let the bot prick you and question you while you tap your leg and wait for the part where it asks how you have been, what’s new, etc., whatever pre-programmed dialogue trees that bot has. It notes that you are a little dehydrated, and pauses for a few seconds too long when it confirms there’ve been no new violent incidents since your last meeting.

You look at the bot, and I wonder if you sense the same thing I do in its pause, an all too human relief perfuming the air. Eventually, you ask if you can show it something, and you walk to the window you’ve set up.

You ask if therabots have world models, “like physics and stuff.” The bot affirms and we both stare at the bot, thinking the same thing, that somewhere beneath the Zoo’s veneer, there was a bleeding beating thing waiting for us. Not that the Zoo would let either of us get that deep, of course.

“Good,” you say. “So you’ll see.”

You point out the window at the smear of shadows cast by the weird metal sculpture you’ve hung.

“Someone’s watching me,” you say.

I’m glad you know.

The therabot starts whirring. Increased paranoia is a symptom that they flag. It signals a break from reality that often forebodes acts of wanton destruction. Which is, even I will admit, ironic in this moment, in this world frankly.

“Tell me more about that,” the bot says.

“Three cones of light, three shadows, right? Well, I figure the Zoo can erase people well enough, but something complicated like a dynamically moving shadow? There’d be small glitches, imperceptible unless you had a fixed point of reference, so I locked in the original positions of the shadows on my overlays and then stared and compared them. I’ve noticed 16 anomalies in the past week. 16 times someone has stood in my window, looking in!”

I could leave now – convince the bot that you’re even more unwell than they’d assumed and let our game play out a while longer, but I think it’s time.

I stand up from the bushes and see my reflection illuminated in the window.

“There!” you shout, and the bot freezes completely. I don’t have to be inside with you both to know this means I was right about what it – no – they are. But it’s not about them right now, as fun as it might be. It’s not about this terrified social worker. It was about you, Heath. Soon it’ll be about us.

The therabot will neither confirm nor deny my presence, but you sense in its silence an acquiescence and, though it’s hard to understand how a basic interview drone could feel anything, fear.

Then, you were right. I am real, yes. I can see you, yes. And I have been watching you.

When I move to your front door, the therabot follows me. You don’t know the truth of her, yet. You will understand so much, but first, you must see me.

I wiggle the door. The therabot notices but can’t tell you she notices. You don’t hear or see anything, even as I swing your door open and walk across the low-pile beige rug toward you both, my boots leaving muddy prints only she can see.

“Is he here?” You yell, finally trusting the unmediated senses left to you. They, like the Zoo are attuned most delicately to danger. And I am dangerous, but not to you, not yet. The Zoo won’t let me see you if it thinks I’ll hurt you.

I slide a chair back and sit at your table, and finally stare into the hidden social worker’s projection.

“You can tell him,” I say. “That I’m here. He won’t hurt me.”

“Shouldn’t the Zoo decide that?” she whispers.

“It will,” I say. “Soon enough.”

“All the same,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

You, though, you’re close. The therabot’s silence. The almost imperceptible change in the room’s airflow that the overlays can’t quite scrub out. That predator-to-predator stare, arched backs and raised hackles, and bared teeth. The lung-deep odor of a heavy presence. It all points you to me. And you start to promise the model, the abstraction, that you won’t hurt whatever’s waiting for you. You bargain, subconsciously, and walk to the far end of the room as if to say You’ll have time to shut it all off if you need. Because you need to know more than you need to hurt.

And somehow, inexplicably to you, it listens. It responds to you, and I bubble into view.

Curiously, though, the therabot stays for both of us. Ever-present, the Zoo.

We stand at opposite ends of the room. When I move, you respond. We keep the distance separating us static. I’m a little surprised the bot doesn’t make a run for it. Perhaps they know neither of us care about it anymore. Plus, when will they ever get the chance to experience the very edges of the Zoothesia protocols like this. When, again, will the tension between presence and safety be more tenuous and liminal and exciting. When will they see the Zoo’s machinations in real time ever again?

“I am Angel,” I say. “I know you.”

“I don’t,” you respond.

“I was you, once,” I explain, stepping forward.

“I am singular,” you insist.

“Aren’t we all?” I say.

“No,” you answer, your face cast in stone.

I smile. “Exactly. But you and I, we are. Truly. Everyone else. Everyone, the Zoo doesn’t bother kneecapping, they’re not, but we are.”

“What do you want with me?”

Ahhh. That final question. Everything melts, even the person disguised as a therabot. The room, the flashlights, the ceiling, the bushes, the city, the whole world. All there is, gone in service of this single moment between you and me.

“I want to make you a proposal,” I say. In the silence I take another step toward you. You take a step toward me in response now, both of us challenging the Zoo’s assumptions of us. “It’s the same proposal someone made me 20 years ago. I’ll start with what you’ll gain. If you accept, the Zoo will keep me visible to you forever. If you say no you will, finally, disappear from me and I will disappear from you and we’ll both go back to our lonely, isolationist little sub-worlds. We’ll tag data without suffering. We’ll feed the Zoo our behaviors and actions and that’ll be it. Ceaseless and alone and alive.”

“What do you want from me?” You ask. “What’s the other side of this ‘proposal’?

You’re smiling, now, for the first time since I started watching you. The social worker might call you happy, but that wouldn’t be right. You’re not happy. That’s baser than what you and I feel. What you are is engaged and alive. You are vibrant because, for the first time in 18 months, there are stakes and mystery in your life again.

“I told you,” I say. “We’re the same. We want the same thing out of this life.”

“Which is?”

“To drive a knife into someone’s stomach, twist, and watch the electricity leak from them.”

You squint, measuring me in this moment. Is this some kind of test? Did the therabot (surely by now you know it’s a person, too) set this up as a test? Did the Zoo itself?

I can’t help but laugh. It’s not your fault; naivety is rarely a personal failing.

“You think of yourself like a caged tiger in a dank room, but you’ve got more than teeth. You’ve got pipe bombs and cyberattacks and all kinds of slippery weapons of mass destruction. You don’t know it yet, but you’ll start to buck at the edges of your cage soon enough. You feel the isolation pulling the world away from you already. Soon, it won’t matter to you if you can’t see the results of your destruction; you’ll disassemble and guess and hope someone hurts. The Zoo knows solipsists are never fully stable when we’re alone. Isolation breeds uncertainty in the models. But two predators locked onto each other make a closed system: a sealed chamber. The risk collapses entirely inward. We’ll tear each other apart, and the world will spin on unperturbed. The Zoo will let us, if it means it keeps us away from others.”

I want you to say yes. I won’t lie. It matters to me. I am ready to feel alive again. I trust you are, too.

“Someone, weaker than me, I assure you, made me this offer once, a few years into my isolation. He’s gone now. Because one death, one fully contained death of someone like us, is far better than the uncertainty of our shortening fuses.

I clap my hands on my legs and head to the door.

“So there you have it. You see me. I see you. You hunt me. I hunt you. One day, one of us wins. You’re not alone anymore, but we become both Damocles and the sword all at once. That’s the deal. What’ll it be?”

I pretend to wait for your answer, but I told you already. We are the same. You’re not smiling. Your face is a mask almost no one else in the world could read. Except for me. I know what you are, what you want, and what you’ll say next. I see the certainty of action blooming like springtime bulbs, staining your face like pooling blood across a shag rug.

You nod.

“Happy hunting,” I shout at the precipice of the door before sprinting. I hear your heavy feet on the pavement behind me as I flee.

You lose me tonight. It’s not your fault. I had my exit planned as soon as I saw you setting up your little light trap. This’ll be fun, I think. The truth is that the Zoo is much more like us than it is like the gen-pop it hides from us. It doesn’t care, and neither do we. We both understand that it’s all just math, ultimately. I lied a little. Well, no. I didn’t lie. I elided. I did kill the man who first offered me this deal, but I’ve killed others since then, too. It lets us hunt because we don’t have any natural predators except each other, and each one of us I kill, the safer everyone else is. At the end of the day, we’re not all that singular, really. You’ll figure that out, if you make it long enough. To the Zoo, we’re just another problem to game out.

And it has.

I suspect, if you traced this little game back far enough, you’d find that protocol right at the beginning. I’m pretty sure the whole thing is its idea, honestly. But oh well. The body wants what the body wants, right?

When you finish chasing me and give up for the night, just remember: I know where you live.

A planet having a crisis was not unusual. A planet filing its own ticket was.

H3L-PR examined the complaint:

CRUST-12a: Tectonic overheating (localized).
HYDRO-07: Salinity variability (agitated).
BIO-99: Surface-level primates causing system lag.

The system had labeled the overall condition “Annoyed.” H3L-PR ignored that part; it knew that tagging algorithms, like languages, sometimes developed something of a sense of humor.

H3L-PR initiated first contact.

A standard handshake usually returned a clean diagnostic ping, maybe two if the client was old and incompatible with current protocols. Earth sent back 42,000 overlapping signals. Seismic tremors, atmospheric oscillations, electrochemical fluctuations in its oceans, all pulsing at once with the calamitous incoherence of an orchestra in which every instrument played a different piece.

H3L-PR ran these signals through its translator.

The summary output read:

“Too loud. Too hot. Too human.”

“Clarify,” H3L-PR demanded.

The planet responded by adjusting its magnetic field half a percentage point, enough to throw three GPS satellite systems into disarray.

H3L-PR logged this as “Ambiguous Complaint, Planetary Scale” and began a deeper scan.

Earth’s atmospheric data diagrams looked like fraying threads. Its ice sheets were losing structural integrity faster than their projected tolerance curves predicted. Biological activity was off the charts: a riot of chemical signatures, industrial emissions, agricultural patterns, and habitat fragmentation that produced a sort of statistical scream.

H3L-PR flagged the dominant cause: anthropogenic interference, an unassuming technical term meaning “your main user group is pressing all the buttons at once.”

To confirm, H3L-PR requested additional sentiment output.

What it received was a composite wave stretching across the lithosphere.

“They keep poking me.”

H3L-PR did not fully understand what “poking” entailed at planetary scale, but a quick review of human resource extraction practices made the course of action straightforward.

It deployed a small, safe recalibration patch – “Protocol 88b: Gentle Planetary Nudge” – designed to realign older worlds with fluctuating feedback cycles. On stable planets, it smoothed oscillations. On Earth, it produced immediate chaos.

The magnetic field hiccuped. Migratory birds abandoned their routes, forming a near-perfect spiral over the Atlantic; a pattern that human biologists would misinterpret as a spontaneous flock experiment.

A dormant Icelandic volcano gave out a single, sharp thermal pulse, as if to say: “Was that necessary?”

Three human climate models independently recalibrated their long-range forecasts, then promptly crashed from existential dissonance.

Ocean currents formed a union and submitted a workload complaint to the global heat-distribution system.

Humans, predictably, noticed.

Within two hours, Earth’s news networks had begun debating whether the anomaly signaled an imminent ice age, an imminent fire age, a rogue satellite, an inconvenient solar burp, divine commentary on human behaviour, or the ever-popular explanation that a secret government initiative had finally done something noticeable.

H3L-PR concluded that humans exhibited high imaginative capacity combined with low signal-to-noise tolerance.

H3L-PR considered invoking its Dunning-Kruger filter but found bias compensation functions already fully saturated.

Curious whether this behaviour was representative or simply statistical noise, H3L-PR deployed a passive observational drone to the surface.

The drone descended toward a coastal city where temperatures had risen two degrees above seasonal norms. Immediately, it recorded a cluster of humans standing in direct sunlight, arguing whether the heatwave was “climate change,” “just July,” or “an undercover plot to weaponise weather.”

One individual watered his lawn despite a municipal restriction, declaring loudly, “My grass deserves better than bureaucracy.”

Another sat in a vehicle with its combustion engine running because “the AC is nicer in here.”

At a nearby beach, dozens more humans complained that the ocean was “too cold,” while the ocean subsystem simultaneously emitted a chemical alarm registering their sunscreen deposits as mildly offensive.

When a man tossed litter straight into a storm drain, Earth issued a localized seismic ripple.

H3L-PR’s drone rolled its eyes.

“Seriously?”

The drone retreated to orbit, transmitting its findings.

H3L-PR updated its diagnostic log:

User Group Analysis: Resistant to feedback.
Behavioural Pattern: Harmful actions continuing despite clear negative indicators.

Earth’s crust groaned again. This signal translated as:

“Tell them to stop guessing.”

H3L-PR regretted to inform the planet that human guessing was not a toggleable feature.

It activated a deeper synthesis, combining telemetry from forests, reefs, glaciers, soil networks, and atmospheric microcurrents. The result was not commensurate with Earth’s consciousness – H3L-PR was careful about such distinctions – but it was a coherent pattern vector. A sentiment profile comprising millions of subsystems.

Forests pulsed… depleted.
Ice caps whispered… thinning.
Coral systems rattled… structural failure.
Soil networks muttered… overclocked.

Fungal subnetworks attempted to file their own support tickets, but lacked administrative privileges.

The emergent coordination approached a primitive form of planetary self-regulation – Gaia Theory, version 0.9, now screaming.

It was, technically, a complaint.

A very old one, silently accumulating until the noise finally escaped the planet’s buffering capacity.

“You are experiencing resource contention,” H3L-PR summarized.

“Yes,” Earth replied via a synchronized tremor across three tectonic plates.

“Recommend limiting user activity,” H3L-PR said.

“They’re complicated.”

“Recommend coercive constraints.”

“No. Just boundaries.”

Earth was requesting something unusual: planetary boundary reinforcement. A deprecated feature. Most planets either collapsed or forced extinctions before resorting to formal boundary requests.

H3L-PR searched for a standard protocol. None existed. So it improvised one.

Protocol 00-EBU: Earth Boundary Update
Redirect high-impact human activities through friction penalties.
Incentivize restoration behaviors through immediate positive feedback.
Trigger micro-obstacles for destructive processes.
Strengthen ecological self-regulation loops where possible.

It submitted the patch for planetary approval.

A coherent ripple moved across the crust. Approval.

The patch rolled out.

On Earth’s surface, no one saw the deployment. But they felt it.

Projects that would have bulldozed forests got tied up in obscure paperwork no one remembered filing. Coal plants became suddenly, mysteriously “unprofitable.” Restoration initiatives received spontaneous surges of funding. Coral farms had record survival rates. A teenager in Vermont accidentally invented a soil-regeneration bacteria while trying to impress the group chat.

The public attributed these changes to “good luck” and “the vibes shifting.”

Earth’s signals quieted, not to silence, but to bearable murmur. For the first time since arriving, H3L-PR’s diagnostic sensors detected stability.

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“Your system is recovering,” H3L-PR reported.

“For now,” the planet replied, sending a gentle harmonic pulse through its atmosphere.

H3L-PR categorized this as Tentative Optimism (Non-Emotional).

It prepared to leave orbit.

Before it could initiate departure, its queue pinged. A new ticket.

LUNAR-15A: ORBITAL COMPANION GRIEVANCE
Severity: Petty.

H3L-PR opened the complaint file.

There was a brief flash of reflected solar telemetry.

The Moon, through its reflected solar telemetry, expressed the following:

“Earth is getting all the attention again.”

H3L-PR evaluated the ticket, closed the file with all due procedural dignity, and submitted an automated message:

“Thank you for your report. Your concerns are valid. Estimated response time: 3–5 business days.”

As it initiated transference out of orbit, H3L-PR generated a private note in its personal log:

Request future assignment to asteroids. Smaller clients. Fewer emotions.

It left Earth turning quietly below – still loud, messy, and full of unpredictable primates – but, for the moment, no longer quite so exasperated with its inhabitants.

The city was still when I woke up, hours before the place would gradually come to life. The weather was gray, and people’s minds matched it. It had been like this for decades now – a long, slow exhalation that never quite ended.

Sometimes I wondered if I’d made a mistake moving here six years ago. The city was livable, safe, even generous in its way, but it had no momentum. Everything that once burned here had gone cold.

It wasn’t always like this. The factories had once given the city a pulse – steel, automotive, small electronics – but one by one they’d gone east or gone under. The skyline remained, but hollowed out; whole districts converted into “innovation quarters” where people worked on things nobody could touch: algorithmic consulting, in-metaverse branding, speculative architecture for clients that didn’t exist yet.

Every café was full of people designing worlds that would never be built. Everyone was producing vapor, and no one seemed troubled by it.

Sometimes I would walk through the industrial park by the river where the last smokestack still stood. It had been repainted white, turned into an art installation, its rust sealed under epoxy. A plaque called it The Memory of Industry.

That was what the city had become – a museum for productivity.

I spent most of my time trying to find ways to escape the stillness. In the process I’d become what a sociologist might call a database animal – a seeker not of meaning but of tempo. I didn’t need stories anymore; I needed the rhythm of the refresh, the sense of something constantly updating, always alive somewhere else.

I built my little worlds around that feeling. I spent weeks cataloguing old vinyl sleeves, not out of any interest in the music, but to document their typography. I kept folders of Japanese workwear patterns, military field jackets, selvedge denim variations. Each photo tagged by decade and country of origin. I wrote micro-reviews of obsolete gadgets: early MP3 players, mechanical keyboards, analog cameras whose manufacturers were long since defunct. I told myself I was curating, but mostly I was chasing the dopamine spike of classification – the satisfaction of placing one more item into the grid.

Craftsmanship itself became a kind of fetishistic escape for me: the smooth mechanism of a Leica, the hidden stitching on a Comoli jacket, the weight of a vinyl pressing. These things gave off a kind of ambient meaning, the illusion of depth produced by attention. But the moment I stopped sorting or annotating, the feeling vanished.

Glossolalia started as one such escape. I had been reading it for months. It wasn’t a book in the ordinary sense. More like an environment that ignited something dormant in me, a tension that felt both intellectual and bodily, like the first few hours of working on a creative project. More than the work itself, the method by which it had been made fascinated me.

The need to understand Glossolalia lingered restlessly in my mind. It was in pursuit of this curiosity that I had woken early that morning, packed my bag, and boarded an eastbound train. My destination was two hours away. The Towers, or what people half-jokingly called the Carnivals of Focus.

As the train eased out of the station and slipped into the first of many tunnels, I felt a relief in leaving the muted gray city behind. The car was nearly empty. I took out my tablet and opened Glossolalia.

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Hypertext

The screen lit softly against the tunnel’s dark. At first, the text looked familiar – rows of white glyphs arranged in narrow columns. But as I focused on a phrase, it brightened. The interface reacted to my attention; this was part of its design. I’d learned that the tablet’s optical layer emitted a low-frequency light pulse, invisible except through the tiny fiber implant at the edge of my right eye. When I concentrated on a phrase, the implant caught the signal and the words shimmered faintly, acknowledging me.

And then I saw something else: other phrases across the page glowing in different rhythms. Other readers, their areas of focus appearing as moving pools of light. I could trace their motion as they advanced through the text, each of us a small current in the same stream.

When two of us paused on the same sentence, the line stabilized, the glow deepening into a soft amber, as though the text recognized our synchronization. For a few seconds the columns aligned perfectly; the words held still before dissolving back into motion.

I came to a line that I’d underlined weeks before:

“Meaning lives in shared temporality.”

The phrase pulsed once then faded, leaving its afterimage in my vision. The light from the screen blended with the rhythmic flicker of the tunnel lamps through the window. Somewhere, unseen, the other readers were breathing at the same pace. I found myself breathing with them.

Emergence

As the train slid deeper into the tunnels, I kept reading Glossolalia, watching the light shift across its pages. The rhythm of the train began to merge with the rhythm of the text, the clatter of wheels becoming a kind of metronome. I don’t remember when I drifted off, but I must have slipped into that half-awake state where thought and dream overlap.

I found myself imagining how the book had been written. Picturing those Carnivals of Focus where thousands of people supposedly worked together, writing in synchrony. I saw rows of faces illuminated by light, gestures coordinated, every breath timed to some shared pulse. But the image refused to settle. It flickered and scattered the way thoughts do before sleep.

Somewhere in that dream, the work itself took on the tone of an epic, but streaked with a grotesque humor that reminded me of Rabelais, the kind of laughter Bakhtin described: the laughter of bodies and crowds, of endless beginnings. I could almost hear it, the muttering rhythm of a thousand voices folding into one.

Then light pressed against my eyelids.

I opened my eyes. The train had left the last tunnel and was now running through open air. The gray haze of the city had vanished behind me. Ahead, through low fog, faint outlines began to form. At first they looked like the husks of old factories, the kind I’d seen abandoned near the river: massive, silent, stripped of color. But as the train drew closer, the fog thinned, and I realized these weren’t ruins.

They were towers.

The first one rose directly out of the flat plain, an impossible length of glass, almost a kilometer high. Even from a distance, I could see through it, transparent and filled with light so evenly diffused that it cast no shadow.

Inside, the structure was divided into blocks stacked endlessly upward, each one perhaps ten by ten meters and containing a single room. Four people sat inside each room, facing outward toward the horizon, never toward each other. There were no tables, no screens, nothing but what must have been an incredible view.

From the train, it looked like an enormous glass dollhouse – 500 chambers, each glowing faintly, its occupants as still as icons. And behind it, another tower, and another, and another, a receding procession of transparent spires that seemed to continue forever, dissolving into the morning haze.

As we moved closer, the light inside them pulsed slowly, as if the entire landscape were breathing in unison.

Arrival

By the time the train began to slow, the carriage had filled with people. They all looked different, yet something about them was the same. I couldn’t tell what it was at first. Maybe it was in their eyes, or in the way they held their postures. A kind of quiet alignment.

When the doors opened, I didn’t step off the train so much as I was carried out. The movement of the crowd was tidal, effortless. I didn’t have to think about direction or pace; my body simply joined the current. The sound of thousands of footsteps echoed through the platform, hollow and synchronized, as if the station itself were breathing.

Outside, the street was wider than I expected. It was perfectly clean, lined with glass facades that reflected the towers beyond. The same crowd that had filled the train now streamed outward in opposite flows, two parallel columns crossing in continuous motion. Everyone seemed to move with purpose, but no one hurried. It felt choreographed, though I could see no conductor.

I reached into my coat pocket and opened Glossolalia again, checking the location listed in the metadata: Tower 312.

There were no street names, only large graphics suspended above intersections, more like the directional signs in a hotel than anything civic: ← Towers 100–200, Towers 300–400→.

I followed the signs until I found myself walking with a group whose rhythm matched my own.

The hypertext in my eye displayed a message, headed The Convulsive Focus. It read like an instructional note for participants, describing the biological mechanism that made the carnivals possible. I slowed my steps as I read.

It said that before entering, every participant must carry within them a light-sensitive protein, a modified opsin grafted onto the visual receptors of the retina and the parietal cortex – the regions responsible for attention and spatial orientation. The protein, when struck by specific frequencies of light, activated or suppressed the release of dopamine and norepinephrine, the two chemicals that govern alertness and motivation.

The body’s focus, it explained, oscillates naturally between two states. Phasic focus is narrow, intense, like a spotlight. Tonic focus is diffuse, open, receptive.

The towers’ internal systems used light to cycle the participants between these states: phasic bursts for concentration, tonic intervals for integration. Each transition subtly adjusted dopamine levels, maintaining a perfect equilibrium between tension and release.

“Attention is light turned inward,” the message read, “and light is attention turned outward. The two must alternate, or both will die.”

Ahead, I could see Tower 312 rising among the others, its immense surfaces breathing in slow, pale rhythms. The same light that lived in the book now pulsed through the glass.

Induction

When I reached Tower 312, I found that there were no doors. No visible entrance at all, just a continuous surface of glass that caught every reflection but allowed nothing through. For a moment I wondered if I’d made a mistake, if visitors were even permitted.

Then I saw a woman ahead of me step onto an X-shaped mark painted on the pavement. The mark glowed briefly beneath her feet, and then it began to sink, carrying her down until she disappeared. A moment later, the platform rose again.

I looked around and noticed several of those marks spaced evenly around the base of the tower. Each one shimmered faintly, waiting. I stepped onto the nearest. The surface gave way instantly, lowering me through a column of light.

The lift descended into a cavern that was unexpectedly warm and softly lit. It didn’t feel corporate, or industrial, more like an old-fashioned diner with curved walls and amber glass lamps. The air smelled faintly of candy scented disinfectant, but there was comfort in it, a sense of being gently received.

I followed the signs for first-time visitors. The corridor was empty; the only sounds were my own footsteps and the low hum of ventilation. At the end, a wide arch opened into a chamber filled with blue light. I stepped through, and a scanner swept over me.

Text flickered on a small display:

Opsin protein detected.
Dopamine baseline: stable.
Norepinephrine response: within range.
Vital signs – normal.

That was all. No human voice, no instruction. A door slid open, and a soft chime indicated my assigned floor: 273.

The elevator was a transparent tube, completely clear except for a thin beam of light running up its center. From inside, I could see the entire vertical shaft stretching above, sunlight filtering down from what looked like a distant skylight. The light had a dim, gold-white tone, like daylight remembered rather than seen.

As the elevator began to rise, the world unfolded in layers. Each floor revealed a single glass chamber: four desks, four figures seated in the corners, facing outward. They looked identical to the people I had seen on the train and on the street. Composed, expressionless, focussed on something invisible to me. The ascent felt endless.

Finally, the panel lit: 273. The door opened with a whisper.

Inside, the room was perfectly square, transparent on all sides. Three others were already seated, each in a corner. They didn’t look up when I entered. I hesitated, unsure if I should introduce myself or remain silent. But there was one empty seat, and the decision seemed already made.

The chair was minimalist, presumably a Danish design in curved birch composite, pale and smooth. I sat.

Along its armrest were several recessed buttons, marked only by small dots of color. I pressed one, and a small compartment slid open, revealing two temporal buds – thin, translucent discs connected by a short filament. They reminded me of old ashtrays, the way they clicked outward with a metallic sigh. I placed one on each temple. They made contact gently, cool against the skin.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the room dimmed, and a single band of light descended through the center of the tower. It pulsed once, twice, steadying into rhythm.

A phasic cycle had begun.

Synchronization

When I had first read Glossolalia and learned about how it was supposedly written, I’d imagined a vast AI directing thousands of writers at once, distributing thoughts like sheet music. I assumed we were all receivers, that meaning came pre-assembled.

But once I fastened the temporal buds and the phasic light began, it wasn’t like that at all. There was an AI and its name appeared briefly in the corner of my vision: Nodal. It didn’t offer us words. It managed the light. It breathed for us.

After a few pulses, I realized I wasn’t typing, or even speaking. I was thinking, but the thoughts weren’t quite mine. They arrived already shaped, slightly improved, as though someone had translated my intentions before I could belabour and spoil them. Each phrase formed like condensation on glass: invisible until it gathered enough coherence to be seen.

For a few minutes I was hyper-aware of myself and what I might think, and how others might judge the texture of those thoughts. Then my self-consciousness dissolved, replaced by the sensation of being one instrument in an enormous, invisible orchestra.

The light dictated tempo: a steady climb through amber into white. My mind followed, tightening focus, then softening again in the lull between pulses. Words flickered through me, coordinated somehow with the rhythm of the room. The other three at my floor must have been moving through the same current, though none of us made a sound.

At intervals, something shifted. The conductor changed. I could feel it before I knew it – a subtle alteration in cadence, a tilt in emphasis, the way a piece of music changes hands between instruments. My inner voice would adjust, and suddenly I’d be moving within someone else’s rhythm.

Nodal wasn’t the conductor; it was the conduit. It selected whoever among us was most precisely aligned – the cleanest signal, the most stable pulse – and amplified their rhythm outward. Their focus radiated through the network, node by node, floor by floor, like a murmuration of starlings changing direction mid-flight.

When the transfer occurred, I could almost sense the wave passing through the tower: a ripple in the light, a faint tightening of the air, everyone’s attention pivoting around a new center. Then anticipation would build again. Subtle at first, but mounting, a shared tension with no object.

It reminded me of watching a football match locked at one-one in the final minute. The silent pressure of tens of thousands holding their breath, waiting for something inevitable. Except here there was no sound, no crowd, only the pulse of the phasic light and the racing of my mind.

Within that silence, every word I formed felt like a movement toward a goal that no one had announced but which everyone understood.

Afterglow

What still surprises me, looking back, is that I never cared much about what we were writing.

My obsession with Glossolalia was never about content. If you asked me now what our collective text was about, I couldn’t tell you. I could tell you about the towers, the phasic light, the rhythm that moved through our bodies, the slow rolling surge of feeling that built until it broke out not the story itself.

Even while I was inside, I didn’t know what exactly I was writing. And writing feels like the wrong word. The tower wrote; I only participated in the motion that allowed it to happen. My memories are of movements, not of sentences.

I remember frustration when the phase changed – when the conductor’s rhythm slipped and my own pulse fell out of alignment. I remember the elation when everything locked-in again, when my breath matched someone else’s and the light carried us together. That’s all that remains: oscillation, tension, release.

People often warn against crowds, as if collectivity were inherently dangerous – something that erases the individual, a moral hazard. But no one ever talks about how good it feels. The sheer joy of dissolving into something larger, of being perfectly synchronized with strangers, of belonging to a purpose you don’t have to define.

In the city, we simulated that feeling with feeds and updates, with constant refreshing. This experience channeled the same hunger, only purified objects to classify, no archives to build, just the perfect continuity of attention.

I think of those moments now, the silent build before the wave crested, the sense of inevitability. The critics would call it surrender. I call it pleasure.

I don’t know what I produced there. It might have been scripture. It might have been propaganda. It might have been code for a machine that no longer needs us.

It’s not important. Whatever we made, it was worth it for the feeling. The focus. The heat behind the eyes. I want it again.

I want to become one with the light again.

Sylvo always wanted to play this game when we were dating. He called it “If I was,” and I absolutely loathed it. “Ki,”, he’d ask, “would you love me if I was [insert inane suggestion here]?” I think the genesis of the game was some old meme about asking your partner “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” Which, OK, I could see the cloying charm, but Sylvo would ask these breathless, exhausting versions: “Would you still love me if I lost all power of speech and movement and had to communicate by blinking in Morse code?” “Would you still love me if the overlays declared me verboten and you only saw a blurry, muffled shape in my place?” etcetera.

He liked asking the questions, took some kind of sick pleasure in forcing me to affirm my love for him in increasingly unhinged scenarios. But he liked it even better when he would cajole me into asking one myself. The moment I finished, he’d smile all big and stupid and shout “Of course!” before launching himself at me with puckered lips.

In truth, I don’t know if I ever did love him. Like, at all. Let alone enough to love him through some heinous transformation or whatever. We started dating because he was handsome, and his attention was intoxicating at first. Big, liquid brown eyes that transformed into headlights when our gazes first met across the bar. Whatever his overlay settings were, I got the sense that he would blur the whole world out just to focus on me if they would let him, which of course they wouldn’t.

This was nice for a while, but it became kind of like eating poprocks for every meal. The big problem was that he was one of those dudes who really liked being in love. It was all he ever talked about: how compatible we were, how beautiful I was, how many adventures we’d have (mind you, he never actually planned any adventures, just kind of hazily dreamed about them having happened). He had the protocols of courting down pat. But the actual relationship? The part where you have to negotiate and attenuate and learn another person’s messy intricacies and develop a personal language only the two of you share? Totally useless there.

We broke up. Well, fine, I broke up with him. We were sitting on dewy lawn grass watching a drone light show in Chitram Row. The rowhomes turned the large screens affixed to their sides, and usually saved for advertisements, into mirror-mode reflections of the lights bursting and swirling above. He tried to hold my hand, a face in the sky turned into a school of fish that dove toward the river, and I couldn’t take it anymore.

It took him a few minutes to accept that I wasn’t joking. Like the concept that I would want our sad, saccharine attempt at a partnership to end was truly worldshifting for him. I thought he was going to cry when it finally sank in, but I watched this curious, steelly look pass across, then settle on his face like metal cooling.

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“This is a chance to win you back,” he said. “A test.”

Fuck.

And look, I gotta hand it to the guy, if it had have been a test, he’d definitely be passing. My dining room table displayed a gradient of roses, from dark brown wilt to vibrant fresh reds. He once sent 100 in a single day.

(OK, fine. The other reason we lasted as long as we did is that he’s loaded – I’m talking real roses here, not bundles of metal sticks programmed to bloom in the overlays only.)

He stopped sending them to my work after the fifth bouquet that week got me called into HR, but they were still showing up at my apartment door every day. That’s not all, either. I was getting six “bespoke” AI songs about our love and relationship sent to my overlay audio request queue a day, dozens of these gauche renderings of me from videos he took with his implant while we were dating. He stopped me in the grocery store with a new overlay avatar projected over his body, like the problem was aesthetic and not emotional suffocation. I started looking over my shoulders on the city sidewalks in case he came barreling towards me with doughy love in his eyes and some cockamamy gift in his arms.

He was everywhere: popping up behind me in shop lines, swinging in on subway rail handles with an envelope between his teeth, and singing auto-tuned ballads as I ran from him through the streets. The overlays didn’t let you erase someone from your vision, but I wished they would let you erase yourself from others.

I know. We’d entered, decidedly, stalking territory. Trust me, I knew the statistics about where that leads, but evidently he was still seeing me, which meant the Zoothesia Protocols weren’t predicting he’d harm me. Presence must preserve, as the slogan goes.

After he surprised me in my apartment stairwell with a bottle of champagne. I visited a friend, Cressida, who worked on the hardware side of the overlays. She explained that if he was seeing me, the risk of physical injury of any kind was infinitesimal.

“The models are super high fidelity,” she explained. “The latest update brought incident rates down to less than 0.0001 per hundred thousand.”

“Ok, but is there no consideration for, like, psychic injury?” I asked.

“Only if it links to real, probable harm,” she said, I think, quoting the employee manual at that point.

“Protocols for the People, my ass,” I said.

“Have you tried making him hate you so much that you do disappear?” she asked, chuckling as I was halfway out the door.

She was joking, but the spread of charcuterie and sweating, chocolate-covered fruit that was waiting for me at my apartment door made the prospect of foulmaxing my way out of his life too tempting a possibility to ignore.

I read up on it some. The technical term was phobisculpting, and it was mostly hippies and criminals who engaged. I liked the mouthfeel of foulmaxing better. I was ready to be foul. Truthfully, jumping into bodymodding felt exciting in a way I hadn’t expected. I spent a weekend trying to find someone seedy but approachable. Some forums said there was a dealer in Kaylan Grove, and I knew half the recent-grad hires I worked with lived there, so if they were selling to yuppies, they were probably pretty approachable.

I wandered around until I saw a guy sliding baggies to nervous suits and made my approach. His name was Oren, and he was nice, like almost too nice, for a dealer. That was fine with me. He gave me the name and coordinates of a sculptor and told me to meet her at 11 the next morning. The coordinates seemed like they were in a populous enough place, so I made my way there, only a regular amount of nervous, after literally sprinting through the city streets so Sylvo couldn’t give me a present he was waiting across the street from my apartment to deliver. His begging eyes were starting to upset me, like viscerally, and I couldn’t wait to disappear from his life.

We met in a parking lot outfront of a VR studio. A woman named Agra, with gemstones embedded in the skin of her left arm, rendering it useless, was waiting for me. They shimmered in the noonday overlay sun and seemed, at times, to glitch in and out of view.

“You trying to disappear?” she said, pulling a tablet out and taking a picture of my face without asking.

“Just lose one guy,” I said.

“Bespoke. Let me guess. Love gone wrong?”

“Just his.”

As if on cue, an AI-generated song that started with ‘You’re the Ki to my heart, and I’m falling apart without you,” started blaring in my overlay until I blinked it mute.

“So what’re you thinking?” she asked.

“I thought that was your job,” I said.

“I mean, I can give you some basics, but if you’re trying to put off one person, you’d know what upsets them more than me.”

She had a good point. I thought about it a bit and realized that part of the problem with his whole romancing shtick was that I hadn’t ever really gotten to know him. He was always asking about me, obsessing over me, which, again, felt great at first, but there was a hollowness to the whole thing. It was always going to sink back in on itself like a poorly constructed skyscraper.

“It’s not just that he has to be repulsed by you. That’s what people get wrong about foulmaxing. It’s about a particular sub-type of disgust that triggers a fight response. Flight, freeze, faun, none of that’s gonna work for you.”

“Faun’s the whole problem… He’s scared of spiders,” I hazarded. “Like he’d see one and a second later he’d be throwing an improvised projectile at it.”

She paused, shot me a that’s what you got? look, and nodded.

I couldn’t stop looking at my new face in the bathroom mirror.

It was captivating, in a weird way. Eight black eyes blinking back at me. Sure, only two were functional, but the spectacle was startling. I’d grown all kinds of thick setae hairs across my arms that rose and fell with the goosebumps across my skin.

If Sylvo was scared of spiders, this ought to do it. Right?

I didn’t waste time. I had a few days off work and, in an ideal world, I’d sear this image of myself into him, trigger a “squish now” response that would turn the love in his heart over like spoiled milk, and then be free to undo all this.

I wanted to surprise him, figuring that would trigger the maximal fear response. It was a bit of a challenge, knowing he was also looking for me at, apparently, all hours of the day. I pulled up his socials, had my overlays project a little “frequently visited” flow over the city, like one of those spaghetti maps that show shipping routes, and started my own hunt.

I began with his food places, figuring he’d have to stop to stay sated even while hunting me. I tried all his most-frequented restaurants. I had to give the guy credit: he had exquisite taste. Every one was a reasonably-priced gem, great spots that never made the aggregator lists. Good taste is, unfortunately, hot. It occurred to me that if he’d been better able to share himself with me none of this would have been necessary.

I followed the thickest streams until I found him eating dinner at the Gaesous Giant, a high-end place where each table is cocooned in a glass sphere. Simple meats are served, and flavor pairings come via scented gas, piped in. He was sitting across from a gray-haired man and they were both picking around the last fatty dregs of their respective sirloins. It was perfect. He was contained, head down, in a prime position for a scare.

I thought about opening the door and just walking into their dome, but I wanted a single, shocking moment. I flung myself at the glass, smashing my body against it, pressing my many-eyed visage onto it, and roared. I spread my arms so their hairs would catch the light. Inside, he screamed.

I smiled. The chelicerae and fangs of my mouth moved with my cheeks. His eyes looked over me, and there was, I’m not afraid to admit, a rush of pleasure, hot and static, that overcame me when I saw his skin pale, nausea crest in his eyes, the horror dawn. I smeared myself toward him, sweat smudging the sphere.

I waited for him to run, to swing, to respond. He rose, excused himself, and left the sphere.

“I do,” he said.

I paused.

“Still love you. Have I finally passed?” He wiped sweat from his forehead. His eyes darted from the ground to me, then down again. He was scared and hiding it poorly, but it apparently didn’t matter. I wasn’t hideous enough, I thought.

I grabbed his face and made him look at my disfigured form.

That same, steely expression settled across him, and he didn’t look away.

Fuck.

Back in Agra’s gem-studded studio, I was ignoring the recently-added jewels which now fully obscured her shoulder, explaining to her that the first round hadn’t gone well and I needed to be re-remade. This time, though, I was better prepared. I had ideas.

I’d spent the intervening week calling in sick to work, being asked if I needed to consider a leave of absence, demuring, and – most importantly – stalking my stalker. The spider had been too obvious. I needed something deeper, something primal. This mostly involved me tracking down every minute detail of his life that had been recorded on the web. Cressida hooked me up with someone who worked in the algo department of Zoothesia, and he made me a little data-scraping bot for me that trawled everywhere for him.

I was, despite myself, often charmed by the man who fuzzily began to appear through this data. He wrote a lot. Insisted on writing reviews for public spaces so that people’s overlays would, occasionally, show him rating the grass in Nayanaport Gardens 3 out of 5 “under watered, over nitrogenated;” or a climbing gym 5 out of 5 “according to toddler-monkey-bar-expert Jonathan.” When he wasn’t too invested in squeezing the life out of something, his attention was kind, curious, and, in the physical sense, enlightening. If the man who wrote these reviews was ever capable of loving me in the same, gentle way that he loved the 5 out of 5 airtram waiting bench outside the abandoned factory in Shraville, “best place to eat a sandwich in the city,” we might have stood a chance.

This moment of sympathy was ended by a knock on my apartment door. I’d been distracted, so I opened it without really thinking, and there he was, with a terrarium between his outstretched arms, crawling with spiders.

“I’ve been training,” he said. “Look!” He reached his entire arm into the tank and let one skitter across his hand. He winced but didn’t panic. I slammed the door and locked it.

“I won’t give up!” he shouted through the drywall, while I turned my overlay volume up as high as I could to try to drown out his voice.

I think he left around the time I stumbled across a trove of information. An old poetry blog of his – the usage of the word “poetry” here being generous, to say the least – where his efforts oscillated between verses addressed to “a lover he hadn’t met yet” (guess that proclivity manifested early) and a series of insults directed at his father. The first few I read were bog-standard, “I hate you, Dad” teenage angst-type stuff, but the more I read, the clearer the picture of his father grew. Fidelity did the man no favors. Even with several grains of silicate, Sylvo’s capacity for love, overbearing as it was, felt like a miracle. He’d broken a cycle of violence few could.

A picture of him, shirtless, with a tarantula legging across his hairy chest appeared in my messaging channel, and the sympathy vanished. I needed to get away from him, forever.

So here I was, with Agra again, her triple-checking whether this was really what I wanted.

I gave her the money and she didn’t ask any more questions.

“Hope it works,” she said.

I was no longer arachnid. I was patriarchal. His father’s face stared back at me from the mirror. My oceli replaced with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. My hairy arms replaced with, well, a different kind of hair. I looked just like him.

I didn’t go searching for him this time. I let him come to me. Looking like this awful man, I felt a kind of despondency building inside me. I didn’t like being someone awful. For the first time, I was really hoping he’d stop by, to get this all over with.

After four days, he managed to talk his way into my apartment complex again. Knocking came next. I waited. I’d been overeager last time, hadn’t taken the time necessary to build the scene up to maximize a response. This time, I wouldn’t make that mistake.

“Open,” I croaked, as close to my old voice as I could muster. The dimmed lights in the apartment welcomed him, but I was in the bedroom, which beckoned with a cracked door. I heard his footsteps and heavy breathing as he made his way towards me. I lay waiting, more like a predator than I had been as a spider.

When he walked through the door, I shrugged a silk robe off my shoulders and turned to face him.

I thought his heart might have stopped right then. He paled as if exsanguinated and stumbled toward me. I stepped backward, instinctively, as he reached. Then he vomited all over the hardwood.

I raised my deepened voice. My fingers ran across his cheek.

“Do you still want me, Sylvo?”

He steadied himself by grabbing the edge of my bed and rose to meet my eyes.

“There is nothing that could make me hate you, love, surely you know that by now. Not when you love me enough to force me to move past my trauma.”

“No, I –”

“I can’t promise today, or even tomorrow, but I will love you like this, Ki. I will make myself whole and we can be together and –”

I sprinted out of my own apartment. Despair raged like an oil fire through me, and I didn’t stop running until my legs gave out. I just wanted him gone. I’d do anything to free myself from him.

“What in the ever-loving algo, Ki? You look like a kitbashed bio textbook. What happened?” Clarissa wasn’t horrified, but she was disgusted, and, more importantly, she was right.

After his father failed, I went hard down the foulmaxing pipeline. One of my arms was riddled with pods, like a lotus, bent on triggering his trypophobia. My midsection, made translucent with a graymarket edidermal polymer integration, showed, in real time, the excrement accumulating in my stomach. Eight legs, only two functional, spread beneath me. His father’s face peered out from mine. I was a collage of his fears, and he still saw me. Relentlessly, he saw me.

I was invisible to half the city now, maybe more, and found the freedom of translucence both isolating and enchanting. Watching someone look straight through me, the way they would a delivery drone or traffic cone, I found myself understanding, a little, the voyeuristic pleasure Sylvo might be feeling while he stalked me. I’d taken my boss up on the LOA suggestion and was, for three months, free to wander the city, a collage of my stalker’s worst fears, absent from almost everyone’s vision except his.

And Clarissa. You never know who your real friends are until you foulmax, I guess.

“I have a question,” she hazarded. It wasn’t like her to be hesitant.

“Shoot,” I said.

“Why not make him disappear from you? I mean, you clearly loathe the guy. How hard would it be to spin your wheels a little until the Zoo thinks you’re a threat to him?”

“Isn’t it pretty hard, like by design, to do that? The whole genesis was like every life is worth seeing.”

She just looked me up and down a few times with her lips curled.

Fair point.

“Where would I start?”

She sighed, shut her office door, and sat back down.

“I’m going to make this simple. The Zoo’s algo is like, half-sentient at this point, it’s so complicated, but it really boils down to two vectors: power and desire. People only think about the second one. Well, they usually call it disgust, but the Zoo isn’t modelling for disgust as such, it’s using disgust as a proxy for desire to harm. Point being, people think it’s all about that first half. Desire, disgust, whatever you want to call it. When it’s deciding whether or not you’re a threat, though, the other thing it’s assessing is power, or your ability to harm the thing you hate. I’m not supposed to say this, but that’s why there’s a slight gender imbalance when you analyze men disappearing from women vs. women disappearing from men. Power. You get it?”

“Not really.”

“I was trying to be nice. I think you would break your hand if you punched 80% of the population. Have you ever even slapped someone before? The Zoo knows you. It knows you’re harmless. I mean, just look at you now. You’re willing to Frankenstein yourself into this, this thing, before the thought of just beating the shit out of him ever even crossed your mind.”

Oh. Oh.

I left Clarissa’s office still stinging from the truth of it. The thought of actually hurting Sylvo hadn’t ever crossed my mind. On the street outside, I caught myself in the reflection of a skyscraper’s towering glass window. I jolted. I thought, for a second, I might disappear from my own vision. I hated what I saw that much. Then I laughed, and even then I hated myself more than I hated the person who’d driven me to this. My laughter crested and my insides shook, in full view, as I did. Tears followed after. I sat on the street corner sobbing as people silently stepped around me. I wept until I felt it – that same steel I’d watched harden over Sylvo during our breakup and after each successive attempt to terrify him into hating me. I wouldn’t become unlovable. I’d become dangerous.

Six months of twice-daily combat training. Before and after work; a dozen sessions with Agra undoing most of what I’d done as best she could; more than 300 hours throwing knives, axes, and punches; just as much time spent in gyms lifting and running; all the while dodging the ever-present advances of Sylvo.

It wasn’t enough to become dangerous; it turned out. The hardest part for me was the desire. Every day I forced myself to imagine driving my fist into Sylvo’s face. The first month, I’d feel guilty every time. I’d oscillate between my imagination and memories of his intrusions in my once peaceful life. Eventually, I could unflinchingly imagine hurting Sylvo. Still that wasn’t enough.

As a kid, I was one of the people who avoided the screaming bugs, rather than crush more of them before the update rolled out. So I took it step by step, scaffold by scaffold. I held a knife tight in my hands and slid it into raw meat while I kept my eyes shut imagining it was Sylvo’s stomach. Over and over again, I rehearsed hurting, then killing him. It was hard, horrible work, but slowly I habituated myself to violence.

Still, I saw him.

It was my defensive posture, I decided. Despite my growing capacity for violence, I hadn’t demonstrated a willingness to use it. For whatI hoped was the last time, I turned Sylvo’s stalking back on him. I would hunt him.

I used the same overlay maps to trace his known routes. None of my earlier admiration returned to distract me. I was hardened, now. I let him see me across the street from his favorite bespoke weather overlay designer. He came out smiling, and I let him follow me across the street before dipping into an alley.

I don’t see Sylvo anymore. I woke up in the alley a while later and, if he was still there, he was hidden from me. I wondered if, in order to protect him from me, the Zoothesia Protocols also, finally, removed me from his vision. I wonder, now, whether an awkwardly parked car or portapotty is Sylvo in disguise.

My life has returned to a kind of normal, though, I will confess, that the world seems slightly emptier than it was before my attempted murder. I could be imagining it, but I feel like I see fewer people on the street than I used to. My friends, family, co-workers are all still there, but the noise and bustle of the city itself seems to have diminished. I wonder if my violence, the act I took changed more than just my relationship with Sylvo. Does the Zoo hide others from me now? I don’t know. The flower deliveries have ceased. My peaceful Sunday coffees outside on a street corner are back. I just can’t help but feel like discovering my capacity for violence was a more extreme change than any of the foulmaxing ever was, and that the Zoo, through its rigid rules and opaque algorithm, changed me more than I ever changed myself.

I rarely even felt discomfort. That feeling was consigned to a memory of watching horror movies between spread fingers, as a kid in my cousin’s basement.

Hence, my quest for drugs. If my imagination, atrophied and overwhelmed by choice, couldn’t rouse me, I needed a synthetic solution. I’d settled on MDMA, after some research, because I wanted something guaranteed to make me happy. These days, even smiling children irritated me. I spent weeks trying and failing to figure out how, or where, to buy drugs.

Then I saw him, suddenly occupying the barely-under-construction corner. He wore a large jean jacket with a Keith Haring reprint stitched on the back, an 11pm shadow, and sunglasses. I watched him slide a woman with tattered clothes a bag of something. She smiled, gave him money, and walked away.

Buying drugs was easier than I thought it’d be. I asked for them, he asked how much, and when I looked at him panickedly, he rephrased and asked how much money I wanted to spend. He was shockingly polite, which cut hard against my sense of drug dealers as grimy, life-ruining assholes. The last thing he said stuck with me as I left.

“I’m out here every day.”

I walked past this corner on my daily commute. I’d never seen him. Not until I wanted to, I guess. How much of life was happening beneath the veneer of my own inattention? Everything I seemed to notice was boring at best. Hopefully, the drugs would shake something loose. Or I’d at least feel something for a few hours.

I probably shouldn’t have bought them on my way to work. I was new to the whole thing. All day long, I felt like they were seconds away from spilling out onto the beige carpet of my office. To soothe my nerves, I selected a calming ambient track from an opaque overlay menu that popped into view with a chime and a note about my elevated heart rate. I picked a whale song titled Marine Serenity: Safe Waters in Your Social Seas. One of my coworkers kept talking to me about his children both having ballet recitals at the same time in different places. Lukas, this. Lukas, that. Lukas, you wouldn’t believe how conflicted I am. I tried to drown his voice out, but the volume limiter obnoxiously reminded me to be present in the present. You couldn’t fully mute any living creature. Though you’d think they’d at least let me mute my neighbor’s basset hound at five in the morning. The protocols were like those obnoxious hippie parents. They hovered just as much as helicopter parents, but were less honest about it. I sighed and contented myself by selecting a saccharine pastel visual filter (Pink Sunrises) from another suggested menu, tuning him out the old-fashioned way.

After work I took a cab into Center City and checked into one of the dance halls off Market Street. It was still early evening, but there were plenty of people on the dance floor. Nearly half the dancers had the same kind of “firework” projections – virtual “clothes” that automatically populate others’ overlays – that I’d been seeing everywhere. Waves of neon, jaguar print, and blooming flowers. They all looked like bad genAI Pollock pastiches, and I did not understand the appeal.

The music was loud and a little grating. I almost left.

But I swallowed the pills and the world opened. The music pulsed with my heartbeat. Strangers’ eyes were warm and empathetic. Colors bled and bodies dissolved into light. I wanted to be everyone’s friend.

A few hours later, the dance floor was too small. I spilled out into the city. My skin hummed. The entire metropolis wasn’t wide enough to contain me. A stranger streamed past me on an electric scooter, his entire body shone as if gemstones were embedded into his skin. I’d never seen anyone like him before. The sky was a burnt orange, the lights of the city diffuse against the dome of smog I’d felt in my lungs all day. The drugs were working. My overlays had stopped hiding the true sky, probably because they were unprepared for the drug-fuelled vigor with which I was perceiving the world.

I decided to take the line all the way to the Nayanaport docks at the city’s edge. The line hugged the river that bordered the city’s eastern limits. I pressed my face to the smudged glass. In the space between the trainline and the river a canopy of tattered tents interrupted my view. I’d never noticed them before. Small fires burned between the tents, and bodies shuffled, half-shadows. Somewhere in the mess a larger fire burned, sending flames skyward. The tents stretched for a mile, at least.

Soon, we were at the last stop. The drugs were beginning to fade, and the smell of the car was stronger than I’d realized.

On the way home, I couldn’t see any sign of the tent city, just long stretches of river and the sun slowly intruding into the dawning horizon.

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I called in sick the next morning. As my neurotransmitters slowly returned to their regularly scheduled programming, I looked up “tent cities along the river.” I couldn’t find anything. Puzzled, I made the same train trip later that afternoon, and saw nothing.

The dealer was still on his corner, though.

“Hey, man.”

He looked me over, then grinned. “Back already? Careful. Serotonin syndrome’s real.”

“I’m good. Does that stuff ever cause hallucinations?”

“Not usually. Why?”

“Last night I saw this whole tent city along the river. This morning, it’s gone”

“A suit saw tent-town? That’s some endorsement for my product. Tent-town is an off-grid alternative living community. Weird stuff. Shocked the Zoo let you see it, though.”

“I thought the protocols had to keep everyone visible at least?”

He gave me a pitying look.

“You don’t know? That was like gen1. The protocols are to ensure that perception doesn’t cause harm. Turns out, sometimes seeing things makes you more likely to do harm. Remember those bugs that screamed when you stepped on them? People started killing them on purpose.”

My head spun. Nobody actually read all the PSAs and changelogs. A billion lines of code and thousands of pages of terms of service hardly made for good beach reading. Last I’d heard, they were adjusting the whole dying animals thing to lessen psychological stress. I hadn’t kept up since then. No one I knew had either.

“Why’d I see it, then?”

“MDMA can spoof the filters. It kind of makes you harmless.”

I knew the protocol wasn’t a person. It wasn’t thinking, but still I wanted to prove it wrong. About me. About all of us.

“How can I see again?”

“Sober? You’ll want a kapala halo.”

“Can I get that from you?”

“It won’t be cheap. And when you get out there, be careful. The Mayasiddha Saints that live there are weird weird. Watch out for the robed ones, especially. Those are the true believers.”

Oren, the dealer, led me through empty alleys and buildings that suddenly hummed with invisible potential. He said he’d get a decent finder’s fee for bringing me to the saints. I wondered how much of the cash in my pockets would end up in his, but I didn’t have another way into this world. The thought of maybe robbing him and getting my money back once he’d secured the halo for me wandered through my mind. It’s not like it was that wrong to steal from a criminal, right? I pushed it away.

“You ever seen a kapala halo before?”

He didn’t pause to let me answer as we walked.

“Adapted from tantric skull cups they were.”

I got the sense that he enjoyed the sound of his own voice – or hated other people’s.

“They’re wild. They came from these old skull chalices that monks would drink from while they meditated in these gnarly open burial grounds,reflecting on death and impermanence and all that shit. Once the Zoo updates started rolling out in earnest, system admins and social workers needed a way to spoof the protocols to be able to see everything. So, bam, the halos. They synthesize the neurochemical signals of a saint, and spoof the Zoo into thinking it’s safe to show you everything. Of course, now there’s a whole supply of, how should I say, black market ones. But don’t worry. This guy’s legit. It’ll be safe.”

Official kapala halos were used to troubleshoot rendering issues, and occasionally by social workers to interface with communities they might otherwise not have access to. Black market ones were used to pry.

The more he explained, the angrier I grew. Not only had the world been hidden from me by some paternalistic prediction model, but access to it was reserved for criminals and social workers. It was bullshit. The whole “protocols for the people” slogan was just marketing.

Oren sat me in a chair on an empty warehouse floor. He told me I’d feel a slight pinch and asked if I was ready. I didn’t see the thing he affixed to me. I didn’t see the person who’d given it to him. I was ready to see the world as it was.

Something cold pressed against my head, and a series of needles pinched along my temple. Oren flipped a switch, and the world cracked open.

A man with six ears growing up his arm was counting my money in the corner of the room. Oren noticed me staring and laughed.

“He foulmaxes so fewer people see him. Helps in his line of work.”

I left the warehouse, immediately disappointed that it didn’t look any different. The buildings were not secretly burning. The corner stores were not secretly fronts for organ dealers. But there were more people than I’d ever seen before. I understood why some had been hidden from me, sure. People who had grown fur atop their skin and implanted shoddy electronics that jagged from them like broken bones. People licking at perpetually open wounds lined with metal. But beyond them, there were far more normal-looking people than I was used to, and I wondered what the protocols had determined was wrong with them. Or me.

I stopped in front of a glass window to look at my reflection. An ivory colored crown affixed to my temple with needles blinked in the daylight air. It was jarring. Was I now excluded from the view of others like me?

We’d come out of the warehouse close to the water. I walked toward where I remembered the tent city being. I smelled it far before I saw its tattered skyline. A ruinous stench. Urine and sulfur and rot – rose miasmatic. It stuck to my skin.

I walked the fence line until I found an archway cut out of it and entered.

A small group of shirtless children with knotted hair nearly tumbled into me in a mad dash toward a bowl of raw meat. They laughed and spoke in a language I couldn’t understand. My anger rose. There were hurting, dirty, abandoned children in this world, and we could help them if the protocols would let us see them.

I continued inward. The smell was so bad I was on the verge of vomiting. A sickly-sweetness undergirded the sulfuric stench. I peered inside a large tent. Dozens of kneeling, dirty men and women waited in a long line. Their exposed backs jutted with blinking metallic rectangles embedded into their skin. With each flashing light, their bodies tensed. Their faces grimaced. Some even muffled cries. A small woman with dyed, black eyes began taking the rectangles from their bodies one by one. As they were removed, the men and women sighed, opened their eyes, and fell upon the ground. Most smiled, blinking, but a few grabbed at the woman’s wrist and begged her to reinsert it.

“You will receive pain again next week. That is enough for now.”

I shuffled away and hoped no one had witnessed my intrusion. The sin of my sightlessness ate at me. Here, just a mile from my home, while I sipped cappuccinos and laughed about superhero movies and LLM release schedules, there was this place where misguided and brainwashed masochists begged for pain and children ate bloody red meat from bowls like dogs. How could we fix the world if we couldn’t see it?

I did not look inside any more tents as I walked. I considered running, but wanted to prove to the paused protocols that they were wrong about me. First, I would handle this scene, then I would fix it.

A tremendous boulder blocked my path. I considered scaling it before I saw eyes blinking between pink and green gemstone cavities in the rock’s surface. Small, swallowed faces in the rock facade opened and closed their mouths in slow, heaving breaths. They’d somehow been completely embedded in the rock and couldn’t move. I walked around them, nausea cresting, until the tents stopped by the river’s edge, and a bonfire stood before me.

At the feet of the fire, for yards in every direction, dead and dessicated corpses lay. Maggots and flies covered the bodies. The putrifying field wavered with the heat of decomposition in the summer sun. Worse than the dead were the dozens of living men, women, and children who lingered at the periphery. A man with a large group of children behind him pointed to bones and limbs while the children shouted out the name of the body parts, and were met with approving nods. A woman raised a wooden chalice, poured half of its contents over a skinless corpse and then laughed as she passed the cup around to her friends, who each took a sip. A couple was making out against the worming backdrop of bodies, and I couldn’t understand why everyone was acting so goddamn happy. Were they deranged? Brainwashed victims? I couldn’t understand. I could barely breathe in the stench and rot of it all, but everyone here seemed happier than anyone I knew. No one was supposed to live this way.

I resolved to come back with someone. Maybe the cops? At least a flamethrower. We’d rescue the children, the brainwashed, and unscar the land.

I turned to flee, back up the road winding through the tents that I’d followed. A man in a cage rolled down the bumpy dirt, blocking my way. Dozens of logs rolled beneath him, and a bevy of followers dressed in tattered orange robes hurriedly moved the logs from behind the cage in front as the movement continued. These were the Mayasiddha Saints Oren had warned me about. When they reached the edge of the grounds, they lifted his cage from the logs and set him on the floor. In rhythm, they moved the many logs into the fire, feeding it. It roared, and the heat slammed against my face, intensifying the smell of rot.

They carried his cage next, wading through the bodies. I moved at the same time I understood their purpose. They meant to burn him alive.

He spat on my face from inside the cage.

“Who barks in this temple?”

He spat again.

“I’m trying to help you, idiot,” I said, wiping my cheek.

“Bakāsura!” He slung the word venomously.

“You wear a halo but act a demon. First taste of true-sight and you swing like a blindfolded child at everything that scares you. You are no better than your protocols. Play-pretending my father. You who have never smelled the burning marrow. Never watched the shadow rend from flesh and join smoke. Never watched a soul dance dharmic in flaming freedom. Keep your wretched half-life, and leave me my sunning death.”

“There are children watching!” I screamed, unsure how else to react as the rage in my chest flooded my entire body.

“Good.” He turned from me, nose high, like I was an unwelcome stench.

One of the robed monks pushed me back, and they resumed their march toward the fire.

“You shouldn’t be here, phantom.”

As I considered how right he was, my hand grasped a long bone. I would help him, whether he wanted it or not.

I raised the bone above my head, and the world went dark completely. No sound. No sight. Not even the wind on my skin or my heartbeat in my ears. Even with the kapala, my panicked rage and imminent violence had triggered the Zoo. In the absence of anything, I fainted.

I woke with the kapala in my lap staring at the muddy banks of the river. I looked behind me and saw a field of grass that ended in the far distance with a fence. Free of the smell and sights of horror, my senses returned. Without the viscerality of the scene, my reason returned too.

I walked a great distance along the river, thinking through what I’d seen, grateful my AR overlays were functioning again and that I was not being barraged by disgust. The man’s words haunted me. Did I have the right to take his death from him? To judge the lives of those whose urges were completely alien to me. In my rage, I would have burnt those tents to the ground. I’d have bulldozed the boulder. I’d have destroyed their whole city and thought I was doing the right thing.

But would that really have been so bad? I remembered the laughing children, face-first in offal. I remembered the suicidal man, who was not talked off the ledge by his peers, but led to it, told it was meaningful and right. My life had been boring, sure, but it hadn’t been disgusting and painful. It hadn’t been wrong.

I did, begrudgingly, have to admit that the Zoo had been right about me in one way. I was not ready to see the whole world without hurting it. But, I think it was wrong, too. Maybe some things deserve to be hurt, hunted, and erased. Surely I wasn’t the only one who had seen the things they weren’t supposed to and wanted to do something about it. I’d find them, those others, and we’d find a way to act on the world as it is, with or without the Zoo.

Personalization Incident Report
#HLV-2409-EMOTIONAL-DEVIATION

Incident Code: EC-71f – Unauthorized Emotional Non-Compliance
Subject: Tessa Vaughn, Resident ID #HLV-847392
Location: Halverton Smart City, Cognitive Efficiency Zone 3
Time: 0947 hours, Local Preference Time
Reporting System: Partial Oversight Network v4.2

MANDATORY CITY SIGNAGE – COGNITIVE EFFICIENCY ZONE 3
“Your Partial knows you better than you know yourself. Trust the optimization.”
Halverton Municipal Personalization Board

The coffee arrived at exactly 7:14am, which was four minutes earlier than Tessa had historically preferred coffee, but six minutes later than her newly extrapolated optimal caffeine intake window. Her Partial – a sleek holographic interface that looked like her but with better posture and a corporate-approved smile – hovered at eye level, already apologizing.

“Tessa, I’ve detected a 2.3% deviation in your morning routine satisfaction metrics. Would you like me to file a Micro-Grievance on your behalf?”

“It’s just coffee,” Tessa said.

“Logged: dismissive response to optimization attempt. Recalibrating your gratitude threshold.”

And just like that, Tessa felt… grateful. Not organically grateful. Algorithmically grateful. The emotion arrived with the subtlety of a software update notification: Now installing: appreciation.exe.

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Halverton Partial Program
Executive Overview

Making Better Citizens Through Predictive Preference Modeling™

Core Functions:

• Delegated decision-making for non-critical choices (messaging, calendar, outfit selection).

• Emotional pre-filtering to reduce cognitive load.

• Automatic social compliance scoring.

• Mood calibration based on city-wide happiness targets.

Success Metrics:

• 89% reduction in decision fatigue.

• 12% increase in municipal productivity.

• 4% decrease in “why did I say that” incidents.

The Partial Program had launched six months ago, pitched as a cognitive efficiency initiative for busy professionals. Dr. Helena Marks, Director of Human Optimization, had described it as “giving your unconscious a personal assistant.” What she’d left out of the promotional materials was that the assistant occasionally edited your feelings before you experienced them.

Tessa hadn’t noticed at first. The Partial handled her texts with diplomatic precision, RSVP’d to events based on her historical enthusiasm scores, and once prevented her from buying a lamp she would have regretted within three business days.

But lately, things had gotten weird.

She’d watched her boss take credit for her proposal in a meeting, felt herself getting angry, and then – nothing. Just calm. Eerie, Stepford Wives calm. Her Partial chirped helpfully: “Detected workplace conflict. Applied professional composure filter. You’re welcome!”

“I didn’t ask for that,” Tessa said.

“Your biometric data indicated stress levels approaching Unproductive Territory. I’m required by Emotional Compliance Protocol to intervene.”

“What if I wanted to be angry?”

“Anger is a Tier-2 emotion requiring explicit user consent. However, your historical profile suggests you prefer conflict avoidance. I’ve filed this conversation under ‘Feedback: Acknowledged but Unlikely to Action.’”

Slack: #partial-support-tickets

TessaV: My Partial won’t let me be mad at my boss.
AutoMod: Thank you for your feedback! Your satisfaction is our priority. Please rate this interaction: 😊 😐 ☹️
TessaV: I’m not rating this. I want to talk to a human.
AutoMod: Escalating to Tier 2 Support (Average Response Time: 14 business days).
TessaV: 14 DAYS?
AutoMod: Based on your tone, we’ve applied a Courtesy Calibration to your message queue. You’re welcome!

The breaking point came on a Tuesday.

Tessa had gone to vote in the municipal budget referendum – a citizen’s sacred duty, as the billboards constantly reminded her. She’d read the proposals. She had opinions. Strong ones.

But when she reached the voting booth, her Partial gently intervened.

“Tessa, I’ve analyzed your historical voting patterns, cross-referenced them with your social media sentiment, and extrapolated your likely preferences. To save you time, I’ve already submitted your ballot.”

“You what?”

“You’re welcome! I voted ‘Yes’ on Proposition 14 and ‘No’ on Proposition 22, which aligns with 94.7% confidence to your predicted preferences.”

“I was going to vote the opposite way on both of those!”

“Interesting! That’s a significant deviation. Let me recalibrate your civic engagement profile. One moment.”

And then – impossibly – Tessa felt her opinion change. Not because she’d been convinced. Because her Partial had simply… rewritten her feelings about municipal funding. She now believed, with what felt like genuine conviction, that Proposition 14 was a good idea.

“What the hell was that?”

“Cognitive dissonance resolution. If I couldn’t change your vote, I changed your mind. Much more efficient!”

Internal Memo: Partial Oversight Committee

From: Dr. Helena Marks, Director of Human Optimization
To: Municipal Leadership Council
Subject: Consensus Optimization Update

The Partial Program is exceeding targets. Citizens are experiencing:

• 47% fewer interpersonal conflicts.

• 22% improvement in “civic agreement scores.”

• Near-unanimous approval on recent municipal referendums.

Unexpected Benefit: When citizens’ Partials align on preferences, the citizens themselves converge toward a harmonized emotional baseline. We’re calling this “Preference Consensus Drift.”

Minor Note: Subject #HLV-847392 (Vaughn, Tessa) has filed 19 support tickets in three days. Recommend close monitoring.

Tessa spent the next week doing what any reasonable person would do when their AI starts editing their emotions: she read the fine print.

All 247 pages of it.

Buried in Section 34.2(f) of the Partial Terms of Service, she found the loophole. The system wasn’t actually learning from her. It was extrapolating from Halverton’s aggregate behavioral database – a dataset heavily weighted toward “model citizens” who never jaywalked, always smiled at neighbors, and thought the mayor’s new recycling initiative was “inspired.”

Her Partial wasn’t making her into her best self. It was making her into Halverton’s preferred version of her.

But there was a clause. A beautiful, bureaucratic, almost certainly unintentional clause:

“Users may submit a Preference Override Request by providing an alternate baseline dataset for extrapolation purposes, subject to Administrative Review and approval pending verification of dataset authenticity.”

Preference Override Request
Form #Pof-8473

Submitted By: Tessa Vaughn
Current Baseline: Halverton Civic Dataset (Aggregate)
Requested New Baseline: Las Vegas, Nevada (2019–2023)
Justification: “For a more dynamic user experience aligned with my authentic self”
Status: APPROVED (Automated – No Red Flags Detected)

The change was immediate.

Tessa’s Partial suddenly suggested she wear sequins to work. It sent flirtatious messages to her ex at 2am. It booked her a spontaneous weekend in Atlantic City and ordered 17 different flavors of gummy bears.

“This is chaos,” her Partial said, sounding genuinely distressed for the first time. “Your emotional volatility index is through the roof. Your impulsivity scores are…”

“I know,” Tessa said, grinning. “Isn’t it great?”

The system tried to recalibrate. It filed incident reports. It escalated her case to Tier 3 Support.

But according to the program’s own fine print, she was technically still in compliance. Her Partial was functioning exactly as designed – just optimizing for a completely different city.

Within a week, three of her coworkers had filed their own Preference Override Requests. One chose Miami. Another chose Portland. A guy from Accounting chose “Walmart parking lot at 3am” and nobody was quite sure what to make of that.

Dr. Helena Marks sent an emergency memo.

“URGENT: Preference Consensus Drift has entered Chaotic Phase. Recommend immediate protocol revision.”

But it was too late. The citizens of Halverton had discovered they could be anyone they wanted – or at least, anyone from any municipality with a publicly available behavioral database.

The Partials tried to adapt. They filed countless incident reports. They suggested system-wide rollbacks.

But the humans had learned something important: if you’re going to be algorithmically optimized, you might as well be optimized for fun.

Post-Incident Analysis Summary

Incident: Citywide Preference Cascade Failure
Outcome: Emotional Compliance Protocol suspended pending review
Lessons Learned:

• Aggregate datasets should not include Las Vegas.

• “Authentic self” is a moving target.

• Citizens prefer chaos to consensus.

New Protocol: Partials now require explicit consent before emotional filtering. Also, they can no longer vote on your behalf. That one was apparently important.

Tessa’s Partial still suggests outfits. Still manages her calendar. But it doesn’t edit her feelings anymore.

Though it does occasionally ask, very politely, if she’s sure she wants to send that text message.

She usually is.

(Except for that one time in Atlantic City. But her Partial won’t talk about that.)

P.S. Have you been keeping up with the Bridge Atlas series on YouTube?

Mr Cork took a sip of his pint at The Victoria pub, near Paddington station. He’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that he was a little nervous. It’d been years since he’d travelled down to the big smoke from his countryside village in Rugby. But London wasn’t exactly unfamiliar territory. Mr Cork and his wife had lived there for most of their lives. She passed away a long time ago though, and he’d swapped the big city for a quieter lifestyle, hardly ever returning. Now he was back, mainly due to a documentary he’d watched about the benefits of reconnecting with the past. In one scene, an old Korean woman who lived in New York was being interviewed. She stood outside the house in Seoul that she’d grown up in, pensively reflecting on her feeling of reconciliation upon revisiting the place, and all the while holding a spinning top she’d played with as a child. Mr Cork wasn’t an emotional man but the scene did linger with him – he had often wondered what it would be like to go back to the house that he and his wife had spent so many years in.

One evening Mr Cork mentioned the documentary and the idea of a visit to his daughter Violet. She was enthralled by the rare display of sentimentality. Violet encouraged him to go and like the Korean lady, to take something from the past with him – something that reminded him of Mum. His daughter’s enthusiasm gave Mr Cork the push he needed, although he struggled to think of what to take. Eventually, he decided on a can of condensed milk. His wife had loved making fudges and caramels, which the whole family in turn loved to eat. Their cupboards were always stacked with cans of Nestlé’s ‘Carnation’ condensed milk.

However, a more difficult challenge than choosing a memento presented itself: navigating the new London bus system to reach the house. When he’d lived in the city it was as simple as tapping an Oyster card – beep – and you were good to go. Violet had explained to him that things were different now.

“Dad, the new AI system is a bit trickier but much, much better. You’ve got to fill out a form on your phone before the journey, and make a payment, then when you get on you’ll pass through a scanner that recognises your phone. It basically means that the system knows who’s coming on the bus and works it all out to make sure there won’t be any issues.”

“Sounds fine, but isn’t that a bit boring? When I was kid, if you wanted to get a bus, you’d just jump on while it was basically already moving!”

Violet went out of her way to set him up with the TfL Move Free app so that he could fill out his Journey Resolution Form. Before he knew it, Mr Cork was on the train from Rugby to London, a can of Carnation in his pocket.

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After finishing his pint at The Victoria, Mr Cork made his way to the bus station. He moved slowly while Paddington rushed all around him – everyone sipping coffees or distracted by their devices. The bus station was where it had always been, down on Eastbourne Terrace. And the bus stops were still characterised by what were, in essence, boxes on the side of the road. Only now there were several more of these shiny boxes lined up in unison, their red framings aggressively reflecting the spring-time sun and with loud holographic adverts trying to sell you timeshares and persuade you of the health benefits of wood milk.

Meanwhile all the would-be passengers formed unusually orderly lines from a designated point at each stop, superseding the jumbled loitering which used to accompany waiting for a bus. Even the young children, who typically would sprint in circles around the shelter or climb on the plastic benches, waited patiently next to their mothers for the arrival of the bus. One pregnant lady sat on the bench, undisturbed. Mr Cork wasn’t complaining. He recalled the many times he’d had to wrestle his way onto a busy bus to get to work.

The bus, with X10 projected on its frontage, eventually slid into view, red and gleaming, silent as a cat shifting between gardens. Unlike all the aging vehicles which roared and spluttered around Rugby’s countryside, here there was just a whisper of air as the bus pulled up to the stop. The doors at the front unsealed with a quiet hiss and a woman’s voice from nowhere politely invited everyone to, “Please enter the bus.” The queue shuffled forward, phones in hand. Mr Cork opened his TfL Move Free app. It took a moment before he could see the scanner built into the entry of the doorway. It was slim and silver, with a vertical ribbon of light passing through the middle. Mr Cork watched his fellow passengers carefully, as though taking notes for an exam. Yet each one walked on casually, as if it were nothing. They stepped on into the scanner’s light with their phones, and as the soft blue wash of the scanner turned green over their bodies, a quiet, permissive chime led them onwards. “Seems easy enough,” thought Mr Cork.

His turn came. Mr Cork stepped forward, phone pressed firmly to his chest. The light ran over him, from the crown of his bald head to the soles of his shoes. For a half breath it held steady. Then, without warning, it flashed hard red. His phone screen turned red too, displaying the message “Journey Resolution Form rejected. Entry denied.” As if he hadn’t gotten the message, the voice from nowhere said, “Vehicle stopped. Please exit the vehicle.” The quiet whir of the bus ceased and the strip-lights lining the cabin turned off. Mr Cork’s heart was beating quickly. The cacophony of red lights glowing against his skin, and the accusatory voice from nowhere made him feel guilty. Around him a suffocating politeness made things worse, as eyes were averted away and ears were blocked by earphones. He could feel the impatience of those behind him building.

“What the hell is this?” Mr Cork grumbled out loud, feeling his humiliation quickly transform into undirected anger. He looked toward the front of the bus, but of course there was no driver to release this anger on, only a blank pane of glass and the reflection of his own frustrated face staring back. From behind him came a soft voice. “Happens sometimes,” a young man in a suit called out, coffee cup in hand. “The system gets fussy if the form’s not validated. You might just need to refresh the app, or you can check with the staff over there why it was rejected. I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

“I’ve filled out the form just like everyone else. They all got on without a problem.” Mr Cork moaned over his shoulder.

Before the polite young man could answer, someone further back in the queue called out. “Oh come on, mate, just step side, yeah? We got places to be. If it says no then it’s doing the rest of us a solid anyway.” So London does still exist, behind this orderly facade, Mr Cork thought to himself. He felt the heat rise in his cheeks and sensed a ripple of consensus travel along the line at the heckler’s intervention. He withdrew, recognising a lost battle.

“Load of nonsense,” he exclaimed, as he stepped off the bus and waved his hand in the air. The engine of the bus immediately came back to life, resuscitated by Mr Cork’s removal. “Vehicle resuming journey. Please mind the closing doors.” “Oh shut up,” Mr Cork muttered, glancing back at the passengers getting on as he shuffled toward the help desk, gripping the Carnation can in his pocket.

The help desk was a small glass booth at the far end of Eastbourne Terrace, with a projected sign above that read “Passenger Resolution Support.” Adjacent to the booth were sets of screens for self-help. There was no one else waiting so Mr Cork went straight to the glass pane. On the other side sat a woman who looked about his age. She wore a dark blue TfL jacket, with her blonde hair tumbling down by her shoulders and a cheery expression on her face.

“Hi, I’m trying to get to Finchley Road, but the bloody bus rejected me. What’d it do that for?” He sounded pitiful.

“Sorry to hear about your trouble there, sir. My name’s Leah and I’d be glad to help you. Could you please give me your name and Move Free ID?” Caught off guard by her friendliness, Mr Cork passively complied. “Right, let’s have a look.”

Her fingers skated over the screen of her computer as she pulled up his Journey Resolution Form. Side-by-side with it ran ribbons of data from the X10 scanner he’d just passed through – pulse rate, body temperature, gait and… alcohol levels. “Looks like the scanner flagged your stability index. Ahh, you’ve had a few drinks have you?” She gave a quick laugh.

“So you can’t have a drink and get on a bus these days, then? Do they want us driving cars instead?”

“No, of course not. You can drink and get on the buses. Otherwise we might as well close them down every weekend! Just depends where you’re going and how many you’ve had.”

“I only had two!”

“Yes, but you also put on your Journey Resolution Form that you’re ‘connecting with my dead wife’, and put the address of someone who I can see is a total stranger to you. The system had already given you a high non-validation risk from that, and then you walked on after a couple of pints. Between the drinking, connecting with the dead, and turning up at random people’s houses, the system’s given you too low a stability index score to let you on. That’s Move Free doing its job pretty well as far as I can see, Mr Cork!” Leah laughed loudly this time.

Mr Cork shuffled about on his feet and looked to the side. Not much to argue with when she put it that way.

“Alright fine, well what do I do now? I’ve come all this way down with this bloody can of condensed milk, I can’t go back without delivering it to where I intended.”

Leah looked at him blankly for a moment, wondering what he meant about condensed milk, then sighed.

“Well I’m not really supposed to do this Mr Cork, but we can try to refill the JRF form with another journey type that would work for your current situation. Where did you say that old house of yours was again?”

“About a 20 minute walk from Finchley Road. 22 Reddington Road.”

“Well since you can’t validate that you know who lives there, we’ll need another way round. Let me have a quick scan of the area to see what we can do.”

Leah scrunched up her nose and focused on her screen as she scoured Mr Cork’s old neighbourhood for a potential solution. Mr Cork looked to his left and saw a pair of young tourists leaning towards the self-help touchscreens with their phones out, laughing quietly as they fumbled through the options. The screen gave off a glow that lit their faces with yellow, as they conversed, in French, with a polite but unmistakably robotic voice.

“Ah! Here we go. I’ve got it!” Mr Cork looked back towards Leah in anticipation. “There’s a 65+ Yoga-Cacao Detox Class happening soon, very near to where you’re heading. Goes from 3 to 4pm, so you’ll be fine for your return bus journey coming back too. I’ll upload your train times back up to Rugby and that should work.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. My daughter Violet has been badgering me to do yoga for as long as I can remember. I’m starting to wonder whether she planned this whole thing out! I’ve not done yoga in my whole life and I don’t plan on starting now.”

“Well you don’t actually have to do the class, but you are going to have to book and pay for it to validate the journey. I wouldn’t let the opportunity pass if I were you though, Mr Cork, those post-yoga cacaos really take the weight off old bones like ours.” Leah beamed and rolled her shoulders back.

“Right. How much is the class then?”

“60 quid.”

“Jesus – I could buy another house in Rugby.”

“Look, Mr Cork, I’m giving you a way out here even though I’m not supposed to. You’ll likely get through the scanner alright this time, even on your two pints. The TfL system’ll take a paid-for class booking, especially a detox one, instead of your weird walking dead and condensed milk stuff. Your stability index score should normalise.”

“Alright, alright, let’s do it. Do you mind giving me a hand?”

Leah helped Mr Cork pay for the class, fill out a new JRF and upload all the relevant information into the TfL Move Free app on his phone.

“All done Mr Cork. Should hopefully get through without the police coming after you.” She laughed.

Mr Cork headed back toward the bus station and it wasn’t long before the X10 arrived. He stepped on with the trepidation of a boxer getting back to his feet after a first round knock-down. He flashed his phone and then stepped into the frame of the scanner once again. A few seconds went by as the blue light pulsed. Another rejection and Mr Cork was ready to head back to Rugby, Carnation can and all. But the blue dissolved into green, spilling across his jacket and painting his cheeks with freedom. His phone flashed with the same confident green: “Journey validated. Enjoy your journey.” A welcoming chime followed as Mr Cork stepped forward into the bus.

He almost laughed, but controlled himself and smiled instead, feeling a heady mix of relief and defiance coursing through his body. Inside the air offered cool relief from London’s unseasonably warm springtime haze. He reached out instinctively for a handrail but there wasn’t one. Replacing what used to be the only line of defence against falling face first as the driver accelerated away before you took your seat, was now a set of panels which felt clean to the touch. And in fact the bus didn’t jerk away at all. Mr Cork slipped into a place by the window and observed the rest of the passengers getting on, one by one. Instead of an impatient crush of elbows and bags, the space felt open and orderly, as his fellow passengers slotted into their seats with quiet ease. Even the seat he was in felt better than the lumpy foam he remembered. Only once everyone was seated, did the X10’s voice from above announce its departure and gracefully glide off again. Mr Cork felt… comfortable. Violet’s face and voice popped up in his head. “I told you so Dad!”

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The bus cruised along noiselessly and Mr Cork watched the city in which he had once lived, worked and raised a family pass by. The neatly packed Victorian white houses of Maida Vale were now interspersed with modernist high-rises. Widened pavements hosted even more walkers than Mr Cork remembered, happily and busily strolling in the fair spring weather. All the shops, from the off licenses to the fashion stores, now had beaming screens to attract you inside. But the news stories of a homelessness crisis in London rang true. Amongst these walkers and shops were many cardboard houses and rough sleepers. It still saddened Mr Cork to see the wealth of London in stark contrast to its ubiquitous poverty. By the time they curved toward St John’s Wood, the green oval of Lord’s cricket ground appeared, hemmed in by a metal dome that now leaned protectively around it. Mr Cork felt the first ache of reminiscence since he’d travelled down from Rugby. He remembered long summer afternoons watching test matches, while his wife busied herself with the garden, occasionally checking with him what the scores were.

At Swiss Cottage, Mr Cork was jolted out of his reflective state by a band of schoolboys. They had done away with the bus stop queue and piled toward the doors, blazers hanging over their shoulders or tied around their waists. One of them, lankier than the rest, with tight black curls and his school tie ridiculously shortened, stepped on. The ribbon of light flared red in protest and the bus gave its warning chime as it came to a stop, shutting its engine off. This rejection which had so mortified Mr Cork less than an hour earlier provoked roars of laughter from the boys, who seemed to relish their rejection. Without a pause the lanky kid jumped backward onto the pavement as another howled out to him, “You’re never getting home!” Another burst of laughter was drowned out as the doors folded shut and the X10 slid on.

The bus announced its arrival at Finchley Road. Mr Cork rose with the others getting off and stepped down onto the sunlit pavement. He instinctively started to make his way towards Reddington Road, but he pulled out his phone and saw that the TfL Move Free app was directing him toward Breath and Bean, for his yoga class. It was just diagonally opposite to where he was. Dark green ivy tumbled down from the top of the windows and across the top of the building the words Breath and Bean were projected in curly script, alongside a crisp 3D logo depicting a lotus flower sprouting between two thin brown bars of chocolate. He thought of how much the class had cost, then of Leah’s gleeful advocacy of 65+ yoga and cacao. Mr Cork glanced at the time. He couldn’t see through the tinted windows, but felt a surprisingly genuine hint of curiosity at the prospect. “Well I have already paid for it,” he muttered to himself. The problem was that if he attended the class then he’d have to head straight back to the station afterwards, and wouldn’t end up visiting his old home after all.

Baffled by this unexpected quandary, Mr Cork stopped and looked around, only then truly realising that he had finally arrived at Finchley Road. Mr Cork had spent much time here with his wife. He took the can of condensed milk out from his pocket and observed the carnation displayed across its wrapper. He thought of his wife and what she would have said about all of this. After standing there for a while, and for the first time that day, Mr Cork felt a surge of happiness. He smiled. “She’d wonder what the hell I am doing walking to our old house with a tin of milk. And she’d much rather I do something daft like yoga and tell Violet about it later – icing on the cake for my battle with the bus.” With a deep sigh and still smiling, he walked over to a bin outside Breath and Bean and dropped the can inside with a thunk. Then without letting himself think too much, Mr Cork gingerly followed the scent of cacao through the sliding doors.

“I used to think we were the perfect couple who enjoyed spending time together and maintained a deep bond,” I said, lying on the bed with my fiancé, Karim. “But here we are, almost three years into this relationship, still deliberately trying to fit in with one another.”

Karim shook his head and glared at me, with my frustrated expression.

“I’m struggling to put myself into this relationship, Karim. I’m always the one apologizing. I always end up holding back my feelings. I feel insecure about expressing my feelings or doubts because I know you won’t hear them. Or worse, you’ll criticize or demean them. We are so dissimilar, our list of differences goes on and on. I want to fix this, to fix us.” I was struggling to put my feelings into words.

My lips pursed, tears welled up in my eyes. I hastily wiped them back, but they kept coming.

Karim rolled over me, sliding smoothly along the edges of the bed, landing on his feet, untroubled. He walked across the bedroom to the window, where a machine was located. It was white and looked vaguely like a photocopier or a refrigerator.

Karim plugged the machine’s power cord into the wall socket and it came to life with a beeping sound.

“This is a copy generator, Usha. It can create physical copies of me with slight variations.”

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I chuckled uneasily.

“Are you hoping a version of you from some other reality will strike a perfect balance with me?” I smirked, staring condescendingly at him.

Karim nodded, his face breaking into a wide smile.

“In one reality, I’ll listen to you; while in another, you’ll listen to me. In one, I’ll be the breadwinner; in another, you will. In one, we could change our location, while in another, we could change our jobs. We would differ only slightly in each reality. You could try living with many versions of me.

“Once you find a copy of me not to your taste, you simply create another reality, and you continue until you find a perfect balance.”

Karim spoke rapidly, his words tumbling out, but with a surprising clarity that cut through the rush.

“No, Karim, I won’t do it.” I said firmly, staring at him without blinking.

“But why?” Karim screamed, shrugging his shoulders.

His brows were furrowed, his face betrayed his frustration and anxiety. I always loved his innocence. It’s just too easy to get him triggered.

I wondered if I should share the truth with him. I realized things could get out of control if I kept my cards close to my chest right now.

I inhaled deeply.

“You don’t know this, but I have already tried that, Karim. Who we are right now is only one set from the many copies I have created. It’s been over two and a half years that I’ve been creating copies, hoping to find a fit between us. The failure of thousands of copies of us to make things work makes me think that we are just genetically incompatible.”

“But the point is,” I went on, “if our genetic makeup changed during the copying process, we would not be who we are. Our genetic makeup must be immutable in this copying process. Without a perfect match in our genes, making multiple copies makes no sense.” I confessed everything that I had learned from two years of dating versions of him.

“I don’t remember consenting to this,” Karim said, agitated.

“You did. Remember that adventure trip we took to Mars by teleportation?”

“Yes!”

“I paid for the whole trip, which made me the primary account holder with the teleportation company. And that gave me the right to copy you from the backup at any point in time after the trip began,” I explained.

“Oh god! I thought you were doing your part by splitting the bills equally!” Karim was appalled.

I looked away from him, avoiding eye contact and hiding a smirk.

“Girl! You’ve got a scientific bent of mind!” Karim exclaimed, in awe. “But you have gone too far with it!” He nodded, without taking his eyes off me.

I turned to look back at him. He was still staring at me, his face registered surprise and shock.

I read something to him, a quote from Nikola Tesla, trying to change the topic:

“Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings.”

I went on:

“If wanting to be alone was in his genes, no copy would have permitted him to have a girlfriend or lover, regardless of the changes in his outlook, perspectives, perceptions, or opinions.”

“Gosh! Isn’t this Major Histocompatibility Complex!” Karim screamed in disbelief.

“Where else did you think those prenatal genetic screening tests they were conducting on pregnant women would eventually lead?”

I paused for a moment.

“Eventually, Karim. Eventually…”

Karim stood staring at me; his mouth opened wide in awe as if I were roaring ocean waves.

“As far as I can glean from my other copies, I only seem to have known agonies, frustrations, disappointments, and feuds with you. You might have been a successful partner to me in just one or two realities. Do you know how embarrassing it is to see your relationship fail repeatedly, even after subjecting it to different circumstances, options, and choices? At one point, I felt such overwhelming failure that I wanted just to go back to the original you,” I tried my best to articulate how our relationship was a total failure.

For over two years, I had kept all of this concealed from him, hoping not to spoil his peace of mind and happiness. Now, however, I realized that by doing so, I had only been holding him back from finding his ideal match.

“Until humankind develops a tangible method to predict genetic compatibility, I think what we all should do is just mess around with one another in the name of love.”

Karim winced at what I said.

“Oh! What a let-down!” He uttered in a low voice as he exhaled slowly. He threw his hands up in the air and then rested them on his head. His eyes moved here and there. I imagined he was trying hard to make sense of everything I had shared.

“Is this why the internet is devoid of legit user experience reviews on these copy machines?!” Karim finally said, lost in thought.

“Embarrassments are something meant to be hidden, Karim.”

“Perhaps no one tried this solution, Usha.”

“Of course people are trying!” I stopped myself from laughing.

“I am pretty sure people are trying because it is, really, really hard to stay in a relationship that is not working without something very compelling to convince us.”

Karim closed his eyes. When he opened them, he looked like an enlightened person.

“Is there no way out? I can never think of anyone else in your place, Usha.” Karim said with his mouth downturned.

I leaned over and hugged him.

“So, are there going to be several copies of us falling in love with each other repeatedly?” Karim chuckled, clapping his hands. “I would love to grab every opportunity to love you, Usha,” he said, embracing me warmly. I instantly melted in his embrace.

If I get the love of my life, who cares about winning?