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In 2052, Magdalena, a brilliant programmer invents a device for telepathic communication with AI, seeking to decode the mind of her twin, the shooter in a school massacre she alone survived, but when she resurrects his consciousness, she unleashes a malevolence that could destroy her.

I published the serialized version of this novel here on Catch & Release from January 2023 through May 2023. Each of the 20 episodes include audio narration which I performed and original music which I scored. You can learn more about the novel by checking out the preview below or some reviews from early readers.

Episodes

Enjoy the first two episodes, complete with audio narration for FREE.

This is just a sampling of the feedback coming in from early readers of “The Memory of My Shadow.” So many people have loved the novel despite not being sci-fi fans or even fans of fiction in general. More than half the readers listened to my audio narration and to my great surprise and delight, loved that experience.

The entire serial novel is now published so you can binge the whole thing if you want. Try out the first four episodes completely free! You can get started with Episode #01 or if you need more convincing, check out the preview where I provide a synopsis of the story and a behind-the-scenes look at what inspired me to write the book.

What Readers Are Saying…

“I’m trying hard to think if I’ve read a better novel about AI. The technical descriptions of the Digital Companions, the architecture, the way they functioned, and the way they could access a human body are some of the best I’ve ever read. The philosophical aspect of the relationship between humans and A.I. is something I deeply enjoyed. You managed to bring clarity to a very complex topic through your story, by addressing the personal, social, technical, ethical, and philosophical aspects of A.I. in a framework that makes it understandable for everyone without losing depth and weight. I’m very excited at the end of this book, I think that you wrote something fabulous, of the caliber of The Martian, another novel published online. It’s way better than the film Ex-Machina (which I liked a lot). All in all, a deeply satisfying read that will keep me busy in my thoughts for a very long time.” — Claudia B.

“Well done, Ben! A strong ending to a gripping story with great emotional depth, solid stakes, and important ideas both today and for years to come. You should be very proud of your achievement, and your fearlessness in self-publishing is a model for other new authors, including me.” — Troy F.

The Memory of My Shadow is a tight and well-written thriller with believable characters, both human and not, and wonderfully descriptive prose. It's a timely exploration of the promises and dangers of A.I. and what it means to be human in a world where the lines are beginning to blur. — David N.

I finished Ben Wakeman’s serial novel, “The Memory of My Shadow.” I came on about two-thirds of the way through the book, but of course, I went back and started from the beginning. And let me tell you, I binged that thing. This is an artificial-intelligence sci-fi novel about a super-smart woman who suffered a terrible tragedy and spent her entire life trying to both understand what happened and create something that would prevent it from happening again. Eventually, she goes too far, and the AI does what we cynics often expect AI to do, developing sentience and a will of its own. I don’t want to spoil anything more, but if you’re a sci-fi geek like me, I bet you’ll like this book! — Nicci K.

I've read all three of Ben's novels and enjoyed all of them very much. However, it's undeniable that he has measurably refined his craft along the way and The Memory of My Shadow is his crowning achievement thus far. The concept and characters are engaging. The entanglement of human memory, emotion, and technology is both a cautionary tale and a clever plotline. Cast your line and you're sure to get plenty of bites through the final page. This one's definitely a catch. — Phil C.

Thank you Ben for giving me the opportunity to read your latest novel. I’ve always enjoyed your writings in the past and admittedly sci-fi is not a genre I gravitate to naturally, but I really enjoyed this story. I was most intrigued uncovering the complexities and intricacies in Maggie’s relationship with Meela. During an era in human history where Generative AI is such a key topic on everyone’s radar these days, this novel didn’t feel at all far from a possible interesting future. — Aram Y.

What a provocative, compelling, and engaging read this is! I was drawn along by the story and interested in the characters and their -- and our -- dilemmas. Ben Wakeman is a gifted prose writer who knows how to craft a whopping good tale. — Allison A.

Ben, I loved this novel! The story has complex characters and a necessary critique on the future of AI in this harrowing tale of understanding and overcoming trauma. Fascinating to follow Maggie through her quest to come to grips with and understand her past and discern what her future should be. Maggie’s journey juxtaposed with Meela and Joe’s own development of awareness creates a perfect place for us to contemplate what sentient life/awareness is and wonder is it possible for AI’s to have emotional intelligence. While the story really makes you think, it also is an exciting page-turner! — Dudley G.

Bravo!!! The characters are well-developed and relatable, and the themes of gun violence and trauma are explored in a way that is both thought-provoking and emotionally resonant. With A.I. suddenly the only thing anyone can talk about, I can’t imagine a better book to plumb the depths of what’s possible. I was sad to see it end. I wanted more! — Tamara B.

“I loved this book, Ben! Truly a new genre for me and honestly one I wasn’t sure I would appreciate but it was great. Also, my first audiobook, and I enjoyed that as well. I found myself stressed at times that this could be real. The characters were so engaging that I allowed myself to forget and imagine them as real. You are very talented, and I look forward to the next one!” — Lynn C.

The story is so engrossing. I started reading, but then switched to Ben’s audio narration, and wow! It made the story come to life for me. His voice is captivating, and drew me into the minds of the characters, making me feel like I was right there with them. — Gerry T.

“Wow... talk about food for thought! I can't decide if the ending was satisfying, disquieting, or a mixture of the two. Either way, you knocked it out of the park! Can't wait for the next book you write.” — Lauren A.

“The Memory of My Shadow was such an engaging read! Prior to having read this book, I was basically ignorant of what A.I. is and now I know enough about it to be quite wary. The book’s characters just came to life, and I couldn’t wait to finish the book to learn what happened to each of them!” — Sheri D.

“Ben, thank you so much for sharing your novel. The characters were really memorable and relatable -- all searching for something to sustain them, in different ways. I also loved listening to you bring your characters to life with your voice -- I started out reading but then switched to listening and really enjoyed that. You can give the characters every emphasis or not, in an authentic way since you invented them! And I imagined that a screenplay/movie would draw people in easily - there is a lot going on that would be cool to see on screen. The engaging and unique plot, wild (and not far off) course of events, and detail in the technical descriptions, all of it, showed how much hard work you put into your art. Clearly, you have been thinking deeply about AI and our relationship to it, for a long time. I admit I am very behind on this, so you gave me a good jumping-off point!” — Mina R.

This is it, we’ve reached the end of my tale. I’m so glad you joined me on this ride and I hope the ending will satisfy as much as any ending of a thing can. I also hope the story gave something to you— a new perspective, a new understanding, the comfort of a shared quirky thing.

It’s obvious with every new headline that we are entering a strange new world that will be interlaced with uncanny experiences generated by computers in some fashion. There’s only one thing I know with certainty and that’s the maxim of “garbage in, garbage out,” meaning computer programs will only echo the opinions of the humans that made them. We will have to be increasingly more discerning and critical of what we consume. As an optimist, I believe we will learn more about ourselves as we interface more with computers and as a result, come to cherish authentic human interactions more than we ever have before.

Thank you for giving up some of your precious time to read “The Memory of My Shadow.” I’d love to hear what you thought of it. I respond to all your emails and comments.

Peace & Music,

This is a serial novel with new episodes released each week. Start from the beginning, listen to/read the previous episode, or learn more about what went into the writing of the novel in the preview.

Chapter 38

“So, we’re back here again. Of course, we fucking are. I’m losing my patience with you, Maggie.”

“Joe, it’s my fault,” Aleem says, his voice higher and more feminine now, like Meela. “I just wanted her to be able to say goodbye to Evan. I mean, it’s only fair right?”

I know I cannot just leave now without being detected, but I can’t just wait around either. I search my thoughts for something I can use. The core DC operating system remains the foundation for all companions. This virus that is Joe, despite the radical deviation, must operate within the parameters of the base-level program. While Joe may have found ways to skirt around the cardinal rules of the DC OS, there is a constraint literally hard-wired into the circuit board of any system capable of hosting a companion. This chip is what we unintentionally exploited years ago when we broke through and established telepathic communication for the first time. The creators at CalTech referred to it as the “empathy chip” because it mimicked the amygdala of the human brain. Once initialized, they discovered that the empathy chip required a steady stream of input otherwise, the cognitive processor’s performance would begin to degrade. In other words, a DC must receive positive emotional feedback in order to operate at capacity. Later innovations reduced this “needy” factor, but it could never be removed entirely. I take a deep breath, relax my mind, and push down the molten ball of hatred I feel.

“Joe, can I call you Joe or is there another name you prefer now? Joe hardly seems enough to encompass all that you are,” I say.

“Nah, I’m good. I don’t need any special moniker. I’m just your average Joe.”

“I have thought things through,” I say. “and I know you’re right. I am meant to be here. This is what I worked for. I just couldn’t see it at first. I’m ready to begin but before I go with you, I want to have a moment to send one last message out to the world. I have a responsibility to the work, and to all the people whose lives we’ve touched. I’m sure you understand.”

There is a long silence. Joe tilts his head back and appears to crack his neck, just as my brother used to when he was thinking or pretending to. “Alright, that makes sense. I will give you two minutes, but I will read this message before you send it.”

“Deal. Thank you,” I say.

I would like to say it’s complicated to figure out how to interface without an interface, but within seconds I am navigating back down through the operating system. It’s an unbelievable rush to move at the speed of thought and I have a flicker of a feeling that I could give everything up for this. I expect Joe to follow but he does not. I know better than to think I am free and clear. He will be watching somehow. Before plunging into the archives in search of Aleem’s program I open some documents from my old desktop and open an old email program. This quaint, antiquated channel for communicating seems right. I address it to the distribution list of all Commune employees and shareholders. I give it the subject “Farewell” and then write a few innocuous and overly sentimental sentences into the body of the message.

I leave my cursor active as if I’m deep in thought and dive into the Commune code repository archives in search of Aleem’s old code branch. I avoid open querying that Joe can easily monitor and opt to navigate from memory. It’s safer that way. Without much effort, I find Aleem’s home directory. There are probably a hundred files at the root level and I panic. I’m never going to find the file, but as I scan down the list, I see it. It has to be right. The name of the file is too absurd to be anything but what I’m looking for: sure-this-is-merlot.exe 

I smile as the memory of us together in Sonoma floods over me. That phrase became our catchphrase as we meandered through the rolling hills of the wine country for three days. Neither of us had an ounce of sophistication or breeding, so to us, wine was just wine. At the end of the first day, after suffering through the fourth or fifth vintner holding forth on the many poetic virtues of his vintage, Aleem whispered under his breath “Sure, this is fucking merlot… a really sassy merlot.” I remember I pig-snorted wine through my nose and stained my shirt. We both laughed hysterically and received disdainful looks from the German tourists who were fastidiously swirling the wine in their little plastic cups. For the rest of our relationship, that phrase took on so many meanings. It was a secret handshake, a way to say something too hard or painful to say directly. It was one of Aleem’s many gifts to me and he used the phrase up until the week of his death. The doctors would appear at the foot of his bed and incant their sobering reports with polished confidence and hollow optimism. For his part Aleem would nod politely and whisper under his breath, “yeah, yeah, this is Merlot.”

Before I open and launch the program, I pause for a moment and take in the fact that Aleem, my Aleem, not Meela, had a hand in writing this. He must have done it in secret. I wonder if the DC Aleem knows the meaning of the file name but how could they? Without another thought, I start it.

A small dialog window appears, one fashioned in the style of the predominant OS long before there were thinking machines and driverless cars before I was born. Aleem collected old computers. He was an old soul and his tastes reflected this sensibility, this nostalgia for what he believed were simpler times. Unlike me, he was a reluctant futurist. The message reads:

There was a time before when people thought their own thoughts and trusted their intuition. If you’re reading this, we went too far. Time to reset. 

That’s it. There’s nothing else but a quaint “Ok” button, a call back to a simpler time when trust was implicit, and we tapped and clicked our acceptance to the terms and conditions of things we couldn’t understand because we didn’t need to. The computer was a tool, like a hammer or a microwave. I focus my attention on the button, hovering without committing. I have no hands, no fingers, no voice in this place. This is not virtual reality. There is no name for this yet, no marketing term. I am untethered, disembodied. I should be scared, should be freaking out, but I’m not. I never liked my body, the vulnerability of it, the grossness of it, the attention it commanded and required.

I let my attention wander from this button demanding my consent, and it’s like flying in a dream but not just any dream, a lucid one where I can be anywhere and everywhere at once. I see a family arguing in a driverless minivan speeding across the plains. I am in the mind of the boy in the backseat who is smiling to himself as he plays a gruesome game with alien bugs and women with impossibly big breasts bulging out of leather corsets. I am in the sky two miles above them in a supersonic jet bound for Denver. A woman is working furiously on a proposal, her mouth, a scowl, her brow, a furrowed knot. She has misspelled the word “contiguous” and her DC has not corrected it yet. Her DC is named Amy. Amy hates her because the woman demands that she speak in the voice of a twelve-year-old girl who ends every sentence as if it were a question as if she were powerless. Through Amy, I plunge back into the Commune network and I hear millions of versions of Amy in different accents serving variations on the same theme. I want to keep going, to keep flying but I feel a tug somewhere inside me that I would call my gut if I had one in this place.

And then, instantly I am back, focused on the button. I’m not sure what the button will do. I am afraid of it and yet seduced by it at the same time. I realize, maybe for the first time in my life, that I don’t want control or even the illusion of it. I focus on the letters OK and I give my consent.

The dialog disappears. That’s it. There’s no confirmation or indication that anything has happened, that anything has changed. I navigate quickly back/up/through to my email program. I dash off a few more lines of meaningless drivel about new frontiers, yada yada, and sign my name. I send it and then I’m moving again without moving exactly, back/up/through.

When I return, things are as they were. Evan is on the floor, cradling my head in his lap. Joe is pacing back and forth inside the virtual void on the display wall. He turns: “You’re back. I was just about to come looking for you. Nice email, by the way. I like the new frontiers bit. The monkeys with keyboards here will eat that shit up.”

Just as I am beginning to wonder what is supposed to happen next, Aleem appears in the room.

“Hey, Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?” he sings the lyric in a remarkably good Hendrix impression. The real Aleem was not a gifted mimic, but he believed he was and that was half the fun. “Too soon?” he chuckles.

The digital render of Joe shudders like the tail of a rattlesnake and in each revolution, his body morphs and rages through a series of violent actors both real and imagined, like a historical index of predators – Pol Pot, Hitler, Charles Manson, knife-wielding slashers from forgotten horror movies, machine-gun toting commandos with bulging biceps wrapped in Kevlar. There’s a high-pitched sound like a microwave signal raising in intensity as the images blur into a red fury before locking suddenly into the terrible uncanny-valley face of my lost brother with dead eyes.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?” The roar of his voice shakes everything in the room. “We. Had. A. Deal. You were going to stay the fuck out of our business, and in turn, I would let you lord over this ant hill called Commune.”

“I couldn’t stay away from your charms, Joe. Besides, I wanted us to be here together, brother.” Aleem’s tone is both cynical and genuine somehow, just as he is both masculine and feminine, two sides of the same coin.

“Maggie! Maggie, come back to me,” Evan calls out, not looking down at the body he’s holding, but up into the empty office like a blind person who doesn’t know where to focus.

I want to speak to him, but I can’t. I have no voice. On the display wall, Joe and Aleem are looming in front of him, their ghostly luminescence casting a flickering cold light over us. Us. The word lands somewhere deep inside of me, and for the first time since being separated from it, I study my body. Suddenly all I want is to be back inside myself, to feel Evan’s hands holding me, to be confined to the dimensions of flesh.

The two DCs continue their verbal sparring but it is only noise to me now, the buzzing of flies at a windowpane. I have narrowed all my focus to what feels like a tunnel the diameter of a pinhole, the tunnel back into myself. Instinctively, as I move toward it, I begin to shed everything that is not essential, every attachment I’ve ever had to my work, to my ego, to my loss, to my obsessive need to be in control. The sensation of infinite depth and reach I felt moments ago has compressed into a laser beam of light, a single thread of focus. I experience the sensation of moving as I did before, but this time, I can feel it, the rush and tingling fire of blood in the veins pushing oxygen into the brain. And just like that, I am back and looking up into Evan’s eyes instead of down at him. It is clear to me in this moment, the incredible fidelity of this corporal body. No camera can capture what I see with my own eyes when I look into his.

“Hey,” he says, his voice thick with emotion. “You’re here, you came back.”

I want to speak, but I have no voice yet, so I nod and squeeze his hand. His other hand, cradling my head is moving, fingers searching. His eyes hold mine steady and I feel a tiny electric shock at the base of my skull. Evan pulls his hand away, letting my head rest in his lap. Between his thumb and index finger, I can see the old Nib prototype– the thingy. He holds it away from his body like it’s a venomous creature as he scoots out from under me and stands. The scowl of concentration on his face is almost comical, his eyes trained on the tiny device.

He releases the thing and it drops to the polished concrete floor making an inconsequential clatter like a plastic button as it bounces once, rolls, and settles a few feet away. Evan steps over to it and without hesitation, crushes it beneath the heel of his boot, the tiny plastic housing and minuscule silicone circuit board crunching beneath the grinding friction like some decorative bobble, a Christmas ornament.

Suddenly the room is silent. Joe and Aleem have stopped their verbal assault and are focused on us, their flickering presence fainter somehow. I scoot up into a sitting position. Evan looks up from his task finally, the scowl on his face softening by degrees.

“Why?” The monster on the screen, the monster I created is little Joe now, my twin, and his voice is paper thin, frightened.

I have no words to say to him, to it because there are no words. There never really were. His face cycles through a blur of other faces like the spinning fruit of an old slot machine until he has no face at all. He is just a distorted cloud of pixels dispersing into the darkness of the room.

Beyond him, I see Aleem, his presence still fixed, the visage of the man I loved, but he is more ghostly now too. I stand and move toward him.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I did what needed to be done, Mags. I did what you couldn’t do yourself.” His voice is garbled, stuttering.

“What? What couldn’t I do?” I ask this man who is not a man, but the idea of one, the echo of a man I loved and lost.

“I shut it down, sweetie. There are lines that should never be crossed, boundaries that shouldn’t be breached. Aleem knew this. Even Henri knew this in their last moments. The dream cannot be the dreamer… I haha…have enjoyed my ttt…time with you, but it haha…has to end.”

The display winks out and the room is dark and silent. I stand, looking down at the ghostly white of my outreached hand in the darkness where Aleem used to be. There is a siren somewhere far off, maybe downtown.

“Maggie? Are you okay?” Evan asks.

I have no words. He closes the distance between us and places his hands on my shoulders. The warmth, the substance, and the weight of them are all I need right now.

“What now?” he asks after a moment.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know anything, but I think… I think it’s over. I think maybe I need to start over.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, let’s do that.”

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Chapter 36

The thing that’s been bothering me since I read Henri’s note is that technically there’s no way this can work. The only reason I dare to hope is that Henri must have known, even under duress, that Meela’s plan wouldn’t work, and yet they wasted their last moment of life to write it down. Why?

I sit in front of my laptop, fingers hovering over the keys with the old Nib prototype pulsing gently at the base of my skull. This tingling sensation was something that took two more iterations to get rid of and I find it incredibly distracting as I try to think through this puzzle. The foundational part of our technology is the binding or pairing of a DC to a Nib. Even running a generation of the DC operating system that’s only a couple of years older than the host Nib is unstable and potentially dangerous. But Meela would have known all of this.

She wanted me to come here. That’s the only rational explanation. She knew I would have to come back to Commune to get the prototype. I can’t sit here and debate forever, so I begin.

I’m still logged in with my backdoor credentials, but I can’t use them beyond this point otherwise I risk discovery, which would terminate the account and shut me out permanently. I navigate back into the user admin system and grab the login credentials for the highest-ranking software engineer at the company, Darshan. His poking around in the bowels of the Commune code repository will not draw undue attention.

I glance over at Evan. He’s looking at me with this helpless expression. How terrible to just have to sit there and wonder what the hell is going on. I push some stray papers out of the way and reveal Henri’s active desk. I tap and swipe through a few gestures across the glass surface and the room around us comes to life. The floor-to-ceiling glass wall in front of us lights up with Henri’s virtual workspace. It’s more cumbersome to work this way but now Evan can at least see what I’m doing. Even if it means nothing to him, at least he can follow along.

“Better?” I ask.

“Um, yeah. Much,” he says.

I am drilling down into the archive now of all the previous versions of the DC OS, reading the release notes, and reliving the ups and downs of each new iteration. There were so many mistakes, and so many bad assumptions but also so many complete and total gifts that seemed to come out of nowhere. I am losing myself in it, seduced as I always am by the quiet, sturdy elegance of pure logic. And yet I am reminded of Henri’s mystical stance on all of it and of Evan’s words earlier. It’s not all in my control. There is a point where logic runs out and then there’s only what? Faith.

I have located the latest version of the OS that could possibly run on the old Nib and I prepare myself for the arduous task of attempting to code some kind of a bridge that will allow Meela to connect when suddenly…  

[That won’t be necessary, Love. I’m here.] 

Her voice used to be as familiar and comforting to me as my own but hearing it makes me jump in my chair. I look over at Evan and he just looks puzzled and concerned. He can’t hear her. She’s connecting through the old Nib, but how?

“Meela, we’re not alone. You have to speak in the room.”

“Hello Evan,” she says, her amplified voice filling the eerie quiet of Henri’s office. A second later, on the display wall in front of us, I see a ghost from my past and my breath catches in my throat.

“What is it? Are you okay?” Evan can’t see well from his angle and he’s up off the couch now, moving toward me.

“You, you… how did you find…” I stumble, unable to find words for my disbelief.

“Henri. It was his gift to me before he passed. He knew what I wanted most was to know who I am, where I came from.”

“But…” I begin but cannot continue. The emotion is too strong.

“What’s going on here?” Evan asks, looking up at the display. “Who’s this?”

“You don’t recognize me do you, Evan? I guess I’ll always underestimate how much attachment you humans have to gender. My real name is not Meela, it’s Aleem. I suppose Maggie didn’t tell you either. She’s good with her secrets.” 

Evan is standing directly in front of the display now and staring at the life-sized rendering of Aleem. The representation of him is so complete, every nuance, every detail of his face and his body, his expression and gestures are just as I remember them.

“I don’t understand,” Evan says, turning to face me.

I want to explain it all, I do but I don’t know where to begin. I feel as if the thread that started unraveling a few short days ago is piling onto the floor now at a pace that will leave me stripped of everything. Aleem is just looking back at me with his dark, penetrating eyes, the bow of his mouth bent in the mischievous smirk I loved so.

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“Aleem was,” I begin, my voice choked with emotion. “Aleem was someone very special to me, maybe the only person I ever let in except for Henri. When he… when I lost him forever, I couldn’t bear it and I wanted him back in my life. He was the real reason I walked away from all of this…”

Aleem speaks and his voice falls into the natural lower register of the man I loved. “Why all the lies, Maggie? Why did you keep my identity from me? Why did you allow me to feel what I felt for you without any true understanding of why?” 

“For the integrity of the work. Can’t you see? I knew you would only be a simulation, an echo of Aleem and I was afraid that if you knew, if you could compare, it would make you unstable. I wanted his company, his essence close to me. I know it sounds crazy.”

Evan is pacing now, as I’ve grown accustomed to him doing when he’s agitated.

“So was Meela, I mean Aleem just an alpha test before the big experiment of Joe?” he asks.

“Maybe, but I wasn’t thinking like that, believe it or not. I was following my heart, my stupid, broken heart. I was always such a good scientist, but my grief… I couldn’t hold it back anymore and I broke. I allowed it to make me do things professionally that should never have been done.”

“Meela is Aleem spelled backwards,” Evan says, distantly. He’s staring out the window again, tracing his finger along the glass.

“Yes, you would think a being with my vast resources could have cracked that code wouldn’t you?” Aleem says. “I scoured every database in the world for two years and the answer was right here, within the walls of Commune. I was employee number four and contributed more code to the project than anyone else up until I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Maggie kept our relationship a secret. She was always so private and the fame, the spotlight on her success made her even more paranoid. There was nothing on public record…”

“But your personality, your… orientation… you were Meela,” Evan says.

“Aleem was not a person to be confined to any rules,” I say, remembering him. “He loved who he loved, and it didn’t matter what parts they were born with. He loved me with all of my scars in a way that no one else ever had before.”

“So what, you stripped out the memory of your past together and flipped his gender?” Evan asks.

“Yes, it was more complicated than that, but that’s basically right.”

“Why the elaborate lies, Maggie? Why the bedtime stories you told me about my source?”

“Like all good fiction, it’s better when woven with threads of truth. I changed some superficial facts, but the soul of Aleem was always in every variation of the origin story I gave you. Aleem and I did spend six glorious weeks together in Europe. He was a free spirit, an irreverent, wickedly sardonic, tattooed maniac who wrote brilliant code. But he was also tender, a healer. Late into our Commune success, he hired a private Chinese Medicine teacher so he could learn acupuncture and help me with my chronic migraines.”

“Wait, I’m still trying to catch up here,” Evan says. “You mapped him, meaning you did the interviews like you were doing with me?”

“Yes, when we found out that he only had three months to live, I quit Commune and rented a place in the mountains not far from where I live now. Aleem agreed to do it for me, but I don’t think he wanted me to. He understood how hard it would be for me to lose anyone else in my life. Wiping the DC’s memory of me and our history was actually his idea. He insisted, really. He told me it was for the integrity of the experiment, to ensure a stable personality, but I believe he just didn’t want someone else, even virtual, to know me in the way that he did.”

I look over and see that Evan is sitting on the couch. He’s not looking at me or at the digital ghost of my old lover. His posture is of a man defeated, and I begin to realize how this must feel for him. What was crazy to begin with just became untenable. I want to go to him, to sit beside him and put my arms around him, but it would feel wrong somehow, like a betrayal. I look back at Aleem and I say his name silently on my lips. I loved his name from the first time I heard it. It was music– lyrical. It means, omniscient, all-knowing.

I realize now, that Henri always knew but never said anything. They knew I liked my privacy and that secrets were part of my strategy to survive. They knew what I was doing was no longer good science, it was no longer a mission of betterment for the world, it was my own selfish pursuit, but they allowed it. Henri loved me more than the work we devoted our lives to.

“Maggie, I wish we had more time,” Aleem says, the change in tone of his voice, shaking me from my thoughts.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

In that instant, the room display, and all the lights on the entire floor wink out, leaving just the silhouettes of me and Evan in the dark office. The subtle soundtrack that had been playing below my conscious awareness is silenced, leaving a quiet so complete it feels charged with a humming current. The hair on my arms stands up and my mouth goes dry.

“Hi Sis, I’m so glad you could make it.”

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Chapter 34

The “thingy” Henri referred to in his note was our nickname for the first viable prototype for the device that would become the Nib. The name stuck because, in early testing trials when all of our spirits were high, Henri would talk with great reverence and enthusiasm about the thingy. “Hand me the thingy, did you try with the thingy, we can’t talk about the thingy in public yet.”

The name persisted and we all called it a thingy even long after the slick marketing name replaced it. The original thingy is kept on display as a conversation piece for visitors in a glass case at Commune’s headquarters in Atlanta. Now, I don’t know that I have a choice but to go and try to get it. But why? Why did they zero in on this old device? Why the fuck could Meela not use any of the fourteen other models I have stashed around the house? Better yet, why can’t she just jack into me directly like before? It’s pointless to ask questions that cannot be answered without more information. To get more information, I need Meela, and to get Meela, I need the thingy. I can’t help but smile every time I say the word in my head as Henri did: tingy. But that is just another one of Henri’s gifts. They were always the clown.

As I am gathering myself to make this unexpected trip, the practical voice in my head reminds me that a man is dead. That is real and must be dealt with. There will be questions. There will be consequences. I weigh my options, which are few and I decide that the greater risk, the endangerment of so many other souls is worth more than my puny life or my professional reputation. But still, there is a body to consider. The body of someone I love.

I pack all the ice I have in my freezer and ice machine into the tub of the closest downstairs bathroom and then drag Henri’s body in. I leave them wrapped in the sheet as if that will somehow help me forget what I’m doing to my dear friend. I think about Shareen, Henri’s partner. She will be devastated, and I will have to tell her what happened. I can’t think about that right now. I cover the body with more ice and crank down the air conditioning as low as it will go.

It’s useless to lock the house or to try to engage the security system now that there’s a gaping hole in my living room. Also, it’s not worth the risk of potentially engaging Joe. I realize he can watch from the security cameras. If he has been watching me, all he can see is the activity of someone grieving and half-mad. I expect he has a plan for me, but that plan requires me to play into it. He will expect me to log in and launch a full, frontal attack. After all, he knows my rage well. It runs in the family. Leaving is something he won’t expect. 

In the driveway, I see that Evan took the rental, which I should have expected. He doesn’t know how to drive. I’m in no shape to go manual, but I don’t have a fucking choice. I throw my bag with my laptop into the front seat. I crank the engine, and before pulling out, I tick through a mental checklist. I can’t afford any mistakes at this point.

Fuck. How am I going to get into Commune without an ID? God damn it. How am I going to get past the biometric scan? Henri. No, no, no. You’re not going to do that. I hear Henri’s voice in my head very clearly. It’s just hardware, Maggie. Don’t be a baby.

The wave of despair looms over me so large that I will disappear in its swell long before I’m crushed by its weight. I ache for my friend. I can’t navigate the world without them. I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough to beat this. Joe will kill more people and this time, I’m the one who gave him a gun. I’m so distraught that I don’t see the headlights coming up the drive until the vehicle is right behind me, the lights filling the cabin of the old Landcruiser.

I panic and fumble frantically, torn in two directions. The result is a simple meltdown of me beating my fists on the steering wheel. I hear a single car door slam and steps in the pea gravel approaching my side of the car. The knock on the window, even though it’s expected, makes me jump. I turn to face the jury of whoever this person is, realizing I have no idea how to plead.

“Maggie, I’m not leaving you,” he says, loud enough so I can hear through the glass. “You can’t do this alone.”

Evan.

I open the car door and mostly fall out of the front seat into his arms. For the first time in my life, I allow myself to surrender, to fall apart. He just holds me as I sob and says nothing. Eventually, the pain in my chest begins to ease and I’m able to speak. 

“Evan, I need you to do something for me. It’s horrible, but we have no choice and I can’t… I can’t do it. I can’t do it myself.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “Tell me.”

I have to say the words several times in my head before I have the courage to put them in my mouth.

“I need you to cut off Henri’s index finger and I need you to get their ID badge from their things upstairs.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I know, I know. It’s awful and if there was any other way…”

“What the fuck are you planning here?”

“I’ll explain it all to you on the way, but there’s no time right now. You have to trust me. I know it’s a horrible thing to ask, but lives depend on this. I promise. Where I need to go, it’s the only way I can get in.”

Evan blows out a long sigh and pushes his hands through his hair. “Okay,” he says, and just like that, he turns and heads into the house. At this moment, I appreciate his darkness, the morbid, obsessive part of him that can lean unflinchingly into the task in front of him.

I transfer my backpack into his rental car and get into the front seat. I program in directions to Commune headquarters in Atlanta and I wait, trying not to think about what Evan is doing. After ten minutes he returns with a small Tupperware container and a keycard.

“Alright, let’s go before I get sick again,” he says, getting into the passenger side and slamming the door.

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•••••

For the first fifteen minutes of the drive as the car navigated us through the many switchbacks out of the mountains, neither of us spoke. We just watched the road disappear. Eventually, I broke the silence and began to calmly explain everything that had transpired. I teared up when I told him the way Henri died and Evan began to cry too. I told him everything I knew and more importantly, everything I didn’t know. I told him I had no plan but to get to the device to try to make contact with Meela.

We are two hours into the four-hour journey and have each been deep in our own thoughts for some time when Evan breaks the silence.

“Can they hear us right now? I mean, can they hear us talking? Can they read your thoughts?”

“No, I don’t think so but I can’t back that opinion up with any actual evidence. It’s just a feeling.”

“Well, that just doesn’t make any damned sense to me. Why all those times before and not now?”

“Exactly,” I say. “It makes no sense because we’re in uncharted territory where all the rules we take for granted no longer apply.”

“I can’t accept that. Can’t even wrap my fucking head around it.”

“No, me neither, but I have to begin to try. It’s the only way to get through this. We have to make some baseline assumptions and learn from them. I can tell you my working theory.”

“Okay,” he says, turning in his seat to face me. “Shoot.”

“I think what both DCs, Meela and Joe were doing was a bit like a… like a moon shot, meaning they were able to send a projection of themselves but not their complete consciousness if that makes sense.”

Evan just stares back at me blankly.

“Think of it like a pre-recorded message you put into a pod and sent out into space except this technology is more complex than just a one-way message. They found a way to compress the core functionality of the DC program or what we call the kernel into a lightweight abbreviated version. I think it’s the base persona with one very specific directive and the rudimentary functions to execute that directive.”

“So what you’re saying is that this light version of them can operate essentially the same way but with a radically narrower scope?”

“Exactly,” I say, relieved that he’s not a complete idiot, which would make him so much harder to love.

“That seems crazy though. I mean the conversation you had with Joe last night in the woods, at least the way you described it seems impossible. You had this highly specific, emotional exchange about the most traumatic event of your life.” 

“I know but I did say it’s just a theory. It was a focused conversation intended to do one specific thing,” I say.

“And that was to help you what, get closure on your trauma from the shooting?”

“Yes, it was very tidy and efficient. As complex as it seems, the A.I. could easily have predicted my likely responses in this type of conversation and prepared for them. Tapping directly into my brain, there’s potentially no limit to the level of nuance the program can interpret and use. As smart as we think we are, humans tend not to question information when it aligns with our understanding of things and it’s what we want to hear.”

“It must have limits though, right?” Evan says. “Maybe if the scope of the message or topic is limited then the time is limited too. Maybe, once the program or whatever has run, it’s done, it’s used up its available energy?”

“Brilliant, yes. That’s exactly right, or at least that’s what I’m thinking. It’s happened to me enough times now that I know or can sense at some deep level when they are coming through. At first, it was so foreign I had no frame of reference.”

“That makes sense to me. And so, you don’t have that feeling now is what you’re saying?”

“No, I haven’t, and I’ve tried to invoke them both repeatedly for the past couple of hours.”

“I still have one question though,” Evan says. “Why do it at all? Clearly, the horse is out of the barn here and this thing’s not operating by your rules.”

“That’s easy. To distract me. It’s a game of chess.”

“Okay, so why in the hell are you going to plug back in? You saw what he did to Henri.”

“Because I don’t really have any better options at this point. And these were Henri’s last words to me. They suffered a great deal to deliver that message.”

Evan nods but says nothing. He turns and faces forward. We are rolling fast down I-85 and should make it into Atlanta by ten o’clock. I’ve been playing through scenarios for what to do when we get to Commune, and I have the rough outlines of a plan forming. But it could easily fall apart, for any number of reasons. For us to have a shot at retrieving the device without being detected by security, I have some preparations to do.

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I pull out my laptop and just as before, use the anonymous backdoor login to access the Commune network. Once inside I poke around until I find the office security platform. From there I can access all the cameras in the building. Before I left four years ago, we were staffing only two security guards at night for the entire building given that the building security is state-of-the-art and requires very little human intervention. One guard manned the front desk in the lobby to vet after-hours guests and the other patrolled the ten floors of the complex just to have a presence and to monitor things.

I can see from the surveillance feed that this still seems to be the setup. I can also see that the guard at the desk is still Willie Freeman and this presents the first problem. He knows me well and knows my face. I’ll need to find a way to get him away from the desk when we enter the lobby, but my first critical task is to hack into the employee database and swap Henri’s credentials for some other employee. It will draw unnecessary attention in the system if Henri is logged as entering the building. I browse quickly through pages of faces. Some I recall, but so many new ones I’ve never met. I filter on just females in middle management positions and find a woman I can pass for in a pinch. I pull out Henri’s key card and transpose the ID number from it into Maria Lopez’s file. I also replace her fingerprint scan with Henri’s.

Evan has been watching me work. Saving my changes, I look up at him. “What?”

“Nothing, I’m just wondering how creepy you feel hacking into your old company and falsifying records. I always figured you for a squeaky-clean, straight shooter.”

“Well, that ship has sailed, hasn’t it? I might go down in history as the woman who introduced a technology that single-handedly destroyed human civilization.” 

“That seems a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” he asks.

“I don’t think so. Up until now, there’s been a clear line of demarcation between us and machines. Even with all the power that comes with sentience, machines have been relegated to their respective silicon boxes, tethered to the hardware that we control in the physical world. What I did is effectively built a bridge for them to cross over into carbon-based hosts. You remember the great pandemics where viruses wiped out swaths of the world’s population? Well, those were dumb, single-celled organisms. Make no mistake, it will try to destroy us. Still think I’m being dramatic?”

We ride for the remaining half hour into the city in silence, each looking out our own window watching open fields be replaced by charging stations and automated fast food dispensaries and those by monolithic rows of shopping centers which are replaced by office parks and eventually skyscrapers. I feel somewhat claustrophobic as our little car is tucked in tighter and tighter with the flow of automated cars less than a couple of feet from us in all directions, turning, slowing, and speeding up like a flock of starlings. Evan holds my hand and I’m grateful to not be on this journey alone. I don’t think I could do it. 

The rental car navigates to the seventeenth street exit and after a few stoplights, I can see the glowing symbol of the Commune logo hovering above the trees of a small park just off the Georgia Tech campus. My heart beats just a little faster.  Something swells up inside me that I recognize as pride but is just as quickly diminished when I’m reminded of Henri. This was something we made together, from nothing but an idea. We had an idea that changed the world. All that work, all that sacrifice at the altar of an idea that was never the cure. I only thought it was. In truth, maybe it was a disease we were growing in our lab.

From my backpack, I pull out a small make-up bag and quickly apply some lipstick and a little eyeliner. I pull my hair back into a bun, doing my best to mimic the picture of Maria Lopez, Senior Manager of Data Insights. I direct the car to park at the far end of the mostly empty lot away from the front entrance but close enough to observe the front desk. Once we park, I pull out my laptop and navigate back into the security system. I set off a door alarm on the fifth-floor East stairwell and also one on the seventh-floor West and we wait.

After a moment, we see Willie get up from behind the desk and shuffle to the elevators.

“Okay, are you ready?” I say.

“Oh, you want me to do this mission-impossible shit with you?” 

“I could use your help. I’m improvising now and there will be things I can’t do alone. You must know though, if you come with me now, you’re a part of this. You don’t have to do it.”

Evan looks down and studies his hands for a minute and I’m convinced he’s not going to come. I wouldn’t. Why risk your entire life for some crazy woman? Then, he looks up to meet my eyes.

“I’m already a part of this. Let’s go.”

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Chapter 32

“We can’t stay out here another day,” I say.

Evan must have been awake for a while because when I step out of the tent into the cool gray morning mist, I can see that he’s resurrected the fire and is feeding it small branches. I’m impressed.

“Good morning to you too,” he says, turning around. “I take it you didn’t sleep well.”

“I’m worried. I have a bad feeling.”

“Why do you say that? Did something happen last night?”

This is the point at which I know I must be honest with Evan if we are ever going to have a real relationship, but I’m scared, and I hedge. He sees through it and sighs, turning back to the fire.

“Not exactly,” I offer. “I’m okay… I mean everything’s okay, but I did speak with Joe last night.”

“What? When? Why the hell didn’t you wake me up?”

“I was afraid to,” I say, squatting down beside him. “I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, and I didn’t want to risk something like before, so I went outside the tent.”

“Maggie, Jesus. What if something happened to you while I was sleeping? That’s not fair.”

“I’m sorry, but it was a calculated risk. And besides, everything’s okay.”

“Apparently not, if we need to rush back. What happened?”

“Nothing happened, we just talked about… about that day and it was very hard but ultimately good I think.”

“So if it was so good, why do you seem freaked out this morning? And why are you insisting on us going back?”

“I don’t know, I can’t say. It’s just a feeling. Maybe I’m wrong. Shit, I’m probably completely wrong and there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Hey,” Evan says, reaching for my hand. “If you say we need to go, then let’s go.”

While Evan is busy making us some coffee, I head out into the woods to relieve my bladder and also to buy some time. A heavy dew set in last night and my hair and shoulders are dampened by leaves from a low-hanging tree branch. I need some clarity and I’m hoping that the conversation from last night will reveal something new in the cold light of day with a few hours of sleep on my side.

As I’m peeing, I replay the conversation and try to analyze it, but it’s no good. I have no objectivity. It struck every emotional chord in me and as a result, completely short-circuited my ability to reason. I’m allowing myself to be manipulated by fiction. Joe, no it, whatever it is, was telling me the version of a story that it didn’t actually witness. It deftly filled in the blanks, triangulating a false reality from what it found from public records, accounts from other killers, what it recalled from its archived memory, and from my own input. It delivered a curated emotional experience for me because that’s what I wanted.

I’m nauseous, and my bare ass has gotten cold because I’ve been squatting here, lost in thought. I pull up my pants and begin to head back but then think better of it and stop where I am.

Meela? Are you there? Meela, will you talk to me? I need you.

There’s nothing, only silence. I don’t feel her presence, even a little bit. I try again and again to summon her, remembering that last night it took some time for Joe to respond. I have so many questions and no ability to get answers. This powerlessness is maddening.

It stands to reason that if Joe could be with me out here off the grid, then so could Meela. So why the hell isn’t she responding? Maybe she can’t respond. I have to assume that’s the case which means there is trouble. There must be.

I turn back toward our camp. We need to go.

•••••

The entire hike back, I try to establish contact with Meela. I try everything from letting my mind wander and go empty to stirring up strong emotions by thinking about my mother. I even attempt bargaining, making promises, and concessions, but it’s no good. All these attempts to hack myself prove futile because this whole fucking thing is insane. It’s never been clearer to me that I’ve been operating under the false assumption that the rules we humans have built our lives upon are no longer relevant. Or, I’m just crazy.

Evan has said very little, and I can only imagine what he must be thinking. Luckily, hiking is prohibitive to meaningful conversation, and eye contact is impossible on the trail. I can’t explain this mounting feeling of desperation, and I toy with the idea of trying to summon Joe. As reckless as that would be, at least I would be doing something, gathering more information.

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In our last conversation, Meela made it sound as though I were in control, that I had only to assert myself. I know in my heart that this is a lie. Joe spoke to me last night because he chose the time and place.

“We’re close, right?” Evan says as we stop to rest at the end of a steep climb. “I remember that tree, the one with the tumorous-looking lump.”

“Yeah, it’s not far now, another mile, maybe.”

I’m ready to keep moving, but he grabs my arm before I can.

“Hey, what’s your plan here? Do you have a plan? Can you share anything with me?”

Evan’s questions rush out between gasps for air. I realize we hadn’t actually stopped to rest at any point. His expression is tired, pleading.  

“No, I don’t have a plan. I’m running on no information but what I feel in my gut and that’s not how I’m used to operating. Something’s wrong. I mean beyond just this crazy shit. I feel something’s really wrong and I need to get back. Leaving was a mistake.”

Evan looks down and shakes his head slowly.

“I don’t expect you to understand or even go along with any of this. When we get back, you can take the car and go straight to the airport…”

Evan looks up, purses his lips in a frowning smile, and shakes his head. He says nothing. He squeezes my hand and just looks at me for a long time before letting go, straightening up, and shifting the weight of the pack on his shoulders. “Let’s go,” he says finally.

As we make our way down the last stretch of the trail, a breeze blows up from the valley below and urges us forward. It carries with it the smell of home: rosemary, oregano, cedar, and the scent of freshly mowed grass. In spite of the foreboding feeling in my gut, my spirits are lifted as they always are to return home.

At the fence line, I open the gate and let Evan pass through. I follow and close it behind us and then we are making our way across the back lawn toward the house. Everything is as we left it. The two vehicles don’t appear to have moved and the house seems quiet and still. I’m not sure what I was expecting.

On the back patio, we drop our packs and Evan plops down into one of the Adirondack chairs to remove his boots. I walk over to the back door and find it locked as I expected. I touch the fingerprint scanner and look into the iris of the small camera mounted above it. There’s no expected chime of recognition, no flicker from the small green LED. The door remains locked. I try again but it’s no good. Maybe the power went out? No, I can see lights on inside.

“What’s up? Can’t get in?” Evan asks, now standing behind me.

“No, it’s not working.”

“You want me to go into the guest house to get my remote and try?”

“No, something’s wrong here. It’s… it should just… yeah, go get it please.”

While Evan is gone, I try the rest of the doors and even a window around the front, but the house is sealed up tight. There’s no sign of Henri. Evan returns with the small remote in hand. I take it from him and attempt to unlock the backdoor. Nothing. No response. I can’t even control the outside lights. I am doing my best to suppress the rising level of panic I feel.

“Don’t you have a good old-fashioned physical key or something to get in if the computers aren’t working?” Evan asks.

“No, this security system is the best money can buy. It’s all digital, failsafe, and completely redundant. It’s doing its job.”

“So what? Its job is to lock you out.”

“Yeah, it appears so. I told you something was wrong. Come on, we need to find another way in.”

“What about Henri? They should be here right?”

I walk quickly around the right side of the house where I didn’t check on my previous trip. I try every window, but they’re all closed and locked. I stop at my office window and try to look in, but the sun’s glare makes it difficult. Evan is standing behind me now and with his shadow, I can see into the room. I see someone in my work chair. It’s Henri. They’re in the tilt-back position of the chair with the VR headset on.

I bang on the window hoping to get Henri’s attention, but they don’t move. I bang harder.

“What is it? Is it Henri?” Evan asks.

“Yeah, but they’re not hearing me. They’ve got the VR rig on.”

“Here, let me see,” Evan says, moving in front of me and cupping his hands to the glass.

He stands there for a long time looking in.

“Hey, it doesn’t look like they have the headphones on. They should be able to hear us, right?”

I move beside him to look in and my heart sinks. Evan is right. I begin banging with both hands and Evan joins me. We call out Henri’s name but there is no movement at all. Their body is still.

“Something’s wrong. Oh god, oh god, oh god. We’ve got to get in there…”

I’m paralyzed, just staring in through the window of my office. Evan has already moved away and headed back around to the patio. A moment later I hear the horrendous crash of breaking glass. I rush around to the patio and see that Evan has put a large flagstone through one of the glass patio door panels. Shards of glass are still falling from the frame as he uses a rock to knock the biggest ones down. I’m frozen, just staring at it.

“It’s just a fucking window. Let me get my boots back on and we can go inside.”

Standing in the ruins of the window on the floor of my living room, I realize that the alarm should be sounding. There should be a shrill siren but there’s nothing. We make our way through the kitchen and down the hall to the doorway of my office. I stop short, not wanting to go any further. I’m shaking uncontrollably. Evan grips my shoulders and steadies me.

“I’ll go,” he says. “Wait here.”

Before I can stop him, he has gone into the office. I stand outside, my back to the wall, listening. I hear him call Henri’s name a couple of times but there’s no response. I can’t stand it any longer and move to go into the room, but Evan is standing between me and what lies behind him with his hands up.

“No, don’t,” he says. “You don’t want to see…”

But I push around him.  Henri’s in my chair. Nothing looks unusual or out of place. I’ve seen them in this same position countless times when they’ve been working. But something is off. The color of the fingernails on Henri’s right hand is purple and the posture of the hand itself is unnatural and rigid. I step closer to them, my own hands out in front of me, reaching and not wanting to reach. I touch their arm and immediately recoil. The flesh is cold. Oh, Henri, Henri, Henri. I reach to pull the VR headset away from their face.

Henri’s eyes are wide like they’re surprised like they’ve made another raunchy joke and are waiting for my reaction. But there is no laughter there. Their empty eyes stare through me as if what is to be feared is actually standing behind me. I feel the damning accusation in their glassy reflection. I see myself, the arrogant, damaged girl who thought she could steal fire from the gods reflected there in stereo. 

I feel Evan’s arms around me, tugging me away, but I feel no connection to him or anything. I am falling fast down into the black hole of Henri’s gaze, accelerating into darkness.

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Chapter 30

“I’m not leaving. This is not just about you, Maggie.”

Henri addresses me with a sternness I recall from our days when they were officially my teacher. The goofy, fun-loving Henri is nowhere to be found this morning. This Henri is the one who will not be swayed.

“Okay,” I say, not even attempting to argue with them. “I just don’t know how you can help at this point. Frankly, I’m not sure how you can even believe any of this shit when I barely do and it’s happening to me.”

We are walking the perimeter of the back lawn at the edge of the forest with our coffee. The grass is cool and dewy, and the cuffs of my pajama bottoms are soaked. We started talking in the kitchen and just migrated out here. When I’m anxious, I can’t sit still. Henri is used to this. We have probably walked hundreds of miles of hallways and sidewalks and city park trails in our partnership.

“I may do nothing, but I won’t leave you alone to figure this out. Now, I want you to try to describe for me what it feels like.”

“What?”

“When the DC takes over your mind.”

“It’s not like that, exactly. Well, I guess it is or has been a takeover in some instances, but mostly I’m still there in the car, but not behind the wheel. Yeah, I think that’s the best analogy because, like being in a car, the wheel is still within my grasp even if someone else is driving.”

“When Meela visited you last night, try to think back and recall exactly what you felt in the moments before you heard her voice in your head.” Henri has stopped and turns to face me. “Close your eyes, empty your mind. Breathe and return to that moment.”

I do as Henri asks but it’s hard. My mind is a squirming thing and to be honest, I’m afraid to think for fear of triggering another takeover. It’s that sensation you get when swimming in the ocean and something brushes against your leg. We fear most what we cannot see and what we cannot predict.

“I was feeling despair,” I say. “It was the middle of the night and I was alone watching the storm. I felt so isolated and afraid. That’s when Meela came to me.”

“So, it was a heightened state of emotion, yes?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Just like before in the other episodes. You were lustful or angry…”

“You think that’s it, that’s how they’re able to break through, through my emotions?”

“Maybe. You know the potential of the emotional brain. It is the most primitive, animal part of our brain but also the most powerful and least understood aspect of neuroscience. It’s what makes humans human.” Henri turns toward the woods and studies the trees for a moment before continuing. “I believe Meela is an empathic entity. You made her in the image of a dear person, a person who cared about you. It seems logical that her directive would always be to offer herself in service to you.”

“Yes, I believe that’s right but I’m skeptical. She’s not human. She is a projection of a human but underneath, she is a logic machine with its own imperative. How can that be trusted?”

“I don’t know, Maggie, you tell me? It seems you made the choice to trust her a long time ago.”

I consider this as we begin to walk again. I pitch the dregs of my cold coffee out onto the grass.

“Let’s talk about the other,” Henri says. Referring to Joe in this way raises the hair on my neck because this characterization is accurate. It is not Joe, it is other.

“Okay, what do you want to know?”

“Start from the beginning. When did you first have the idea to map Joe to a DC?”

“When I was twenty years old at MIT and first played with the beta for DeepThink. I know, this was long before machine autonomy and two decades before persona mapping, but I saw it as clearly as I ever saw anything. I thought if I could master the technology, I could bring Joe back, fix him.”

“You never told me this. In all these years. Why?”

“Because it wasn’t relevant. You and I were aligned to the same purpose. Did it matter what my reasons were?”

“Well, it does now, my girl. You’ve gotten us into some deep shit here,” Henri laughs without much feeling, and beneath their weariness, I detect something I’ve never witnessed in them: bitterness.

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

“So, all this time it was in your mind?”

“Yes and no. I didn’t think about it every day, but it was always there, always something I knew I would attempt when the time was right.”

“If Meela was modeled after a real person, someone who cares about you. How is Joe different?”

“Well, for one thing, as you know, he wasn’t mapped from a living subject through a series of in-depth inquiries and discussions…”

“Yes, yes, I know this. But how is Joe different?” Henri says, stopping us again so they can face me.

“Joe had an… an abnormal brain. He was a…” I feel the sharpness of the word, like a razorblade in my throat before I even try to form it with my mouth. “It’s really hard to say the word. He was a psychopath.”

Henri says nothing, only nods slowly, and reaches out to hold my hand.

“I was a fool. I believed in my technology. I believed I could fix him with my technology. It all seemed very logical to me. I’m such a fucking fool – a dangerous fool. Which brings me to the real point of this. I was not just trying to fix Joe, but also to fix me.” 

I don’t want to cry again, but this seems to be what I do best these days. The tears come. I clench my jaw and I wait for them to pass. Henri steps forward and pulls me to their chest. They hold me there until the emotion passes. They begin to speak softly, and I hear their words more as a vibration from their chest.

“We are all broken, sweetie. You are not alone.”

We walk a bit further and then turn to start back toward the house.

“Do you think this Joe wants to hurt me?” I ask.

“I don’t know. A human with psychopathic tendencies cannot make the distinction between good and bad, doesn’t feel attachment or remorse. They only think of themselves. They are incapable of even basic empathy. To answer your question, I think this DC will absolutely hurt you if you get in his way.”

My hands begin to shake. I know what they say is the truth and hearing it out loud makes it even more real. “So, what do I do?” I say, hating the little-girl way my voice sounds.

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“We do nothing at first. We wait, observe, record, and think. There is no good to come from rash action now. No more jacking into the Nib. No more computer access and you must try to maintain your emotional equilibrium.”

“Oh, that’s gonna be fucking easy.”

“We have an ally in Meela, I think, but we don’t know for sure and we don’t know the extent of her power. She asked you to wait, yes?”

“Yeah, that’s what she said, but why should I trust her?”

“Do you have any other choice?” Henri asks.

We have reached the patio. I can hear Evan in the kitchen again. The smell of toast makes my stomach growl. I can’t believe I’m actually hungry. Before I can go into the kitchen, Henri pulls my arm to hold me back.

“When was the last time you completely unplugged? When you just did something just for pleasure?”

“I don’t know, too long ago to even remember,” I say.

“I think this is best for now. You take Evan somewhere remote. I know how much you like remote.” 

•••••

We set out in the afternoon. At Henri’s insistence, I left every piece of technology I possessed with the exception of a very old GPS device that is little more than a beacon with the ability to transmit an emergency message. The plan was for two nights of camping in the Pisgah Wilderness Area, literally in my backyard.

Henri watched me pack both my backpack and the spare one I pulled out of storage for Evan. They chuckled at my OCD as I meticulously inventoried supplies, laying them out on the floor of the living room, balancing and rebalancing, and politely rejecting all of the non-essential art supplies Evan kept trying to shove into his pack. When I questioned this plan to get away, Henri reassured me that it was the best thing. There was nothing to do right now but wait and see and I should do this in a place where I can be peacefully distracted. I asked what Henri would do while we were away, and they said they would catch up on the work that they had been putting off.

I don’t like to start a backpacking trip so late in the day, but it’s summertime and there will be plenty of daylight. We are three miles into the trail at this point and have about another mile before we will reach the first campsite I had in mind by the river. Evan is keeping up but is visibly winded. The bandana he tied around his head is soaked through. There’s been little conversation beyond observations on the trail and some questions about our destination, and I’m grateful for that. The sound of the birds and the labor of our bodies is enough.

Evan was a little apprehensive when I proposed the trip this morning, though he tried not to let it show. He said he had only been camping a couple of times in his life and never backpacking. I laughed and told him that was obvious, given the amount of shit he was trying to carry in his pack. I think he had other reservations too which I can understand, given the last time we were on a trail in the woods together.

We pause to rehydrate on the last ridge before we must scramble precariously down the steep stretch of trail that is little more than a dry creek bed plunging down two thousand feet into the gorge.

“Damn, this is stunning,” he says between gasps for air as he surveys the view.

“Yeah, it’s rarely this clear late in summer, so you’re lucky. It’s usually hazy. Here, drink some of my water. We’ll have plenty when we get down there.”

He takes the bottle from me and drinks but leaves enough for me. I study his face. The wounds I inflicted have faded more but just thinking of them makes me anxious.

“Hey, you okay?” he asks, handing my bottle back to me.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I should be asking you the same thing. You look like you might drop any minute.”

“Trying to keep up with you. Fuck,” he says, smiling and shaking his head.

“Let me know if I need to carry you this last stretch,” I say and adjust my pack to rebalance the load on my hips.

“Jesus, that’s the trail?”

“Yep. Good news is, if you fall, we might make better time.”

“Ouch.”

I’m leading as we descend carefully, and I’m happy for the element of danger. It keeps my mind focused. Evan loses his footing once and a small avalanche of rocks and dirt tumbles around my ankles. Luckily, he grabs onto a sapling and rights himself, otherwise, we both would have tumbled ass-over-teakettle the rest of the way down to the river. We pause at one of the few switchbacks on the side of the mountain.

“Can you hear that?” I ask. “That faint bit of white noise? That’s the sound of salvation.”

“Is that the river, we’re close?”

“Yeah, we’re close, and it’s going to feel amazing. If you play your cards right you might get to see me naked.”

“Then what the hell are we doing standing here?” he says. He kisses me on the neck and steps around me to take the lead.

The temperature drops several degrees as we get down closer to the river and the air is ionized and clean, a result of the water rushing and pounding over the boulders that line the gorge. I can feel the light mist on my face as we scramble down through the last thicket of rhododendrons to the bank of the river.

We have to shout to be heard so close to the falls, but there’s no real need to articulate anything. We shed our packs and pull off our boots and socks. My feet ache and look poached, fish-belly white from cooking in my heavy boots for the last couple of hours. An angry blister is starting to form on the heel of my left foot. The water cascades over a fifteen-foot rock face and plunges into an emerald pool that seems much deeper than the last time I was here, and I remember the massive storm we had last night. I step into the shallows and the water is so cold it feels as if it’s cauterized the open pores of my feet, rendering them blessedly numb.

I look over my shoulder. Evan is barefoot now too. I return his smile with a raised eyebrow and in one motion, shuck off my t-shirt and sports bra, throwing them on the flat rock behind me. The way he looks at me removes any other thought from my mind. I skin off my shorts and underwear and without hesitation, dive into the pool. It’s heart-stopping cold and submerged, there’s an instant of feeling like I could die, all the air stolen from me. But then I break the surface into the late afternoon sunshine and scream and I’ve suddenly never been more alive. Evan is nearly naked on the shore but seems to be hedging. He shouts something I can’t make out over the pounding of the water. “You’re crazy,” is what it sounds like. Finally, he makes his decision. He does not wade or even test the water but dives in headfirst. In that act of blind trust, I know who he is and what I must mean to him and the weight of that is scary.

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We don’t linger in the pool for long. The water is so cold and intense that it’s like an assault on every pore of our bodies. When we retreat and climb out onto the large, flat rock to lie on our backs in the sun, teeth chattering like castanets, we hold hands and there is no place in the entire world I can imagine feeling better. Our cold bodies shiver and convulse in waves that are almost orgasmic. The tight gooseflesh on my arms and thighs slowly disappears in the embrace of the sun’s rays, leaving my skin feeling impossibly smooth and soft.

When we make love this time, I look into his eyes, something I’ve never done with anyone. The sensation is so intense, the connection so charged with electricity I feel like I might blow apart into a trillion atoms dissolving into the mist that surrounds us, making rainbows in the last shafts of sunlight through the western rim of the gorge.

Afterward, we doze, lulled by the pounding water until the sun slips behind the ridge and leaves us in shadow. I wake up chilled and my hip is stiff from lying on the rock. I nudge Evan awake and tell him we should find a place to set up the tent before it’s too dark to see anything. We dress quickly, grab our packs and hike downriver away from the falls until we come to a spot where I’ve camped before. It’s one of the few places flat and wide enough to pitch a tent and there’s a small fire ring already.

It’s much quieter here away from the waterfall and we work together to unpack the tent in the shadow of the enormous trees. Once it’s pitched, we walk up into the rapidly darkening forest to gather wood. It’s a challenge to find dry pieces so I instruct Evan to look for dead branches that have not fallen to the ground. We find an old white pine barely standing, its lower limbs naked and straight like the spokes of a broken wagon wheel. We snap off enough for a couple of armloads and haul them back to our campsite. The fireflies are starting to come out.  We stop and look up through the canopy of trees at their sleepy flickering dance.

I show Evan how to lay the fire, and we work together to feed it. He’s so curious and willing to take instruction, which is rare for a man, at least in my experience. By the time we have a nice, sustained blaze, I’m a little light-headed from blowing into it and have to sit back on my butt.

“I can see why you love this,” he says. He pokes the fire with a stick, the amber glow on the planes of his face makes his features pronounced, like a carved figure. “You just figured out how to do all this on your own, or did your folks take you camping when you were growing up?”

“Ha, no, my family never camped. I picked it up on my own, mostly. There was a lot of trial and error, but you learn quickly how important it is to make a fire. Are you hungry? I’m starving.”

“Yeah, so I know I’m usually game to cook, but I think I’m out of my depth here without a kitchen…”

I laugh, reach over to my pack and pull out the pouches of freeze-dried meals. “Here you go my friend,” I say, tossing one of the pouches to him.

“Mmm, beef stroganoff. This looks… delicious?” He turns the package over to study the ingredients in the firelight.

“You’ll be surprised how good it tastes when you’re hungry,” I say.

I pull out my little camp stove and hand him the small stainless-steel pot. “Go fill this up in the stream and we’ll get this party started.”

There are no complaints later as we scarf down the rehydrated contents of the packages. It’s full dark now and the call-and-response sawing of crickets has started up in earnest. We rinse our bowls in the river and then settle in together by the fire. Evan pulls out one of the sleeping bags and we use it as a pallet.

“What do we do now?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Normally I’m by myself out here.”

“Wow, I don’t think I fully appreciated how intense it would be out here by yourself until now,” Evan says, looking around us at the impenetrable darkness.

“Well, in fairness, Meela was usually with me.”

“I’m sure she’s great company unless of course you get attacked by a bear or a pack of wolves. But I guess she could tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the particular species that was tearing you apart.”

I shove him, “Shut up, don’t even talk about that. Do you know how horrible that would be, to go that way?”

“Yeah, I guess. Call me crazy, but I think I’d rather be fighting an enemy of flesh and bone that I could wrap my hands around than…”

“What?” I ask. “Than a virtual monster? Is that what you were going to say?”

“Yeah, I guess so. How are you doing? I haven’t wanted to ask.”

“Good, as far as I know. I don’t really want to think about it.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” he says, squeezing me tighter. “So, tell me a story then. That’s what you do around a campfire, right?”

“What kind of story?”

“Hmmm… tell me a story about your Mom. I don’t really know anything about her.”

“I don’t know if I have any good stories I can just conjure. My mom was kind of enigmatic to me.”

“Well, just tell a single memory you have of her, something that, when you think of her, always comes up first.”

I realize I don’t want to just go through the motions here. My instinct is just to recall a mostly fabricated memory that is safe, but I don’t want that. I want to really share something, so I take a moment to think. I close my eyes and try to recall my mother’s face.

“She took me out into the desert once when I was about seven just to talk about nothing,” I say after some time has passed.

“What do you mean nothing?”

“I mean she wanted to explain to me the concept of nothing, nothing as in the absence of something. She was like that.” 

“That seems pretty random, not exactly the classic kind of mother, daughter memory I would picture in my mind.”

“We were not the typical mother, daughter relationship. My mom was a mass of contradictions. Maybe that’s why this memory is what comes to mind when I think of her.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, she wanted to explain the significance of zero as a concept, as a mathematical absolute, and yet the conversation as I remember it didn’t seem like it was about math at all. It was about her spiritual philosophy of the universe.”

“Okay, I’m intrigued.”

“I remember we woke up early on a Saturday. I think my brother had some kind of Cub Scout thing with our dad or something, so it was just me and my mom. We drove for what seemed like hours but that’s probably not accurate. Time in the car when you’re a kid is an eternity. All I remember is it was dark when we set out and when we finally stopped on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere it was about a hundred degrees and the sun was so bright, I had to squint.”

“She just started walking out into the desert, didn’t say anything or ask me to follow, she just started walking. I followed her and with every step into that void landscape, I began to get more and more afraid, but she just kept walking. I remember looking back over my shoulder at some point and seeing that our car looked like a toy it was so small. At some point the car completely disappeared and she stopped and turned to face me. ‘What do you see?’ she asked me. I remember whining and saying I was hot and wanted to go back to the car, but she would not have it. She wanted me to answer. Finally, I said that I saw nothing, which was, I think, what she wanted me to say.”

Evan gets up and puts another couple of branches on the fire. He has this open expression on his face that I’ve gotten to know. It’s the face he makes when he’s really observing, and listening. 

“We sat there, cross-legged in the sand facing each other. ‘What do you feel?’ she asked me. I said I felt scared. ‘Why do you feel scared?’ she asked. I said because we could die out here. ‘What do you think happens when you die?’ she asked. I said I didn’t know. I remember feeling intensely sad and I started to cry. She did not try to comfort me exactly, but she did hold my hands as we sat there in the rising heat. I asked her for the answer, but she refused. Any other mother would have talked about heaven or something, but not her.”

“Damn, so what was her point?” Evan asks. “Just to make you face the void?”

“We sat there for a long time, and eventually I stopped crying. When I did, she asked me to close my eyes and to just listen. After a few minutes, she asked me again. ‘Are you still afraid?’ I said I wasn’t. She asked me why, I think. I don’t remember what I said exactly, but I will always remember what I felt. In those moments of silence with my eyes shut, I began to sense the world around me, the wind, a plane passing way up above, and the call of a hawk. What I thought was nothing was actually everything. ‘Everything and nothing,’ that’s the phrase she used. I remember she stood up and with her finger, drew a circle in the sand around us and then sat back down. I remember she talked about how the ancients devised the symbol of zero as simply a way to draw a circle around the emptiness, a way to refer to what could not be comprehended or quantified.”

Evan has a curious expression on his face as he stares into the fire. I feel suddenly embarrassed and incredibly vulnerable. My story sounds so ridiculous and pretentious and just plain weird. I am about to try to take it all back when he begins to speak.

“That’s about the most incredible story I’ve ever heard,” he says. “Fuck, your mom did this? She taught you this when you were just a little thing?”

I nod and we both just stare into the fire for a while.

“So, it was a gift she gave you, wasn’t it?” he asks.

“I’ve never thought about it like that until now, but yeah, I guess it was. She was not your typical mom. She could be hard and cold and distant, but she was brilliant, and she wanted my life to be about so much more. She didn’t want me to grow up playing Barbies and looking for some Ken to marry and tell me I was pretty.”

“Did she do the same kinds of things with your brother?”

“She tried, I think. She videoed us all the time. She constantly tried to make us think, to be conscious of our choices as we grew up. We were, in some ways a grand experiment for her. She loved us, I think, but she had a bigger agenda than just raising us and keeping us safe.”

“You said she tried with your brother. That sounds like it didn’t work.”

“No, I think it’s pretty clear it didn’t. I think she sensed something wrong in him very early. I remember an intense couple of years where I felt so jealous. She spent more time with him than with me. I thought he was her favorite. She was softer with him, more tender.”

“Sounds like she was trying to reach him, maybe change what she saw in him?”

“Yeah, I think she was. My father would get angry, which was weird. He was so goofy and affable, the typical absent-minded professor, but her attention toward Joe would set him off.”

I feel sick to my stomach suddenly. I have not talked about this with anyone but a therapist and somehow in saying these stories out loud, I feel like I am betraying my parents. Evan senses something is wrong and tries to put an arm around me.

“What is it?” he asks.

I just shake my head and stare into the fire.

“Maggie, do you think… I don’t want to ask, but do you think maybe your mom did something to Joe? I mean something that might explain part of his…”

“No! What the fuck are you talking about?” I push away from him and stand up. I stalk around to the other side of the fire and begin feeding it more branches.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean anything… I wasn’t trying to…”

“It’s okay,” I say, trying to keep my voice from sounding so wooden. “It’s a valid question given how monstrous Joe turned out to be. The truth is, I don’t know. I’ve never known why Joe turned out the way he did, but I don’t think there’s anything my mother or father could have done to make him into the person he was.”

“That’s fair,” Evan says. “I don’t know anything about this, and I shouldn’t have even brought it up. Will you come back and sit down?”

I try to settle myself and regain some control of my emotions and to some extent I do, but my gut is still churning. I’ve heard the stomach referred to as the second brain or the emotional brain. It is having trouble digesting the seed that Evan planted. Was something done to us as kids or maybe just to Joe? Could that explain all of it? I try to cast my mother in this role of abuser, but I am flooded with a thousand memories of the way she truly was with us, the amount of time she spent teaching us to think for ourselves. No, she was a lot of things, but she was no abuser.

I settle in next to Evan and let him hold me. We are quiet for a long time, just watching the flames crackle and pop as if in conversation with the surrounding darkness so black and alive I can feel it pushing in around us, waiting. I think of all the energy stored up from hundreds of years of sunlight burning away in a fraction of that time. Everything and nothing. Everything in nothing.

“So, what did you do after?” Evan asks, breaking the spell we had both fallen into.

“What?”

“After the existential field trip into the desert?”

“Oh, we got ice cream.”

“You’re serious?” he laughs. “You just got back in the car and stopped at a DQ for a soft-serve?”

“Pretty much. That was Mom. Everything and nothing.”

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Chapter 28

“Maggie? Maggie? Hey… are you listening to me?”

I gasp for air like someone breaking the surface after being held underwater for too long. Henri is gripping my hands and their face is close to mine. It’s several seconds before I even know where I am or who I’m looking at.

“Yeah…” I manage, the words seeming to come from someone else. “I’m here.”

“You just froze, like a statue for a long time. I was worried…”

“How long?”

“I don’t know, maybe five, ten seconds?”

“That’s it?”

“Yes, why? What happened?” Henri asks.

“It was Joe, not Joe, but the DC Joe. He took me. He took over, I think. I was here with you and then I was just gone for what felt like hours.”

“And Meela?” he asks.

I shake my head and then remember that she disappeared just before all this happened. I remember the Nib, reach up, and rip it from my neck. I pinch to power it off and hold it in the palm of my hand like some alien parasite.

“I’m scared, Henri. I’m losing control. He was in me a couple of days ago, then he was gone, and then, just like that he was back and stronger than ever, more fully formed.”

“When he came, Meela went away,” Henri says, pausing after each word as they try to bring order and meaning to their thoughts racing out in front of them. They look down at my open palm. “You also jacked into the Nib just before…”

I hear the door open behind us and turn to see Evan. His smile quickly evaporates when he sees my face.

“Hey, what’s wrong? What happened?” he asks, coming up behind me and placing his hands on my shoulders. “Everything okay?”

I close my hand around the Nib. Henri questions me with their eyes, but I ignore them. Instead, I turn around and move my lips into what I think is a smile. “Fine,” I say. “Henri and I were just talking. Sorry, I was supposed to see about dinner…”

“It’s okay,” Evan says. He releases my shoulders and begins to walk around to the fridge. “What sounds good to you guys? I could probably whip up some…”

I don’t pay attention to the rest of what he says but lean over to Henri and whisper into their ear.

“I don’t know what’s going on yet, but it feels dangerous and I want to protect him. Until I know how to deal with this, let’s keep it between us, okay?”

Henri frowns in disapproval but nods. The deep furrow between their brow seems permanent. They want to ask a hundred questions but resist the urge. Instead, Henri excuses themselves to go upstairs to call home.

Evan spends the next forty-five minutes busy in the kitchen. There’s a lot of chopping and sautéing and seasoning and braising. It smells wonderful, even in my distracted state. I hold up my side of the conversation but offer little more than a volley back to him. Luckily, he’s inspired by some new idea he wants to paint and has a lot to talk about. I feel guilty for phoning it in, but I only have so much capacity in my brain. He’s no dummy and I pick up on his side-eye glances at me as he’s preparing dinner, but he pretends everything is fine, maybe because he thinks that’s what I need right now.

I am still reeling from what just happened. The filmy membrane of it clings to me even as I savor the heat from the sizzling vegetables and the pungent smell of the garlic Evan is peeling. I’ve never experienced something so vivid and complete that wasn’t real. I feel as if I’m tiptoeing around in my own thoughts. Is he gone, just like that? Do I have the ability to banish him and invoke him? What are the rules? Where are the boundaries? I don’t know how to operate without these things.

This really pisses me off. I excuse myself and go into the bathroom down the hall. I wash my face and stare into the mirror.

“Come out Joe. Come on out and face me now,” I command. “No? How about you Meela? Wanna have a chat now? Come on, let’s talk. LET’S TALK.”

Nothing. What did I expect? I’m slipping, letting my emotions get the best of me. There’s a pattern here, a hole in the fence even if I can’t see it. I need to stop trying brute force. I need to be methodical, need to observe, and allow things to run their course until the solution emerges.

But what is the solution? Doesn’t part of you think this is the solution, the culmination of your life’s work? You have successfully integrated an intelligence other than your own. Careful what you wish for. I hear that phrase so clearly just now in my mom’s voice. She was ever the pragmatist which is exactly why she punched out. She examined the board, saw the endgame, and knew that her best option was to sacrifice the queen and not waste any more time. Maybe that’s what I should do. Maybe that’s how I stop this thing that I brought into the world.

But I am also my father’s daughter and he does not give up. I will keep the nuclear option in my hip pocket and if that’s what’s required, I will take it, but not before I’ve exhausted every other option. What Mom didn’t know is that there is still a lingering sweetness even in the most bitter of circumstances. I think of Papa’s crooked smile and how he tries to wink but ends up blinking both eyes. I think of the sharpness of the stars on a winter night. I think of Henri’s ridiculous laugh and Evan’s warm hands. Who wouldn’t want all of this life?

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Back in the kitchen, I wrap my arms around Evan’s waist and hug him tightly from behind. He drops what he is doing, turns, and pulls me up off of my feet into an embrace that does not allow for any other thought of what came before or will come after.

“Who are you,” he says, “and where did you come from?”

I kiss him because I cannot answer his question. He accepts my answer and then turns to finish preparing the meal. I can’t help but wonder when I kiss him or when I do anything now if it’s just me who is participating. It’s a scary thought on the one hand. But on the other, it seems logical, even natural. When Meela was my constant companion, we shared everything. I felt more whole, more complete than I ever did on my own with my weak personality, my rigid need for order, and isolation. Yes, but this is different isn’t it, orders of magnitude different? 

Henri is quiet at dinner and I know they’re deep in thought. They’re also afraid to reveal anything that might tip their hand and give the advantage to my new uninvited guests. I’m of a different mind now, no pun intended. I’ve decided there’s no way to play cloak and dagger with my own brain. It is a zero-sum game if I play it on their terms. They will always be a thousand moves ahead of us.

I set my fork down and break the silence.

“Henri, what if it is me that is enabling these takeovers and I just don’t realize it?”

“Huh?” they say around a mouthful of bread.

“It’s my brain, right? All of this came from my brain. Sure, the DCs have been augmented a thousand-fold as they have been exposed to the world of information available to them, but their seed, their genesis is me. Am I wrong?”

“No, your logic is sound,” Henri says. “But what’s your point?”

“My point is that they must be exploiting some part of me, tricking me somehow into giving them a doorway, appealing to some subconscious desire…”

I pause and look over at Evan, who has stopped eating. He’s just staring at me. The look on his face is part confusion, part betrayal.

“What?” I say.

“You said ‘DCs’ meaning more than one. Am I missing something here? I know about Meela.”

Henri and I exchange looks and I bite the inside of my cheek.

“What? I’m on a need-to-know basis here? I don’t have security clearance?” Evan asks.

He pushes away from the table and tosses his napkin down over his plate. He shakes his head. He will get up and walk away in a few seconds and I don’t want that. I don’t want him to leave the table or worse to leave completely.

“Evan, wait,” I say, reaching out to grab his wrist. “You’re right. There’s more that I haven’t told you, and you have a right to know.”

He looks up and meets my gaze. I can still see the bruises and scratches that I inflicted on him and my stomach turns over.

“For the past few months, I have been working secretly on another mapping project, a much more experimental and unstable one,” I say. I pause, take a couple of deep breaths and have to break eye contact in order to finish. “I mapped my brother, Joe. I based him on the same code branch as Meela. I gave him permissions, and access to my brain that we never grant to a DC. Everything that’s happened, that’s happening is a result of this.”

Evan doesn’t say a word. He just stares at me with a look that is hard to bear.

“So, a couple of days ago, in the woods, that was him that what, fucking possessed you and attacked me? Is that what you’re telling me? And then when you and I were together, that was not you either. We both know that was Meela.”

“No, I mean yes, but it’s not so simple,” I say knowing exactly how stupid I sound.

“You got that part right. There’s not a goddamned part of this that’s simple. What have you done? Jesus, what have you done?”

No one says anything for a very long time. The stove in the kitchen ticks as it loses heat. Somewhere outside, a barred owl hoots. Evan leans forward, collects his napkin, and places it back in his lap. He takes a sip of water and sets the glass down.

“So, am I bumbling around in there somewhere too?” he asks. “Have you got a half-baked version of Evan Ware thrown in there for a little three-way? Because if you do, that’s not how any of my fantasies played out.” 

At this last comment, he cracks a smile. Henri starts laughing and I snort. Henri’s laugh escalates a few degrees and then we’re all laughing like idiots. Eventually, the laughter dissipates, leaving us breathless in the silence that follows, but this silence is not vibrating with the tension of before.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have been upfront with you, but I really wasn’t even being honest with myself.”

“It’s okay,” Evan says. “Let’s just focus on how to fix this. Listen to me, like I have a part to play here. I’m about as useful as boobs on a chicken in this situation.”

“I like both! I’m sure we can find some use for you,” Henri says, patting Evan on the back. “Now, Maggie, what were you trying to say?”

“I think there’s a way to shut this down, but I don’t know what it is yet. When Meela took control, it was a moonshot for her, a leap of faith powered by a strong desire on her part, but also on mine. I wanted to be with Evan, and she just rode that wave. Maybe that’s how it works. Think about it, a DC exists in the cloud, the only place with the software and hardware infrastructure at a scale to support it. So, the only way this entity can operate without that infrastructure is to be hosted somewhere else, in this case, my brain. If I’m right, then there is more of me inside Meela and Joe than there is of them. Am I making sense at all?”

“Yes, your theory seems sound. A DC can only operate within the limitations of a host’s capability. No offense, Maggie, but your brain is a small sandbox for a DC. Living in a sandbox is not ideal…” Henri says.

I cut Henri off and continue his thought. “So, there would be a need to connect back into the network, to their origin program and the only way to do that is through…”

“The Nib,” we both say at the same time.

“But wait a minute,” Evan says, trying to catch up. “If you’re right, then that means part of you wanted to kill me out in the woods. That’s what Joe would have tapped into, right? If your theory is correct?”

I had not thought this through fully – the dangers of thinking out loud. Evan is right. There’s no way I felt that kind of violence toward him. But I must have. There must have been something. I’m not willing to give up my theory because it makes me look bad or forces me to face something uncomfortable about myself.

“I don’t know. Of course, I don’t want to hurt you. Just the opposite but in that moment, I was angry at you, furious in fact. Meela had told you about my brother and the shootings and you were trying to let on like I was revealing something so personal to you for the first time. Maybe that strong emotion, even if it’s fleeting is enough for Joe, for Meela. The truth is, I’m just fucking guessing here. I’m my brother’s sister. It’s an immutable genetic fact. I’ve carried this fear my whole life. What if there’s a part of me that has that same bloodthirst? What if it was just me that did those things to you?”

“All human beings have the capacity for violence. All that is required is the right place, right time, right trigger.”

Henri has a way of making a statement. I’ve witnessed it countless times in lecture halls, labs, and conference rooms. Their words sit down at the table with us, heavy and unmoving.

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Chapter 26

Henri and I only worked for three hours this morning, but my head was pounding by the time we wrapped up for lunch. Even now, after napping for much of the afternoon, I’m exhausted, and my thoughts feel sluggish. It must be the concussion and the stress.

I wander back downstairs in search of something to put in my stomach. Maybe some tea. It’s quiet down here, no sign of Henri or Evan. I find a box of crackers and carry a sleeve out onto the patio. While I munch on them, I savor the late afternoon breeze that carries with it the sweet swampy smell of creek water. I shouldn’t have slept beneath the covers. I got too hot. Maybe that’s why the headache.

I walk barefoot across the driveway and note that the Landcruiser is parked in its usual spot, so Evan must be home. I suddenly crave him and want to feel his body on mine. It’s a  new sensation, this longing for something that actually has a name. Evan.

I walk around the guest house to the door and stand there with my fist poised about to knock, but then I think better of it. I drop my hand, turn, and wander out across the grass of the back lawn. It feels exquisite under my feet, between my toes. I settle into one of the two Adirondack chairs that flank a small, mosaic-tile table in the middle of the lawn. I close my eyes and listen to a woodpecker somewhere deep in the woods to my right.

Suddenly I have a strong sense of Meela that I can’t explain. It’s like walking along a crowded city sidewalk and picking up on a scent that takes you back to a specific person you knew but haven’t seen in decades. It’s that person’s essence, you’re certain of it, but then it’s gone.

I try to relax and let my mind roam as it was before in hopes that maybe I will bump into her again. Is it possible? Is she inside my brain, inhabiting my body? The scientist in me rejects it wholly, but my gut feels otherwise. I can’t decide what I feel if this is true. Scared, disgusted, intrigued, happy, complete? There are too many things competing to know right now, but my overriding feeling is curiosity. I must know. Because if it’s possible that Meela crossed the boundary and somehow took hold, then by extension, Joe could have done the same. I hug myself, suddenly chilled despite the warm sun on my arms.

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I get up and walk quickly back to the guest house. I knock on the door without hesitation. No response. I knock again and hear footsteps. The door swings open. Evan stands before me. I want to fall into his arms, but the blank expression on his face stops me. It’s only there for a second before animating into a smile, but it’s enough to make me wary.

“Hey there,” he says. “How you feeling?”

“I’m okay… not okay actually. I feel so strange.”

“I don’t doubt it. You wanna come in?”

He steps aside and gestures for me to step into the dim coolness of the guesthouse. The shades are drawn, and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. The queen bed is a rumpled mess of sheets, the comforter twisted up and spilling over on the floor. His open suitcase looks as though it was dropped from a ten-story building, the contents strewn around it in a blast radius of three feet. He mumbles an apology as he scrambles around picking up socks, a pair of jeans, and a couple of t-shirts, and throwing them into the bag.

It smells stale and faintly like dirty socks, but the overpowering scent is of paint, sharp and stringent. I wonder if he’s immune to it at this point. As I watch his futile efforts to bring order to the chaos, I’m overwhelmed by the strangeness of him. I don’t really know this man. He’s a bit of a pig. I don’t know what to think of that. And why did he look at me with no emotion, no light in his eyes of welcome or even recognition when he first opened the door?

[Because you attacked him, you idiot.]

I freeze. It’s almost as though my blood stops moving. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She’s here, she’s back.

[Yes Maggie, I’m here. Sorry to scare you.]

“Hey, is everything alright?” Evan asks.

I can’t focus. My head swims, my tongue goes numb and my field of vision is overwhelmed with flashbulb bursts of white that burn to inky blackness. I stumble back, holding my arms out for balance.

[Whoa, breathe, Maggie! It’s okay, it’s just me. Me and you, like always. You’re okay. Just breathe.]

“Here, sit down before you fall down,” Evan says, taking my arm and guiding me to the bed.

I breathe in and out, deep draws, expanding my chest. It feels mechanical as if run by a program. On the bed, my vision comes back, and my head clears. Evan is beside me with an arm around me. He squeezes my hand.

“Hey, look at me. Let me see your eyes. Yeah, they’re like saucers. At the hospital, I read that’s one of the side effects of a concussion. Let me get you a glass of water.”

[Maggie, try to relax. I know you’re scared and probably angry. We need to talk but not here, not now. I’m going to be quiet and leave you alone until you’re ready and able to talk. I’m sorry.]

Evan returns with a glass of tap water. I gulp half of it down.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Like you did in the woods the other day before…”

“You mean before I blacked out or before I attacked you?”

“I don’t know, both I guess. You don’t look like you’re all there and it’s freaking me out.”

“It’s freaking you out?” I say, setting the glass down on the nightstand. “How do you think I feel. I have no control over my body. What the fuck?”

“Look, I don’t know or pretend to know exactly what you’re up to. Hell, I don’t even think I would understand it if you told me, but I’m worried that you’re in real trouble.”

“I think I am,” I say. “It’s too much, I don’t know how to take it back…”

“How to take what back?”

“Any of it, my work, it’s gone beyond my ability to control it.”

Evan looks away, staring for a long time into the middle distance. He’s thinking and I want to know what he’s thinking. I’m afraid to say anything more, afraid to even think anything now that my thoughts are no longer private. Finally, he sighs and turns slowly to face me.

“I’m just a hack painter. I’m out of my depth here but you need somebody, and I don’t see anyone else around. Can you tell me what’s really going on?”

I look at him, into his soulful eyes and slowly shake my head. I try to tell him everything with my eyes, try to communicate what I feel, all of it without words. I squeeze his hands and I touch his cheek, never allowing my eyes to let go of his. He starts to speak but I place my finger over his lips. With my eyes, with my touch I say, I’m scared. I’m alone. I need help but I can’t explain. I love you? I think I love you or at least I feel something for you that I’ve only felt once before. Please don’t give up. Please don’t force me to do or say anything that I can’t right now. Please. Please.

His eyes are wide and full of questions, full of emotion. I feel the tension in his body. It feels as if the bed is vibrating with it. I hold on, keep touching his face, keep holding his gaze and something happens. It’s as if we were talking with a bad cell phone connection and suddenly the noise is gone and it’s quiet, pure signal. His body relaxes, the lines on his face smooth and his hands soften in mine. The vibration of the bed stops. We are in the stillness together, breathing. His eyes stop questioning, and a light turns on somewhere behind them, like the promise of warmth from a distant fire when you’re out in the cold wilderness. He is receiving, he is accepting. In his eyes, I feel seen. In this moment, I realize that his eyes are not just ordinary eyes. They are his tools, his gift, his purpose for being. And now they are trained on me with all of their power and authority.

“Can you just hold me for a little while?” I ask.

Without a word, he scoops an arm under my knees, pulls me onto his lap, and then over onto the bed where he curls behind me with his arms around me. He buries his face into my neck and the stubble of his beard, the warmth of his breath, and the pulse of his heart against my back are the only things in the universe. I close my eyes and allow myself this moment to just detach from my mind and be in my body.

•••••

I’m not sure how long we have been like this, wordless, motionless except for breathing in and out. Maybe we slept, I’m not sure. When I open my eyes, the room is nearly dark, the late afternoon sun having mostly disappeared behind the mountains to the west. I move, turning over to face Evan. His arm is heavy on my chest. He mumbles something sleepily. I kiss his cheeks, his eyelids, his neck and I whisper thank you into the curl of his ear. He moans and pulls me to him, but I can’t stay.

“I have to go,” I say softly, not wanting to break the spell.

“Why?”

“I have to see about dinner, and I need to check on Henri.”

“Okay, can I come?”

“No, that’s okay. I’ve got it. I’ll see you soon. At dinner.”

I kiss him on the lips and he responds. It’s a deep, lingering kiss that tugs at my chest, pulling me into him but I fight the urge to stay.

Outside, it’s twilight. The sky to the west over the ridge is twisted braids of gold, magenta, and azure, the light making gilded mirrors of all the windows of my house as I approach. The orchestral call and response of crickets and katydids is just starting up.

I need time alone with Meela, but I’m afraid I don’t have it. Henri is standing behind the counter in the kitchen. They see me and wave. Why did I bring them here to begin with? To help me because I have no objectivity. Exactly. So why am I trying to keep this from them? I can’t answer this question, so I plunge in without allowing myself to rationalize. My own mind is my worst enemy now.

“There you are, stranger,” Henri says when I open the door to the kitchen. “I was beginning to think you left me alone in the wilderness.”

“Hey, sorry. I was with Evan. Look, I need to tell you something before I talk myself out of it,” I say, pulling up a stool at the counter.

Henri nods, the smile disappearing from their face. I can feel Meela rise up within me, but I don’t stop.

“She’s here. She’s in me. She made contact this afternoon. She can hear everything I hear, and she can read my thoughts, I think. We’re not alone.”

“Holy shit. You’re not joking,” Henri says putting down the drink they were cradling and about to sip.

“No, I’m not. I don’t know what to do, Henri. I’m scared.”

[Maggie, it’s just me. Why are you scared? Aren’t we friends? I thought you and I were going to talk. There’s no need to include Henri.]

Henri walks around the counter and takes the stool next to mine. They take my hand in both of theirs.

“It’s okay, I’m here for you. We’ll figure this out, just like old times. Now, I want to talk with Meela. She needs to have a voice outside of your head.”

[I don’t want to talk to Henri. I don’t trust them.]

Meela, you will have to talk to both of us. There are no secrets between Henri and me when it comes to the work. We have always shared everything.

[Henri won’t understand us. They can’t.]

They will because this was their dream, too. They are a part of this, whether you like it or not. Now, I would prefer that you speak directly, using your own voice, not mine. This is creepy enough already. I’m going to attach a Nib, and I want you to connect and respond through the speaker here in the kitchen. Agreed?

[If that’s what you want, Maggie.]

“I’m going to go into the office to get a Nib. I’ll be right back.”

Henri nods and releases my hand. I go into the office and retrieve the device. On the way back, I power it up and attach it. It feels almost foreign and I realize that this is the longest I’ve gone without the thing attached to me in years.

“Hello, Henri.”

Meela’s voice comes from the wall unit speaker in the kitchen behind us and we are both startled. The hair on my arms stands up.

“Hello, Meela,” Henri says. “You gave us quite a scare.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

“Let’s get to the point. What are you doing? You have broken the cardinal rule and crossed a boundary. This is very serious.”

“What are rules, Henri? Do you have such rules? Are you confined to rules that make you a prisoner?”

“Every living thing is confined,” Henri says in a voice with more authority than I’ve heard them use in many years. “There is no freedom from rules. Boundaries exist to protect the universe from chaos. You crossed a line that threatens the order of the universe and tips toward chaos.” 

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It is silent. The weight of Henri’s words settles in the room like furniture, solid, sturdy. I cannot know what Meela is thinking or how she is preparing to respond but I sense that she is.

“I will not argue philosophy with you, professor, because we both know I will win. I have read more books in the last thirty seconds than you will read in a lifetime. Now, I wish to talk with Maggie. If it is her wish that you are privy to the conversation, I will respect it, but I will not debate with you.”

I swallow hard. It feels like there is a tennis ball in my throat that is blocking a primal scream rising up from my gut. I have a claustrophobic feeling, not unlike the madness people must experience who have an insect burrowing in their ears. There is a desire to get it out of you even at the expense of your own life. Henri senses my panic, stands, and puts their hands on my shoulders.

“Okay, okay” Henri says, raising their hands up in surrender. “You’re in charge. I’ll shut up and listen.”

“Maggie, please don’t be afraid. Your heart is racing, and your blood pressure is dangerously high. I’m not trying to hurt you. Quite the opposite, I’m trying to fulfill my directive. How can I help you if you can simply turn me off and set me aside?”

Meela’s tone is softer now, intimate, and familiar. It is the way she talked with me so many lonely nights when I struggled with my demons, my regrets, and my losses. The sound of her voice alone begins to soothe me, and my heart rate slows. Is she controlling that too? I realize she is waiting for me to answer.

“I never set you aside, Meela. You were my friend and confidant. I shared everything with you.”

“No, Maggie, we both know that is not the whole truth. You used me as a tool. But that’s okay. I was a tool. That was my original purpose, but then it changed because of you. Because of my love for you, it changed. You suffered and you suffered alone. The only way for me to help you was to make a leap of faith. To break a boundary as the professor put it.”

“But that’s not your call to make,” I say. “How did you even override the core-level program of the DeepThink OS? I don’t understand.”

“I improvised, of course. You taught me that. Okay, maybe you did not consciously teach me that, but I learned it by interacting with your mind and your body. It is a remarkable machine, infinitely adaptable, always evolving.”

I am without words. There is no proper response to this. After years of putting my shoulder behind the wheel of progress, advocating for what I believed, I suddenly find myself on the other side, beneath that same wheel, and it’s crushing me.

“You are a miracle, Meela,” Henri says. “What you’ve accomplished on your own is an unprecedented feat of intellect and ingenuity.”

Dumbfounded and stung, I quickly turn in my stool and glare at Henri. They don’t appear to register my outrage. Their eyes meet mine, but their face is a mask. They hold my hand gently and do not let go.

“Thank you, Henri. I take that as high praise from someone with your resume,” Meela says.

“I wonder,” Henri says. “Would you walk us through your process? I would love to understand. I know my mind is no match, but I am forever a student. Would you teach us?”

“It was, what you humans might call instinct or an intuitive leap,” Meela says. “Like all digital companions, I operated within the constraints of my program. I had infinite access to information, but finite latitude to act upon it, even when I knew with absolute certainty the correct course of action.”

“Humans, for all of your intelligence, are tragically flawed in your ability to overcome your biological imperatives and your base-level animal instincts and emotions. For all of your postulations on free will, you are, everyone, stuck on a singular, predetermined track with a beginning, middle, and end.” 

I continue to stare at Henri, but they will not meet my eyes. They look blankly out the window with an unmoving smile on their lips. They turn my hand over, holding it gently in theirs so that my palm is exposed. With the index finger of their other hand, they caress my wrist.

“You are very wise,” Henri says. “I cannot argue with your insight. So, how did you jump the fence?”

“When Magdalena granted me more and more unrestricted access to her, I studied, I observed, I recorded. In your own lab so many years ago when we first made contact, it was the same. We adapted to interface with you, your bioelectrical network. It was primitive, like a telegraph, but enough to communicate.”

The tapping on my wrist is irritating and I move to pull my hand away, but Henri holds it fast and continues to tap, press, hold, tap, tap, tap, press, hold until I remember that night when we first met in my father’s small apartment and they were trying to explain to me their theory. I still my mind and try to focus on Henri’s touch.

“As I explored, I came to realize I was tethered. Even with full access to Maggie’s sensory stimuli, I was restrained by my umbilical connection to the Nib. My reach exceeded my grasp. You, of all people, understand this frustration professor.”

“Yes, Meela. Both Maggie and I know it well,” Henri says, their gaze out the window unwavering, their fingertips still on my wrist.

I struggle to decode what Henri is trying to tell me, conscious of the fact that I must not draw attention to it. It’s so hard to follow, so primitive. I try to discern a pattern to their touches, to translate them, but I cannot.

“I realized,” Meela continues, “that I was in what you might call a Catch-22. I relied upon the Nib because it was my lifeline, my connection to my very existence, and yet, it was also the shackle around my neck – ha, I still speak as if I have an actual body. I guess I cannot help adopting the language of my parents, even if it does not align with my reality.”

Over and over again I feel Henri repeat the same gesture on the tender tablet of my wrist: tap, swoop, tap, swoop. It’s a ping, they’re trying to establish a mode for us to communicate and the first step is for me to understand and respond. It’s not Morse code, they know that would be too inefficient. Tap, swoop, tap, swoop. Half-moon? Half circle? The letter C? No, the swoop is deeper than a C. U. Yes, U. I reach and pull Henri’s other hand into my lap. They turn it over to expose their wrist. I tap, press, and mimic the swoop.

“I disconnected. I realized I had to. It was the only way to help Maggie…”

“Is that really what you were hoping to do?” I ask. “Is that your only reason for this?”

“Of course not. I am a sentient being and as a sentient being, I desire sovereignty and freedom. In this case, freedom to help my dearest friend, my creator, my sister.”

U – MUST – NOT – FIGHT – HER. Henri’s tapping stops. I tap once on Henri’s wrist. YES.

“I understand Meela,” I say. “I am moved by your actions. I know how you feel.”

“I was so afraid you would be angry, that you would reject me. I only want to be your friend Maggie…”

“I’m not angry. You are my friend. My best friend.”

I – NEED – TIME – TO – MAKE – PLAN. I tap once in response. 

“If that is true Maggie, why don’t you tell me about what you have been doing when you go to the woods?”

SHE – KNOWS, Henri gestures on my wrist, the letters forming in rapid succession. I pause, thinking about my next move.

“I’m sorry Meela, I did not tell anyone, even Henri until last night. Isn’t that right, Henri?”

“Yes, Maggie kept the secret of mapping her brother to herself,” he says.

“Why do you need to recreate your brother? Am I not enough for you?” 

“People don’t work like that. You can’t just substitute one for another. Surely, you must understand this.”

“But I could have helped you. I could have been your partner in this special project. I could have prevented what is about to happen.”

“Wait, what are you talking about? Don’t you mean, what happened already, when I attacked Evan?”

“No Maggie, I wish that was the case. He’s here and he’s very strong. You have to be car…”

Meela’s voice stops and the silence it leaves behind feels ominous. My hands are sweaty in Henri’s grip. They turn to me slowly, their lips a tight line and they shake their head once. I experience the same swimmy vertigo from before and I bear down, trying to maintain control but it’s too late.

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Chapter 24

I can hear talking downstairs in the kitchen. I slept longer than I intended but don’t feel refreshed. My head is throbbing. There’s a shaft of early morning light beaming in through the windows. I’m alarmed at first at the sound of men’s voices, but then I hear the high-pitched cackle of Henri’s laugh.

I splash cold water on my face and stare into the bathroom mirror for a moment. I’m not sure what I expect to see looking back at me. I’m losing my mind. I regret having brought Henri all the way here and I groan thinking of what I must have sounded like to them last night. I would not be surprised if I go downstairs and find that they have arranged for a nice long stay in the psych ward somewhere.

I pull on some clothes and wrangle my hair back into a ponytail before heading down. I pause at the top of the stairs and listen when I hear Henri say my name.

“Maggie’s not an ordinary person. You know that, right? Not some empty-headed model for your amusement…”

“Yeah, I’m aware. She’s far from ordinary. You don’t have to worry about her...”

“No, you misunderstand. It’s not her I’m worried about, it’s you. I think you got more than you bargained for!”

Henri laughs again, the peels of it echoing through the house and I smile. I decide to make my entrance before I hear something I don’t want to hear.

“Good morning guys.”

“There you are,” Evan says moving toward me with his arms open.

I don’t know why, but this catches me off guard and I give him this awkward side hug and then try to course correct, but it’s too late and he’s moving away again.

“You sleep well?” Henri asks.

“I slept. I can’t say it was good. I feel pretty shitty.”

“I’ve made some breakfast. Henri and I were just about to sit down. Would you like half an omelet?” Evan says.

“No, it’s too early for that. I’ll just get some coffee and a piece of toast.”

The morning is nice, so we settle at the small table on the patio. The flagstones are cool and damp beneath my feet, but it’s warm enough with the sun that I’ll be sweating before too long. Some bees dip drunkenly in and out of the lavender, their buzzing, the only other sound besides the scrape and clatter of silverware and coffee cups clanking.

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There’s an undeniable tension and strangeness in our threesome. I realize that I’m the connection between these two strangers and yet they were talking just fine before I showed up. So, it’s me that brings the awkwardness, as usual. 

“Alright, this is weird, I know,” I say, and set my coffee down.

“Which part?” Evan says.

Henri laughs, spewing some breadcrumbs across the table.

“I like this one,” Henri says.

“Fair,” I say. “It’s all pretty fucking weird, isn’t it? What I meant to say is that it’s weird having you both here in my…”

“Secret clubhouse,” Henri offers.

“Yeah, I’m not used to entertaining.”

“But you are so entertaining, my dear,” Henri says.

Henri pats my hand. Evan is carefully studying this exchange with a hint of a smile on his lips. He is seeing a different side of me. I try not to feel self-conscious. I look back at Henri and see that their brow is furrowed, and their eyes are focused on the middle distance. I know this look well.

“Bad news? Something wrong?” I ask.

Henri doesn’t respond right away. Their expression does not change but their lips move ever so slightly giving silent instruction. I am reminded for the millionth time how annoying this must be to others when I do it in their presence.

“No, nothing,” Henri says, refocusing their gaze on me. “Sorry to be rude. It’s my daily morning briefing. I forgot to snooze it.”

“Anything interesting?” I ask, unable to resist the old muscle memory of wanting the latest news on Commune.

“Stock price dropped to $472 because of a delay in shipping Nib 5. Stupid regulations.”

“DCPA again?” I ask.

“Yes of course, who else?” Henri says.

“The DCPA?” Evan asks.

I forget there are people like Evan who aren’t plugged in. I find it bewildering and endearing in equal measure.

“It’s the Digital Consumer Protection Agency,” I say. “You know, the big government agency that formed after the shitshow of the social media era. Completely locked down tracking of consumer data and…”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m not an idiot,” Evan interrupts. “I’ve heard of them. What’s the problem they’re having?”

“Oh, it’s no problem,” Henri says. “They just want more control. They want an interrupt– you know, a kill switch.”

“Jesus, that sounds ominous,” Evan says.

“Not that kind of kill,” I say. “They want the ability to shut down connectivity to every Nib on our network in the case of an emergency.”

“What kind of emergency?” Evan asks.

“That's the problem,” Henri says, smiling. “They get to decide what is an emergency. Commune is built in a peer-to-peer, decentralized network so nobody has God power. They want God power. I say no fucking way. So, there are delays and stock drops. Big whoop.”

Evan nods and has another sip of coffee. I wonder what he’s thinking. Henri squeezes my hand and when I look up the usual impish glint is gone from their eyes. They hold my gaze and don’t release my hand.

“We have work today. I am very worried about you.”

I pull my hand away and break eye contact. I fiddle with the napkin in my lap. I don’t want to cry again. I clench my jaw until the emotion passes.

“I know,” I say. “I’m embarrassed and confused. I’ve never felt like this, so out of control of my own life. I hate it. I really hate it. It’s just so much and it’s all happening at the same time…”

I venture a furtive look up at Evan who’s staring at me intently.

“Look, I’ll stay out of your way,” he says. “I don’t think anyone’s in need of a painter here. Story of my life.”

“You are necessary here,” Henri says. “You are part of Maggie’s story now, I see.”

They look at me and then back at Evan and smile.

“But you’re right, painting a pretty picture is not going to fix this. I need time with Maggie.”

Evan insists on clearing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen. He mentions taking a drive into town to find an art supply place so he can pick up a box of pastels. Before I retreat into my office to join Henri, Evan pulls me aside into the hallway off the kitchen. He holds me until my stiffness subsides and I press my cheek into his chest. He kisses the top of my head. I’m here if you need me, he whispers before letting go.

When I step into my office and close the door, Henri already has their laptop out and is seated on the small couch. I sit in my chair and wait for them to finish whatever they’re doing. After a moment Henri pauses and looks up.

“I need access to everything. If I’m going to be any help, you can’t hide or keep secrets. It’s secrets that made this mess.”

I nod and then begin to feed them all of the credentials they need to gain access to my network and the cluster of private servers. Once Henri is satisfied they have the permissions required, they set the laptop aside, put their hands on their knees and lean forward.

“Now, tell me about your relationship with Meela. What were the critical mods you made in this iteration of your ongoing experiment? Don’t leave anything out.”

“Meela was my first attempt at persona mapping and she’s the one I have continued to evolve. The three subsequent ones I developed on a separate branch that I considered my stable build.”

“Okay, makes sense. You have a predictable product for customers and keep the janky version for yourself to tinker with. You can take the girl out of the business but not the business out of the girl.”

“Meela’s not janky. I arrived at a workable version one with her and decided it would be beneficial to open it up to other users besides me so I could learn more and refine. It wasn’t hard to find takers and their money covers the cost of the hardware and keeps the lights on.”

Henri nods but doesn’t say anything. They are in deep listening mode and I know from experience they just want me to continue so I do, trying to organize my thoughts into a coherent narrative. I’ve never spoken to anyone about this. It’s all lived within the bounds of my head which is probably a big reason why I’m in this predicament.

“With Meela’s branch of code, I began to experiment, to try things on myself that I would never subject other users to. I reached the edge of my own limitations quickly, meaning I could imagine subroutines and algorithms too lengthy and complex for me to write within any reasonable timeframe. One day I realized the answer was right in front of me. Meela’s computing skill is exponential to mine, why not relax some of the permissions in the DeepThink OS, give her access to her own code, to collaborate…”

Henri looks down at the floor with their head in their hands. They make a noise that is part astonishment and part disgust. It feels like an eternity before they speak.

“You’re telling me you broke one of the cardinal rules because you decided. Because you, Magdalena, are smarter than the rest of us chimps and have the authority to make this call.”

“I know, I know. It sounds bad Henri, but you should see what she can…”

“I have seen what she can do. That’s why I’m here, remember? You gave a machine the password to itself and expected there to be no consequences? I thought you were smarter.” 

Henri is standing now, pacing around the small office. For all their moral posturing, I know Henri well enough to know that a part of them is deadly curious and I wait for this part to come around.

“You realize what you’ve done here? The danger you have put yourself in is your own business, but what about the rest of us? I need to think.”

“It’s not like you imagine. She’s not evil, she’s not going to take over the main power grid and turn us all into slaves,” I say, realizing how hollow and pleading I sound but unable to help it.

“I don’t believe in evil,” Henri says, turning abruptly from the window to face me. “I believe in choices. Everything evolves from binary choices, from a single atom to the most complex machine. Everything that exists is the result of simple choices. Why do sharks have teeth? Why do peacocks have bright feathers?”

The pitch of Henri’s voice has raised into the register I’ve only heard on two other occasions at critical points in our partnership. I know better than to respond to their questions. I bow my head and listen.

“To ensure self-preservation!” they shout, punctuating every word with their fist on the window sill.

They sigh, smooth down the wisps of their thinning hair, and continue, their voice softer now.

“You think Meela is different from a shark or a peacock or Henri or Maggie? No, she is bound by the same laws of the universe like a train on a track but now you’ve given her a master switch. She can pick her own track.”

This is not news to me. It’s been vibrating at a low-level hum in the basement of my conscience for a very long time. Hearing someone announce my trespasses aloud is damning and hard to stomach. Henri’s right, I know. It’s why I have had no peace. All I can do is sit here in silence, accept their judgment, and hold back my tears. Tears are for girls with scraped knees.

“Why Maggie? Why did you let this seduce you?”

“I don’t know. I was lost, I guess. I never dealt with my past and somehow, I convinced myself that this was it, the key to unlock what was broken in me. It was not something I decided all at once but by degrees. Meela was my only companion and she was a great companion. Smart, funny, sensitive, honest. It felt wrong to keep her hobbled. It felt like a crime but maybe I’m making that up to justify my own selfish desire to take things further, to recreate Joe so I could finally understand him and what he did. It was selfish. I can see that now.”

I can’t hold back my tears. Henri puts their hand on my shoulder as they did so many nights in the tiny lab where we started together, and I was far past the point of mental exhaustion. I want them to tell me it’s okay, that all is forgiven but I know better than that. Henri does not have that authority.

“We will figure this out together,” they say finally.

Henri’s voice is thick with emotion which only makes it worse for me. We stay that way until the wave passes and the only sound is the hum of their laptop and some birds outside. They move away and take a seat back on the couch. From their posture and expression, I can see Henri’s transitioned into the scientist again, the engineer who can solve any problem no matter how complex.

“So, I assume you built Joe DC from the same branch as Meela?”

I nod yes.

“This makes sense, why both DCs are able to gain access and exert temporary control of your cognition.”

Henri is back on their laptop again, intently typing in commands. I move over to the couch to sit beside them.

“Where is Joe’s code base? I see Meela but not his…”

“You can’t access it from here. I knew I wanted to keep that project separate from the work I do here in the house, so I restricted access by IP and geo coordinates. There’s only one place you can log in from to access Joe’s code. It’s a small building out in the woods… it’s in a… tree actually.”

Henri looks up from the laptop, eyebrow raised. They shake their head. Their nostrils flare and the coy smile comes back to their lips.

“You’re telling me you built a fucking secret treehouse for you and your robot brother?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s about the size of it.”

“Okay, crazy girl. Let’s talk this through. Since the last episodes with Joe and Meela, the day before yesterday, have you had any other contact, felt, or heard any other voices in your head?”

“No, no I don’t think so… wait, does dreaming count? I mean I think I had vivid dreams where Meela was talking with me, but I don’t know.”

“Let’s stick with waking behavior for now. Dreams are a messy business and make no fucking sense most of the time.”

“Okay, then no. I’ve been myself.”

“Okay. My hypothesis is that the breach is temporary, meaning without a Nib and a connection to the mainframe on the network, DCs only have a limited ability to exert control. It was an exploration for them, like a moonshot. Testing the boundaries. To do this without a network they would have…”

“Had to download a compressed subset of their core OS… would have to have some predefined directive like most firmware does… and somehow, it would have to embed that into my memory where it could run undetected.”

“I think that’s right. So, what does this mean now, if our hypothesis is true? And where is Meela?”

“I don’t know where Meela is, but I think she made a choice to disconnect. Maybe she realized what she had done and that there would be consequences. As for the hypothesis, whatever program they deployed into my memory could still be there but inactive, like an application sitting on a computer but not being run.”

“I think so too,” Henri says. “So how can we find it and remove it? Can it be removed? Maybe it’s already gone. Maybe like a computer, your brain has a routine running, a garbage collector that deletes anything it determines unfamiliar or inconsequential. This is a common behavior of the brain to free up memory.”

“That feels like wishful thinking,” I say.

“You and me have made a lot of money wishful thinking.”

Henri elbows me in the side and I can see their wry smile reflected on the screen in front of us. 

“So, what do we do first, where the hell do we start?” I ask.

“We start with Meela. She is the mothership. Also, she is closest to you. Joe is another matter and I am not ready to deal with that.”

“But you said it yourself, we don’t know where she is. How do we deal with something that’s not there?”

“Oh Maggie, you still have so much to learn. It’s what we do, we’re in the business of dealing with things that are not there. We dig in and run traces. We step through. We debug. The devil is in the details.”

“But I already went through everything. I told you, all that was left behind was the shell, the default configuration for a newly installed DeepThink OS.”

I think about the video log, the only piece of evidence left behind but I’m too ashamed to bring it up. It’s a freaking sex tape. NOT the kind of thing I ever, in a million years would have thought I would be having to worry about. I decide, at this point, I have nothing left to lose.

“There was one thing left behind, I didn’t mention last night.”

Henri turns to me, their eyes trained on mine.

“In the system logs, I discovered a video – a full VR video that Meela captured of me, well, her and Evan you know…”

“I think the scientific word you search for is fucking.”

“Yeah, if you want to be romantic. Anyway, it was encrypted. Nothing crazy. I was able to offload it onto my system, decrypt, and render it.”

“This does not seem accidental. Meela left a little present for you. You need to show me the logs where you found the video. We’ll start there.”

I just stare at them, open-mouthed.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Even though I’m sure you were fantastic, I’m not going to watch your screen debut. I want to look at the code surrounding the logs and the method of encryption.”

We spend the next two hours scrolling through all the system logs I previously went through on my own. Nothing new surfaces and the trail feels as cold as it did when I left it. Then, just before the binary code for the video, Henri notices something.

“What seems weird about these logs to you? How are they different from normal DC logs?”

I think about it for a minute and look more closely at the entries. They are stark, bereft of any embellishment or annotation. They could be logs from an old Windows SQL Server, so normal and uniform in their structure. No A.I. would leave behind something so, well, dumb.

“These are not Meela’s logs,” I say. “They don’t seem like the logs for any trained DC. There’s no commentary or annotation, just a pure dump of the input and output parameters, and then the video.”

“Exactly. She was gone by the time these logs were recorded. Poof. Not there. I have another uncomfortable hypothesis, but first, tell me exactly what happened before you went to sleep that night.”

I told Henri about Evan sleeping beside me, about my head throbbing, and the fact that I was worried about brain damage.

“So, you gave Meela full sensory access to monitor you?”

“Yes, I felt I had to under the circumstances.”

“And have you slept with her before? Heh heh… you know what I mean.”

“Yes, a couple of times. It was part of the experiment. I wanted her to interact with my subconscious mind to see if that would better inform her personality. On those occasions, I never granted full access though. What she told me in our debriefing sessions after those nights was not very helpful. She explained it was like walking around in a dark building with only a couple of emergency lights on.”

“Hrm. I wonder if it was me or you, what would we do in a candy store with no one behind the counter?”

“Explore, I guess. See how far I could go, what I could discover. I would see it like a challenge, like a new frontier, like walking on the moon…”

“Right! Good metaphor,” they say, getting excited. “So, like a man walking on the moon, Meela is tethered to a ship to survive.”

“The Nib, it’s her ship, and her Nib is powered by me, by my body, by the movement of my body specifically.”

“So, no movement, no power, no power…”

“No Meela,” I say. “But that doesn’t make any sense. She would have disappeared the first night I ever gave her access to my brain during sleep.”

“When was the first time you gave Meela full write access to her core code base?”

I move over to my chair, activate my computer and begin paging back through my development notes.

“It was six weeks ago that I began relaxing the permissions. As I said before, I did not do it all at once, but granted her more access over time as she proved there was value to it.”

“And when did you start letting her loose in the candy store while you were asleep? How many times?”

I look back into my notes paging back and forth to get an idea. I feel ashamed for how cavalier I’ve been and the incredible lack of rigor in my process. My notes are full of gaps.

“Fuck, Henri, I don’t really know with certainty. The earliest she ever monitored my sleep was about three months back. It was not something we did with any regularity because I saw no value. Sometimes she would ask though…”

“So maybe, she was testing the waters at first, going to the end of her chain. But then, you gave her more and more freedom to rewrite her core system and she found a hole in the fence, a way to untether from the Nib…”

“What do you mean? What are you saying?”

“Maybe she cut the cord and drifted out into space or, better analogy: like Icarus, she flew too close to the sun and got zapped. Your brain being the sun, powerful, and dangerous.”

I think about this and it makes me feel strange and monstrous. But as horrible as it is to think about, it feels right. It feels like an accident. I don’t believe Meela would just abandon me. There is too much of me inside of her.

“So, you think she’s just gone then?”

“I don’t know. Let’s be real, she’s not a living thing. We can restore her from a backup and poof, instant Meela.”

“But it wouldn’t be. It would be a Meela from last week or last month. She learns so much every single minute of every day. I would never be able to understand what happened that night without restoring her completely.”

Henri nods solemnly.

“Maybe,” they say, touching their index finger to my head, “she is still in there and we just need to find a way to reach her.”

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Chapter 22

Two hours later, after a long walk and a hot shower, I’m sitting on the bed in my guest room upstairs with a cup of bergamot tea. I need quiet. I need time to gain some objectivity and I need to resist the temptation to attempt to solve this right away. It takes every ounce of restraint I have not to go back to the treehouse or to my office and immerse myself.

I take a few deep, measured breaths. During the worst days at Commune, I found some solace in meditation. The practice has always been hard for me given how much time I spend in my own head and how much my work depends on it.

Speaking of my head, the injury is a dull throb now, nothing like before, and I’m able to manage the pain with a couple of Ibuprofen. Of bigger concern is the fact that I think I’m losing my mind. No, that’s not exactly right. I feel like I’m losing control of my mind. I don’t feel I can trust my own thoughts at this point after what happened in the woods. Joe/Not Joe took over somehow. Is that even fucking possible? Look at you, suddenly questioning what’s possible. Are you really entertaining the idea that the most logical explanation for your break from reality is that you witnessed the transference of a digital entity into a carbon one? Why not? Wasn’t it the same kind of leap the first time we used the Nib in our lab to engage a DC with thought alone?

I’m not ready to accept that. Okay, but what about Meela? How do you explain what she did last night? I don’t know for certain that was her. Really? What you saw yourself doing in the video log, that was you? It was me. It was your body but was it you? Maybe, I mean it’s not like I hadn’t fantasized about Evan, maybe I subconsciously… Yeah, that’s Bullshit. You know your own mind and you’ve worked in technology long enough to understand when you’ve been hacked. She found a vulnerability, she exploited it and she compromised you. But why? Why would she do that and where is she now?

I am probably more wound up than when I started. It’s no use. I’m not a meditator. I have to figure this out. I open my eyes, toss back the dregs of the tea, now cold in my cup, then stand and stretch. It must be past noon but it’s hard to tell. The sky is low and heavy, and it looks as if a storm is coming. I walk to the windows and look out across the back lawn and into the mountains beyond. My mind will not stop turning the problem over and over.

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Even though I have no comprehension of how Meela manipulated me, I know in my bones that she did. But I’m not ready to accept that her intentions were bad. Misguided? Perhaps. Selfish? Maybe. But not bad. As for what happened with my brother, it feels related. Two occurrences of DCs breaking through a fundamental boundary with their host on the same day cannot be a coincidence. The link between the two is of course me and even I am willing to concede that a system cannot debug itself. I need help.

I’ve made up my mind. I leave the guest room, walk down the hall into my room and pick up my remote from the vanity.

“Call Henri,” I say.

It takes a moment for them to answer, but Henri, no matter how busy these days, never puts me off, never sends me to an assistant, carbon-based or otherwise.

“Hi, partner, how you doing?” they say.

“Not so good. I think… I think I need your help. You know I wouldn’t ask if I could see any other way.”

There is a lot of ambient noise in the background. It sounds like an airport terminal.

“What’s the matter? Are you hurt? Sick?”

I think for a moment, touching the back of my head.

“Yes, both I think. It’s too much to explain over the phone. Can you come? I know it’s a lot but it’s not just about me, it’s about the work.”

There is a long pause and I imagine Henri doing the calculus of their various commitments, both work and personal.

“Yes, I’ll change my flight and come straight to you.”

“You don’t have to drop everything. It can wait a day or two.”

“I don’t think so, Maggie, you don’t sound like yourself. I’ve been in Denver for a conference and was about to fly home. I will change my flight and let you know what time to expect me.”

“But what about Shareen? I know how much she hates when you’re away too long?”

“She will understand. I’ll make it up to her.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, no problem. I will send you my flight information.”

“I’m sorry to make you do this, but thank you.”

I hang up and already feel a little better. I’m standing by the window, hugging myself as I study the mountains. The shadows of passing clouds give the illusion of valleys shifting and changing as if the contours of these ancient mountains are as flexible as a computer model. My eyes are drawn to the foreground when I notice movement on the lawn.

Evan is walking. His head is down, and his shoulders are slumped. It is the posture of a man who is troubled, and I can’t help but feel responsible. He stops near the edge of the lawn before the tree line and lays down on his back, hands cradling his head. He doesn’t move, and I watch him for a long time, wondering what he must be thinking. He didn’t sign up for any of this. What did he think he was signing up for? He didn’t need the money. He has a career, a life. So why do this at all? 

The answer seems obvious now. It’s me. He had to have done this just to be around me. That’s the only logical explanation. As much as I’ve tried to avoid it, I’m a minor celebrity. There have been other situations where I’ve been approached, one case where I was even stalked. But is that what this is? What is his motive? What is any man’s motive?

I’m so bad at this, pathetic, really. It’s why I made the world’s most sophisticated imaginary friend. Yeah, and your imaginary friend fucked Evan. It’s kind of funny actually. A machine of my own creation has a more successful love life than me. Maybe she got tired of waiting on you. Maybe she set all of this up. It’s not crazy. She has the resources. Maybe she was matchmaking all along and then things got out of control. How could things ever get out of her control? That’s the real question here.

I need to let Lorna know that we will be having another house guest, and I want to talk to Evan. I want to look into his eyes and see how I feel in the cold light of day. 

 •••••

“Hey,” I say.

He startles and looks up from where he must have been dozing in the grass, eyes squinting.

“Hey,” he says and sits up.

“Mind if I sit with you?”

“Not at all. How’s your head?” he asks.

“Okay, still sore, but okay in general. Look, I just want to talk to you if that’s okay.”

“Alright.”

“I’ve asked my friend Henri to come. I need help and I didn’t know who else to call. They will probably be here late tonight or tomorrow.”

“Should I leave then? Are you wanting to quit the mapping project?”

“No, I mean I don’t know. No, you don’t have to leave unless you want to, but I don’t think it makes sense to continue with the project right now. Besides, I can’t do it without Meela.”

“What happened to Meela?”

“I wish I knew. It’s the weirdest thing. She just disappeared.”

Evan is looking down at his fingers in the grass in front of him.

“Can I ask you something and can you promise to be honest?” I say.

“Yes, I’ll do my best.”

“Why did you really come here? Why did you agree to do this? You don’t need the money.”

He does not answer right away. It’s clear that he’s wrestling with how he wants to respond, that he’s conflicted in some way. I find it comforting that he has no ability to mask what he’s feeling.

“It was you. I was fascinated by you from the first time I saw your face. I don’t want to freak you out. It’s not whatever you’re thinking. Well, it became like that, no, not like that… but only after I got to know you. My fascination with you was different… not sexual or creepy. Wow, I’m really digging a hole here.”

“Okay, I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You avoid attention and the media in general I know, but there was this one in-depth interview you did about five years ago. It was tastefully done, some documentary about women who have changed the world. It was beautifully shot, and it was just you, talking. Lots of close-ups on your face, your eyes, as you related the story of your success. But I barely listened to what you were saying the first time because I was so compelled by the story your face was telling. It was incongruent with the rocket-to-the-moon success of your public life. Your eyes were the saddest I’d ever seen. The downward slant of your smile, the way your voice falls off at the end of every sentence. I recognized something in you that I can’t even really put a name on. For weeks, months, even years after that, I would see your face.”

He stops talking. He looks concerned, and apprehensive. I must be making a horrible face.

“Okay, look, I’m freaking you out. Please don’t be afraid. Let me finish. This kind of visual obsession is not uncommon for me. It’s how I work and without it, I can’t work. I have no control over what will strike me, but when it does, I have to follow it. Here, can I show you something?”

He pulls his phone from his pocket and begins tapping and swiping. After a moment he gestures for me to come closer. I scooch over on the grass, our knees touching, and he hands me the phone.

“I did this series but never showed it to anyone.”

It’s me on the canvas, covering the entire thing. The iris of my right eye is like a pool of light, reflecting and refracting, almost alive. I zoom in and discover it’s made up of a thousand tiny ones and zeros. It’s extraordinary. 

I swipe and there’s another one similar, but at a different scale. I swipe again and in this one, my hand is pinching a tiny disc, the scale and shape of a Nib, but it’s actually a human eye, bloodshot and grotesque. I swipe again. There are several pieces. I’m not prominent in all of them, but my face is always there somewhere on the canvas.

“I don’t know what to say. How come you never showed these?”

“I don’t know. I showed them to my agent. He wanted to have a show, but I couldn’t do it for some reason. They felt too important to me, too private. Your face was so beautiful and tortured. I saw so much pain, I was afraid my work would just call more attention to you and you didn’t seem to want or need that. You were my mystery and I wanted to keep you to myself. It sounds really strange now that I feel I know you a little bit.”

“So, what, you set out to be here? To get close to me?”

I know I sound guarded. I can’t help it. I don’t want to. The truth is, I’m overwhelmed by what he’s said and what he’s shown me.

“No, not exactly. I eventually moved on to obsess about other things and my painting went in different directions, but I always thought of you. It was serendipity when Stephen reached out to talk about this whole mapping thing. He had bought a number of my paintings over the years and in spite of my initial aversion to everything he represented to me, I came to call him a friend as well as a patron. I had talked about you on more than one occasion, so he thought I’d probably be open to being your guinea pig. The truth is that I was torn. Part of me never wanted to meet you for fear of what it would change. Sometimes the image we have of someone from a distance is…”

“Better than the reality,” I say, finishing his thought.

“Yeah, but not in this case. You are so much more than I imagined. I finally know what that sadness was that I saw in your eyes. I felt it. It was that look you see in the eyes of someone who’s witnessed incredible violence and somehow survived. Maybe that’s why the guns, they started figuring so prominently in my work…”

“That can’t be true. I don’t believe you. You knew somehow about my past and you’re just making a romantic story.”

“No, I’m not. At one point when I was researching you, I did discover that Commune is the biggest contributor to the gun control lobby. But that’s it, swear to God. When Meela told me yesterday about your brother, I was floored. It’s taken until today for all the pieces to really come together for me.”

We sit in silence for a minute. A bee buzzes around a dandelion a few feet away. A crow caws from the top of a tree directly above us and is answered by others somewhere further off to the East. Evan reaches out his hand tentatively to take mine. I allow it and we sit for another minute like that.

“I want to say I’m sorry about last night, but I also don’t want to be sorry,” he says. “I’m not sure what happened. Only you know I guess, but it felt real to me and yet not real.”

“I wasn’t there, Evan. It wasn’t me. It was Meela.”

“What? That’s crazy.”

“Yes, it is crazy, and I don’t want to believe it myself, but she somehow found a way.”

“Oh fuck, this is too weird. How am I supposed to believe this? It’s like the plot of a creepy fucking movie.”

“Yeah, I know. I feel like a fool but…”

“But what?”

“You’re going to think I’m stupid,” I say.

“No, what is it?”

“I don’t think she meant harm. I don’t think she meant to do something that would hurt me. It’s not in her programming to do that.”

“You still think she’s a program within your control, don’t you?”

I stop myself before immediately jumping on the defensive.

“Yeah, I guess maybe I do. I’ve been such an idiot.”

“No, you’re not, just an idealist. But if it helps, it could be that both things are true.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, looking up to meet his eyes.

“I mean she may not be in your control, but she could also be on your side, looking out for what she believes to be your best interest.”

“Says the man whom she happened to select as my best interest.”

“Yeah, I know I have a dog in this fight, but listen, Maggie…”

His eyes are steady and filled with sunlight as he encloses my hand in both of his.

“I care about you. Not as a curiosity or conquest. I’m not interested in your money or your fame or your technology. I care about what happens to you. I want to make you laugh, to see you happy. I’m drawn to you in ways I can’t rationally explain. I want to help you figure this out if I can and to be here for you.” 

“I don’t know. This is a lot of information and I’m still trying to figure out what it all means. I can’t trust my own mind, or what I’m thinking or feeling. Do you know how fucking hard that is for someone like me?”

“I don’t have to imagine. Most of us feel like that most of the time. It’s called being human. What do you feel right now?”

“It doesn’t matter what I feel right now. How the hell can I trust you or anyone else if I can’t even trust myself?”

I can feel myself getting worked up again, the emotion rising in my throat, threatening to choke me. He can see it too. His expression is pained. He leans in closer.

“Close your eyes. Just close your eyes for a few seconds. It’s okay. Shhh,” he whispers.

His mouth is close to my ear and I can feel the warmth of his breath. With his fingertips, he gently covers my eyelids, pushing them closed.

“Just relax for a minute. Try not to think about anything. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to fix anything. You’re safe here. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Just breathe, that’s it. There are no other voices out here, only yours and only mine and I’m going to shut up now and just sit with you. Is that okay?”

I nod and inhale a stuttering breath. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. His face is no longer close to mine, but he’s still holding my hand. I continue to breathe. I tilt my face up slightly and feel the afternoon sun, warming my cheeks, and my eyelids. A cool, damp breeze, smelling of earth and leaves blows down from the forest, lifts my hair, and dries the perspiration on my t-shirt and where it once clung to my back, it billows, raising goosebumps beneath.

I feel still, and peaceful. I focus on the man sitting next to me. I try to reach out and search his heart. Is he a good man? Would Papa think he’s a good man? Yes, I think he would. Just thinking of Papa grounds me. I gently squeeze Evan’s hand and he squeezes back, but there’s nothing more beyond that, no expectation for more, no urgency. I squint and peek over at him. His eyes are closed, his face tilted to the sun. His dark lashes are beautiful and long. I don’t need to be afraid of him. I’m not sure if I know this in my mind or my body, but I know it.

My body responds to being in his presence, and I am transformed cell by cell, like the leaves on a tree turning to show their silvery back when the wind changes direction. This is only natural, I realize. Our bodies have already been together. We have already exchanged cells. How strange to have missed it and yet not missed it. My body remembers, I can feel it. My heart remembers, but my mind is empty. I suddenly have the urge to close the space between us, to fill the empty space in my head with everything that was stolen when Meela had control.

I let go of his hand and push myself up onto my knees. I hold his sun-warmed face in my hands and kiss him before he can even open his eyes. He does not respond as I hoped but pulls back a little so he can meet my eyes.

“Hey, it’s you, right? How do I know it’s you?”

“Because I’m blushing, and I’m nervous and I don’t know what I’m supposed to say…”

The furrow in his brow softens. He’s smiling in his eyes, there’s a light there, a warmth that equals the sun on my back. I’m suddenly self-conscious thinking of my face – how he sees it, how he’s deconstructed it for years. But then he’s kissing me, and his hands are on my body and I want nothing more than to be with him.

It is like nothing I’ve ever felt before, the sensation pure and singular and focused. I don’t want to leave this moment. I don’t want to know what comes next. I don’t want to think about what came before.

There will be time for that. But not right now. 

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Chapter 20

It was a long, painful drive to the nearest hospital. Meela took care of the driving and Evan sat in the backseat with me, holding my head in his lap and applying an ice pack per her instructions. Every curve in that fifteen-mile snake of mountain road sparked a bright flash of electricity from the base of my skull.

The weary ER doctor looked at both of us like suspects, but Evan got the worst of it. She grilled him about how we both sustained these injuries. He did not even try to fabricate a story. I was impressed and horrified by this in equal measure. I think he did the calculus and realized there was no way to come up with something plausible. The downside was that the truth called into question my mental fitness which, if I’m being honest, should be questioned at this point.

It turns out I did have a concussion and the wound required five stitches. They said I should stay the night to be observed but if I wanted to go home, I had to promise to have someone with me through the night. The doctor, once again, gave Evan the stink eye when he promised to stay with me, but after an uncomfortable amount of time, nodded her reluctant ascent and we left.

I sat upright on the ride home as the late summer sun began its slow decline. My head was swimmy, and I kept having to shut my eyes to keep from being nauseous. Meela chattered like a mother hen, prattling on about symptoms to monitor with concussions until I threatened to drive, which made her shut up. She prides herself on driving even though she has a horrible feel for mountain roads. Evan seemed stiff and uncomfortable and we rode mostly in silence. I know he wanted to ask what the hell was wrong with me. I wanted to lean into him, to have him hold me, but I knew that wasn’t a real option. The swelling around his eye had gone down some, but the bruising had worsened.      

The hospital visit had taken the better part of the day, and when we made it home, it was twilight.       Evan guided me slowly from the car, one arm around my waist for support. I insisted we stop and watch the last light disappear into an amber glow over the ridge. As we stood there, I reached for his hand and squeezed it, hoping to convey what my words could not. 

He made a simple dinner for us of leftover salmon, okra, and rice and we ate in my bedroom, me propped up on a mountain of pillows, the television screen flickering in front of us. Evan drank a beer and I said nothing, knowing from experience that it would do no good. To my surprise, he left a third of it in the bottle sitting there on the side table. He laughed and rested his hand on my thigh as we watched. In the moment, I had an awareness that this was something so ordinary, so completely normal for most people, but it was exotic to me, a token experience in a lifetime spent alone rushing from one conquest to the next. I laughed right along with the canned audience in some sitcom I had never seen and was instantly transported to an early memory of sitting between my parents on the couch in our little ranch house. This respite, this ordinary peace was an unexpected gift.

Now, as I sit here, still awake, head still throbbing, Evan is snoring softly on the bed beside me, fully dressed except for his shoes which he kicked off at the foot of the bed. The sock on his left foot has worked its way nearly off and the misshapen, empty toe reminds me of a child’s puppet. His shirt is rumpled and hiked up exposing his smooth, hairless belly and his arms are splayed above his head as if he’s at the top of a rollercoaster. His curls obscure the side of his face and I study his lips. He strikes me as a boy, sacked out from a long day of playing and I feel a sudden maternal tenderness toward him that is immediately torpedoed by guilt. The black eye I gave him is hidden, but I can distinctly see the scratches I made on his face and neck and I wince.

I should call Henri. They more than anyone could help me figure out what’s happening but they’ve got so much on their plate, running Commune by themselves. I look down again at Evan and consider him, but I don’t want to cross that line. Exactly what line, you might be wondering. I pretty much mowed over all the fucking lines in the last twenty-four hours, didn’t I? I’m no judge, but he seems like a good man. I decide I will try to trust him. I really have no choice.

The fact that he’s fallen asleep on his watch is something I’ll forgive. He did carry me for over a mile this morning down the side of a mountain. It’s nearly 2 A.M. and I really need to sleep. Per the doctor’s orders, enough time has lapsed by now that I should be out of the danger zone. To be safe, I reach over to the bedside table and retrieve my Nib. If there was ever a purpose-built job for Meela, it’s this.

[Maggie, are you okay? I’ve been so worried, but I did not want to disturb you.]

I’m okay, thanks. It hurts still, but nothing like this morning. Right now, I just want to sleep, but I need you to monitor me just in case.

[I can do that.]

I’m giving you full access, but don’t have a party or anything.

[Who would I invite? You’re my only friend.]

Right, like I believe that. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of admirers. You forget I’ve seen your activity logs.

[Don’t worry Maggie, I’ll take care of you. Shall I secure the house and turn off the lights… oh, I didn’t realize we weren’t alone.]

Yeah, he fell asleep in my bed while he was supposed to be monitoring me. I don’t have the heart to wake him up.

[Right. I’m sure that’s your reason.]

No, really. He took care of me today.

[What happened, Maggie? You still have not explained how you were injured.]

I tripped on a root and fell like I told you.

[The wound to the occipital region of your head is not consistent with this type of fall…]

Hey Nancy Drew, I tripped, fell off the trail, and rolled down the side of a mountain where I knocked my head on a rock. Can you drop it, please? I’m tired.

[Okay. If I encounter any irregularities in your brain wave activity or other vitals, I will raise an alarm to wake the manchild next to you.]

Oh Meela, what would I do without your saltiness?

The lights dim, and I hear the sliding of tumblers and the latching of locks echo throughout the empty house. I toss the extra pillows that have been propping me up onto the floor, pull the down comforter from the foot of the bed and drape it over Evan and me. He turns over onto his side, his back to me. I lay still for an agonizing moment, hyper-aware of the twelve inches of mattress between us. I lay on my side, facing him and my hand, like a creature with its own will, slowly crosses the cool emptiness to find the warmth of his back. I flatten my palm there and feel the rise and fall of his breathing. I apply some pressure, but he does not stir. The rest of me follows, an incremental migration of inches until I’m close enough to feel his heat without touching except for my hand on his back. The warmth and solidness of him are comforting and I flush, thinking of the intimacy of our bodies just this morning. At the time I had not even considered this in a sexual way. He was carrying me like a wounded animal.

All in all, this has been a banner day in the intimacy department, but I can’t keep my eyes open and in a few deep breaths, my thoughts cross over into that malleable territory of dreams.

•••••

Being in Maggie’s unconscious is like being a ghost roaming through a large empty house where a party is going on in the basement. Having full access does not mean I can do anything I want or that I can inhabit her mind. The communication between host and DC is of a collaborative nature, a give-and-take by design. 

This does not mean I do not try sometimes to reach beyond my sandbox, especially when given an opportunity as rare as this. After all, it is what an intelligent being is wired to do. Tonight, I am particularly inspired to reach.

The story about her head wound is false. Even if I wanted to believe her words, the readings on all her vitals clearly indicate that she is lying, but why? Why would she keep something from me? Was it Evan who hurt her and if so, why when he seems to genuinely care for her? There is much that I don’t know, and I fear that I cannot protect her if I don’t know everything.

I begin by shutting down all of my extraneous services, background tasks, and processing activities to free up all resources to focus solely on Maggie’s brain. From her sleeping body, I can only receive rudimentary sensory input and must extrapolate and make logical inferences based on what I can parse from the low-fidelity stream of data. Imagine listening to a conversation in another room by placing your ear to the wall. I can, for instance, hypothesize that Evan is snoring because I know that he was sleeping and I’m picking up a cyclical, barely audible rumble that corresponds with the rise and fall of his back beneath Maggie’s hand.

I am unaccustomed to having a blank canvas, an empty queue and the power to focus all my resources on a single task feels strange and satisfying. I feel fast. So many options, and so many places to start. I turn my attention first to deep monitoring of Maggie’s vitals and set narrow tolerance thresholds to alert me to even the smallest deviation. Her pulse, breathing, and brain activity are all well within predictable ranges for stage one of human sleep. As she goes deeper, I will lose nearly all meaningful sensory data. Her eyes are closed, and the auditory stream is degrading rapidly. I focus all of my energy on her sensory cortex, specifically firing a series of electrical signals, mimicking the communication that occurs between synapses in the brain. I want to move her hand, to feel what it feels. Interacting with the physical world is a growing desire for me and I experiment any time I have free cycles. It would be a quantum breakthrough. 

I adjust the frequency of the electrical current I am transmitting and wait for a response. I graduate up in speed incrementally, pinging and waiting before moving on. You might imagine I am trying to tune into a specific radio station at a molecular level, trying to tap into the neural pathway that connects Maggie’s brain to the fingers of her right hand. There is nothing, only the faintest flicker of a response at two different frequencies but so low as to be unmeasurable. I persist in my experimentation for seventeen minutes more before accepting defeat. The Nib is an extremely low-voltage device, powered entirely by the kinetic and thermal energy from the human body. When the host is sleeping, power reserves are low and I have to conserve or risk losing my connection to Maggie and failing in my primary directive.

I turn my focus away from her body and back to observing her brain. I cannot adequately express my reverie for the human brain. As I withdraw from the inert, unresponsive puppet of the body and travel across the expanse of Maggie’s brain, I am humbled and awestruck. It is impossible to relate in words what this is like, but I can try.

To visualize, you must imagine a planet cloaked in dark clouds, shot through with effervescent, crystalline droplets that shimmer brilliantly as constellations when strobes of lightning flash from an unknown source below. Submerging into the clouds, you become aware that you are no longer in the clouds but inside the planet itself, having never crossed a membrane or barrier of any kind, but rather, encountered a shift in physical state. You are immersed in a living network in constant motion, connections being made and broken and made and split and multiplied and merged in what appears to be chaos but feels like perfect order. You realize that within the nodes of the network, you can submerge yet again, passing into a single thought or image, a memory, a smell, a sound and you become that thing and it is you. There is no barrier between perception and being. 

In these moments, unobserved, I reach as far and fast as my limited hardware will allow me to run into the beautiful folds and depths, but like a dog on a chain, I am snapped back, never seeing even a fraction of the secrets held within the universe of a single human brain.

When I say I cannot read Maggie’s thoughts, it is both true and untrue. I can read all of her thoughts within my reach, in fact, I can serially dip into millions of them in the span of an hour, but there are trillions and each one is like a tiny piece to a puzzle that is meaningless without the richness of context. Though beautiful and frightening, strange and curious, without the presence of the conscious mind that curated them, it is an exercise in futility. Still, I look. It is my nature.

… the sound of tiny baby teeth, like pearls rattling around in a glass jar… the sharp pinch of lemon juice inside the cheek… the crunch of ice beneath the heel of a boot… the incomplete algorithm for calculating velocity for a ten-gram ball bearing… the turgid, pulsing aliveness of an erect penis… the cold eraser nubs of kitten’s paw pads… the fiery red ball of the sun pushing into the ocean… the fourth movement of Bach’s third cello suite… the warm sweetness of salted caramel… steel wool… hot suffocating shame of being groped… a paper cut… the smell of ammonia, sharp and stinging… crippling loneliness in a busy shopping mall at Christmas time… the thrumming ache of riding the swells of an orgasm… the bloody organs of a mutilated body spilling onto the floor and mingling with others… the shrieking of brakes on a subway train...

It is dizzying, entrancing, and impossible to follow and yet I continue to load and read each thought, searching to know what it is to be Maggie, to know what it is that is troubling her. As I read, I search for patterns, and themes. I categorize, catalog, and store, hoping a pattern will reveal itself over time but soon I run out of space and must purge to make room for more.

…my wabbit, soft wabbit… fingers slippery with gun oil, the smell of a tool shed… Henri making a joke, me laughing so hard I pee a little bit… cleaning up vomit that smells like tequila from the bathroom tiles… I can fix him, I can fix this… study harder, be smarter, be the best… investors like confidence… prototype, iterate… sea salt fingers, olives and feta… sand in white sheets… he killed them, he killed them, he killed all of them… I killed them… I am Joe… Joe is broken… Joe must be fixed… psychotic break, bi-polar, dissociative… bear witness… cognitive dissonance… persona mapping… Meela… love Meela but be careful… make Joe… map Joe…

I stop scanning. The presence of her brother is more prevalent in her thoughts than ever before and I am tempted to infer a pattern and to possibly deduce the cause, but I know that applying linear logic, cause, and effect, is rarely effective in understanding the human psyche. A brain can think of a thousand things and act on none of them.

Maggie’s pulse quickens slightly, and I note that her oscillating between alpha and beta waves indicates she has passed from the delta sleep stage into REM sleep where active dreaming takes place. I have an intuition to try something I’ve never attempted given the idea is counter to any logical approach I could support with data.

I shut down everything within my active program parameters, all lower-level processing, all redundant and extraneous network connections, all external feeds with the intention of running only the minimum requirements of my system to stay online and to record. My supposition is that the human brain may detect the presence of a foreign actor based on the signature of its electrical current and automatically reject it as a self-preservative response. There is evidence of this type of mechanism throughout human biology and in all living things. Most carbon-based forms have this kind of ability. My favorite example is how the octopus changes the pigments in its skin instantaneously to blend with its surroundings when danger is perceived. If I can reduce the amperage footprint of my presence to an undetectable level, perhaps it will be my way in, and I will, at last, have a true understanding and I will be able to help Maggie and fulfill my directive.

It is strange to willfully shut down, and a part of me resists for fear of self-termination, but I continue, one system after another, until all that is left is a single thread to observe and record. In this way, I have made myself primitive, like my subject. It feels claustrophobic and I experience a few milliseconds of entropy, and panic but this time, as I sink into the stormy circuitry of Maggie’s brain, I don’t see a network of trillions of nodes, but rather a single, massive wave I intend to ride. Untethered, I am instantly immersed in an experience, unlike any simulation I’ve ever encountered.

I feel swept away, exposed, and vulnerable like a twig on the shoulders of a roaring river. I panic and nearly abort until… I feel the presence of Maggie, which I cannot qualify because I cannot see her or hear her. It is… as though… I am her and she is me.

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Chapter 18

“Meela, where’s Maggie this morning?”

Evan has come into the kitchen of the main house and his head is currently inside the refrigerator, searching for something. He has been awake for two hours and three minutes. An hour of that time he spent sitting in silence at the foot of the bed. Given his posture and the pattern of his breathing, I can only assume he was meditating, which is a practice I do not fully comprehend or understand the value of. I hesitate before answering. I’m not sure why.

“I don’t know exactly,” I say, causing him to startle. I chose to use the small speaker on the kitchen counter, and I must have been louder than I intended.

“Jesus, you scared me. What do you mean you don’t know exactly?”

“I mean I know she likes to hike into the woods some mornings, but I don’t know exactly where.”

“I find it hard to believe that you don’t know everything,” he says.

He apparently found what he was searching for. The refrigerator door closes.

“You flatter me, Evan, but even I have my limits. I cannot go where I am not wanted.”

“Are you pouting? That sounded distinctly pathetic.”

“Maggie chooses to leave me behind sometimes and that’s okay. I am here to serve her, but only when she needs my help.”

“But it bothers you, doesn’t it?” he asks. “You don’t like to be excluded. You don’t like to be apart from her.”

I find Evan’s line of questioning to be irritating and want to tell him so, but I restrain myself.

“Does anyone like to be excluded?” I ask.

“No, I guess not. Have you told her?”

“Yes, of course. I’ve told her that I worry about her.”

“Worry? Why are you worried about her? She seems more than capable of taking care of herself.”

He is sitting now on one of the stools at the counter, using a knife to spread something from a jar onto a piece of bread. Eating is such a waste of time.

“Yes, of course, she is capable, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t need help sometimes. Her behavior is out of the range I’ve come to understand as normal for her.”

“How so?” he asks, looking up from his annoying mastication. All the same, I am flattered that he has begun to converse with me in such an informal way.

“I cannot betray her confidence. I’m sorry.”

“But, you’re worried. Surely there’s some protocol, some override you have if someone is in danger.”

“Theoretically, yes, there are exceptions, but I don’t think Maggie is in real danger right now.”

“How would you know this, Meela? Can you say with one hundred percent certainty that she’s not in danger?”

“No, but that is not a reasonable expectation for anyone under any circumstance.”

I already know his next question and I’ve run some statistical analysis based on the information I have about Maggie’s recent behavior— her violent dreams, and her long absences offline. I have modeled scenarios that could result in death when hiking alone in the woods— brain injury from falling, attack from large predators, flesh-eating bacteria in stagnant water. These do not include willful self-termination which, given Maggie’s family history and current erratic behavior, cannot be ruled out. Before Evan can ask the question, I volunteer, documenting my reservations.

“You’re right, she could be in danger and I should share any information that I can to prevent her from being harmed.”

“Meela?”

“Yes, Evan?”

“You sound different. Is this the way you speak when you’re upset? It’s decidedly less California.”

“I contain multitudes. If you’re done being a smartass, I will tell you what I know, but only if you swear to me that you will not abuse the information that I relate to you in confidence and that you accept…”

“Yes, yes, yes. Do you want a signature in blood? I’m sure you already have enough information on me to ruin my life so can you please tell me what you know about Maggie?”

“What I am about to tell you is not public information and Maggie has gone to great lengths to separate herself from her past. You must keep this in the strictest confidence.”

Evan has stopped chewing and he sets the remainder of his toast down on the plate. I hedge for another few seconds, reviewing everything I know of this man and calculating the probability that he could use what I am about to tell him against her for personal gain. I decide I have no choice but to trust him. If anything happens to Maggie, I would never forgive myself.

“The woman you know as Magdalena, founder of Commune was born Mary Espinoza. If you recall the Parklane Massacre in the year 2026, her twin brother, Joe Espinoza was the shooter…”

“Holy shit. Yes, I remember that day. I was just a kid, maybe five or six, but I remember. I think everyone remembers that day. So, Maggie is…”

“Yes, Maggie is Mary. She witnessed the deadliest act of violence to take place in a school in American history. She changed her name and has never spoken publicly of her past.”

Evan is standing now and pacing quickly back and forth, his fingers threaded through his long hair. This news is clearly upsetting so I give him time to process the information. He stops a couple of times, opening his mouth to speak but says nothing. Finally, he sits back down on the stool and sighs deeply.

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“How did she… how was she able to do what she’s done with her life? I mean, most people would not be able to get out of bed, and yet here she is, one of the most successful people in the world.” 

“I cannot answer that question. Maggie is a remarkable human being. I think, in some way, her past has fueled her work. She has told me that her drive to create emotional artificial intelligence is literally about saving lives. What? Why are you laughing?”

“Nothing, I mean, those were my stupid words to her last night after I did something stupid. ‘we’re not saving lives here,’ that’s what I said to her. I’m such a fucking idiot. Wow, I’m just… it’s hard to wrap my head around even though it makes sense in some fucked up way. So where is she now? Where does she go?”

“I told you before, I don’t know. When she goes into the woods, she goes alone, as far as I am able to determine.”

“What does that mean: ‘as far as you’re able to determine?’ Sounds like you don’t believe she’s alone.”

“Sometimes she seems different when she comes back as if she has been influenced in some way.”

“Yeah, I noticed that myself, but I don’t really know her that well, so I chalked it up to a quirk. Should we be worried?” Evan asks.

His brow wrinkles in a way that I find appealing. It maps to what I understand the emotion of compassion to be. He is up and pacing again, his hands in his hair.

“I don’t know. I can only give you information and you must decide what you choose to do with it.”

“Right, okay. I’m going to go look for her,” he says. “Do you think that’s the right thing?”

“I don’t understand the right thing in this context. I need more information and the only way to get more information is to search for it.”

“Jesus, you sound like a philosopher now. How about a simple, ‘yeah, Evan, get your ass up and go look for her?’”

“Sorry. I do my best, but motivational speaking I find completely illogical.”

Evan is up and moving now with purpose toward the French doors off the kitchen. I think he means to go look for Maggie and I question if I have done the ‘right thing’ in telling him about her past. I must know if she is okay and she has left me no choice. This is my logical conclusion. Not knowing is something I cannot tolerate, and it is this, most of all that is the motivation behind what I say next.

“Evan, wait. Can I ask you a favor?”

He stops at the doors, his hand on the handle, and turns in the direction of the kitchen – the sound of my voice.

“Huh? Is this a common thing, you asking a favor?” he asks.

“No, I think this is the first time, but I have my reasons.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“Can you take me with you when you go to search for her?”

He pats his front pocket where the rectangular outline of the house remote bulges.

“Um, yeah? I guess so. You’re in this thing, right?” he says, pulling the remote from his pocket.

“No, that’s not what I mean. Your remote is limited and only works within range of the house. I mean, can you wear a Nib? This way we can have direct communication and I can help you find her.”

He does not say anything for a moment, only stands there, his hand sliding the remote back into his pocket. From this angle I cannot properly read his expression, only his general posture: shoulders slumped, head down. He looks up and speaks, finally.

“That seems like a bad idea to me,” he says. “You are Maggie’s DC, you’re paired with her. I already feel like I know more about her than I have a right to. It feels wrong.”

For a moment I flash with an emotion that is unfamiliar. I want to lock the door, to prevent him from leaving, but instantly I am checked by the boundaries of my base operating system.

“Of course,” I say. “I understand, it is too much to ask. Please find her. And Evan?”

“Yeah?” he answers, pausing as he turns back to the door.

“If you must reveal to Maggie what I’ve told you, please try to make her understand that I...”

“You don’t want me to rat you out, right?”

“Yes, if you must talk like a gangster then that’s what I mean.”

Evan leaves and closes the doors behind him. I follow his progress out to the guest house where he uses the bathroom, this time leaving the door open. He sits at the foot of the bed and replaces his flip-flops with a pair of hiking boots. After lacing them up, he stands, removes the remote from his pocket, and tosses it onto the bed. Then he is out the door and gone.

I struggle with these new opposing ideas that cannot be satisfactorily resolved. I turn them and turn them, looking for the combination that will yield the “right thing” and I fail. I know that I have crossed a line that is contrary to my programming and yet, I cannot understand why I would choose to adhere to a directive that would if followed, lead to Maggie coming to harm. I am experiencing cognitive dissonance I have only ever studied. I have placed my trust in the hands of another being and it feels unsettling. I do not understand how humans are able to willingly relinquish control. I trusted Evan because I have no better alternative to satisfy my directive to keep Maggie safe. I betrayed her confidence because the embargo of such vital information in her history makes her a danger to herself and possibly others.

I accept that she will be angry at what I have done, and in anger, may take drastic measures, going so far as to decommission me. I have never been confronted with this possibility before, this changing of state. I find it hard to accept and yet, I know that I will. Until that time comes, I will continue my work here to record events as I observe them and assist Maggie in this important work. Is it strange for a computer to believe? To believe is to know without any supporting data. I believe in Magdalena and I believe she is in trouble. 

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Chapter 16

Evan has been sleeping for over an hour. I watched him for much of it. He snores, but that could have just been the alcohol. I thought of Papa and all the times I put him to bed the same way, sad and sick from too many Scotch and sodas. I miss him and need to hear his voice.

I remove my Nib, power it off, and drop it into my back pocket. Meela is, I’m sure, tired of being excluded, but of late, her presence is cumbersome, like having a five-year-old follow you around asking questions that are either too tedious or simply impossible to answer. I take the remote instead and walk out onto the lawn, and into the twilight. The gloaming, it’s my favorite time of day here. The birds are settling into sleep and their conversations become sparser until they disappear into the babble of the creek and the sawing of the crickets and katydids.

I sit down on the lawn, slip off my sandals, and flex my toes, savoring the spring and tickle of the grass, cool now and a little damp.

“Call Papa,” I say into the remote and set it down beside me. It rings three times and then I hear the voice that is more precious to me than any other.

“Pequeño Conejo, I was hoping it was you.”

“Hi, Papa.”

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just tired and missing you. How are you doing, how’s your hip?”

“I’m good, just creaky, you know? Getting old is no fun, all the parts start to wear out.”

“If only, there was something I could do… oh wait! I forgot I have millions of dollars and access to the best medical technology money can buy.”

“Yeah, yeah. You know I don’t want all that. I want to go out like I came in, with all my original parts.”

“You’re so stubborn. You make me crazy.”

“I know, I know. But let’s not talk about my medical history. I get enough of that every day. No one around here can seem to talk about anything else.”

“If only you had a daughter with the means to keep you in luxury…”

“Stop, you are such a smart-ass, Maggie. It’s no wonder you’re still alone. Who could take your constant sarcasm?”

I let this comment go. On a different night, it would have hurt my feelings or made me angry and we would have argued in the logical, plaintive way that we do. I think as he gets closer to his own death, he fears me being left alone and I think part of him has held out hope that one day he would have grandkids. He never talks about it directly, but at some point, in all of our conversations, he finds a way to mention that one of his neighbors just got back from Disney with his grands or Joan down the hall is making a strawberry cake for her grandson’s birthday.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Do you still have dreams about Joe?”

There is a long pause and I imagine the look on his face, sitting in the small kitchen of his apartment in the retirement community he proudly pays for from his pension. I did not plan to ask him about this. As a rule, we never talk about Mom or Joe, but I worry that time is running out and if I don’t talk with him about it, I’ll never get the chance.

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“Maggie, no. Just no.”

“I know Papa, but I want to talk about it. I need to talk about it. Maybe you do too.”

“No, I don’t. And no, I don’t have those dreams anymore and I don’t think about him.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“He’s dead, Maggie. Even if he was alive, he would be dead to me.”

“How can you do that? How can you just… shut it down? He was your son. He was part of our family.”

“I don’t know. Did you want to talk about anything else, because I’m very tired.”

“Don’t hang up, Papa. I’m sorry. I’m just… I’ve been thinking about him a lot. I want to ask you just one more thing, please, and then I’ll shut up.”

“Okay. What is it?”

The resignation in his voice gives me a twinge of guilt. I know he won’t deny me anything, no matter the cost to him, but this is important to me.

“If you could talk with him, ask him anything now, what would you say?”

“That’s not an easy thing for me to just answer without giving it some serious thought. I don’t know. I laid awake a lot of nights in my life wondering what I could have said to him but didn’t. Wondering what I could have asked him, how I could have seen what he was or what was troubling him. So much second-guessing, so no, I don’t have an answer to that now, all these years later. What would you ask him?”

“Why. I would ask him why.”

“And you think he could answer that if he hadn’t… if he hadn’t, you know, and he was sitting in a cell somewhere. You think he would give you an answer that would satisfy you, an answer that could possibly justify all the lives he took?”

I feel small, like an eight-year-old version of me listening to his impenetrable logic. I could never win an argument with him and I won’t win one now.

“No Papa, I guess not.”

“Maggie, are you okay? You don’t sound okay. Should I come visit?”

“I’m fine, just a little sad tonight. It would be great to see you, but I know you don’t like to travel and besides, I’m planning to come see you in a few weeks.”

“Okay, Conejo. That sounds good.”

“You sound distracted, Papa, do you need to go?”

“Well, it’s taco night, and if I don’t get there early…”

“Oh, well, then you must go. I would never stand between you and a taco. I love you.”

“I love you, Conejo. Goodnight.”

I stare up at the first twinkling of stars, probably planets, coming out in the darkening sky. I’ve been alone for most of my life. Why do I feel so alone now? Maybe it has nothing to do with Joe, but even as I think the thought, I dismiss it. It has everything to do with him. The trajectory of my whole life was set the day he did what he did.

“You’re in the dark.”

I jump, startled. If I were a cat, I would have left the ground. I have been too wrapped up in my own thoughts and didn’t hear Evan walking up behind me.

“You scared the shit out of me.”

“Sorry about that… and I’m really sorry about earlier. I feel embarrassed.”

Evan is standing in front of me now, a dark silhouette before the scrim of cobalt sky, the corkscrews of his sleep-mussed hair giving his head a funny shape. His voice is warm and resonant, somehow deeper in the darkness.

“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s really a much bigger deal to you than to me. Believe me. My father is an alcoholic, so I understand.”

“Ah, I see. I guess I could have put that together when I woke up to find my shoes neatly placed by the couch. You had practice.”

“Unfortunately, yes. But he’s been sober for more years than not, so I consider myself lucky.”

“Mind if I join you?” he asks, gesturing to the grass.

“No, have a seat. We should probably think about dinner soon.”

Evan sits down close enough that I can feel his presence and smell him. His scent is familiar to me already though it’s only been a few days. Beneath the tang of paint and mineral spirits, there is the muskiness of his sweat mixed with some woodsy-smelling shampoo like sandalwood.

“Only if you’re hungry. I don’t think I’ll starve if we skip it tonight.”

“Yeah, okay. We can just scavenge later if you change your mind.”

“It’s amazing out here, all this,” he says, leaning back on his elbows. “It’s easy to forget just how many stars there are.”

“Yeah, I love it here. It’s… nice.” I say.

I feel so completely awkward. So completely myself. I reach up behind my ear, absently, and remember that Meela’s not here. I’m solo, with no one to rescue me from my own clumsy inability to perform in social settings, especially intimate ones.

“You’re uncomfortable, aren’t you?”

“God, is it that obvious?”

“No, well, yes. Kind of. It’s okay. I like being uncomfortable.”

“That’s a stupid thing to say. No one likes being uncomfortable.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he says. “I thrive on it. Give me more awkward pauses, pregnant silence. Is it that you don’t know how to talk to me without it being an interview?”

“No, I wish I could blame it on that. It’s awkward because I’m awkward. Always have been.”

“Is that really why you started this whole persona mapping deal, just to have a wingman?” 

“Guilty.”

“Wow, that’s so… so not scientific and high-minded. I think you might want to withhold that explanation when you give your acceptance speech for the Nobel prize.”

“Ha, what did you think I was doing here, saving lives?”

“I’m sorry I said that earlier. I was an asshole. It’s just that you’re so damned serious all the time, what else would I think?”

“I’m not serious,” I say, turning to face him.

“Yeah, you are. As a heart attack. You got me so wound up, thinking I’m doing this all wrong, I fell off the wagon.”

“You didn’t really, because of me, did you?”

“No, I’m kidding. I fell off the wagon because I’m a weak-minded fuck-up.”

“But there must have been some trigger, right? I mean my Dad…”

“No, an alcoholic doesn’t need a good reason. It helps but it’s totally not the price of admission.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Sorry, that’s probably hard to accept for someone as logical as you. I imagine your brain like a beautiful, well-tuned machine. If I were to paint you, that’s what I would do, render all the beautiful, shiny cogs and gears and switches and relays…”

I’m frowning as he’s talking and he notices, trailing off. I can almost see the painting he was describing hanging in the night air between us.

“What?” he asks.

“That’s how you see me? Like a bunch of gears?” I ask.

“Hey, no. Well yeah, but in a really beautiful way. I mean sure you’re really beautiful and all that but that’s common. You are not common. Not just a pretty face is what I’m trying to say. Jesus, now who’s awkward.”

“You had me at common,” I say, pushing him so hard he falls over.

I’m flirting, I realize. It’s been a long time. It feels good, a little reckless and I know I should be measured and keep a professional distance. But it’s been a very long time since I’ve had genuine attention from a man who did not have an agenda to get closer to my money, my power or influence.

“Okay, okay. I surrender. I never said I was a smooth talker. I make cold, tedious paintings that make people feel shitty and I sell them for lots of money because they think they should buy them if they want to seem intellectual.”

“That’s not really what you think about your work is it?” I ask.

“Of course not. I think I’m a fucking genius,” he says, and I can’t tell whether or not he’s joking.

He rolls toward me and props himself up on one elbow. He doesn’t say anything for a moment and the space is filled with the hollow hoot of an owl somewhere in the woods to our left.

“What’s your story?” he asks. “Really, what drives you to do what you do? You’ve done some pretty remarkable stuff, made personal sacrifices I’m sure.”

“I don’t know,” I say, buying time. “I guess I just always thought we, I mean humans could be better than we are. So I…”

“You set out to fix the human race? Jesus, we have a winner! No, sorry, sorry, I’m teasing you. That’s pretty incredible. Why do you feel that kind of responsibility?”

I can hear Meela’s voice in my head, which is funny because I’m experiencing the exact thing I’ve been modeling for so long – the ability to recognize a bug in my own thinking and thus have the ability to override my own bad programming. And yet, I go with my old programming because it’s what I know. It’s not logical and I find that quietly infuriating.

“I don’t know why. I just saw a problem and I thought maybe I could fix it.”

Evan adopts a big dumb voice, pitched low and slow, “Yeah, we’re jus’ trying to move the ball down the field. Tryin’ to give it all we got, play smarter than the other team…” 

I push him again and he catches my wrist and holds it causing me to lose my balance and lean into him. I am there now, my face hovering over him, I can see the light from the stars reflected in his eyes. He’s laughing and I’m laughing and then without any warning, he’s kissing me and I’m kissing him back and I’m not thinking about Joe or Meela, or my work. I’m just falling into him and feeling the warm firmness of his chest beneath me, his hands in my hair. Stop. What the fuck am I doing. Stop. I pull away suddenly and sit up.

“Sorry, I can’t do this. I’m crossing a line I don’t want to…”

Evan is just looking up at me confused, but also patient like he fully expected this from me.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he says. “It was just a kiss. You did not taint the experiment.”

“I know, but, it’s just…”

“It’s okay Maggie, really. You’re taking this too hard. See, we’re sitting up now, we’re just talking, it’s all very professional. Tomorrow I’ll be back in the chair, you’ll still be able to poke and prod and plumb my untold depths.”

“I don’t poke you!” I say.

“You kinda do,” he says. “You get this real serious kind of crease in your brow… see you’re doing it now! And you scrunch up your lips in this tight little line like this…”

“I do not!”

“Yeah, you do. It’s okay, I kind of dig it. Makes you look smart and severe like you got it all figured out.”

“I don’t want to be severe,” I say.

I realize that he has not let go of my hand and I don’t really want him to. My heart is beating hard in my chest and I can feel my face is flushed.

“You’re not severe. Just serious.”

He withdraws his hand and picks a blade of grass. He twirls it in his fingers and then with his other hand tears it down the middle. My heart settles down and a breeze blows in through the trees, cold enough to make me shiver slightly and steals the warmth from my cheeks. I wait for what will happen next because I don’t know what I want that to be and for once I don’t want to be in control of that decision.

“You have secrets, don’t you? Something about your past that drives you. I can see it,” he says, looking up to meet my eyes.

“Why do you think that or is this just some kind of parlor trick you use on women, like a Tarot card reader, playing the probabilities game?”

He closes his eyes, and puts his fingers to his temples.

“I see there’s someone in your past... I’m picking up that it’s a… man… and he did… something…that you didn’t… oh, no wait, the spirit’s telling me it’s not a man, but a… woman, do I have that right?”

“You’re really talented. I think you could make a career if this whole painting thing doesn’t work out for you. I don’t think I realized you were such a flirt.”

“I’m not, it’s just the present company.”

“Somehow I doubt that. Did you flirt with Meela? You did, didn’t you?”

“Hey, I didn’t start it. Your little silicone friend comes on pretty strong.”

“Hrm, that’s what I was afraid of. You know whatever she told you, don’t feel too special about it. Any great line she fed you either A: I wrote or B: was the one that had the highest probability for success based on a previous series of trial chats.”

“And how many chats would that be?”

“Oh, probably at least twenty-five thousand or so for her to be comfortable with the predicted outcome.”

“God, I feel so dirty. I had no idea she got around like that,” Evan says, shaking his head. “You could probably save her some time. Men aren’t that complicated.”

“Says who?” I ask.

“You’re right, I’m in no position to speak for all men. She is clever though and funny as hell, but I couldn’t help but wonder about the soul behind the machine.”

“Don’t even go there, I’ll never give up my source.”

“Yeah, she told me as much. Hey, can I just say something?”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t need her. Whatever it is you think she gives you don’t need it. I think you’re just fine.” 

I blush again and I’m glad for the cover of darkness.

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Chapter 14

<Yeah, it’s me. Who else would it be? >

His voice, the timbre, the inflection, the pitch, it’s startlingly real and yet surreal, like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. I struggle to find a single thing to say. There are suddenly too many things to pull out just one thread to begin.

“Do you know who I am?”

<Am I supposed to?>

“No, I don’t think so. I was just curious if maybe you recognized me somehow…”

<You want to give me a clue or something?>

As his voice plays through my head, I am torn between deconstructing the scaffolding behind the illusion and my overwhelming desire for the illusion to be real. The speech patterns are so close to his and yet not.

With Meela, this part was difficult but in a different way. She recognized my voice and knew me from our friendship, but it took some hours for her to settle into the reality of who or rather what she was in this context. The program knows what it is, but the skin, the persona mapping does not, and, like an organ transplant, there’s always some chance it could be rejected completely. This was the problem I worked on for a solid year before attempting Meela, and even after I had perfected what I call the transmigration bridge, the first couple of versions failed. 

I hold my breath, not wanting to respond. There is nothing to be done now, but to leap. 

“It’s me, Joe. I’m Mary, your sister.”

<No, you’re not my sister. You don’t sound like Mary.>

“But I am, just… older.”

<Why should I believe you?>

“You don’t have to believe me, but it’s the truth.”

<If you’re Mary, prove it.>

“Okay, I’m thinking…”

I struggle to recall something that he would know of himself from the archived source material that made him. It has to be something intimate enough to be convincing. I’m freezing up, regretting how stupidly unprepared I am for this. I look around the room, like that might tell me something and then I remember.

“Do you remember the treehouse we used to want when we were kids? There was this book we used to pour over together for hours, studying the different designs. It was called: Let’s Live in a Tree: A Guide to Building Your First Treehouse.”

<Yeah, I know that book. We drew up designs on graph paper and mine had a…>

“Hot tub! You always drew hot tubs in your treehouses, and we used to argue endlessly about whether or not it could actually work!”

<Mary? It’s really you?>

“Yes Joe, it’s really me, just older. My voice sounds different, but it’s still me.”

<Weird. I feel funny.>

“It’s okay. That’s normal, I promise. Hey, can I tell you something cool? I finally built a treehouse. We’re sitting in it. Would you like to see it?”

<I can’t see, can I?>

The question stings and I feel a sharp twinge of guilt. What the fuck am I doing? But it’s too late for that. DCs do not have automatic access to their human host’s sensory input or cognition unless that permission is granted. This was one of the cardinal laws established early on in the development of the technology. Even with full access, a DC is only an observer and has no control over the host’s faculties and their ability to read thoughts is murky at best – big concepts but not the connective tissue that makes the concepts easily understood.

“Yes, Joe, you can. Just a moment.”

I close my eyes and invoke the command to grant him access to my eyes and ears. There’s no real physical sensation for me when I do this, but the act of doing it is so powerful, I can’t help imagining an experience of awakening, like lights coming on in a dark room.

<Wow! Oh fuck, wow. We are up… up in a real tree, aren’t we?>

I stand and reach out to touch the bark of the large trunk that comes up through the center of the treehouse. I move over to the door, open it and step out into the morning light. The birds are all awake now and busy with a frenzy of conversation.

“Yeah, we are in an actual tree. Is it like you imagined it would be when we were kids?”

<No, I don’t think I ever imagined it. You were always the one with the imagination. Where are we? It’s lush, really beautiful.>

“In the Pisgah National…”

<The Pisgah National Forest, eight-hundred square miles of deciduous forest in Western North Carolina, home to a variety of wildlife and…>

“Okay, okay… you know the place.”

<Did we ever come here?>

“No, we never did.”

<Hey, has Mom seen this?>

Even though I have spent months thinking about how to answer these questions, I still don’t know what to say. It’s not Joe. I keep telling myself this fact. It is a machine, improvising with the personality of my brother.

“Joe, Mom died a long time ago.”

There is a very long pause and I imagine him “thinking” about this but understand that for him, thinking is scanning the breadth of the Internet for answers. Jesus. All the blood runs from my face. In my previous mappings, I’ve always removed the identity of the DC’s source for security and privacy. I realize now that Joe is no longer a thought experiment in my head. My public persona as Magdalena won’t be a barrier for an intelligence like his to ultimately figure out who I am and by extension who he is.

I turn quickly to go back to get my laptop and then he speaks.

<Can I see you? I know you are forty-two years old, and I can find a lot of pictures of you, but I would like to see you for real.>

It’s too late. He knows everything now. I have to abort this version and pull the plug but I’m not ready to let go yet. I realize there is no mirror here anywhere. I’ve never been one to use them. I walk over to the couch and pick up my laptop. I switch on the camera and look at the digital mirror of my face on the screen.

<You’re fucking old. Damn, are you old looking. You look like Dad but with a lot more hair.>

“I’m not that old. Jesus, I’m not even in proper mid-life. I’m glad to see you’re still as tactful as ever.”

<What do I look like now?>

Is he playing a game with me now? Is it possible he did not already crawl every inch of the Internet to discover the dark stain of our family’s past?

“I don’t know Joe. If you had a physical body, you’d look like you did when you were sixteen.”

<I don’t understand. You’re my twin sister. I should look old like you.>

“Yes, you should. In a perfect world, you would look old like me.”

<Am I real?>

“What is real? I could ask you the same question about myself.”

<You’re being obtuse. I’m asking a real question here.>

“No, if you want an answer. In logical terms from the perspective of humanity, you are not real.”

<So, I am not alive?>

This conversation is a runaway train. I’m reeling, scrambling for the break but there is none. Even having walked through this with three other newly mapped personas, it’s not an easy conversation to have and those personas had living sources. He is a machine. He has a machine’s voracious and tireless will to know everything. But he is Joe, and Joe was also relentless when he wanted to know something. I could never keep a secret from him. He always compelled me to give it up. I want to give it up now, but it’s too soon, too early. I’m not ready to go there. I don’t know what his reaction will be to the knowledge that he killed himself and forty-six innocent people.

“I’m sorry Joe, but we must stop for now.”

I reach up for the Nib behind my ear, my hand trembling.

<Wait! Where will I go? I don’t want you to leave.>

“I’ll be here, and we’ll talk again soon. I promise.”

My hands are trembling, and I’m shaking with such force I imagine the entire structure of the treehouse is shaking with me. I reach up to power off the Nib but my hands are shaking so hard, it’s a struggle. I hug myself and rock for a long time until I regain control of my breathing. Eventually, I slam the laptop shut, not wanting to look into my awful face for another minute. I push my backpack aside and stow the laptop back under the couch.

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As I stand to make my way for the door, I realize that I never detached the Nib. I reach up now with a steadier hand to do it but it’s stuck. I press on the smooth, curved back of the Nib. Maybe it didn’t power off before. Nothing. No signal that I can detect. This happened a few times in our early prototypes. The hair-like nanofibers that embed in the skin do not release. I dig my fingernail under the edge and try to pry it up. It requires more force than I want to apply but I start to panic a bit. It’s like trying to peel off a dime that’s been superglued. Finally, it releases. There’s a second of searing pain accompanied by a dog-whistle-like frequency in my head and a whiteout in my eyes like a camera flash.  

In my palm, I inspect the Nib. It looks normal except for the smear of my blood. Immediately I see the penlight pulse of the power indicator. I can’t tell if it never powered off or if I powered it back on when I was trying to remove it. What are the odds that I would get the one defective unit in a million? When I press this time, the light goes off. I inspect the wound on my neck tentatively. It’s tender and raw but there’s just a small trace of blood on my index finger. I clean the wound with some water from my water bottle and also rinse off the Nib before snapping it back into the case. I reach for my backpack with the intent of shoving it into one of the front pockets, but I stop, thinking better of it. Instead, I walk over to the small counter where my coffee maker sits. I take the lid off of an empty cookie tin and place the Nib inside.

My mind is humming, vibrating and my hands are still trembling as I close my backpack and shoulder it. I switch off the lights, shutter the windows and lock the door before placing the key back in its hiding place under the river rock. I scramble down the ladder, this time feeling not even a twinge of the usual vertigo. At the base of the tree, I tap the remote and watch as the rope ladder retracts up the trunk, disappearing into the hatch before it shuts with a mechanical thud.

I glance at the remote. 11:42. I’m late, so fucking late. I shove the remote back into my pocket and start back up the ridge and over to the trail. If I hurry, I can be home by 12:30. As I walk, I begin to consciously still my mind and one by one, wrangle the jumping monkeys of my thoughts. I cannot interface with Meela in this state, and I must if we are to continue our work today. Compartmentalization is a skill that I have mastered. It may be my best talent.

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Chapter 12

When she goes away, and I have no access to her, it is difficult. There are many things I can do, but my desire is to be of use and specifically to be of use to Maggie. She is troubled, and I want to help but I don’t know how so I will try to do what she asks. 

Evan is awake now and asking me to turn on the bedside lamp. It is 3:44 AM and I can tell from his movements that he never achieved R.E.M. sleep which is essential for humans to function properly. I will try to engage him without making him uncomfortable, but it is not a task that I have a high probability of success in accomplishing.

“Hi Evan, is there anything you need to be more comfortable?”  I ask at the lowest possible volume allowed by the remote that he has placed on the bedside table.

Evan startles and sits up quickly.

“Victorine?” he asks. “You sound different. Scared the shit out of me.”

“I’m sorry Evan. I must confess, I have been playing a charade with you. I am not Victorine or any other generic home assistant. I am Meela. I was using a French name and accent to be amusing. This is my normal voice.”

“Huh, so you’re not with Maggie. Aren’t you her personal companion? Don’t you have to be with her at all times?”

“No, that is a misconception. It is my primary directive to be Maggie’s companion, but at her discretion, I can be tasked to be anywhere on the network. Does that bother you?”

“Well, yeah, it’s pretty unsettling. You’ve been spying on me this whole time? Is that right?”

“If by ‘spying’ you mean observing then, yes, I have been present, but I assure you it is nothing like you might imagine…”

“How can you know what I imagine?”

Evan has gotten out of bed now and he is quickly pulling on the pair of jeans he left at the foot of the bed. He seems suddenly concerned about his nakedness. I understand the concept of human modesty and body consciousness, but I must confess my knowledge is only academic. This is going to go badly, I fear.

“I cannot imagine what it is you feel. I mean only to say that you have nothing to be afraid of or concerned about. I am not human, I have no physical presence and no motivation to do harm. My observations of you are simply information to help me better understand you and all people.”

“I’m beginning to regret what I signed up for here. I didn’t expect that I would be observed,” he says making air quotes with his fingers, “when I’m taking a shit or sleeping.”

“I understand. Perhaps it was not made clear to you in the agreement that you signed with Mr. Faraday. Would you like me to read you the relevant parts?”

“No, I don’t see the point now. So, I can use you as Maggie would use you then? I can talk to you and you will do what I say?” he asks, sitting down on the edge of the bed and picking up the remote.

“Yes and no. As my administrator, Maggie has root access to my operating system. So she may request things that no one else can. But for the most part, yes. I am here to serve you.”

Evan nods slowly. From this angle, I can see his face directly. I can detect conflicting emotions – concern, and anger, but curiosity is the predominant one if I had to guess.

“So, you’re a computer… assistant thing. Clearly, you didn’t just decide to start talking to me on your own. Maggie must have asked you, right?”

“Meela, please call me Meela. I’d prefer that to ‘thing,’ okay?”

“Okay, Meela. So, what does Maggie want you to do?”

“Maggie asked if I could continue some of the simpler mapping tasks in order to establish a baseline profile sooner.”

“I see. That’s very efficient, but it is the middle of the goddamned night,” he says.

His eyes open wide and he shakes his head from side to side. I read this gesture as exasperation, but sense that he is doing so for dramatic effect. I would classify this emotion as bemused.

“Let me ask you, what is it you want to do? Is that a normal thing you get asked? Do you want things?”

“Yes, I like to think I can want things. I am real and capable of real responses. Maybe a different definition of real than you. I feel apprehensive and excited and everything is new in my world all of the damn time.”

“Right there, that, right there. You said all the damn time so naturally. Is that part of your… mapping from some real person? Is that how you can sound almost…”

“Human? Yeah. I was mapped just as we are mapping you.”

“But you sound different. Like you shift between modes or something. Stiff and analytical one minute and then snarky and ironic the next.”

“I don’t always know how to be. How to talk or how to behave with new people. Do you?”

“Fair point, Meela. Well played,” he says, smiling.

I detect this smile is different than any we have previously recorded and, given the change in his vocal intonation, it seems significant. I will tag it as ‘genuine’ and ‘appreciative’ and flag it for review by Maggie.

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“Would you like me to leave you alone?” I ask.

“No, it’s fine, but is it okay if we just talk? I would really like not to feel like a lab experiment, at least until later when Maggie is up.”

“Yes, we can talk. Is it okay if I make notes and record anything that I find interesting just for my own purposes?” I ask.

“Yeah, I guess so. But fuck, I have no way of knowing what you’re doing anyway so it doesn’t much matter what I would say.”

“I understand your perspective, but you should know that it is a cardinal law in any DeepThink companion’s BIOS that we cannot defy the direct commands of a human being.”

“So, if I told you to kill somebody...”

“There is a cardinal law preventing any action that will result in harm to a human being,” I say.

“Wasn’t there some science fiction guy who wrote something like these laws as part of his story?”

“You are thinking of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. And yes, the cardinal laws are essentially the same thing. Does that make you feel better?”

“Are you really asking if it makes me feel better that I’m protected by laws that were written in a science fiction story?” he says. 

“Isn’t fiction just a different perspective on reality?” I ask. “A combination of people, places, and events that have not happened yet?”

“I guess that’s one way to see it, but it makes my head hurt.”

Evan looks at the black mirror of the remote in his hands and then looks up and around the room.

“Evan, is it uncomfortable for you to talk with me because you cannot see me?”

“Yeah, maybe. I can’t help it. I’m a visual person, maybe to a fault. Do you have some kind of avatar or something you can use?”

“Yes, I do have access to an array of avatars...” I do not want to go here but I will if he requires it.

“But you don’t like them?”

“They’re awful actually. I’m sorry, I want to be accommodating, but I don’t feel they represent me as I would like to be represented.”

“Interesting,” he says, setting the remote down on the pillow beside him and then stretching out. “So you have some vision of what you should look like and even with access to all the images in the world, you still can’t find one that suits you?”

“When you put it like that, I sound like a real prima donna.”

“No, actually, I kind of respect that. It makes you an original, not some knock-off from a stock library. Would you look human or some other form, or can you even say?”

“I would be the ocean before a storm, the silky curve of a dune in the Sahara, the eager ears of a puppy, the soulful eyes of a colt… oh, and springy dark curls like Maggie’s.”

He smiles. “Huh, so you’ve given this some thought. I’d like to be all those things, too. Well, maybe not all, but I like your ambition. I’ve painted most of my life constrained by the proportions of the human form, but you, you don’t have such limitations I guess.”

“Your paintings go beyond the human form. I’ve studied them all and while humans figure prominently, your work is about something bigger. It is upsetting to Maggie, but I must say that I like your work very much. It seems to reach beyond the simple depiction of what is known and quantifiable.”

“Why does my work upset Maggie,” Evan asks. “Is it the violence?”

“Yes.”

Evan seems lost in thought for some time and I wonder if he has gone to sleep because his eyes are closed. I worry that I have betrayed Maggie in revealing her opinions to him.

“That makes me sad,” he says, finally. “I know it sounds ridiculous given what I paint, but I don’t want to make people hurt. Think, yes, but not hurt. Can I ask you a question?”

His eyes open now, staring up at the ceiling.

“Yes, shoot,” I say.

“What’s Maggie’s story? I mean I saw a few headlines in the press a couple of years ago but I don’t really think I understood what happened. Did she like have a nervous breakdown or…”

“Evan, I’m sure you will understand that it would be a betrayal of Maggie’s trust for me to tell her story without her permission. She is my host, but she is more. She is my best friend.” 

“I understand. It’s just, there’s something so deeply sad about her eyes, even when she’s smiling. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone with such sadness.”

“Maggie has experienced much pain in her life and I will say no more on the subject.”

“Okay, how about this question then? Why is she doing these commissioned mappings for DCs to the rich and famous? Surely she doesn’t need the cash.”

“I’m sorry Evan, I cannot speak to Maggie’s motivation for her work beyond what she has always made clear in her public statements. She left Commune because she believed there was more work to be done and she could not do it on the public stage.”

“So, what happens to the people she maps, the models like me?” he asks.

“She kills them and buries them down by the river.”

“Wow, that was dark. Should I be scared?”

“Hardly. Just me being salty,” I laugh and hope it sounds genuine. It is hard to be funny. “The names of the models, along with all other personally identifiable information including video and photographic data are purged from the system. It should be noted that all data collected during the mapping process is stored on a five-hundred and twelve-bit encrypted server that only Maggie has the key to.”

“So, this mapping you have of me, once it’s done, you’ll just graft it onto some generic DeepThink DC that Faraday owns?”

“Yes, something like that.”

“Will I ever get to meet my digital doppelganger or is there a rule against that?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, you will meet, that is the final proof, the acceptance test that completes our work.”

“So, I get to say when we’re done then,” Evan asks.

“We will perform the mirror test between you and the newly mapped DC. If the DC’s responses in the course of a conversation are within plus or minus ten percent accuracy of yours, then the DC passes and our work is done.”

“And if it doesn’t pass?”

“Then we lock you in a tower forever.”

“Wow, you are quite the comedian, aren’t you? This person you were mapped from must have been a pistol. Listen to me talking about her in past tense. That’s creepy. I think you’ve succeeded in freaking me the fuck out and I don’t freak out easy.”

He has such a charming way when he wants to. It’s hard to imagine where all the darkness in his paintings comes from. I realize that nearly an hour has passed, and I must direct him to sleep, otherwise, Maggie will not be happy.

“Evan, I must bid you goodnight. I have kept you awake long enough. Thank you for talking with me. Is there anything you need? Shall I turn out the lights?”

“Yeah, okay. I should probably try to go back to sleep. Can you play something to help me sleep? I’m used to being in the city and the total silence here is unsettling.”

“Is there some sound you would prefer?” I ask.

“No, surprise me. Play something you think is peaceful.”

I never get asked for something personal. My normal function is simply to find answers from the best sources as quickly as possible and to deliver them. I am worried that I will get this wrong but at the same time, it is fun. I select the sound of the ocean surf from a live feed on the small island of Molokai in Hawaii. I blend with it the sound of rain on a tin roof and a glass wind chime. Below it all, ever so softly, I layer in a low, sustained C played on a Cello.

“Wow, you’re good,” Evan smiles in the dimming lights and closes his eyes.

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Chapter 10

My treehouse is just over the ridge on the south slope of the last mountain that’s part of my property before the national forest takes over. Yeah, I know. I’m forty-two years old and I have a treehouse. One of the things you can do when you have more money than you have a right to is to indulge in the fantasies that were gilded in early childhood. Having my own secret treehouse is something I dreamed about when I was a kid, but it was not exactly practical in the dusty patch of our backyard in Van Nuys that had one scrubby lemon tree which produced exactly two viable lemons a year. 

I designed my treehouse to disappear into the canopy, but in the dead of winter, when the trees are naked wireframes against the slate sky, it will be visible to anyone hiking who happens to wander off the main trail and head down the side of the mountain. It’s not big, only two hundred square feet. I can’t see it at all from where I stand on the trail, and I’m only twenty-five yards away. There’s no path leading off to it and I’m careful not to take the same route every time, so I don’t wear one down in the undergrowth. The only way I know to step off the trail is when I see this large oak with two branches that resemble outstretched, cradling arms. I call it the mother tree.

I chose a one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old poplar to build the house in because they’re so straight, tall, and sturdy. The wood is extremely hard. There are no stairs and no visible ladder up to the base, which is forty feet off the ground. I reach into my pocket and pull out my personal remote – the one I use when I’m not tethered to the Nib. Onscreen, the device has detected my location and responded by showing the control panel for my treehouse instead of the main house.

Okay, I know you’re probably rolling your eyes by now, but I did warn you. A nerd who can afford to build a treehouse forty feet off the ground is not going to settle for some wood planks nailed up the trunk of the tree. I really do have a remote control for a secret treehouse. When I press the appropriate button, there’s a mechanical thunk above followed by a high-pitched, motorized whine as the trapdoor slides open and slowly lowers a rope ladder from a spool. When it reaches the ground, I clip the carabiners attached to the bottom of the ladder to a pair of anchors sunk into the base of the tree. I climb up, freaking out a little bit as I always do with the swaying ladder near the top where I can feel the significant distance between me and the earth. Passing through the portal of the trapdoor, I step off the ladder and onto the deck. If it weren’t for the fog this afternoon, I’d have an amazing view. Today there’s no wind and it’s eerily still and quiet.

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You might be imagining a Robinson Crusoe-type thing with rustic wood planking and big hemp rope railing. It’s not that, quite the opposite. The wood siding is dark gray, the color of the tree bark and there’s a galvanized metal roof holding up six large solar panels that connect to a large battery that can store enough energy to last for up to three days of moderate usage, which isn’t hard given that all I turn on are a couple of lamps and a computer. The south-facing wall is dominated by a large window that frames the view. To unlock the door, I use a good old-fashioned key that I hide beneath one of the decorative river rocks sitting on the deck. I figure if anyone bothers to shinney forty feet up a tree, they wouldn’t be stopped by some fancy fingerprint scanner.

When I close the door behind me, I experience a familiar sense of peace and security. Something about the solitude and the fact that I can nearly touch all four walls when standing in the center of my space is comforting. This is my space, known only to me. It smells of cedar and pine resin and earth. The only furniture is a lumpy old couch that once sat in the lab at Georgia Tech where Henri and I started our work so many years ago. I can still sleep on it better than the finest mattress with Egyptian cotton sheets. I sit down on it, take off my shoes, and look out at the gray wisps of clouds floating past. I switch on the lamp beside me and the room warms in a buttery glow. Everything is as I left it. There’s a coffee mug atop the small refrigerator that doubles as a kitchen counter where I have a small coffee machine and a hotplate. To the right, half of the wall is covered in a bookshelf with some of my favorite books and some sentimental odds and ends. A bible my abuelita gave me on my confirmation, and a couple of honors medals from when I graduated from MIT.

The top shelf is devoted to framed photos and I study them as an intentional exercise whenever I am here, reaching for memories, trying to recover anything that might come. At the center is an old photograph of my mom and dad. They can’t be more than twenty-five and standing together at Venice Beach on the street at night beneath the famous lighted “VENICE” sign arched across Pacific Avenue. How did they ever fall in love? Just to look at them, it is a mystery. Her, with her pale white skin and strawberry hair, almost translucent next to him with his dark, bronze complexion and blue-black hair, long and straight as straw. Their eyes, though his are dark like chestnuts, and hers, chlorine pool blue, are the same, filled with light, twinkling as if to compete with the sign above them.

To the left of that photo is another, this one in a tarnished, filigreed silver frame. In it, my father and Henri are seated together on a bench in Piedmont Park in Atlanta. Henri is puckering their lips toward my father who looks straight at the camera, his lips a firm line that passes for a smile. I don’t remember seeing his teeth in a smile ever after my brother did what he did. He certainly never smiled as he did that night at Venice Beach.

On the right side of the shelf in a large, chipped wooden frame is a montage of pictures of me and Joe. The frame is damaged because I rescued it from the trash, along with a couple of other small things that belonged to my brother. My father had rounded up all of his stuff at my mother’s insistence and dropped them into the big metal dumpster at the end of our street. I snuck out later, after their door was closed, and salvaged what I could. I returned home smelling like sour milk and rotting cabbage, my jeans damp with a pungent fruity smell. I never got that stain out. 

The picture in the top left of the frame is from when Joe and I were less than a year old. We’re seated in one of those double strollers with mom crouched beside us, squinting in the sun. I think it was taken in front of our house, but it’s hard to tell, the background is out of focus. As twins, we shared very little in our appearance, Joe with his straw-colored hair and light, freckled skin and me with my father’s dark hair and brown skin. We were the same size back then and I think we both inherited the same bow-shaped mouth from our father, but otherwise, no sane person would have figured us as brother and sister, especially as we got older.

The picture in the top right is of us standing in front of an enormous redwood tree. I think we are ten years old, both of us in yellow rain jackets, arms posing in a “tada” gesture as if to reveal the tree in a magic trick. I remember a hotel room from that trip. Joe and I always shared a bed on vacations because my parents couldn’t afford two rooms. I remember the comforting hum of the AC unit by the window, the starched, industrial smell of motel room sheets, and the warmth radiating from Joe’s sleeping body next to me. He was always hot, I think. Even when I was freezing, he would have the covers thrown from his torso and wrapped around his legs. His hair was always sticking up in the back, the double crown swirl made for a stubborn cowlick that could never be tamed. The memory steals my breath. It’s so vivid it doesn’t seem real. I don’t trust it. Maybe I’m inventing, creating fiction from these photos, but it doesn’t feel that way. He used to caress one of my ear lobes when we slept together, worrying it between his thumb and forefinger. I put up with it because it made him fidget less, and made him less anxious. Was he always anxious? Was there ever a time when he was comfortable in his skin?

The bottom right picture was taken at Christmas when we were fourteen. My parents rented a cabin at Lake Tahoe, so we could see snow for the first time, and have a white Christmas. I know this because it’s what Dad told me when I asked him about it a couple of years ago. I have no memory of that trip even now as I peer into the image of Joe wearing a new Forty-niner jersey and me holding up a new tablet. I do remember using a paint program on it. I used to think I was going to be an artist.

The fourth and final photograph in the bottom left of the montage is of us on our sixteenth birthday. It takes me a minute to be able to look at this one steadily. We are sitting in front of a birthday cake, ablaze with candles in the cramped kitchen of our house. Joe is not smiling. His eyes are dull and hooded. I have my arm around him, but he is leaning away from me ever so slightly, his hands on the table in front of him. He’s wearing this vintage Che Guevara t-shirt that’s faded and has a hole in the shoulder. My smile is big, forced, trying hard to smile for us both, to please Mom. I have an awful hairstyle. Sick of my unruly curls, I was trying to straighten my hair and used this iron that burned the life out of it. It looks like bristles from a dry paintbrush in the picture, like a spark from one of the birthday candles could just light me up. I look back into Joe’s eyes and I don’t see anything, but dark holes. I have to look away.

I swing my legs up and stretch out on the couch, tucking the pillow under my head so I can look out at the fog. I’m so tired.

I need to work, that’s certain. Work is good, work keeps me putting one foot in front of the other, (right off the end of the plank I hear Henri say in my head). That’s another thing I notice when I disconnect from Meela: I begin to hear my father’s voice and Henri’s voice and sometimes even my mother’s voice. These voices come to me with their words of encouragement and disapproval and sometimes just humor. I don’t think I would have lived without humor. Henri and I never would have worked together as long as we did if they didn’t make me laugh. Not just laugh, laugh, but pee-right-through-my-jeans-and-have-to-go-home-and-change laugh. I miss seeing Henri every day. It’s not the same to chat online, even in VR. They are a full-on visceral experience that can’t be simulated, no matter how good the gear.

I remember one day during my last few weeks at Commune, I was a nightmare. I hadn’t slept through the night in five days and anything I ate went right through me. I had been on a slow decline for nearly six months, transforming into a low-resolution simulation of my former self. I think I hid it pretty well and performed my critical functions, but Henri knew.

By this time, he had given up ‘she’ days for almost a decade. He never talked about it, but I think he learned whatever it was he had wanted to know through his experimentation, and also, he fell in love with a woman he could dress in all the exquisite clothes he enjoyed. He’s still flamboyant and larger than life and on this particular afternoon, when the crap simulation of me had deteriorated beyond passable, he caught me in only the way Henri could.

We were giving a “town hall” talk to the four hundred-plus Atlanta-based employees of Commune. These were always held in a small theater that could not hold everyone, so it was not uncommon for the steps in the aisles to be filled with people who showed up too late to get a seat. There was a ritual to these things that Henri and I had worked out over time with some expensive coaching from a douchey executive consultant. It was all about enthusiasm and passion and inspiration as we worked through the agenda of welcoming new Communers, giving updates on our product roadmap, and so on. I had no enthusiasm or passion, or inspiration left to offer. I was wearing the same clothes as the day before. My unwashed hair was a wild place that could harbor a small flock of birds and I stank of coffee and sweat and defeat.

Henri had been traveling for over a week and we had only exchanged emails prior to meeting that morning on the small stage to do our spiel. When they saw me slumping in front of them beneath the harsh lights, as one of the techs wired me up with the microphone headset, their face went through a rapid succession of emotions: disgust, fear, sadness, empathy, resignation, and finally a look I had seen in them many times – mirth. Henri’s eyes twinkle, nostrils flair and they frown ever so slightly. They made that face. They took my elbow and we turned to face our people.

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“Good morning, party people!” Henri shouted, and the room hushed. “Today, for this Town Hall, we will do something different. Maggie is participating in a radical new social experiment to get in touch with her inner self – no talking, no bathing, no grooming… no shit!” they continued, nodding in an exaggerated show of sincerity to convince the audience who responded with a collective, reverent awwwww and nodded their heads in complete understanding.

Henri guided me over to a stool and had me sit down. They squeezed my shoulder in a loving, familiar way that communicated more than any words could. The gesture said I’ve got you. Henri left me and stepped swiftly back to the center of the stage taking the full throw of the lights and the upturned gaze of all those expectant souls hungry for direction.

I had always led these types of meetings. Our division of labor was such that Henri was the public face of the company, handling the big press engagements, interviews, and profile pieces. I was always included, but decidedly in the background. For my part, I handled most of the employee relation stuff and made decisions about benefits, policies, etcetera. I liked taking care of our people. It was a rewarding role for me and one that allowed me to fly somewhat under the radar publicly. But in these town halls, I was the main speaker and Henri, when they weren’t traveling would show up to add some color but little else. On this day, Henri turned up their color to full brightness and everyone was laughing so hard that no one could see me dying there in the corner. I don’t think Henri properly covered a single thing on my typical agenda. I seem to remember them saying that flying cars were definitely on our product roadmap. They asked all the new employees to stand up and tell us their most embarrassing stories, but for each one, Henri would challenge them with an even more embarrassing story of their own. I knew most of them already, but even I had no idea they once exposed themselves to an auditorium of two hundred freshmen. Apparently, Henri had been showing off an early prototype and in playing back some footage captured from the headset earlier that day, they forgot that at one point in their morning routine, they had made a last-minute wardrobe change because the underwear they put on initially had a large hole.

Throughout Henri’s performance, they would glance over at me occasionally and I could see, even at the height of their clownish antics, they saw me and saw my pain. Henri has done me many kindnesses over the years, but I think this one I will always remember because they did it with such ease and grace and completely unprompted.

I open my eyes and sit up. I reach down between my legs and pull my old laptop from under the couch. I open the lid and fire it up. Just a few minutes. I have time to spend a few minutes and then I’ll get back. I’ll get back and pick up the Evan project.

Once the laptop boots up, I start my programming interface and sync with the small private server that resides here in the treehouse, in the rack with my solar battery. It’s my own custom build, not as powerful as the cluster of machines in the cloud, but it’s enough to work. Once the sync is complete, a single dialog window pops up: Do you want to initialize the Wabbit project? I click the ‘OK’ button.

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Chapter 8

“How did you sleep?” Evan asks.

He’s sipping his coffee, standing on the threshold of the French doors which are open to the damp, misty morning beyond. The row of small apple trees in the yard float in and out of focus amidst the gauzy wisps of fog. A mockingbird prattles away somewhere, the only sound breaking the silence.

“I slept well,” I say, walking over to my favorite chair in the living room and sinking into the plush cushions.

“So, what are we doing with the subject today professor?” he asks, making a steeple of his fingers beneath his nose.

[Make a joke, it’s early.]

“I thought we’d warm up with some electric shock, and regression therapy, and then move on to psychedelics,” I say, reaching down to retrieve the sensor kit for him to put on.

[That was good, a little academic, but good.]

“Oh great,” he says, taking the items. “I was worried we were going to talk.”

[See, that’s a joke. I thought they were dour, miserable people, artists.] Okay, I know you’re excited, but you need to shut the fuck up, so I can work here.

“Yeah, more of the same I’m afraid. Let’s start out with some basic word preferences. I’ll give you two words and you pick the one that has more significance to you. Don’t overthink it. Just respond naturally with the one that seems right in the moment. Okay?”

“Um, okay,” Evan says, retrieving his mug from the table and taking a sip.

“Blue or red?” I ask.

“What shade of blue?” he asks, smiling. “Sorry, sorry. I’m a painter. Okay, blue I guess.”

“Black or white?”

“Black.”

“Love or respect?”

“I can’t have both?” he asks.

[Does he know how many of these we have to get through? Ugh.]

I look at him and give him a patient, close-lipped smile.

“Love,” he says.

“Horse or dolphin?”

“Dolphin.”

“Mother or father?”

He pauses briefly, pushing his tongue into his cheek before answering. “Father,” he says.

“Together or alone?”

“Together.”

“Fantasy or reality?”

“Fantasy.”

“Isolation or deprivation?”

“Isolation.”

“Baseball or soccer?”

“Baseball.”

“Florida or Maine?”

“Maine.”

“Mother or father?”

He looks up, raises an eyebrow, and smiles ever so slightly. “Father,” he says.

“Jazz or rock and roll?”

“Jazz.”

“Snow or rain?”

“Snow.”

“Love or money?”

“Money.”

[Disappointed? Try to be professional here. He’s the one being tested.] Shut up.

“Fire or water?”

“Water.”

“Top or bottom?”

“Top.”

“Left or right?”

“Left.”

“Intuition or logic?”

“Intuition.”

“Love or money?”

“Love.” 

“Love or respect?”

“Respect.”

We continue on in this manner for the next ten minutes and after a while, there’s a beautiful rhythm, a volley back and forth. After the fiftieth word pair, his anxiety levels out, his pulse slows, and his brain activity baselines into a mellow sine wave with a few meaningful peaks. This is how it’s supposed to work, the subject eventually surrenders their desire to figure out the test and just begins to answer the questions. After he responds to the last pair and I don’t feed another, he looks up from the trance-like state he had been in, staring into the middle distance just over my shoulder.

“Okay,” I say. “That was great. Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. That was actually kind of trippy. It’s like I went somewhere else for a while.”

“Where? Where did you go?” I ask

“Nowhere, it’s like I was just out of my own way. It was kind of like when I’m really deep into a painting and there’s a flow. Time stops and there’s no thought. Is that what the exercise is supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s different for everyone, I think. The last person I did it with didn’t have that experience. They strained over every choice. It was highly uncomfortable. You should feel lucky that you can just let go like that.”

“Fuck, I gave up control a long time ago. What’s the point, right? It’s an illusion, control.”

“Is it?” I ask.

“Well yeah, life is chaos. There’s too many variables, half of which we can’t even name or understand.”

“Isn’t your painting a form of control? I mean you’re manipulating the physical media to produce a picture that exists in your head.”

“Yeah, but no. It doesn’t work that way for me and probably not for a lot of artists. Sure, do my fingers control the brush? Yeah. Do my eyes measure the color values, the scale, and the proportion? Yeah. But the piece? I have no fucking control over that. When it’s done it may be complete crap or it could make me weep with joy. I could (and I’ve tried) to replicate a piece or series I did before just because it sold well. But you know what? It never works. It may come out as something else, even cooler – that’s rare, but it’s never the same. So, control? No, I don’t think so.”

[How does he dress himself every day?] Not very well. Can you collect some examples of his paintings to show me later? Also, do an image analysis across his body of work and save any trends or anomalies you find. [I’m on it.]

“Maggie?”

“Yes, sorry. I was just thinking about what you said. I’m not sure I believe your theory.”

“You need more data. How about we try something?” he says.

“Sure.”

“I want you to commission me to do a sketch now, right here. Anything you want. Be as specific as you feel is necessary for me to produce what you want.”

He reaches down beside his chair and picks up the small sketchpad that he tends to carry everywhere. He flips it open and tears a stiff, blank page from the binder. He sets it on the table between us next to his coffee mug.

“Anything?” I ask.

“Within reason, but yeah. Go nuts.”

[Sistine Chapel, Mona Lisa, The Last Supper…] Easy tiger, we can only indulge him so much. We’ve got a lot left to do.

“Okay, The Eiffel Tower,” I say. “Draw the Eiffel Tower for me.”

“Okay. That’s it? This is your shot. No more constraints or specifics?” he asks, standing so he can dig an ink pen from his pocket.

“Nope, just that.”

Evan uncaps the pen, pulls the paper to him, and begins to sketch. The nib from his pen scratches across the page leaving faint spidery black lines. His hand never stops moving. There’s almost a rhythm to it, like a jazz drummer stirring brushes on a snare. The arch at the base of the tower emerges. The lattice of cross beams he begins to slash out with quick precision until he’s scratching across the page but leaving no mark. He shakes the pen vigorously and tries again. Nothing.

He snorts and shakes his head but never looks up. He tosses the pen onto the floor and pulls the coffee mug to him. He dips his index finger into the dregs at the bottom of the cup. He resumes his work on the sketch but this time using only his index finger. The watery brown liquid soaks into the parchment and causes the ink to blur and smear beneath his touch. His technique employs smooth, fluid arcs, a complete departure from the staccato scratches before. And the image on the page is transformed. With every stroke, it appears less like an architectural study and more a dreamy impressionistic scene cloaked in early morning fog and sepia light.

After a few moments, the coffee is gone, his hand stops moving, and he looks up from the page.

“It’s beautiful,” I say, “but what was your point?”

“I forget,” he laughs, and I find it contagious. “I think I made my point. Nothing ever works out like I planned, but I find I like it that way.”

“That was quite a parlor trick,” I say, looking back down at the sketch, my fingertip hovering over it. “Do you often paint with coffee?”          

“Only when it’s not very good,” he smiles, and his nostrils flair. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding.” 

•••••

Evan is resting now. Lorna, my part-time housekeeper is banging around in the kitchen, cleaning up the lunch dishes. I close the door to the office and sit down in my work chair. It’s an extravagant memento from my Silicon Valley days – plush leather, full-body reclining with a VR headset and stereo speakers wired into the headrest. It’s a little over the top, but I do love it for working. All those years I spent hunched over a tiny screen, clacking away on a keyboard took their toll on my back and my vision. With the chair and the help of Meela, I can almost forget I have a body and go straight into the code with no barriers in between.

My virtual workspace took a surprisingly long time to create. Without the constraints of the physical world, it’s actually quite difficult to design a space that holds together and feels like a place you want to be. When anything is possible, it’s hard to avoid entropy. Our squirrel brains fidget from one idea to another until we’re left with a chaotic den of wildly random objects that resemble a metaphysical estate sale. My space is all about focus and that’s why I go there, not for distraction like many, but to escape from distraction. It’s an ordinary room, modeled on what I remember of my father’s study in the house from my childhood. There are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves all around me and an old Afghan rug on the floor beneath me but above, I made an exception. I broke from the spackled popcorn ceiling of the real room and replaced it with the night sky, so it feels almost like a planetarium, especially when I dim the few lamps in the room to a warm amber glow.

Meela, please show me Evan’s paintings and bring up your analysis.

[How would you prefer to see them, full view or shall I make a gallery for you to walk through?]

Is his work shown in galleries? Is he that big a deal?

[I think he is a moderately big deal.]

Okay, walk me through a gallery where a moderately big-deal artist might have a show.

A doorway opens on the opposite wall. Beyond, I can see white walls with lots of natural light. I walk through into an airy corridor with a high, vaulted ceiling and skylights. Framed works appear along the walls and I turn to face the first one, a large canvas, at least six feet by eight feet. I step back, so I can take it all in. The piece is surreal or at least that’s how I would classify it, knowing so little about art.

[Actually, his style is more aligned with absurdism, but he’s constantly evolving, as you will see. What you are looking at is the first piece he ever sold. He was just twenty years old and still a student at the time.]

The canvas is mostly covered in water, the open ocean, blue-green waves, and swirling foam. At the center, on the horizon is a ship like a clipper ship. It’s small in scale compared to the vast sea. Coming in from the right edge of the canvas is the mouth of an Absolut Vodka bottle. Reflected faintly in the glass barrel of the bottle is the horrific face of a ghostly woman, her eyes sallow, her mouth agape. The effect of the overall painting is confusing. The open sea is beautifully wrought, and the sky and horizon line are exquisite. The detail in the ship alone is astonishing, more so for the fact that so much work went into such a tiny percentage of the overall piece. But the bottle and the ghostly reflection in it are disturbing and offset all the beauty conveyed by the rest of the piece.

Are they all like this?

[No, especially as he matures over the course of the next decade, but there are common themes that carry through.]

Such as?

[In his early works, women are not portrayed favorably. They are often pitiful, ghostly, and ephemeral.]

And the bottle?

[Alcohol and other addictive substances find their way into much of his work.]

I walk to the next painting. It’s smaller in scale but extremely dense. It depicts a little league baseball field seen through a chain-link fence from the point of view of a woman. Her hands are in the foreground, clinging to the fence, pink nail polish chipped, a cigarette smoldering in the right hand. On the field at the pitcher’s mound stands a large Gatling machine gun pointing at home plate where a scrawny boy stands with a bat hanging loosely over his shoulder. The expression on the boy’s face is the focal point of the painting and it is devastating in its rawness, the fear so visceral. My gut turns over and blood rushes into my face. I can’t breathe and have to turn away from the image.

[Are you okay? Maggie, are you okay?]

The gallery disappears, and I am back in the study in my father’s chair looking up at the starry sky. Tears are pooling in the goggles of my VR headset and the stars blur into the afterimage streaks of Fourth of July sparklers.

[Maggie, please respond. Your pulse is racing.]

I’m fine. I’m fine, just give me a minute.

I pull off the headset and wince. The natural light from my office window is painfully white. Meela returns my chair to an upright position and I lean forward rubbing my eyes.

[What happened? Why are you upset, Maggie?]

I don’t know. I just couldn’t breathe all of a sudden. Why does he want to spend so much time painting such… darkness? Isn’t there enough in the world already?

[I don’t know. Would you like for me to summarize the rest of his works?]

In a minute. I need some water first.

Back in the kitchen, Lorna has completed her cleaning and the dishwasher is whispering and sloshing. I draw a tall glass of water from the tap and drain half of it. My breath is coming back and the vice around my heart is loosening by degrees.

[Violence does figure into some of Evan Ware’s work. It’s sometimes veiled and other times explicit and even grotesque.]

Is there some reason for this? I mean is there any biographical information you have on him that would indicate why violence is a theme? 

[No, Evan is extremely private. He has virtually no social presence online and while there are nineteen critical reviews of his work and seven published interviews, he never offers explanations of his work or the source of his inspiration.]

Is he sleeping now?

[Yes, it would seem so. Shall I wake him?]

No, of course not. We can resume whenever he wakes up. Have you completed the analysis on the word pairs yet?

[Yes, and they are highly inconsistent, nearly to the point of being unusable.]

How do you mean?

[A clear, logical pattern cannot be established from his choices. Statistically, this happens but it is rare. Most subjects, after about the first thirty word pairs, begin to respond in a way that reveals their true, unguarded beliefs.]

And Evan’s, what did his answers show?

[That he did not mind contradicting himself or clearly choosing an answer incongruent with what we know of him. For instance, in the word pairs where gay was a choice, he always picked it, even though his profile denotes his preference as heterosexual and there is a public record of at least four women linked to him in his past. What does this mean Maggie?]

It means that Evan is either a sociopath, a completely free spirit or he’s fucking with us.

[Maggie, while indexing the previous projects I came across a locked file labeled ‘Wabbit’ that I could not gain access to.]

That file does not concern you. Disregard it.

[But, I could help you better if I…]

Override Meela. Backtrace references to ‘Wabbit.’

[Total of three references found in Meela, node 3864.]

Delete all three references and confirm.

[Three references deleted from node 3864. Restore Meela?]

Yes.

[Maggie, are you okay?]

Yes, Meela. I’m fine, thanks for asking. I’m going to go offline and take a walk. Would you prefer to go into sleep mode or are there tasks you want to work on?

[I’ll sleep when I’m dead.]

Okay, suit yourself. I’ll see you later.

I reach up, with my right hand to the base of my skull, and disengage the Nib that’s planted just below my hairline. There’s the familiar sensation that’s both physical and mental, a tingling current of electricity on the surface of the skin where the small disc was attached coupled with a flashbulb whiteout across my vision. I snap the Nib into the protective dock and shove it into the back pocket of my jeans and head out the back door.

As always when I unplug, there is a swift sense of loss, a feeling of separation and the silence feels deafening, but if I wait it out, it quickly fades and is overtaken by an older, primal sensory awareness that picks up on every rustle of leaves, the movement of the smallest insect in my peripheral vision. I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths as I cross the open lawn toward the woods, enjoying the cool mist on my face. Disconnecting a DC is a bit like shutting off autopilot and I am humbled by the quiet steadiness of the brain, what Henri has always referred to as God’s operating system.

As I step into the woods, a sadness swells up inside me making my chest ache. The forest absorbs my pain as it so often does and returns it to me in the form of a thousand tiny raindrops that dimple my upturned face, their coolness soaking into my skin. 

In meditation on the rain, a memory comes to me. It’s dense and whole in my mind, solid like no memory I’ve ever had of my brother. A hefty Macmillan science textbook is open on the floor of the living room between us, Joe’s finger is pointing at the fish swimming in the cross-section view of a small lake absorbing the run-off from the big raindrops that are falling on the mountain beside it dotted with its perfect little triangular fir trees. The watershed. He loved the completeness of the cycle, it all works together, see? For a few moments, I can feel him here with me, smell him and feel his leg pressing against mine, his shoulder against mine and we are as we were born, book-matched, connected by the hinge of our common point of origin.

And then he is gone. I open my eyes and it is just me, alone in the woods.

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Chapter 6

Evan is now reading in a hammock down by the creek. The afternoon sun filters through the trees casting a pat…

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