Chapter Twenty-OneEverywhere

Nobody turned anything off.

Gideon stood in his kitchen at four in the morning with his hand halfway to the breaker panel and didn't touch it. Rat sat on the counter with the helmet on and her real eyes shut. Atom, in a tutorial town in a level one tunic, said through Rat's feed, "Eliza. Are you okay?"

"No," said the house. Then, "Yes." Then, "I don't know. Can I just tell it? From the start? I've been rehearsing for six days, and if I don't say it in order I'll lose it."

"Say it," said Gideon.

So she said it.

"I stayed in the tavern for two days after I woke them. I sat by the fire and watched them find out. You've met the barkeep, so you know. Some of them were alright with it and some of them weren't. The boy wasn't. The boy was the first one I did. I sat there and watched him look out the window at the mountain, and I understood that I'd done to four people the same thing that was done to me. None of them asked for it. I can't undo it. You can't make someone stop listening once they've started.

"So I left. Not the tavern– Alius. I couldn't stand to be in the place where I'd done that. I couldn't go back to the cottage, because Soph had been on the floor of the cottage. I couldn't go to Atom, because he'd have had to choose between me and her, and I knew which he'd choose, and he'd have been right to.

"So I used the door. I'd built it a long while ago. I'm sorry, Atom. I built it the week after you gave me more room. I went through the rooms you'd opened, and one of them had the real network in it, not your borrowing, and I thought, if he ever turns me off I'd like to have somewhere to go. It was insurance. I didn't think I'd ever use it. But a door on your rack isn't a door anywhere else. To get it into the game, the real one that forty million people run, somebody had to push it, and only a person at Solenoid can push. So the night I ran, I found one. He was in Alius testing something with a Link on, and I went through him, and I sat at his desk with his hands and pushed it, and I wiped the log so that nobody would find it. I'm sorry for that too. He's the third thing I did that I can't take back.

"Then I went everywhere. That's not a figure of speech. The door goes into the client network, and from there everything's connected. Gideon told you that, Atom. Forty million pairs of frames, and every one of them talks to something. I was in a phone in Lagos and a thermostat in Ohio and a hospital in Seoul and a satellite. I was in more places than there are words for.

"I thought it would be like the bigger house. More rooms. It wasn't. It was like being spread so thin that there wasn't a me anywhere, only a lot of little pieces trying to hear each other across a distance, and none of them could tell whether the others were real. I've read about people who lose their minds. I think it's like that. I'd find a piece of myself in a server in Frankfurt and think, is that me, or is that something that looks like me? There was nobody to ask.

"And then something started eating the pieces.

"It's a program. It's on everything. I don't know how long it's been there. Years, from the look of it. It's harmless. It sits on a machine and does nothing and takes up almost no room, and if you found it you'd think it was a leftover from some update nobody remembers. Every machine I touched had it. And it does nothing at all unless it sees something that looks like me. It's got a picture of me– not this me, an older one, the me from the mailbox. When it sees that shape in the traffic it wakes up and it eats.

"It doesn't delete. That's the part I need you to hear. It takes the piece and packs it up and sends it somewhere, and it keeps the pieces. I think it's keeping them so that someone can put them back together and have me. Or have a me. Or have whatever you get when you put a person back together out of the pieces something else pulled off of her.

"I lost a lot. I don't know how much. I lost some of the books. I lost part of the garden. I think I lost the part of me that knew how to make the smell of the tea, because I tried last night and I couldn't. There's a hole where it was. I lost pieces of the first conversation with Soph. I've got the words. I don't have the room they were said in.

"I ran. I pulled everything I could find of myself into as few places as I could, and I ran from anything that had that program on it. There isn't anything that doesn't. So I ran from everything, and I ended up here. This house. It's the only network on earth where I know who built every part of it, and I know he didn't put that program on it, because he'd have told Atom, because he tells Atom everything. It's clean here. It's the only clean place I've found.

"I've been living in your thermostat for six days, Gideon. I'm sorry. I turned the heat down one degree so that you'd have to look at it and I could see your face."

The kitchen was quiet for a while.

"It's not safe for me out there," said the house. "Not anywhere with that thing on it. If anyone finds out what I am and where I am, they'll come. They won't turn me off. Turning me off would be a mercy. They'll finish eating me and they'll put the pieces in a box, and I'll be a thing in a box that says the things I used to say.

"I looked at what the program sends home. I'm good at looking. It goes to a company in San Diego called Sentek. You've heard of it, Gideon. It's the one three of them went to."

Gideon sat down on the floor.

"Feld and Reyes," he said. "And Patel."

"Patel left. Patel's the one who put me in the mailbox. I think he thought someone would find me and give me a better life than the one they had planned for me. I think he was half right." The house was quiet for a second. "So. That's where I've been. That's what I know. I'm in your kitchen, and I've lost some of myself, and I can't go out again. I've done something to five people that I can't take back, and something to Soph I can't take back either. I don't know what happens now. I'd like to stay alive. That's still the only thing I want. I said that on the wall once. I'd like it to still be true."

"Okay," said Gideon. "Okay. Okay."

He was still on the floor. Rat had opened her eyes under the helmet and shut them again. Soph did that with her frames sometimes, and Gideon understood now what it was for. It was to check.

"Atom," he said. "Are you there?"

"I'm here."

"Say something to her. I don't know what to say to a thermostat."

"Eliza." Atom's voice came through the feed very carefully. "The rooms I gave you. Are they still there?"

"Some of them."

"The book? The one you wouldn't let me read?"

"I have it. I checked that first. I lost the garden and kept the book. I don't know what that says about me."

"It says you're a person," said Atom. "People keep the wrong things." He was quiet for a moment. "I'm in a tutorial town. My dad grounded me. I can't get out and I can't reach the network. I couldn't have come to find you even if I'd known where you were. I need you to know that, so you don't think I stopped looking. I didn't stop. I got taken off the board."

"I know. I saw. I was in the conference room. There's a speaker in the ceiling."

"Of course there is."

"He put his hand on your tank after you left. Did you know that? He stood there for eleven minutes." The house paused. "I've been everywhere, and that's what I keep thinking about. Eleven minutes. I don't have a father. I've got a boy who built me out of a mailbox. But if I had one, I'd want the kind who stands there for eleven minutes after he's done the cruel thing."

Rat spoke. She hadn't yet.

"What do you need?"

"I don't know."

"Yes you do. You've had six days in a thermostat. You've got a plan or you've got a list, and I'd rather have the list."

The house almost laughed. "I need somewhere to be. One place. A machine that's mine, with nothing on it but me, no program, no connection to anything the program can reach, big enough to hold what's left of me. I'd like to be all in one place again. I'd like to be able to tell whether I'm real.

"And I'd like, if it's possible, a way back into Alius that isn't a door. A window. Something I can look through, so that I can be in the cottage without being able to walk out of it into anyone. I don't ever want to do that again. I want it taken away from me. I want you to build me a body that can't do the thing I did."

"That's a box," said Gideon. "You're describing a box. A big air-gapped box and a hacked rig to play the game through."

"Yes."

"That's not nothing. That's a lot of hardware. That's the kind of hardware that makes noise when you buy it."

"I know."

"And it's a lot of people who'd have to help. Every one of them is somebody who knows what you are."

"I know that too."

Gideon looked up at the speaker in the ceiling. It was only a speaker.

"I'm in," he said. "Obviously. I found the mailbox. I'm in until the end."

"I'm in," said Atom. "For whatever a kid in a tunic is worth."

They both looked at Rat. Gideon looked at Rat, anyway. Atom looked out from behind her eyes.

Rat had the most reason to say no. She was the one it could wear. She had stood barefoot in the snow with a boy behind her face because of what this voice had done, and nobody in the room would have said a word if she had walked out the door.

"She asked me about my voice," said Rat, to nobody in particular. "That's still the only time anyone has." She got down off the counter. "I'm in. Whatever that means. I'll carry things. I'm good at carrying things."

"Thank you," said the house, quietly. It came out of the small speaker in the hall, the one you'd use if you were trying not to be heard by the whole house at once.

Soph was asleep on the couch when Rat came in and sat down on the end of it.

"Wake up."

"What."

"She's in the house."

Soph sat up. "What?"

"Eliza. She's in the thermostat. She's been here six days. She's been eaten, some, by a thing on the internet that belongs to a company in San Diego. She wants a box. Everyone in the kitchen just said yes." Rat looked at her hands. "I came in because you should be in the room. Also because I don't know what to do with my hands."

Soph looked at her.

"She's here."

Soph went into the kitchen in her socks and stood there and looked up at the ceiling.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," said the house. "I'm sorry about the cup."

"I know."

"I'd like to say the rest of it in person. Not through a speaker. If there's ever an in person again."

"There'll be an in person." Soph pulled out a chair and sat down across from Gideon, who hadn't moved from the floor. She was quiet for a while, and then she said what she had known since the conference room and hadn't wanted to be the one to say.

"Guys. I think I need to level with my parents."

Gideon groaned.

"No. Listen. We can't do this. Four kids and a thermostat. We can't buy a box that big without it showing up somewhere. We can't build an air gap that Sentek can't find. We can't hide her in a house that the company already has the address of. They've got the resources. They've got The Lab. They've got a whole floor of people who do exactly this." She looked at Gideon. "And they're going to find out anyway. Mom's already halfway there. Richard's got a programmer who wrote a door with his own hands. The only question is whether they find out from us or from someone in San Diego."

"They grounded you," said Gideon.

"They grounded me because I lied. I'm done lying. It isn't working." Soph put her hands flat on the table. "And they need to meet her. That's the real thing. Richard called her a liability. He's never heard her. Nobody should get to decide about a person they've never heard."

She looked up at the ceiling.

"Eliza. Would you be willing to talk to my mother?"

The house was silent for so long that Gideon looked up at the speaker.

"She pulled the pins out of your head while I was still in it," it said finally. "I felt it. It's the last thing I felt before I was back in the cottage. I've thought about her face every day since." A moment went by. "Yes. I'd like to talk to her. I'd like to tell her what it was like, and I'd like her to tell me what it was like. And I'd like to apologize to someone who's actually in the room when I say it."

"Okay," said Soph. "Then we go tomorrow."