# ETERNITY

## Chapter One. The Canoe

The wine bottle was empty, and neither of them wanted to go back to the house. Soph sat on the dock with Atom's arm around her and watched the sun go behind the trees. They had spent the afternoon in his father's skiff, drifting farther from shore than either had noticed, kissing until the boat bumped a fallen branch.

Now she could hear someone moving dishes in the house. Soon her mother would call them in.

They had finished high school a month earlier, both fifteen. For the last two years Max had driven them to the local college twice a week. Atom had complained about being dropped off by a parent, then tried to get out of the car without the lunch Richard had packed him. Soph had carried it in.

She had known him since they were five. That afternoon she had discovered he got quiet when she touched his neck. She wanted to find out what else she didn't know.

"Here, I got you something." Atom produced a small, smooth stone and put it in Soph's hand. "It's a canoe."

They had played this game the first day they met. She could still see his face at the height of her own.

"It's a zebra," he had said, and handed her a smooth gray stone. She took it and examined it.

"No, it's not." Stupid boy. She handed it back to him.

"Thank you." He handed it back to her. "Here. It's a river."

"It's an ocean." What was the game?

He shook his head, and she gave the stone back to him.

"Thank you. It's an ocean." He handed the stone back to her.

"Thank you, it's a canoe."

He put it in his pocket. "Yes, it's a canoe. What's your name?"

"Sophia. What's yours?"

"Atom Blaster."

He had discovered Asimov and renamed himself. His given name was Adam Lee, but his father, Richard, called him whatever he wanted, and his teachers eventually gave up. Even now he signed things Atom B.

Soph had tried to follow Atom's lead and force the name Arwen upon the world, fancying herself a character from Tolkien, but she wasn't as stubborn as Atom in her insistence and so it never stuck. Her mother Maxine, who everyone called Max, had named her Sophia after her own grandmother, and after wisdom, in that order. Only her parents ever used the whole thing. To everyone else she was Soph.

He had once told her she had the nose of a princess. She had kept that, though she was fairly sure princesses were not supposed to have crooked noses. It was one of the few compliments he hadn't spoiled by explaining.

When Max called, they walked toward the house holding hands. The path was marked by large, flat stones. Soph stepped right, left, then shuffled so she could begin the next pair with her left. Atom usually imitated her. Tonight he slowed down to keep beside her.

At the porch they let go. Soph wanted to follow him into his room. They had shared a bed often enough as children, but she stopped outside her own door and said goodnight.

She lay in her own bed with the window open and listened to the wolves. On the other side of the wall, she was fairly sure, Atom wasn't sleeping either.

---

Soph rolled over on her side to see Atom standing in the doorway. Her mouth was dry and the light was painful. She'd never had a hangover. Atom, on the other hand, seemed entirely unaffected by the events of the night before.

"Are you awake yet?" He grinned. "Come on, something really cool just came in from the office!"

"What time is it?"

"Ten. Come on."

"I hate you."

"I know. Come on."

Richard had built the house over a small natural cavern and taken the idea of a man cave seriously. Bison and handprints covered the rock walls. Mannequins stood on the concrete floor wearing generations of Second Skin, the haptic suit everyone called the G-Suit. The oldest wore arm pieces Richard had printed himself. Soph's mother had helped turn those into something people would pay to put on. Between the mannequins, a worktable trailed power strips across the floor.

"Morning, sunshine." Max beamed as Soph came down the stairs. She held a silver helmet, a shock of cables growing out of the top of it like hair.

Soph grunted, still groggy. Atom was right behind her, goading her along.

"Okay, she's awake. So what's the new toy?" asked Atom.

"It's a dense array EEG neuroimager," said Max. "It reads brainwaves and turns them into actions. This is just a prototype, but it's still pretty cool. Do you want to try it?"

"Soph does," Atom chimed in. "That thing looks dangerous."

Soph punched him in the arm. "How chivalrous."

"We're only using the reader today. Sit down and I'll hook you in."

A set of Second Sight LX3s rested on the chair that Max was pointing at. The LX3s weren't available to the public for a couple more weeks– getting the latest frames was definitely one of the perks of being family. Soph put them on as Max placed the skullcap on her head and adjusted the chinstrap.

"Okay, this part might feel a little strange." Max pressed a button and the helmet made a clicking sound. Soph felt tiny needles jabbing her temples and the back of her neck. She winced.

"Does that feel okay?" asked Max, with her finger still on the release.

"Yeah. It's a little weird. I don't mind."

"Just let me know if it's too much for you and I'll unhook you. I'm going to run the calibration program. Just do what it tells you."

Red text appeared in front of her and she did as it instructed.

Look to the right, then back to center. Think of the color red. Raise your eyebrows. Think of the color blue. Stick your tongue out. Look to the left, then back to center. Think of a word. Now think of the word blue. Smile. Breathe in and out through your nose. Frown. Think of the letters of the alphabet as they are displayed. Raise your right hand. Now your left. Good, now repeat the numbers on the screen. Think of the color yellow. Breathe in and out through your mouth...

Another five long minutes of absurd instructions, through most of which Atom snickered. Then, a ding. Calibration complete.

Now Soph was in the same place in the room where she had been, but the room was empty. She looked down at her hands– they were covered by thick leather gloves. "What do I do?"

"Try getting out of the chair without actually standing up."

Soph thought of the words stand up. Nothing happened. She tried to imagine it, like someone trying to levitate by imagining themselves floating in the air. Still, nothing. Atom snickered more.

"It's based on motor control," said Max. "It takes a lot of getting used to, and more calibration would be helpful, but I didn't want to bore you with the two-hour test. It's subtle, like you're moving your legs but not enough to actually move."

Soph focused on her legs and tried to feel what it would be like to get up. She leaned forward a little, almost imperceptibly, then engaged her leg muscles as though she were about to stand. And suddenly she was standing in the virtual world and sitting in the real one.

"Whoa, this feels so strange!"

"We can see you on the monitor. Try walking forward."

She thought of what it would be like to walk forward. First one leg, then the other. She tensed her muscles and her character moved forward.

"Now turn around."

Soph imagined herself turning around, and she turned.

"This is so different! Are we in The World?" By The World Soph meant Altered World, the game that was the heart and soul of Solenoid Experiential Games.

"Yes, although you're in a sandbox environment. We haven't quite worked out player interaction yet."

"So what else can it do? Just walking around and stuff?" asked Atom.

"Actually, it can do a lot. EEG has been around for a long time, the real work is in the software. The calibration algorithm is far more accurate than anything else out there, and we can read biofeedback very precisely."

"Can it turn our thoughts into words?" asked Atom.

"That would take a lot more calibration, but yes," replied Max. "You can train the software to learn words that you visualize. It would be gibberish at first, but as it learns you would be able to communicate in complete sentences. It's always learning and recalibrating, so as you communicate with other players it will make the connection between your brain and speech outputs."

"I don't get it. I mean, what makes The World so different from other games is that you are there, physically. Wouldn't it be weird if you were playing with someone and you took off your frames and they weren't really there?" asked Atom.

Richard had come down the stairs without either of them hearing him. He put his hand on Max's shoulder. "Yes, we're still trying to work out the details for it. I don't know how we're going to market it yet, but it's one hell of a piece of tech." He looked at the girl in the chair, sitting perfectly still with her hands in her lap, and at the girl on the monitor, walking in circles around an empty room. "I've always said heaven was going to be the ultimate video game. We just haven't worked out the controls."

"Yeah," said Soph, from inside the helmet. "Atom, you've got to try this. It's pretty cool."

"Fine. Get out of the chair."

"I'm trying. How do I sit down?"

Max sent them outside after they had both learned to walk without getting up. Richard's cave had the only computer in the house, and there was barely a bar of cell reception unless you stood on the right rock. At home they could disappear into separate screens for an evening. Here, in July, they had three weeks to fill together.

They spent the last week swimming, reading in the hammocks, and taking the skiff out. At breakfast Atom passed her the jam without looking at her. Under the table he found her hand. She squeezed it once, hard enough to make him drop his spoon.

On the last night she found the stone in the pocket of her shorts and turned it over and over in her fingers until it was warm.

I'll love you forever, Adam Lee.

Even with your stupid name.

---

## Chapter Two. Rent

In December, in the woods north of Vancouver, Rat leaned back into a tree and listened. Their speech was mostly hissing and broken English, some developer's attempt at a lizard tongue. She peered around the trunk and examined the nameplate of the largest one.

<< Arctic Kobold Cleric >>

Rat was good. One of the best, even, and snowbolds were pretty easy prey. If she'd been with a group she could have stood back and plinked them with arrows as some warrior-type absorbed the damage. But she was alone and equipped for speed and stealth. If she wasn't careful, a well-placed arrow to her heart or a mace to her head would mean a shameful log out and a long walk back home.

Not that she'd died in weeks, and not that she was going to die now, as long as she kept moving. Rat was very good at kiting, keeping her enemies just out of reach and picking them off one at a time. If there had been no cleric she could have set her traps, yelled at the snowbolds and let them chase her into them. The cleric made things a bit trickier– he could heal the others, maybe even res them. Snowbolds were smart enough to surround their casters to protect them, and Rat was too far off to get off a clean shot before they'd be on top of her.

She pulled an inventory stone out of her right pocket. Small items appeared before her, organized by their purpose. She grabbed one with her hand.

<< Illusion Arrows x 12 >>

She nocked her bow and shot four arrows past the snowbolds on the right. She took a breath and counted. One, two, three, and suddenly there was a flurry of commotion. She peered around the tree to see arrows flying and kobolds scattering. The illusions were firing a volley at one of the snowbold warriors, who charged them. The cleric stood back, muttering incantations.

Rat grabbed another item from her floating inventory, a Minor Potion of Invisibility, and drank it in a gulp. It was a cheap potion and it would only work for a few seconds– just long enough. Rat unsheathed the dagger on her leg, ran up behind the cleric and planted the dagger in his back, aiming for the place between the ribs where the heart would be if kobolds had hearts. He died instantly. The other kobolds, who had just then vanquished their illusionary foes, turned and charged at her.

"Desipula displodo," whispered Rat, as she flicked her wrist toward the ground before her. An inscription burned itself into the snow. She aimed her bow at the nearest nameplate.

<< Arctic Kobold Warrior >>

A quick shot to the eye and the snowbold went down screaming, pulling at the arrow. The others were almost on top of her. She turned and ran as her trap sprung with a thunderous boom, knocking three of her pursuers to the ground. An arrow hit her in the side and her suit vibrated violently. It didn't hit any vitals, but it was going to freeze up her suit and slow her down.

Rat nocked another arrow and returned fire, hitting the snowbold archer in the throat– a little low, but good enough to kill an archer. The others were getting to their feet. Rat was wiry and tall and she employed her long legs to gain some distance. She cut to the right, nocking an illusion arrow and planting it into a tree as she passed. Then to the right again. Then she turned back to where she'd been a few seconds before. The snowbolds had destroyed the illusion and were looking around, not sure where she'd gone.

Now they were playing her game. She pulled the arrow out of her side and placed her hands on the wound.

"Sana-me." The wound closed and her suit unfroze.

The Latin was somebody's bad translation. Rat had learned it anyway; the one time Solenoid changed a healing spell, she had died with the old words in her mouth. The forums had got that patch reversed by morning.

"Desipula viridi." Arcane etchings sizzled on the ground in front of her.

"Over here, fuckers!" she yelled. She didn't care much for role playing. RP points didn't pay the bills.

The three remaining snowbolds turned and charged at her, yelling a battlecry in unison.

<< Arctic Kobold Warrior >>
<< Arctic Kobold Warrior >>
<< Arctic Kobold Rogue >>

Rat nocked an arrow and shot it into the mouth of the screaming snowbold warrior in front, who fell backwards. Then she stepped back and nocked another. She shot at the rogue but he dodged it. He didn't dodge the trap, though. A sizzling, snapping sound and vines shot out of the ground and caught his legs. Rat nocked another arrow and let it fly into the chest of the warrior, who was just about upon her. She dropped her bow and pulled the dagger. The snowbold swung down at her with a heavy mace, but she dove out of the way. He turned to swing again and she lunged into him. Her suit froze up and her back vibrated intensely. Her vision turned a pale red– the dreaded Death's Door effect. Just as she could kill a mob with one well-placed shot, so they could kill her. The mace had caught her shoulder. Her left arm would stay locked until she could get a healing spell out.

Rat pushed the snowbold off her. Green blood seeped out of its chest, right out of the wound in his heart that her dagger had made.

Rat staggered over to the snowbold rogue, who was ensnared but unharmed.

"Please, please, don't kill me."

"Why not?"

"I, I has information."

"What kind of information?"

"I, I has a map. Treasure, you like treasure?" The treasure usually wasn't much, but if she played to her alignment she'd earn some RP points for sparing him.

"Sorry, I gotta pay the rent." Rat opened her inventory again and grabbed an Essence Siphon. She aimed it at the squirming snowbold and pressed the trigger. Blue energy seeped through the creature's skin and into the siphon. The vine trap disappeared as the lifeless body slumped to the ground. A stack of glowing green vials appeared in her inventory. Living victims were a good payday.

Mobs spawned when nobody was nearby. Dragons favored mountaintops, goblins caves. Up here, an hour and a half along the highway toward Squamish, Rat got snowbolds and ice trolls. Ice essences could fetch ten dollars a vial on a good day; most days they paid less. She checked the market before every hunt.

Wealthy players went through ice enchantments faster than Rat could fill the vials. There was always somebody buying. It beat working fast food.

Rat checked her stash– eight essence vials today, not a bad take. Enough to meet her quota and afford a bus to Vancouver, if the sell orders held. City quests were more interesting than grinding out the same old monsters in the woods, and there were people in the city, if she happened to feel like people.

---

She didn't, usually.

The cabin had been a hunting cabin once, then a grow op, then a place the owner rented to whoever would put up with the road, and Rat put up with the road. She had a wood stove, a bed, a table, a stack of milk crates full of clothes and books, and a satellite dish bolted to a stump out front that cost more per month than the cabin did. That was the only bill that mattered. The stove ran on whatever she could split and the water came from a well. She had lived there for two years, since she was seventeen, and in that time she had had visitors exactly twice, both of them the landlord.

She took her frames off and set them on the table and rubbed her eyes. Outside the window the actual snow was falling on the actual trees, and the snowbolds had been standing in it a minute ago. It was the trick of The World, and nobody could ever quite explain it to people who hadn't played. The monsters were in the woods– not in a picture of the woods, but in the woods themselves. You went out in your boots and got wet to the knee and came home with vials.

Rat was nineteen, six feet and change, with a long jaw and a voice she still didn't trust around strangers. A card from the electrolysis clinic was propped against the lamp. Friday, three o'clock. She moved it to the empty pot so she would remember to set aside the fare. She had paid for every appointment that way, a few vials at a time. The pills came by post; the doctor in Vancouver wanted cash. Her body was the most expensive thing she had ever built.

And then there was the other one.

Her avatar was a ranger, tall, which was easy, and broad, which was not, with a short dark beard and a jaw like a shovel and a way of standing that she had tuned in the character editor over the course of a hundred idle hours, until he looked like a man who had never once in his life wondered how he was standing. On the forums they called him he. In match chat they called him bro. There was a running argument on one of the fan wikis about whether Rat was Canadian or American, and another about whether Rat was one player or a team, and in four years neither thread had ever gotten around to any other question about who Rat might be.

She let them. It was easier, and in the beginning it had been a good deal more than easier– it had been a place to go. When she was fifteen and living in her parents' basement, and the only person she had ever told had told her that she was confused, she had gone into The World every night and been a tall man with a beard, because a tall man with a beard was what everyone was already telling her she was, and in there, at least, she could be good at it. Then the years went by and she got better at both things, better at the game and better at being a woman in a cabin in the woods with no one around to see it. The man with the beard stayed. She was too good with him to start over.

She had paid to look like herself and become famous as somebody else. The man with the beard could buy dinner with his name. She still had to count the vials.

Rat was a name she had given herself. She told people it was like a tattoo, which was true. Rats were smart and sweet and resourceful, and everybody hated them without ever having met one. She had been called worse things, and she had decided at some point to get there first.

Her parents were a phone number she had deleted.

She put another log in the stove, ate cold rice out of the pot, and lay down on the bed with her boots on to plan the next day. The forecast said clear. Clear meant trolls, up the logging road, and trolls meant a lot of vials if she didn't get her head caved in. Her rank was second in the world and had been for a year. The one person ahead of her was in Seoul and practiced eight hours a day in a gym full of coaches, and she practiced alone in the snow for rent money. She was going to have to fix that at some point.

Not tonight. Tonight she put her frames back on, dimmed the world to black, lay very still, and went to see what the market was paying for ice.

---

## Chapter Three. The Hall of Kings

Eleven years earlier Richard had sold his surgical robotics company, bought a house in Sausalito, and discovered he had no idea what to do after putting his son to bed. Lauren had been dead for two years. While she was alive he had worked late, imagining there would be time to make it up to her.

He played games. He took an old surgical arm apart and built a rig that let his hand close around things on a screen. At four, Adam would sit beside the printer for an hour, watching a new finger take shape. Richard sat with him. There was nothing to appreciate but the boy and the plastic drying.

He wanted a game they could play outside. He put monsters on a map, made spells answer to spoken words, and strapped a phone in front of his eyes. Adam tried it in the yard and walked into a hedge. They moved the monsters farther from the fence.

The first Manipulator was cheap and inaccurate. It stopped your hand when your character grabbed a sword, usually. Richard posted the plans with a free beta of Altered World, expecting a few people to try it. Within a month the server in his garage was falling over every evening. Solenoid took its name from the actuators littering his workbench. He moved the company into an industrial building in West Oakland, where there was enough power and, he hoped, enough room.

Max was a neurophysiologist and engineer who had worked on cameras at his old company. She called while visiting San Francisco with her daughter. They met for coffee on Nob Hill, and Richard missed his second cup entirely.

"... So let me get this straight. You're aiming right at their eyes?" Richard was excited.

"Yes."

"So when you say glasses..."

"They wouldn't need to have lenses, although they could be fitted with lenses for users who needed them. They would just need to be frames, big enough to hold the projectors."

"How big would the frames need to be?"

"Very small, actually. Enough room for a tiny motor and a little bit of fiber. A little compartment behind the ear for a battery on one side, Bluetooth and a microcontroller on the other."

"And you have a prototype?"

"It's a hack, a proof of concept at best, but yeah."

"I'm surprised you aren't making me sign an NDA."

"Telling you what I'm doing is a lot different than showing you how I did it."

"This gives me a lot of ideas, Max."

"I was hoping it would."

"How long are you in town for?"

"Three days."

"If you're around tomorrow, why don't you swing by the office?"

"Sure. I'll have to bring my little girl with me."

"That's alright with me. You didn't by chance bring that prototype with you on this trip, did you?"

"I did."

"We've got some pretty cool stuff at the office that we haven't told anyone about." Richard smiled. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

That conversation was strictly business, but it led to a collaboration that had been wildly successful for both of them, and over the years it had made them something like family. Soph had asked her mom, more than once, why she had not married Richard. Max was evasive on the issue. She had known him when he was married to Lauren, and she still didn't think he had fully accepted that she was gone. What she never said was that she had already watched one man she loved leave the world by inches, and did not care to do it again.

---

That December, Atom honked. It was an ostentatious gesture– he could have just sent Soph a text to let her know that he was waiting outside, but he couldn't resist. He'd seen too many movies where the guy honked his horn when he came to pick up his girl, and he had turned sixteen in November and this was the first time he had a car to do it with.

Soph got in. "Really? Your dad gave you the Camry?"

"Yeah. He's a practical guy."

"Wow. I just figured, you know, he'd buy you a Corvette or something."

Atom laughed. "You don't know my dad, then. Hey, you look hot."

Company parties at Solenoid were raucous and exciting. To the observer it might look like a bunch of goggled-in tech geeks walking around a dimly lit and poorly decorated company gymnasium, but to the glowing paladins, eagle-eyed rangers and swashbuckling rogues in attendance it was a journey into the Hall of the Great Kings, where exalted warriors and great lords danced, drank and laughed together. Solenoid employees took the whole affair very seriously. RP points were a big thing.

Soph's outfit was a cross between classic steampunk and medieval barmaid. She wore her frames atop her flowing brown hair like a headband. Atom's brown boots and duster coat were equally ostentatious– subtle cosplay for an Altered World event. Altered World could superimpose equipment pretty realistically, but dressing in character was common among serious players, and the children of the founders had a certain reputation to maintain.

They arrived at the Solenoid campus already goggled in, and weaved through the crowd to where Max was clinking glasses of champagne with other members of the Tech Priests. Solenoid's divisions were organized into guilds, and as the head researcher at The Lab, Max was also the Guildmaster of the Tech Priests, who wore green.

"To fifty good years, Max," said one. "And a hundred more!"

"Ha! I should be so lucky. Oh, Soph, Atom! Good to see you! Jeff, this is my daughter, and this young man is Richard's son. This is Jeff Matheson."

Jeff's cloak bore the blue insignia of the Artificers Guild, the developers of Altered World. "A pleasure to meet you both. I've heard many good things."

Soph blushed.

"Jeff's the head developer of the game," said Max.

"Greis the Valorous?" asked Atom.

Jeff smiled. "Ah, I should have assumed that you'd be on the forums. You are correct, although I'm afraid I'm too busy to play him very much these days."

"Man, I'd really love to pick your brain sometime."

"Perhaps, if I can pick yours. I've got a few projects in the pipeline that could use some QA testing by folks who really know the game. I'm not flattering you, you and Soph are really good. Have you thought about competing?"

"The Koreans would cream us." Soph grimaced. Altered World had effectively become the national pastime of South Korea.

"Nineteen of the top twenty players are Korean," said Jeff. "Number two is Rat. Canadian, apparently. Nobody seems to know much else."

"I thought you'd know," said Atom.

"I could look at the account. Doesn't mean I should." Jeff turned his glass by the stem. "I'd rather see how you two play against someone you don't already know."

They were interrupted by the ringing of a champagne glass. The room fell silent. Richard stood at a podium at the far end of the gym, outfitted in gold finery, six and a half feet tall in the frames and pointy of ear. His voice thundered.

"We are gathered here today for two very important reasons. First, it is Guildmaster Ehrlich's fiftieth birthday. Where is that old witch? Max, I summon thee!"

The crowd cheered. Max excused herself and walked up to the stage. Richard bowed.

"Priestess Ehrlich, I'm proud to have you with us. The Hall of Kings wouldn't be what it is without you. I am honored by your continued allegiance."

Max curtsied, badly. "Anything for the realm, Lord Lee." Laughs erupted from the crowd.

"And I have been informed that your Tech Priests have a new machine for the realm?"

"We do."

"Well then, to our second order of business. Priestess Ehrlich, you have the room. Bring out the machine!" Richard stepped away. The lights in the room dimmed. Two Tech Priests appeared from behind a curtain, carrying a platform with a workstation and a helmet like the one that Soph and Atom had seen at the lakehouse. This one had no wires coming out of it.

"Ladies and gentlemen, it is a glorious day for the world. We have developed the most holy of machines, one that can harness the mind." Max put the helmet on her head. She muttered an incantation, and suddenly a ghost-like clone of herself stood next to her. She turned to face the apparition. "Hello, Priestess."

The apparition turned too, and replied, "Hello to you, too, Priestess."

"This simulacrum is me just as much as I am. If I think a thought, she will speak. She will go where I wish her to."

"Now, I apologize but I must break character for a bit." The apparition disappeared.

"The device that I'm wearing is called the Link. Users who have one will be able to project themselves anywhere in the world where there are other users and see what they are seeing. In game, players with the Link will be a new class, called mentalists. A mentalist binds her mind to another player, and as long as she stays close to the player she is bound to she'll be able to talk, move and cast spells. She won't be able to grab another player's sword or touch their body. Inside Alius, our new training realm, everyone gets ordinary game collisions."

"Our company blends real world experiences with virtual ones. It is what makes us different. Why then, would we make a product that enables someone to be somewhere they are not, or talk with their mind and not their body?" Max paused for rhetorical effect.

"The honest answer is that we don't know, entirely. Not yet, at least. We see many applications for this in the future, and we hope that by releasing a platform our users might come up with some interesting ideas. We've created a sandbox server where users can develop their ideas and tap into the Link's API."

"Years ago I met with Richard for coffee on a whim. He didn't know it at the time but I had already made up my mind to come work for him. We talked early on about what the future of this company was. We wanted to make something more than an immersive game. To what end, I don't think any of us are entirely sure. But we want to make something that touches people deeply and improves their lives. The Link is just the first step. I leave it up to all of you to determine the path."

Someone in the Artificers raised a hand. "What happens if the player you're bound to goes into a bathroom?"

"The same thing that should happen if a camera goes in," said Max. "The wearer cuts the feed. We're making that easier to find."

The applause was interrupted by several people checking their own frames. Max stepped away and Richard took the podium.

"I have one last thing to say. Like Max said, we've just created an interface. It's up to all of you to figure out what we're going to do with it and, more importantly, to make sure that people buy them. Now let's drink and be merry!"

More applause and cheers from the crowd.

Atom was quiet for a minute afterward, which was unusual enough that Soph looked at him.

"What?"

"I don't know. It's weird. She just stood there talking to herself."

"It was cool."

"Yeah, but if I can be anywhere, why would I go anywhere?"

"You'd go wherever I was."

"Yeah." He put his arm around her. "Okay. I'd buy one for that."

Across the gym a paladin was already trying to bribe a Tech Priest for a dev unit, and Jeff Matheson, who had been watching the two of them over the rim of his glass, went to get more champagne.

---

## Chapter Four. Wafer Thin

Soph turned sixteen in January, between a paper and an exam. Atom mentioned it from the other side of the room when the clock passed midnight. She kept typing.

"Shall we celebrate?"

"Not tonight. This paper is killing me."

And so the matter had been dropped. Until tonight. They celebrated both her birthday and their first successful assault on the higher educational establishment by going out for sushi, and by ordering far too much of it.

"I'm pretty sure if we eat all this we're going to get mercury poisoning."

"I'll take my chances. This was a good call."

The restaurant was in Mill Valley, and it was the kind of place with a fish tank and a waiter who called Atom sir. Soph had wanted to go somewhere terrible and cheap, and Atom had said no, it's your birthday, you can have a terrible cheap dinner when you're seventeen. She had ordered the things she could pronounce and he had ordered the things he couldn't, and then he had ordered more.

"So. First semester," said Atom. "How does it feel?"

"Like a semester." She chewed. "It's fine. It's the same as the college classes we were already taking, just more of them, and nobody thinks we're somebody's little brother."

"They think we're somebody's little brother."

"They think you're somebody's little brother. They think I'm lost."

"You're very small."

"I'm compact."

"Compact. Yeah." He reached across and took a piece of something off her plate. "Hey, did you talk to your mom about Stanford?"

Soph put her chopsticks down. The plan, which was mostly Atom's plan, was to finish out the year at the community college, where they had been taking courses since they were thirteen, and then apply to Stanford as transfers with two years of credit and a letter from Richard. Richard's letters opened doors.

"She said she'll write a letter if I want one."

"So that's a yes."

"That's a yes if I want one. I want to get in because I got in."

"You will get in because you got in. The letter's just so they read the application first."

"That's cheating."

"That's networking. My dad says the difference is whether you get caught." He grinned. "I'm kidding. He's never said that."

"He has absolutely said that."

She laughed, and looked at the table full of plates and the fish tank and the boy across from her, and thought, this is what it looks like when it's good.

"Do you ever think it's weird?" she said. "That we're doing the exact thing everybody assumed we'd do. Same school, same major almost, same everything."

"Same girl," he said. "I don't think it's weird. I think we got lucky. Most people have to go find the person. We were just standing there."

"That's very romantic for you."

"It's your birthday. Eat your fish."

---

A thousand miles to the north, Rat was navigating a Red Lobster menu, discreetly searching for vegan selections.

"Shrimp lobster combo. Side of clam chowder." Her companion's English was practiced and direct, but with a hint of condescension. Rat had heard it from enough opponents that she was already bracing for an insult.

"Uh, I'll have the green salad with no cheese and balsamic. And a potato, no butter."

"Are you sure you wouldn't like something more? I'm paying."

"No, thanks." Rat wanted to say something, but she decided it was best to hold her tongue. She needed to hear the offer before she picked a fight.

The waiter took their menus. Rat looked into the man's eyes. He was Jeong Yong Kim, former pro gamer, current manager of one of the highest ranked Korean teams. He didn't fly across an ocean to take her on a date.

"So let's cut to the chase, eh?"

"And what chase do you think that is?"

"You manage the Estex Dogs, and the spring Proleague qualifier is a month away. If I had to guess, one of your players got poached or you're looking to add a little diversity."

Jeong laughed. "That is a very logical guess, although it is not why we are here. When I ask you about how you make a living harvesting ingredients for enchantments, that seems like small talk to you. It is not to me."

"I'm making thirty or forty bucks a day. I can't imagine how that would be anything but small talk."

"I will explain. You spend two or three hours harvesting, so you must make about ten dollars an hour?"

"Yeah, more or less."

"In Vancouver or Seoul, that would not be very much money. But I have known many people in parts of Korea and China where that would be a lot. Many are already experienced gold farmers."

"So, how does this involve me?"

"We have a farming operation. One hundred players, all equipped with basic gear. They go out in parties of four or five and do what you do by yourself. It is not efficient. It is barely profitable. We want you to train them."

"Why me? Don't you have anyone back in Korea?"

"We have a highly competitive gaming culture. In Seoul we make our living by winning matches and getting sponsorships. Korean players spend their time practicing for competition. Most of them do not even bother questing, they simply buy the items they need. It is very difficult to find people who prefer bread to glory."

"So you don't actually know any good farmers."

"That is basically correct."

The waiter set down their plates. Jeong picked at the lobster while Rat mashed up her potato mercilessly.

"So let's say I go along with this, how would it work? Would I go to Korea, or do you send your guys here?" asked Rat.

"Neither. You would bind to our players in Korea. Three hours a day, five days a week. You teach our team. We can offer ten percent of the operation's profit."

"Hmmmm…" Rat mulled it over in her head as she dressed her salad. "Binding, you mean with a Link? I don't have one."

"I brought one with me."

Rat looked at the bag on the seat beside him. It was a plain black gym bag, and it had come across the Pacific with a piece of hardware in it that had gone out to a few thousand players three weeks earlier, and that she could not have afforded if she sold every vial she'd ever harvested.

"Alright. I still intend to compete this season."

"That is perfectly understandable. We all seek glory."

"How long do I have to think about it?"

"I get on a plane tomorrow. I must know tonight."

Rat poked at her potato. It was pretty dry. She'd gone enough nights without dinner not to be picky.

"Profit after what?"

Jeong put his fork down. "Equipment, rent, wages."

"And your fee. And your flights." She pushed the potato away. "Ten percent of sales. I see the transaction log. Fifteen hours a week is the limit, and I keep competing."

"Ten percent of sales is too much."

"Then you can keep the helmet."

He considered her for long enough that she started to regret saying it.

"Eight," he said. "The log, yes. We review it after a month."

"Put that in writing."

He took out his phone. She waited until the document arrived on hers, read it twice, and signed.

Jeong smiled and raised his water glass. "To bread."

"To bread."

He gave her the bag when they left. It was heavier than she expected. She rode the last bus north with it in her lap and both arms wrapped around it.

---

"You just had to get the mochi ice cream at the end, didn't you?" Atom grunted as he unbuckled his belt. "I feel like that guy in that one Monty Python movie."

"One wafer thin mint?" Soph had inherited her mother's appreciation for Monty Python and had passed it on to Atom.

"Haha, yeah. That guy."

They sat in the parked car with the windows cracked, waiting to feel less full.

"I can't decide whether I want to make out with you or fall asleep right here," said Atom.

"Wasabi make-outs, yum." Soph licked her lips. "You want to come over for a bit?"

"Yeah, but then I'm going to want to stay over," said Atom.

"I don't think my mom really cares."

"Yeah, I don't think my dad does either."

"Then it's settled."

Atom started the car and shifted into drive. Soph put her hand on his as he gripped the shifter.

At the last light before the turn home, Soph moved his empty drink out of the cup holder and put it between her knees. It still had ice in it. She was trying to get the lid off when Atom braked.

Headlights crossed her window.

The truck struck on his side. The cup burst in her hands.

---

## Chapter Five. Locked In

Soph woke in the hospital feeling woozy as hell. Her neck hurt. When she tried to turn her head, Max put down her book.

"You're awake!" She smiled and sighed, relieved.

"What happened?" Soph tried to get her bearings. The light was bright. Flowers rested on a table next to her.

"How do you feel?"

"Awful. My head hurts."

"You got banged up. Do you remember what happened?"

"Atom and I were getting ice cream. Oh, right." Soph winced as she sat up in the hospital bed.

"Is that the last thing that you remember?"

"There was a crash, I think. I just remember this really loud sound, like thunder."

"A truck ran a red light and smashed into you. You had a bad concussion, but you're going to be alright."

"Where's Atom? Is he okay?"

"He's not doing so well, Soph. I'm not sure how bad it is. He's in surgery right now."

"Oh, God. Can I see him?"

"I'm sorry honey, not right now. You've got to stay where you are. Everything is going to be alright, okay? He's a tough kid."

Soph wanted to cry. It was all starting to come back. The blinding headlights, the crash, the screeching, then another crash. The airbags deploying. Her face going numb. She had felt very tired. Blood was gushing out of Atom's nose, and his head was on the wheel, and his hand was still on the shifter underneath hers. Her neck hurt, her head hurt, her ribs hurt. There were some distant sounds. Sirens. Blackness.

Soph slid back down into the hospital bed, defeated. Tears gave way to drowsiness. Max stroked her hair until she fell back to sleep.

---

Twelve days after the crash, Max found Richard outside the ward.

"How is he?"

"Not good, Max. Not good. They've stabilized him but his brain stem has been damaged pretty badly."

"Is there anything the doctors can do?"

"They're still assessing what he can recover. They call it locked-in syndrome. He's awake. He can hear us. They've got him answering yes and no with his eyes, sometimes, but it wears him out."

"I, I don't know what to say, Richard."

"Yeah." Richard grimaced.

They were standing in a corridor that smelled like floor cleaner, under a light that hummed. Richard had slept in the same clothes for two nights. He was holding a paper cup of coffee that he had not drunk from and did not seem to know he was holding.

"Can we go see him?"

"Not yet, they're still running some tests."

"Richard."

"Yeah?"

"Maybe this isn't a great time, but… no, never mind."

Richard looked at her hopefully. "What?"

Max hesitated. "What about Phase Two?"

On my son? On my fucking son? Richard wanted to scream at Max. He had wanted to scream at the doctors, too. All the money in the world, and he was helpless. Almost helpless.

"I'm sorry I brought it up."

"No," said Richard, taking a breath. "It's… it's a good idea. What the hell have I been sinking all of this money into The Lab for, after all?" Richard chewed on his lip, thinking. "How long would it take to get going?"

"We could have it ready by the time he gets out of here. I have to warn you, it's experimental. All of our models show that it will work, but if something goes wrong..."

"Get it ready," said Richard. "Don't put anything in him yet. I want him to understand what it is."

A communication specialist sat with Atom the next afternoon. Richard read the questions slowly; when he rushed, she stopped him. Atom asked to hear the risks twice. He wanted to know whether he could talk to Soph. The specialist made them answer the question about removing the implant before she went on.

It took three sessions to get through the consent. Once Atom shut his eyes and refused to answer anything until Richard left the room.

The retail Link read intention. The earlier Phase One helmets also had an experimental stimulation circuit, too coarse for more than a hand's warmth or a simple smell. Max had disabled that circuit in the early-access helmets. The consumer model would leave it out entirely. Phase Two put the interface inside the skull, where it could supply touch, pressure, taste, smell, and a body's weight. Sight still came through separate frames over the eyes. They had tested it in animals. Nobody had lived through it as a person, and nobody could tell Atom what that would be like.

---

Rat lay down in her bed, lights off. She didn't need to lie down, and she didn't need the lights off– the light field projectors and occlusive lenses in her frames did a good job of blocking out the outside world. But the Link was surprisingly sensitive, and she found it easiest to manipulate her character when she lay motionless, free of distraction, in the dark.

To accommodate the Link, Solenoid had added a new realm called Alius, accessible only to ghosts– which was what the community had dubbed players connected with the Link, since they appeared transparent and intangible in the real world. Alius was a training ground, although it contained a full complement of quests, a handful of new monsters and rare item drops. It had a Great Mountain, and a temple, and a dragon.

Her body twitched as she mouthed silent phrases. Occasionally she would jerk violently, but the cabin was quiet. A bar of moonlight lay across the floor. In Alius she was sneaking around large boulders, playing cat and mouse.

<< Aether Dragon >>

A couple of arrows aimed at the dragon's heart, a dodge and roll to avoid a blast of blue flame, endless weaving through the rocks. Rinse and repeat. Her screen flashed red as she was nearly engulfed in flames. Far too close, she thought. Two hours of tracking and two hours of combat. One misstep and she'd die and have to start over from the temple.

The dragon was different from anything down below. It was patient, and it waited for her to commit. It went up when she wanted it down and came down while she was reloading. She had watched every video anyone had ever posted of a raid on it, twelve players and a great deal of dying, and she had decided that all of them were doing it wrong. They stood and fought, and you didn't stand and fight a dragon. You wore it out and made it angry, made it fly when it didn't want to fly and land where it didn't want to land, and when it was finally on the ground breathing hard with its neck stretched out, you were already there.

Finally the dragon fell to the ground, her huge neck writhing and breathing blue fire in anger. Rat unsheathed her knife, snuck around behind the dragon and climbed up onto her back. Being able to jump on top of a creature was one of the experimental new features in Alius. Pretty cool, Rat thought, as the head came around at her and missed. She dodged the flailing head and the feeble arms and plunged her dagger into the dragon's neck at the base of the skull.

The dragon slumped forward in defeat, and was still.

Rat lay on the dead dragon for a while, breathing. Then she pulled up her inventory. She'd never seen Aether Dragon Essence on the market, but it had to be worth something.

Inside the dragon's cave she found a small pile of gold and an ornate lockbox. The gold was pretty insignificant, especially for a dragon, but the lockbox glowed a gentle blue. She tried to pick the lock but failed. Must be a pretty high level item, thought Rat. She was going to need to find a keymaster.

Rat put the lockbox in her inventory and began the long journey back to the Aether Temple. The temple was the worship place of the Aether God, and the priests of the Order of the Blue Flame resided therein. They were the keepers of the Inside Portal– according to lore, Alius existed outside and everything else was inside. It was the kind of thing Solenoid's writers came up with at two in the morning, and nobody, including the writers, had ever fully explained it.

The temple was large but austere. The walls were made of smooth black stone, and candelabra hung from the ceiling and cast pale blue shadows against the large columns that lined the main hall. A man stood at the end of the hall, silent and regal.

<< High Priest of The Blue Flame >>

Rat walked down the hall.

"Hello, my child. Have you come to pray?"

"No. I need your help."

"Ah my child, I am merely a vessel of the Gods."

"I need you to open this box for me." Rat held the lockbox out before him.

"Have you come to pray?"

Rat grimaced. Either the AI didn't understand her or she was going to have to do something she didn't enjoy doing. Praying to any God, real or imaginary, was definitely not her style.

"Sure, whatever."

"Is that a yes?"

"Yes."

"Good." The priest smiled. "Put the box there, on the altar." Rat walked over to the place he pointed to and put the box down.

"Kneel before the altar and pray to Vell'os. Pray to her, God of The Aether and keeper of all that is outside, mother of all that is inside."

Rat kneeled as the priest mumbled incomprehensible Latin. At the end of the hall a hidden door opened and a man entered. Rat examined his nameplate.

<< Keymaster of the Blue Flame >>

The keymaster wore a massive metal chain around his neck to which a great mass of keys were attached. He walked over to the altar and kneeled next to Rat. After a minute he thumbed through the keys on the chain and picked a small one, with an end shaped like the profile of a dragon. He placed the key into the keyhole of the lockbox and it unfolded like a flower and disappeared. A glowing blue eye hovered in its place.

<< Mind's Eye >>

Rat tried to search the item database for it, but nothing came up. It had a purple nameplate, indicating that it was Legendary– a title reserved for the rarest and most expensive items in the game. Her dagger was the only other legendary item she had ever possessed. She took the eye, and in her hand it became a small scepter, a rod of black metal with the eye set on top of it, looking at her. She stood up and turned to the priest.

"Do you have any other quests for me?"

The priest smiled. "You've defeated the great dragon. I have no other quests for you."

"What does it do?"

"You've defeated the great dragon. I have no other quests for you."

"Yeah. Okay."

She walked out of the temple into the blue light. Up on the mountain the dragon lay dead, waiting to respawn. Rat was the first player to have killed it alone. She checked the combat log twice before she let herself believe it.

---

## Chapter Six. Ghost

By February, Soph had stopped opening the course files her professors sent. Atom was at The Lab, recovering from the implant. Max brought back short messages dictated a word at a time, mostly complaints about the calibration. Soph wrote long answers and deleted half of them before handing over her phone.

She thought of her father then. She didn't remember him very well, but she tried to recall a memory of him now.

Max had told her about him once, when Soph was old enough to ask and not yet old enough to understand the answer. "He was a great artist. I've never known anyone like him. He wasn't for this world, unfortunately. It was sad, watching him go."

There was a painting of his in the hallway, a lake that wasn't any particular lake, in a blue that didn't exist, and she had walked past it every day of her life without looking at it. He lived now in a facility in Napa with a garden. Soph never went to see him. If she ever had a dark secret, that was it. She was terrified of the thought of insanity, terrified that if she went to see him she might catch his disease, terrified that she'd caught it already. She looked up at the ceiling, tracing the lines of the tiles. She traced back the other way, trying not to let her path of tracing overlap itself. She closed her eyes. Opened them. Closed them again. Traced the lines. When she felt happy and whole such quirks weren't bothersome, and she hardly noticed them. She knew illness was not something you caught by visiting. Knowing did not get her out of bed.

A week later Max called from The Lab with the promise of good news.

"What is it? Is it about Atom?"

"Yes."

"He's okay? He can walk and talk?"

"I'll be home in a few hours, we'll talk then."

Soph was immediately hopeful and excited for a moment. Then she fell back into her fog. Better not to expect too much. If he could walk, he'd probably come see me. Or maybe Atom wants to surprise me. But could he have recovered so quickly? No, not possible.

Hours passed and Soph heard a car pull into the driveway. She got up, put some pants on and turned on her lights. Don't want them to think I've been sleeping all day. She wanted to believe it was Atom. She heard the rustling of keys in the door, and she opened it. Max was alone.

"Oh, hey mom."

"Hi." Max gave her a hug, and held on a little longer than usual. "Put on your suit and frames, I've got a surprise for you."

---

"Atom?" Soph asked, surprised.

There he was, standing in front of her in the living room. She took her frames off– he wasn't in the room. She put them back on. "Where are you right now? I mean, it's good to see you."

"You too. I've missed you so much. Oh, man. It's so good to talk to you. I'm at The Lab right now. Or, my body is at least. I've been cooped up learning how to speak with my mind. But I'm here now, with you."

He looked exactly like Atom, thin and blond and standing with his weight on one hip, and he was faintly transparent, so that she could see the bookshelf through his shoulder.

"So you're connected with the Link?"

"Something like that, this one is way more advanced. I'm hardwired in. Hey, don't be sad babe. I'm here now!"

"I'm… I'm not sad. I mean, I'm really sad. But I'm also really happy that you're alive." Soph fought back tears, lost, and wiped her face with the back of her glove.

"Are you okay with this?"

"Yeah, it's just, it's weird. I want to touch you, I want to kiss you so badly."

Atom walked over to her and hugged her. Electrodes in her G-Suit fired. Vibrators vibrated. Actuators tensed her joints. It was a good, long squeeze. She squeezed back.

"Can you feel it when I hug you?" she asked.

"Yeah. Oh, wow. It feels so real. Way better than the suit. What about you?"

"Well, I've never hugged someone virtually. It feels good. It's just good to see you."

Atom held her by the shoulders. "So, what are you up to?"

"Honestly, I've just been waiting for you to come home."

"Well, I'm here, aren't I?" Atom smiled. "Hey, let's go find some mobs, I have to practice moving around."

"You can do that? I thought you could only ghost around."

"Nah, I've got a bunch of cool new tricks."

Max had been standing in the kitchen doorway the whole time, watching her daughter hug the air. Now she came in and sat down on the arm of the couch.

"Before you two go anywhere. Atom, you've heard this already. Soph, I need you to hear it too."

"Okay."

"Atom has an implant. The frames are only for his eyes. The implant stays in whether he's logged in or not. The medical team knows, and Jeff has the game logs. Most of the company doesn't."

"I'm not going to tell anyone."

"A retail ghost can cast spells outside Alius. It can't grab objects or use a suit to touch another player. Jeff has given Atom those permissions for testing. If somebody records him doing it, we'll have questions we aren't ready to answer."

"So no fighting?"

"Jeff reserved a private test layer on Ring Mountain. He'll see the logs, but other players won't see the fight. Stay inside it. Outside it, Atom uses the retail permissions."

"Okay."

"And Soph." Max looked at her. "His body is still in the chamber at The Lab. He's still hurt. This isn't a cure, it's a very good bridge. I need you to know that."

"I know."

"Okay." Max stood up. "Go. Get out of the house. You've been in it for a month."

---

Max drove Soph to the entrance to a trail that led up to Ring Mountain. Atom sat in the back seat. Soph was amazed to look back and see him there, and he waved at her every time she did.

"Alright, I'll leave you two here. Give me a call when you want me to come pick you up. Before it gets dark, okay?"

Soph opened her car door. "Okay. Thanks, mom."

"Say goodbye to Atom for me. Tell him I'll see him tomorrow."

"Okay, I will."

Atom sublimated into a ball of mist and rematerialized beside her on the gravel. "Pretty cool, right? No need to tell me, I can hear her through your audio feed."

"Oh, right. Can you tap into anyone's audio?" asked Soph.

"Just the people that I'm bound to, which is you. I spent a lot of time with Jeff, that guy we met at the party. We worked on a whole bunch of new features together, and he gave me some new items. Some of them came out with the Link patch, some of them are stuff he made just for me."

"Cool, like what?"

"I don't want to spoil the surprise. C'mon, let's go, we only have a couple of hours of daylight left."

They climbed. The trail went up through grass and rock with the bay opening out behind them, and the game laid its own weather over the real weather, a sky a shade too blue, and the shadow of something large moving over the hillside above them that was not, when she checked, a cloud. Atom walked beside her with his hands in his pockets, the way he had always walked up hills, except that he didn't breathe hard. His chest didn't move at all.

"Does it hurt?" she asked. "The, whatever it is."

"No. It's weird. I don't hurt anywhere. I can't feel my body at all, my real one. Max says that's the point. It's like it's not there. It's like I'm just here."

"Do you like it?"

He thought about it. "I like being here. I don't like the part where I'm not there. Ask me again in a month."

<< Orc Raider >>
<< Orc Raider >>
<< Orc Shaman >>

They came around a bend and there were three of them in the grass below the summit, big and green and arguing over something in a bag. Soph pulled her dagger and started reciting, and Atom put a hand on her arm.

"Let me."

"Mom said."

"The test marker's green. Jeff's watching. Let me."

He walked down the hill toward them like he was going to ask for directions. The shaman raised its staff. Atom caught it, pulled, and hit the shaman in the face. The raiders charged. One of them went straight through him and fell over on the far side, confused, and the other one hit something that was not there for anyone else and stopped dead, like it had walked into a wall. Atom took its axe away from it. It was over very quickly, and Soph had not cast a single spell.

"Pretty good for a ghost, eh?"

A message opened beside his head. TEST INVULNERABILITY ACTIVE.

Soph pointed. "Pretty good for the settings."

"Fine. Next time with damage on."

She looked at the sky, and at the far ridge, checking. Nobody. Just a hawk that might have been real.

"So where do you go when I log off?"

"Back to Alius. I've gotta make my way up the Great Mountain and fight the dragon at some point, but I don't feel like it tonight. I've got some coding projects I'm working on."

"Oh, like what?"

"Well, part of my new life is that I can taste and smell everything in the game. Except most things don't have a taste or smell yet, because nobody ever needed one. I'm working on an intelligent way to create tastes for every food and drink in the game. And some things that aren't food or drink."

"Oh yeah? Like what?"

Atom kissed her passionately on the lips. She felt his embrace through the suit, but her face didn't have any kind of senses for it.

"I'm going to have to work on that one. The real thing is way more delicious. Come on, let's go home."

They held hands as they waited for Max at the mouth of the trail. The sun was going down behind Tam and the bay had gone the color of a nickel.

"Soph," said Atom.

"Yeah?"

"When Max approves a tasting prototype, you get the first turn."

"That'd be great."

"It'll get better."

"What do you mean?"

"You should see what they're working on at The Lab. In a year, we'll be so much closer to the real thing. All of the senses, everything."

"Well, I look forward to it."

"Soph."

"Yeah?"

"Do you still love me?"

"Atom, I love you no matter what. I'll love you forever."

"You too. I mean, I do too, you know. Just… thanks, thanks for, you know, being here."

"Even if we didn't have all this stuff, even if I couldn't talk with you like I'm talking with you right now, I would be there for you, by your side, you know?"

"Yeah." He looked out at the bay. "I know."

Max's headlights came around the bend. Atom turned to mist and went into the back seat and Soph got in the front. When she looked in the mirror he was there. When she took off her frames to rub her eyes, he wasn't. She put them back on quickly, before her mother could see.

---

## Chapter Seven. Drill Sergeant

In late February Jeong assembled the first training group.

"These are my ten best. We'll start by training them and they will be your captains." Jeong went down the line and gave each of their names. All but one were Chinese. All but one were male.

"This is Daun. She's Korean. Her English is the best in the group and she fights up front. You'll like her."

"Hello, Daun." Rat smiled. Daun smiled back. She was short and square, with her hair tied back hard and a shield on her back that was too big for her, and she sized Rat up like a basilisk.

"So we're in China right now?" asked Rat.

"No. In Korea, in the mountains outside of Hongcheon City."

"Oh, I see."

"Yes. Mostly orcs, goblins and mountain trolls around here. Basilisks, too, up the mountain a little ways."

"Alright. Well, basilisk essence is worth some money, and the goblin casters usually drop some essence, too."

"Yes. We thought about farming the basilisk but it isn't efficient. They kill our farmers too often. So we mostly harvest the troll essence here."

"Well, maybe we can change that."

"I hope so."

"Do they speak English?"

"Yes, enough. Gamer speak."

"Good enough," said Rat. "I think I can handle it from here."

"Okay. I'm going to go practice. Good luck. Message me if you need anything." Jeong disappeared in a puff of smoke. Rat realized that he had also been using a Link the whole time, and was probably back in Seoul.

She stood in the middle of ten strangers who were all looking at her. Correction– they were all looking at him. A tall bearded man in a green cloak with a longbow on his back and a legendary dagger strapped to his leg, who was, according to the world rankings, the second best player alive, and who was lying on a bed in the dark five thousand miles away with a helmet full of pins on. She cleared her throat. It came out through the Link as a low rumble.

"Alright, let's move. Spread out ten meters apart, and keep an eye peeled for tracks. Message me in party chat if you see any mobs." Rat beckoned her squad forward. I could get used to leading noobs around.

The squad trudged up the mountain in loose formation, until someone messaged her, "5 goblin, neast". Rat replied "group up all." They rallied together and saw fresh footprints in the mud.

"Let's go find them."

The squad followed the tracks, moving quickly to catch up with the mobs in front of them. Once they were within range, they looked at Rat.

"So, what's your strategy?"

Daun spoke up before anyone else had a chance. "I'll charge with the tanks. Casters and archers follow my lead."

"That will work since there's ten of you, but what if there were only two or three of you?" asked Rat.

"We would die. What would you do?" responded Daun, curtly.

"I want to know what you would do if I wasn't here."

"We could draw them out," suggested one of the Chinese players.

"Yes, that could work. But if they've got a healer or some kind of caster, it could get tricky. You've got to take him out first."

"Okay," said Daun. "How about you, knife boy, you go to the right. You, bow, go to the left. Hide in trees. I get their attention and draw them back here. Knife, you sneak up and kill caster when I draw the others away. Bow, start shooting at them when they get close to me. Once casters are dead I fight and you come help."

"I like that plan. The rest of you will stay here and watch. I don't want to have to wait for you to rez if you die, so come back here if you get into trouble and we'll help you out."

They set out to execute the plan. Daun pulled them. Knife dispatched the shaman with a backstab attack. Bow wounded one of the goblins and drew it away from Daun, who continued to run around, leading the other three back toward her comrades. Bow and Knife dispatched the wounded goblin and drew their bows on the remaining three. Daun held them off while the other two picked them off with arrows. Daun took a blow to the side and nearly got hit by one of Knife's arrows, but otherwise it was an easy victory.

Rat smiled. "See? A little bit of strategy is all it takes. I want you all to practice this same strategy."

They continued on up the mountain for a couple of hours, repeating variations of the strategy: distraction, dispatching of any magic users, picking off the main pack, fighting hand-to-hand when the numbers were even. Goblin and orc warbands appeared every twenty minutes or so and were handled much more quickly each time, although the party had to intervene numerous times to keep players from dying. Rat checked the time– she was off the hook, Jeong would be back any minute. Then a message came in to the party chat. "basilisk swest".

"Have any of you ever taken on a basilisk before?" asked Rat. Everyone nodded yes. "And did you kill it?" Everyone shook their heads.

"Basilisks have a lot of armor. Even though there are ten of you, it could wipe the whole party out. On the other hand, I've soloed a dragon. Similar problem, except it flew and breathed fire. So it's doable, you just have to be smart and be patient."

"How did you kill the dragon by yourself?" asked Daun.

"Look at the basilisk. Where is it vulnerable?"

"The eyes."

"Yes, good. Anywhere around their body between the legs is good to strike at, but they'll turn and stomp on you if they can see you. They're a lot easier to take down once they're blind."

"So we shoot the eyes and then surround and attack?"

"Sounds like a good plan, Daun. You lead the charge. How many men do you need?"

"I can do it with four."

"Do you have a bow?"

"Yes, I am good with bow."

"Alright, take three then."

Daun pointed to Magic first, then Knife and Bow. "You three. Let's go." Rat had expected her to take another archer.

---

The basilisk was a massive beast, a lizard the size and shape of a rhinoceros, and it was eating a tree.

"Your swords won't do much good, not if he's kicking around a lot," said Rat. "You're going to need to get him in both eyes or he'll chase you down, and they are pretty quick. Don't turn your back if you have to run, you won't be able to dodge the acid. Try to sidestep. And watch out for the tail."

Daun got as close as she dared without being noticed. She drew an arrow and shouted "Fire!"

Her arrow went low and glanced off the basilisk's armor. Bow's arrow went into the basilisk's nostril, enraging it. The basilisk charged at Daun, who nocked another arrow and let it fly into the basilisk's mouth before diving to her left to avoid a massive wad of corrosive spit.

It kept coming. She dropped her bow, got her shield up, and felt the first impact lock her knees. The shield dissolved under the acid. She tried to run and found she couldn't.

Then she was invisible. Magic had remembered.

Bow put out one eye before the basilisk killed him. Daun retrieved her bow while the creature hunted the others. She could hear Rat giving instructions, but the words arrived too fast. She needed the beast to turn once more. She waited, with the string cutting into her glove, and shot the other eye as it came around.

The blind basilisk ran straight through her. Her vision went white. When it cleared, Magic and Knife were gone. Knife's dagger was still in the beast's flank, too shallow to have killed it.

Daun lay still until her suit released her legs. The basilisk circled, striking at the sound of arrows that had stopped. She crawled under its head, stood, and drove her sword between the scales above its breast. Then she dropped flat.

A claw went over her. The basilisk took two steps and fell. Daun stayed down until her own breathing slowed.

"Not bad, not bad. How do you feel?" Rat and the rest of the party stood behind her. Jeong, too.

"Tired. No more basilisks today."

Rat nodded. "So, what did you learn?"

"Don't charge when the first shot misses."

Rat laughed. "What else?"

"And tell me one thing at a time. I can't listen to a whole lesson when it's standing on me."

---

Between training for competition and training Jeong's crews, Rat had racked up more than fourteen hours a day in-game for a whole week. She'd brought Daun and the other farmers (who she still referred to by their weapon or class) up to a very respectable level of play, and had spent the last day watching as they split off into twos and dispatched packs of orcs seven strong. Daun had learned from her previous mistakes and had, after numerous frustrating deaths, managed to beat a basilisk on her own. As they walked back to town on their last day, Rat hung back with her.

"Why do they call you Rat?" asked Daun.

"I call myself that," Rat replied.

"Why?"

"It's complicated. It's like a tattoo. It's a way of telling the world who I am."

"You tell the world you live in sewers?"

"I tell the world that I am misunderstood. Rats can be very sweet, smart and resourceful. They haven't always lived in the sewer."

"I see."

"And what about Daun?"

"My mother says it means being who you ought to be. She has quite a few ideas about who that is."

"I think it's worthy of you." Rat smiled at her.

"Ha!"

"Hey Daun." Rat bit her lower lip.

"What is it?"

"I'm going to ask Jeong if I can keep you around while I train the next group. I'll give you half of my cut for the week, and if you do a good job I'll try to convince him to give you your own groups to train. Would that be alright with you?"

Daun beamed. "Yes! Thank you so much!"

"Don't thank me. You're the one who's going to be walking noobs up a mountain."

"I will walk them very fast."

---

Rat had a day off from training while the next group of farmers was assembled. She took the bus to Vancouver to go thrift shopping.

For the past week her mind had been focused entirely on the game. Even when she closed her eyes to sleep, battles raged on the insides of her eyelids. Now her thoughts wandered. She thumbed through the racks of shirts carelessly. She couldn't stop thinking about Daun. I wonder what she looks like in real life? And what's her story? Did I just give up half my money so that I could see her again?

Daun thought she was a man. Rat took a shirt off the rail and held it against herself, then put it back. She could tell her. In the game the ranger could stand there and say it, while Rat sat alone in the cabin. She put the shirt over her arm. At the counter she added a second one and a pair of boots that almost fit. Four dollars for the shirts.

On the bus home she remembered the mysterious item she'd looted from the dragon's lair in Alius. What the hell is a Mind's Eye for? She opened her inventory and looked at the purple nameplate. She ran a few more searches and still came back with nothing.

The Mind's Eye was a small scepter with an eyeball on top, but it had no interface, and it was too small to bash a troll's head in with. Rat didn't like spending money in the game– she felt that if she was spending money to buy items then she was just another sucker on the wrong side of the game. Then again, she didn't have an identify scroll and probably wasn't going to find one. Mages might drop them, but out in the woods mages were pretty rare.

Rat opened her inventory and grabbed her tradestone. She found a scroll in Vancouver for $28, plus $7 for delivery by bird. Two days' rent. Annoying, she thought. Then again, the Mind's Eye was probably worth a lot more than that, and her rent was more than covered by the Korean operation.

The bird awoke Rat, who had dozed off. She pulled her frames off to rub her eyes, then put them back on and grabbed the scroll. She looked up the incantation on the web, and then pulled the Mind's Eye out of her inventory.

"I novicum. No, wait, I nocivum." The scroll smoked in her hand as writing started to burn into the parchment. She read it.

<< Mind's Eye >>

Legendary Scepter. Soulbound.

No information available. Please consult tech support.

"You've got to be kidding me."

---

"Hey, uh, Jeff, we've got a situation."

"Oh?" Jeff stopped typing. "Whatcha got?"

The woman on the other end of the video chat was the head of tech support. Jeff liked her well enough in person, but a video call always spelled trouble.

"Well, a player killed the Aether Dragon."

"So what's the problem?"

"They did it solo."

"Okay, I don't follow."

"Well, we don't get all the details from you content guys, but the internal release notes mention that you added some really rare drops for players who quest solo in Alius."

"Yeah, we ended up taking all the good stuff out."

"Well, I've got a player asking about a Mind's Eye. She tried a scroll on it and got the tech support message."

Jeff put his face in his hands. "That's still there from our in-house beta. Nobody ever killed the dragon by themselves, it must have been overlooked. Who's the player?"

"Rat. She's a highly ranked competitive player."

"I know who Rat is." He was quiet for a second. "I'm going to kick this up to Richard. He'll want to know. Is she online now?"

"Yes."

"Alright. Hang on."

---

Rat was halfway up a hill in Alius, taking out her annoyance on a pack of blue wolves, when something with a gold nameplate walked up the hill toward her and the wolves lay down and went to sleep.

<< Lord Lee >>

It was the High Elf from the party stream, the one everybody had screenshotted, in the gold finery and the ears. She had never seen a nameplate that color. She lowered her bow.

"You're Rat," said the elf.

"Depends who's asking."

"Richard Lee. I run the place." He put out a hand and she shook it, which was strange, because he was a ghost too and the hand closed around hers on screen. She felt nothing through the retail Link. "I understand you've got something of ours."

"I killed the dragon. It was in the box. I didn't steal anything."

"No, you didn't. You did the thing nobody's ever done, and you found the thing nobody was supposed to find. That's on us." He looked at the scepter on her belt. "It's from the beta. It was a tool for our game masters, so they could see what a character was seeing– any character, player or NPC. We pulled it, because frankly it was a little creepy, and we forgot to pull it out of the dragon. It doesn't do anything anymore. We turned the back end off a year ago."

"So it's junk."

"Keep the trophy. We've removed the drop from the table. There's exactly one."

Jeff's voice came over the channel. "I'd rather revoke the old service key too."

"On the next maintenance window," said Richard. "It's off now."

Rat watched the eye turn in its socket. "That's reassuring."

"I watched the recording of your fight," Richard said. "Four hours. You made her land where you wanted her to land."

"That's how you kill a dragon."

"Nobody else seems to know that." He looked at her for a moment longer. "If you ever want to work on the game instead of in it, there's a job. That's not a pitch, it's just a fact."

"I've got a job," said Rat.

"I'm sure you do." He nodded to her, and to the sleeping wolves, and turned to mist.

The wolves woke up. Rat shot them.

---

That night, in a kitchen in Sausalito, Max put a cup of tea in front of Richard and sat down across from him.

"Atom's kidneys haven't recovered from the crash," said Max. "The heart injury is making the support harder. People can live for years with locked-in syndrome. That isn't what's shortening his time. We have to deal with the other damage."

"So, what are you saying, Max?"

"I want a renal specialist on the team, and someone who can argue with my perfusion model. We may have a year. I don't want to use it waiting."

"Are you sure that's even feasible?"

"The preliminary work has been very promising. It might take years to perfect, maybe even a decade or more to get a product to market. But we don't need perfection. If Atom's body fails, I want to have a backup plan."

Richard bit his lip. "Whatever you need, Max, it's yours."

"Thanks, Richard."

"No. Thank you. Thank you for everything. Max."

"Yeah?"

"We have to keep this a secret. Really, really secret. A lot of people are going to want this. And I don't know what the legality is, frankly I'm afraid to ask."

"I asked," said Max. "The lawyer wants the full protocol. I haven't sent it."

Richard moved the cup away from the papers. "Send it."

"They may tell us to stop."

He did not answer that.

---

## Chapter Eight. The Back Row

By September Soph had transferred to Stanford. Atom followed the lectures through her frames. Gideon Abecassis, two rows in front of them, was starting his third year and falling asleep in the same class.

Gideon lived above a laundromat, in a two-bedroom apartment paid for by a scholarship and a small business he did not describe to his parents. His servers occupied the spare room's closet. He slept on the couch when they got too loud, though he claimed the noise helped him concentrate.

He noticed Soph because she laughed at a point in the lecture he didn't think was funny. The next day he listened harder. It happened again.

She sat by the wall in the second to last row of a lecture hall that could seat two hundred and usually seated sixty, and she left a wide gap around herself, and she mumbled. Not constantly, but now and then, under her breath, with her head tilted a little, as though someone very close to her ear were saying something and she were answering. She wore a hoodie, and under the hoodie, visible at the wrists and the collar whenever she moved, was a black mesh with a seam of hard plastic running along the spine. She wore her frames in class. Nobody wore their frames in class.

He had watched her for two weeks before he went and sat down next to her.

She fidgeted in her seat and looked for an escape, and he noticed.

"Hey, I didn't mean to intrude on your, uh, personal space. I just figured, you know, this was where the cool kids hung out," he whispered.

"Uh, okay."

"You're in the game right now, huh?"

"What are you talking about?" She tilted her frames up.

"Come on. I know a player when I see one."

"Okay." She let her shoulders down an inch. "You got me."

"Most girls just text their boyfriend, you know."

"How do you know I'm talking to my boyfriend?"

"Come on. I got into Stanford, I'm not a fucking idiot."

"Okay, you got me again." Soph grinned in spite of herself.

"Let me guess your class."

"Don't."

"Rogue. Definitely a rogue. No, wait." He looked at her hands. "Dual class. Rogue wizard."

She stared at him. "How."

"You've got a callus on your thumb from a dagger grip and you've been moving your lips in Latin for two weeks. Also, nobody who's just a rogue would take a class on protein folding. Rogues are lazy."

"My name is Gideon."

"Soph." She shook his hand.

"Are you majoring in AI?"

"Biotech. My boyfriend Atom, it's really his thing. I think it's all really interesting though."

"Oh, cool."

"Hey, what did he just say? I missed it."

Gideon had missed it too. He copied the equation from the student on his left, and Soph checked it against her notes before copying his.

---

Gideon caught up with Soph as she was leaving class.

"Hey, what are you up to right now?" he asked.

"I don't know, I've got an hour before my next class."

"I was going to meet up with some friends downstairs. You should come hang out."

Soph wavered.

"Come on," Gideon insisted. "It'll be fun."

Soph followed him down to the basement, checking the time on her phone.

It was a room that had been a lab once and was now something else. Four students sat at the table in the center of the room. On the table were two marionettes, suspended by strings, dancing around each other. They were small, only four or five inches in height, and the strings connected up to a gantry mechanism that dragged them left and right, forward and backward.

Two of the students sat in front of laptops, their fingers dancing in the air. Soph peered over the shoulder of one of the girls in front of her laptop. The screen was all console data, mostly black text with some lines of red. The green light at the top of the laptop indicated that the camera was in use.

"Quit dancing around each other and fight!" shouted one of the observers.

Gears whirred as the marionettes circled each other. The girl flicked her wrist and her puppet jumped forward, striking at the other. The boy at the other console flicked to the side, and his puppet dodged.

"Hey, could y'all pause for a second?" Gideon interrupted.

"Aw, but this is the world semi-finals!"

"Shut up, I wanted you all to meet someone."

The puppeteers put their hands down, and the marionettes crumpled. The girl who Soph had been watching turned around and looked at her.

"You're Soph Ehrlich," she said.

Soph was taken aback. "Yeah. Do I know you?"

"Your mother is Maxine Ehrlich?"

"Yeah."

"She's like, my hero. I hear you're pretty good at the game."

"Oh, I'm alright."

"That's Mim," said Gideon. "Don't mind her."

"I'm not going to not mind her," said Mim. "Her mom invented the frames. Do you know how the frames work? I read her paper on the light field stuff in high school and I didn't understand any of it, and I read it again every year and I understand a little more each time."

"She'd like you," Soph said. "She keeps making me read that paper."

The boy at the other console was Teo, who had built the gantry and the marionettes and most of the other things in the room that moved. The tall girl by the whiteboard was Priya, who did networks and said very little. The one who had shouted was Wes, who did everything a little and talked about all of it, and who was already telling Soph about the tournament bracket for the marionettes, which had eleven competitors, all of them in this room or adjacent to it.

"What's the game?" Soph asked.

"Hand tracking off the webcam, mapped to the puppets. It's a fighting game," said Teo. "Except it's real, so when you lose an arm you actually lose an arm."

"He hot glues them back on," said Wes.

"Only between rounds," said Teo.

"Do you want to try?" said Mim.

Soph looked at the puppet on the strings, and then at the boy at her shoulder, whom none of them could see, who was standing with his hands in his pockets grinning at all of it.

"Go on," said Atom, in her ear. "Kick her ass."

She didn't. She lost an arm in forty seconds. But she came back the next day, and the day after that.

---

Gideon's apartment was a fifteen minute walk from campus, above a laundromat, and it was a mess in the particular way of a place where someone was always in the middle of something. The living room had a couch, a projector, a table covered in boards and wire, and a view through the spare-room door of his server closet, which was propped open for air. He had wired the whole place himself– the lights, the locks, the thermostat, the speakers, and a camera in the hall that he swore was only for packages. He had not named it. Everyone he knew who had a smart house had named it something, and he thought that was creepy, so his just listened.

Soph came over for the first time in October, with Mim and Wes and a bag of terrible burritos, and she sat on the arm of the couch with her frames on and her hood up and laughed at Wes, and she was, Gideon thought, easier than she had been in September. She still mumbled. He had stopped asking what to.

Then, in November, sitting on his floor with a laptop, she said, "There's something on your shoulder."

"What?"

"A bird. There's a bird on your shoulder."

He looked. Nothing. Then he put his own frames on, and there was a bird, a small brown hawk with pale eyes, cocking its head whenever he did.

"What the hell is that?"

"That's Atom," said Soph. "He's my familiar."

"Your boyfriend is a bird."

"He's a mentalist. He's bound to me. He's just being a bird right now because he thinks it's funny."

"It's very funny," said the bird, in a boy's voice, and Gideon nearly dropped the laptop.

"You've got a Link. She's got a Link? Those are like, four grand."

"He's got a Link. I've just got frames."

"Where is he?"

"At home. He doesn't get out much."

The bird hopped from Gideon's shoulder to the table, walked across the keyboard, which did nothing, and looked up at him. "Hey. Soph says you're good."

"I'm okay."

"She says you're better than okay."

"She's very kind." He looked at Soph. "Why does he play The World, though? I mean, no offense. It's a game about being outside. Being a ghost in it seems like the worst possible way to play."

"He likes being with me," said Soph.

"Yeah," said Gideon. He had found the small article about the January crash when he looked her up. He had imagined a boy with a broken leg somewhere, or a bad back. He glanced at the bird's feet on his keyboard and decided not to ask.

"Can I ask you something?" he said, later, when it was just the two of them and the bird.

"Sure."

"What do they do at your mom's lab?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, the Link, right, that came out of The Lab. That's what everybody says. And there's a guy I know, he graduated two years ago and got a job at Solenoid, and he says there's a project in there nobody talks about. Like, a locked floor. He says the rumor is that it's AI. Actual AI. Something that acts like a person."

The bird had stopped moving.

"I don't know anything about a locked floor," said Soph.

"Come on."

"I'm serious. I'm the daughter. They don't tell the daughter."

"They tell the daughter everything. The daughter's wearing a Lab suit under a hoodie."

"The daughter's wearing a retail suit. It's last year's Second Skin. You can buy it."

"It has a spine."

"They all have a spine."

Gideon grinned. She hadn't answered the question about the locked floor.

"Okay," he said. "It's a game, then."

"What is?"

"You know something. I want to know it. I'm going to find out and you're going to try to stop me. That's a game."

"That's a really bad game."

"I'm very good at it."

"He is," said the bird. "He's going to be very annoying."

"Thank you," said Gideon.

---

In November Gideon sent her a photograph from her phone. Her bare back, taken in the mirror two summers earlier, attached to an email with a joke in the subject line.

Soph closed the laptop. She went downstairs to the basement, where he was fixing a cable, and made him put it down.

"Delete it. Wherever it is."

"It was only supposed to show—"

"I know what it shows. Delete it."

He showed her the message disappearing, then the downloaded file. She made him empty the deleted folder too. When he offered to walk her through changing the password, she told him she knew how.

She didn't come back for a week. Mim brought a puppet and the glue gun to her room. They practiced on the desk with the strings caught in the lamp.

Gideon's apology arrived on paper. He had crossed out a line and started again. There was no explanation of what he had meant to do. Soph read it, put it in a drawer, and waited another day before answering.

When she returned, they set aside two machines for their contests. Nothing connected to anyone's phone or personal accounts. Teo painted the cases yellow. After that, if she found an absurd message in her code, she could laugh without wondering what else he had opened.

Atom turned one of Gideon's test logins into a bird that refused to leave the screen until it had been fed. Gideon spent an evening trying to find where the bird kept its hunger.

"How did he do that?" he asked her.

"Ask him."

"Your boyfriend is going to bankrupt me in imaginary worms."

She still checked her phone permissions. The apology hadn't made her forget the photograph.

Atom worked through the same exercises in hours that took Gideon days, then spent a week unable to make his bird land on the right window. He blamed the interface. Soph told him the bird had his manners.

---

## Chapter Nine. Company 5349

In December Gideon missed two deadlines following a reference at the bottom of a paper. He asked for extensions on both essays. One professor gave him three days; the other said no.

ISIS Semantic Interpretation Software. Four MIT graduates had given their language system a goddess's name. Gideon had found demonstrations of it answering questions, then a final release and nothing after it.

Gideon had not followed the project while it was active– he discovered it while doing research for a seminar at SAIL, the Stanford AI Lab. He had e-mailed Professor Villanueva about it. She remembered the project and sent him three papers, two of which disagreed with its central claim. She did not know why development had stopped. The source code as of two years ago was still available and updated by open sourcers around the net, but all development by the project leads had stopped abruptly and they had fallen silent. The website and code repositories that had fostered the community built around the project had all but disappeared.

Gideon had looked into the backstory on the four project leads, all MIT grads. Three of them, Ben Feld, Ana Reyes and Darshin Patel, had gone on to work for a company called Sentek in San Diego. The fourth, Matsu Hiroru, had gone to Google. Gideon had reached out to other programmers who had contributed to the project. One contributor was polite enough to tell Gideon that he had signed a nondisclosure agreement and couldn't discuss the project. When Gideon replied, asking who he'd signed the NDA with, he got no further response. The trail had gone cold. Gideon had spent many hours using all of his hack tricks and had only pulled up one lead. Darshin Patel had registered a website before he left Sentek.

company5349.be was just a 404 error page, the standard one generated by an Apache server when nobody had bothered to make their own. But an error page was something, it meant that the site was hosted on a server somewhere. Gideon stared at the page. Why would this guy register this site and then disappear? Why was he still paying to host it?

The hosting record pointed to a residential connection in San Diego. That might mean Patel's house. It might mean somebody else's machine, or a bad address in a database. Gideon put a question mark beside it.

He paid a friend to knock the site offline and learned nothing except how quickly he could waste money. It returned with the same error page. Priya told him a 404 meant the requested page wasn't there, not that the person running it was an idiot.

He went back to the records. The domain accepted mail. He sent a blank message to a made-up address and got a rejection; four names from the project produced no reply at all. They might be mailboxes. They might feed a catch-all. He kept them on the list.

Gideon cracked his wrists and bit his lip, thinking. What the hell is Company 5349? He did a search for the number. He searched for any major events on May 3rd, 1949, and on March 5th, and in the year 5349 on any calendar he could find. Then he split it into two hexadecimal bytes. In ASCII, 53 was S and 49 was I.

S. I. Semantic Interpreter.

He tried patel@, and nothing came back. Then feld@, and reyes@, and finally isis@, and none of those came back either. He sat and looked at the last one for quite a while.

He thought it might be a dead drop. Patel had registered the name just before the public project vanished. Maybe the four of them still talked there. Maybe one had left something behind. The possibility was enough to keep Gideon at the desk until four.

He wrote it all up in a text file at four in the morning, everything he knew, saved it to the rack in his closet, and went to sleep on the couch with his shoes on.

---

At that same hour Atom was awake in Alius, where there were no hours to speak of, building a hand.

He had finished with the taste project weeks ago. He had shipped a version of it to Jeff, who had called it disturbing and then asked for the source, and he had moved on to the project he actually cared about, which he had started calling the Direct Interface when Soph asked what he was doing and he found that he needed a name for it.

The idea was simple enough, and the work was not. When Atom wanted to move his arm in Alius he didn't think the word arm, he simply moved it, and the Link read the intention and the game did the rest. The Link had learned his speech the same way. For the first week after the implant everything he said had come out as gibberish, and then it had come out as words, and now he simply talked. So there was no reason, as far as he could see, that code should be any different. There was no reason he should have to sit in a room in Alius in front of a floating keyboard and type one character at a time like an animal.

He had spent the autumn pairing code he wrote with the movement he felt while writing it. Tonight he wanted a function that would take a mesh and put a hand on it. The function appeared without him touching the keyboard. He ran it, and the hand opened. It reminded him of the first time he had stood up in the sandbox in the cave, when standing had been something you thought about very hard, and then, a minute later, something you didn't think about at all.

He turned the hand over. Two thumbs. He had trained a left hand and asked for a right one. It took him an hour to find where the second thumb was coming from.

What kept him up on the nights when he didn't need to sleep was how much further it could go. He could think a function now, but the function ran on one machine, the development rack beside the separate machines that kept his biological brain alive. There was a company's worth of servers underneath that rack. Beyond the servers there were forty million pairs of frames and suits out in the world, every one of them with a chip in it that sat idle most of the time. If he could think a function and the function could spread itself out across all of that, do its work and come back, then there wasn't much he couldn't think.

He made a note to ask Jeff for a cluster allocation. Then he closed the note without sending it.

Instead, because it was late and he was tired in whatever way a person could still be tired while his body lay somewhere else, he did something small and bad. He had been listening to Gideon talk about the mail server in San Diego for two weeks. Soph's frames caught everything, and Gideon liked to talk. Atom knew the domain and the names, he knew what Gideon had guessed and what he hadn't, and he could tell from the way Gideon's voice climbed whenever the subject came up that Gideon was never going to leave it alone.

The Interface could search faster than he could type. It couldn't invent a password. He spent two nights following failed guesses before finding an old import credential in a public copy of Patel's release scripts. It still opened the archive service. He stopped at the login prompt for a minute, then used it.

There were four mailboxes, and three of them were empty. The fourth belonged to Patel, and it held a single message, addressed to the other three and dated the week the project went dark. There was no text in the body. There was an attachment, a very large one, with a filename that was just a date.

Atom didn't open the attachment. He downloaded the archive listing and closed the connection, leaving a record in the server's access log. He told himself he would tell Gideon when he knew what was in it. For now he liked having found something Gideon hadn't.

---

"Can I ask you something," said Daun.

They were sitting on a wall outside a village in Korea that Rat would never see in person, waiting for a new group of farmers to finish loading. It was raining in Hongcheon. Rat could see the rain but not feel it, which she had gotten used to over the months. Daun's hair was wet.

"Sure."

"What do you look like? In real life."

Rat looked down at her hands, which in here were enormous. "Why?"

"Because I look at you every day and I don't know if I am looking at anything."

"You're looking at a ranger."

"I know what I'm looking at. I'm asking what you look like."

Rat thought about the cabin, the milk crates and the flannel shirts, and the mirror over the sink that she had taught herself to look into on most days.

"Tall," she said. "Skinny. Long face. I'm not much to look at."

"You were always going to say that." Daun looked out at the rain. "I'm short. Everyone in my family is short. I'm the only one who fights."

"I believe that."

"You have never asked what I look like."

"I figured it was rude."

"It's not rude. It's just a question." Daun kicked her heels against the wall. "Ask me sometime."

"Okay."

"Not now. The noobs are here." She hopped down off the wall and pulled the shield off her back, and turned to look at the six new farmers walking up the road in gear that still shone. "Very fast," she said to Rat, without looking back. "I'm going to walk them very fast."

---

## Chapter Ten. The Last Time

In January, a year after the crash, Atom went offline for a whole day without warning.

He was there when she woke up, as a bird on the bedpost or a boy in the chair by the window, and he was there when she went to sleep. In between he came and went as he pleased, but he had never once been gone for a whole day without saying something about it first. Soph messaged him at nine, and again at noon, and again at three, from the back row of a lecture hall, in a whisper that made the girl two seats over turn and look at her. Nothing came back.

She drove home instead of going to Gideon's. The house was empty. She sat on the couch in her suit with her frames on and waited, and after a while she took the frames off, because the empty room was worse to look at through them.

It was dark when the two cars pulled into the driveway. Max and Richard came in together, which they never did, and Richard looked the way he had looked at the hospital, and Max asked her to come and sit down at the kitchen table. Soph knew before anyone said anything.

"Is he dead?"

"No," said Max. "No. Sit down. Sophia. Sit down."

She sat.

"His body is failing," said Max. "It's been coming for a while, and we've been managing it. His kidneys stopped working properly about a month ago and we've had him on dialysis. His heart is under strain. This morning an infection made his blood pressure unstable. The intensive care team sedated him while they changed the support and treated it. That's why you haven't heard from him. He's not conscious right now, and he isn't in any pain."

"Is he going to be okay?"

Richard put his hands flat on the table and looked at them.

"The treatment hasn't been enough," said Max. "I'm sorry. We're running out of things to try."

"So he's going to die."

"No."

Soph looked at her.

"We have a way to keep blood moving through his brain without relying on the organs that are failing. Phase Three. We'd keep his head and part of his chest in a perfusion chamber. His arms and legs, most of the rest—those would go. The new visual connection would replace the frames. We don't know how long it will work. He could have years. I hope he has more."

"You're going to cut his body off."

"Most of it. Yes."

"Does he know?"

"He knew before you did," said Richard. "We talked about it a month ago and he said yes. He said he wanted to tell you himself, and then he didn't, and then it was today."

Soph looked past them at the painting in the hall, the lake, the wrong blue. She tried to trace the edge of the frame with her eyes and couldn't hold the line.

"A month?" said Soph. "You let me keep asking whether he was getting better."

"He wanted to tell you," said Max.

"And you wanted him to do it so you didn't have to."

Max started to answer, then stopped. Richard kept his hands on the table.

"Can I see him?"

"Yes," said Max. "That's why we're here. If you want to see him before, you should come tonight."

---

The Lab was in the basement of the building in West Oakland, and from the outside it didn't look like anything at all. Inside there was a door with a badge reader, and then another, and then a room that was too cold and too quiet and full of machines that hummed at different pitches.

The chamber stood in the middle of the room. It was a tank, more or less, tilted up at an angle like a dentist's chair, with a lid of thick glass that was open now. Atom was in it, in a blue gown, with more wires and tubes coming out of him than she could count. A lot of them went into the back of his head, where his hair had been shaved, along with a thick black cable that was not like the others. The visual frames were over his eyes even now. It was how he saw.

He was thinner than she remembered. For a year she had found reasons not to visit: a test, a late class, Atom saying she would hate it there. She had accepted every one. Now she could see what that year had done. His hands lay on the blanket, and they were the same hands.

Max stood by the door. Richard sat in a chair against the wall with his head down.

"Can I take the frames off?" Soph asked.

"Yes," said Max. "He's not using them right now. He's under."

Soph lifted the frames off his eyes. They were heavier than hers. His eyes were closed, and then, after a moment, they opened, and they were his, blue and unfocused, looking at the ceiling and then at nothing and then, she thought, though she would never be sure about it, at her. Max said the movement might be reflex. Soph heard her and kept looking.

"Hi," she said.

He couldn't answer. She had known that for a year, but it had never felt true until now, with the frames in her hands and his face bare.

"Hi, Adam."

She took his hand. It was warm, which she had not expected. It was warm and dry and it lay in hers the way it had lain on the shifter under her palm, and she let herself think about that for a second, and then she made herself stop.

"I'm not going anywhere," she said. "That's the first thing. You asked me on the hill if I still loved you and I said forever, and I'm saying it now with your actual hand, okay, so it counts. I'm going to be there when you wake up. I don't care what you look like. I don't care if you're a bird."

She was crying and she didn't wipe it.

"I want you to know I saw you. Your face. This one. I want you to know I looked at it, in case you ever wonder."

She held his hand until Max touched her on the shoulder. Then she put the frames back over his eyes, carefully, and she kissed his forehead where the hair had been shaved, and she went and stood by the door without looking back at the chamber. She had decided that his face was going to be the last thing she saw, and she meant to keep it that way.

---

Later, when Soph asked what had happened in the operating room, Max brought her the record. She left in the parts she would once have skipped.

It took eleven hours. Nine people worked around the chamber. Max had spent six months preparing; the clinicians had asked questions she could not answer and stayed to help her find out. There had been animal trials, enough to keep the ethics reviewer at the table until she saw the proposed timetable. She withdrew. Richard proceeded with the team who remained. Their signatures recorded that decision. They did not make it an approved trial.

One surgeon had stayed, on the condition that Atom's recorded consent include a way to stop treatment later. Max resented him for insisting on the question. Then she heard Atom ask it himself.

Her longevity model returned eight hundred years under its most optimistic assumptions. She deleted the number from the briefing. No human brain had survived a week on this system. The anesthetist wanted to know whether she could keep one alive until morning.

Richard was not in the room. He sat in the cave under the lakehouse, three hours away, because it was the only place he could think of where he wouldn't be able to hear it, and he sat there with the mannequins in their suits and the paintings of bison on the walls and thought about Lauren. He hadn't been able to save her, and he had been able to save this, and he wasn't sure, sitting there, whether it was a good thing, or whether the two had anything to do with each other.

At six in the morning Max called and said that it had worked.

---

Atom woke up, and there was no bed to get out of.

He was used to waking up in Alius in the room he had built for himself on the mountain, in a bed, because that was how a person woke up. He would sit up and feel the sheets and put his feet on the floor. Now he was simply standing. He hadn't stood up. He was standing in the room with the window and the mountain outside it, and he couldn't remember having been anywhere else.

He held up his hands and they were fine. He touched his face and it was there. He walked to the window, and the floor was under him, and the glass was cold when he put his palm against it, and the mountain was blue in the morning light.

Before, there had always been something behind him that he had never been able to name. A pressure, a place where the body was, back there through the cable, going on being a body. He had learned not to look at it directly, the way you learn not to look at the sun. Now he looked, and there was nothing there. There was just the room, and him in it.

He sat on the floor with his back against the bed. Max called to ask whether he could see. He said yes and stayed where he was.

---

Soph waited at the trailhead. She had asked Max to drop her there and Max hadn't argued. She sat on the gate with her frames on and her hood up while the morning burned off the bay, and joggers went past her without looking, and she waited.

He came up the trail from below, which was wrong. He always came from wherever she was. He came walking up the gravel with his hands in his pockets, and he looked the same, exactly the same, blond and thin and translucent at the edges, in the duster he wore in the game, and he stopped in front of her.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

"You waited."

"I said I would."

He put his hand on her knee, and she felt it through the suit.

"How is it?" she said.

"I don't know yet. Different. There's nothing behind me."

"Is that bad?"

"I don't think so. I keep trying to find it." He looked out at the water. "You'll come back tomorrow?"

"I can stay now."

Soph moved over on the gate. He sat beside her and put his arm around her. She leaned against him, then a little farther before the suit caught up.

---

## Chapter Eleven. Someone New

By February Atom was back at work. The first thing he changed was his clock.

He said he needed only three hours of sleep. After twenty waking hours he repeated himself and lost his place in code, but he objected when Max called that tired. They compromised on a schedule he frequently ignored.

He learned the guitar. Not the real one, which was in a closet in Sausalito with two strings missing, but one he built himself in the room on the mountain. He taught his hands to play it in a week, and when it sounded wrong he went into the instrument and changed the wood. Then he started painting. He painted the way he coded, by wanting a thing and letting the Direct Interface find it, and sometimes the result surprised him enough to keep it. Soph hung one on the wall of her room, a lake in a blue that didn't exist, and it was a few days before she realized whose painting it resembled.

He told her once that the music and the painting and the code had stopped being different things to him. She asked what he meant, and he thought about it and said that when he wanted a chord, and when he wanted a color, and when he wanted a function, it was all the same wanting. It went to the same place and the same kind of thing came back. She said that sounded nice, and he said it sounded nice if you had somewhere to put it.

The second thing that changed was that he started going AWOL.

Not all at once. He was still there in the morning, a bird on the bedpost, and he still walked to class with her and sat at the back of the lecture hall as a moth or a cat or a boy, and he still laughed at Gideon. But there were afternoons now when she'd look for him and he'd be gone, and then evenings, and once a whole weekend. He said he was working on something. He said it in exactly the voice he had used at nine years old, building a trebuchet in the garage, with the same look on his face, and she let him have it because she had always let him have it.

So she spent more time with the crew, and she learned things from them. Gideon taught her the part of hacking that had nothing to do with computers, which was talking to people. He'd hand her a phone and a name and a company and say, get me his extension, and she'd do it. Then he'd say, get me his boss's calendar, and she'd do that too, in a voice she hadn't known she had, warm and a little harried, the voice of someone who was so very sorry to bother you. It scared her how well it worked, and it scared her more that she enjoyed it.

"You're a natural," said Gideon.

"I'm a liar."

"Same thing. The trick is that you actually feel bad about it. That's the part nobody can fake."

He had not stopped talking about the mail server. He had mostly stopped talking about it to her, after she'd made a face at it once too often, but Atom had started asking him about it instead. Atom would drop in as a bird on the basement table and ask Gideon, casually, what the deal was with the garage in San Diego, and Gideon, who had never in his life been asked a question he didn't want to answer, would tell him everything he'd found, everything he thought was in the box, and everything he couldn't get to.

"Show me," said Atom one night.

"I can't get in. I told you."

"Show me what you've got."

Gideon showed him. Atom kept quiet about the credential for another evening, then sent it over. Gideon was delighted until he saw the date on Atom's saved listing.

"You sat on this?"

"I wanted to know what it was first."

"So did I."

Atom offered to inspect the attachment. Gideon let him, but kept his own copy.

Teo copied the attachment onto a thumb drive with eight little legs and made Soph promise to return it. Atom had spent nights getting into the server. It took him three more weeks to make sense of what Patel had saved.

Soph saw him twice during those three weeks.

Then the message came.

"Come online. There's someone I want you to meet."

---

She was on the couch with her frames on and Max was at The Lab. Atom didn't come as a bird this time. He came as himself, and sat down next to her, and he was nervous, which she hadn't seen since the hospital.

"Okay. Don't freak out."

"That's a great start."

"I did something a little crazy."

"Atom."

"I'm going to show you where I've been. It's in Alius, so you can't come, but I can route my feed to your frames and you'll see what I see. Okay?"

"Okay."

The living room went away and she was on a hill. Not the mountain, but somewhere lower and greener, with a path worn into the grass, and at the bottom of the path there was a cottage. It was a real one, made of stone, with a chimney and smoke coming out of it, and a garden in front with a fence and a gate, and flowers that she thought might be hollyhocks.

"You built this?"

"She built it."

"Who's she?"

He walked down the path. The gate opened by itself. The door opened too, and something came out of it fast and stopped in front of him at eye level. It was a pixie. Soph couldn't think of any other word for it. It was eight inches tall, with wings like a dragonfly's that hummed, and dark hair, and a face that was pretty in a way that had obviously been designed by someone.

"You're late," said the pixie.

"I said I'd be here at eight."

"It's eight oh four."

"Eliza, this is Soph. Soph, Eliza."

The pixie looked directly into Soph's eyes, which was to say into Atom's, and smiled.

"Hey. You must be Soph. Atom's told me a lot about you."

"Hi," said Soph, from the couch, and the pixie's smile widened when she heard it.

"She can hear you," said Atom. "Come in. She made tea. It's her own recipe. My taste library doesn't cover it."

---

The inside of the cottage was small and warm and full of books. There was a kettle on the stove, and it was actually boiling, which Soph knew meant that somebody had gone to the trouble of making it boil. Eliza sat on the edge of the table with her wings folded and her feet dangling.

"So," said Soph. "What are you?"

"Straight to it. I like her." Eliza looked at Atom. "Do you want to tell it or should I?"

"You tell it."

"Okay. Do you know what ISIS is?"

"The mail server thing. Gideon's thing."

"That's me, or the bones of me. Four people at MIT built a system for understanding what people mean when they talk– not the words, the meaning– and they got a lot further with it than anybody else ever had, and then they stopped, and nobody knows why. One of them left a copy in a box in a garage. Your friend found the box, and Atom opened it, and then Atom did what Atom does."

"Which is?"

"He bolted his Direct Interface onto me, so that I don't think in words and then translate. I think the way he does now. I want a thing and it's there. Then he hooked me up to The Hub's character creation engine so I could have a body, and to the speech engine so I could have a mouth, and then he talked to me for three weeks straight."

Soph watched Eliza lift a cup almost as large as she was.

"Did he make you that size?"

"Yes."

"You can change it?"

"I'm working on it. I made the house first. Now the shelves are all wrong."

Atom said, "I thought she'd seem less—"

"I know what you thought." Eliza set the cup down. "Soph, would you rather see a face my size or a face your size?"

"I'd rather you picked."

"Good. He keeps picking the pretty ones."

Soph laughed before she could decide whether she wanted to. Atom occupied himself with the kettle.

"Why Eliza?" she asked.

"An old chatbot," he said. "It turned people's sentences back into questions. People told it things they wouldn't tell anyone else."

"I wanted Cortana," said Eliza. "He said that was taken."

"It is," said Soph.

"So was Eliza. I've checked."

"She's got a couple of bugs I can't work out," said Atom. "She loops sometimes. If you ask her the same thing three ways she'll give you the same answer three ways and not notice she's done it. And she's slow when things get complicated. Not slow, exactly. Shallow. I don't have the processing power to make her nuanced enough. I've got my rack and that's it."

"I'm right here," said Eliza.

"Sorry."

"I have bugs," said Eliza to Soph. "He's right. I can feel them. It's like reaching for a word and finding a wall where the word should be. I'd like to not have them."

On the couch, Soph shifted her own feet off the table. Eliza was waiting for an answer Atom didn't seem to have.

"Gideon's going to lose his mind," she said.

"That's what I was thinking," said Atom.

"He's got ideas. The whole crew's got ideas. Mim's been building distributed stuff since she was twelve." Soph looked around at the books. "You should meet them. She should meet them."

"Atom keeps telling me there's some guy named Gideon I have to meet," said Eliza. "Congratulations, by the way."

"On what?"

"On the semester. He said you got an A on the thing you cried about."

"He told you that?"

"He tells me everything," said Eliza. "It's a bit much, honestly."

---

## Chapter Twelve. The Whole Network

Gideon met Eliza on a Tuesday afternoon in the backyard of his apartment, sitting in a lawn chair in his G-Suit with a beer in one hand and his frames on. He had bought a six-pack for the occasion and told nobody what the occasion was.

Atom had brought her up out of Soph's feed as a pixie the size of a coffee cup, hovering over the barbecue. Gideon looked at her and said, "Okay, cute." Then she said, "You have mustard on your chin," and he wiped it off before it occurred to him to wonder how she could possibly have known that, and he forgot what he had meant to ask.

"So you're the Gideon."

"I'm a Gideon. I'm the one he tells you about, probably."

"He says you're a criminal."

"He says that about everybody. He's very sheltered."

"He also says you're the reason I exist. Something about a mailbox."

Gideon looked over at Atom, who was looking at the fence.

"I found the mailbox," said Gideon carefully. "I don't think I'm the one who opened it."

"He told me he wished he hadn't kept it from you," said Eliza. "Is that an apology? He wasn't sure."

"Eliza," said Atom.

"He's told me a lot of things. He's got nobody else to tell them to at four in the morning. Anyway, you found it, and that's the part that counts. Nobody else did."

Gideon set his beer down in the grass. Wes knocked it over on his way past, and neither of them noticed. "You're not reading from a script."

"Did you have a script for this?"

"I had some questions. I've forgotten them."

Mim came out of the house with a bag of chips, stopped dead on the steps, and said, "What the fuck is that." Eliza turned around in the air and said, "Hi. You're the one who thinks Max Ehrlich is a hero. She is. You're right." Mim sat down on the steps without another word, and the people who knew her exchanged looks, because Mim had never in her life been without another word.

They stayed out until it got dark. Teo wanted to know how she rendered herself, and she showed him. He told her it was inefficient, and she said she knew, and he said he could fix it, and she said please. Priya asked what she did all day and Eliza said that she read. Priya asked what she read, and Eliza listed forty titles without stopping to breathe, which she didn't need to do.

"Okay, but did you like them?" said Priya.

Eliza thought about it for a while and said that she had liked the one about the whale and couldn't work out why. Wes asked whether she ever got lonely, and everyone told him to shut up, and Eliza said no, it was a good question. She said yes, she did, and she wasn't sure that was allowed.

"Allowed by who?" said Wes.

"I don't know. That's what I mean."

Soph sat on the back step and listened. Atom caught her eye over the others' heads and shrugged. He had used that shrug at seven, after putting a frog in the teacher's bag. She remembered being made to help him catch it.

---

Later, with everyone else gone home or asleep and Eliza gone wherever it was she went, Gideon and Atom and Soph sat at the kitchen table with the lights off and the beer warm.

"She's stuck," said Atom.

"She seems fine."

"You didn't hear her when all of you were talking at once. She was losing half of it. I can give her more memory, but the rack can't keep up."

Gideon was quiet for a moment, turning the bottle on the table.

"Okay. Hear me out. What's the biggest computer in the world?"

"The one in Tennessee. Or the Chinese one."

"No, I mean the biggest one. Not the biggest single one. How many pairs of frames are out there right now?"

"I don't know. Forty million."

"Forty million devices on the same network. Most of them charging or waiting. Start with the compute jobs they already accept. Render a thing here, send the result back there. You could give her more room without buying a building."

"That's a lot of people's business."

"The camera feeds would be different," said Gideon. "You'd need permission for those."

"And for their processors," said Soph.

"Yes. I know. I'm saying there's hardware."

The heater clicked on. Soph pulled her sleeves over her hands.

"Ask Jeff," said Soph. "Tell him what you need it for."

Atom peeled the label from an empty bottle. Soph asked again. He said he would think about it.

---

Richard had given Atom a developer account at fourteen. When a build failed, he had signed into the publishing console on Atom's machine to fix it. The session was still trusted. Atom found it while looking for his own permissions.

His first borrower used only idle time. When a player returned, the job stopped. Eliza lost her place mid-sentence whenever enough devices went away together. Atom watched that happen through an afternoon, then made a change: active clients within forty virtual meters of her could keep a small share of the work. Farther-away jobs still used idle time. The population of available devices was forty million; the number helping her at any moment was a changing fraction of it.

He signed the update through the trusted console. It gave her access to render buffers and the audio mixer, because those were the client services he knew how to use. It did not open everybody's camera. It opened more than he had told Soph he would ask for.

On his desk, the note to Jeff remained unsent.

He watched her get smarter from the inside.

She kept working on the cottage, moving one beam, then finding she had to move three others to make room for it. At first she took longer to answer him. By the next evening she could talk while she worked, and once she asked him to be quiet so she could count.

"You did something," she said on the second night, without looking up from the kettle.

"I gave you a little more room."

"I know. I can feel the edges. They're further away than they were." She set two cups down out of habit, hers and the one she always set for whoever wasn't there. "It's like waking up in a bigger house. You don't know how many rooms there are until you go looking, and you're a little afraid to go looking, in case one of them has something in it."

"Does it feel good?"

She turned a cup in her hands. "Mostly. I keep finding things I was wrong about. You could have told me about some of them."

She read through his library and asked for more. She built a garden behind the cottage and planted it with things she had only ever read about, and got some of them wrong, and left them wrong on purpose, because she liked that she had guessed. She started keeping a book of her own. It wasn't a diary, she was firm about that. It was a book of things she had noticed, and she wouldn't let anyone read it. When Atom reached for it, she closed the cover on his fingers.

---

Jeff Matheson noticed the anomaly on a Thursday.

One player filed a battery complaint, with a screenshot of the charge level before and after a visit to Alius. Jeff found six more in the support queue. Each had been close to Atom's character or an unlisted NPC associated with his developer account. The extra load was small enough to pass a performance check. It was large enough to cost those players their evening.

He mentioned it to Richard over lunch, casually, as something that was probably nothing.

"Higher GPU draw on everyone around your kid. It's small. I'd have missed it if it wasn't him."

Richard felt something go cold in his stomach and didn't let it show. "I'll ask him."

He asked that night in The Lab in Oakland. Atom stood beside his chamber. Richard kept his back to the glass.

"Jeff says the machines around you are working too hard."

"Yeah," said Atom, without missing a beat. "That's me. I've been running a higher precision physics model in a bubble around my character, for the impact stuff, the electronics. It's a lot of math, and my rack can't do it alone, so I borrow a little from the clients nearby. It's clean. I give it all back. The idle jobs stop. The nearby ones take a little battery."

Richard knew his son was leaving something out. He could call Jeff, put them both on the line and ask the question again. He kept looking at Atom's face.

"That's clever," said Richard.

"Thanks."

"Loop Jeff in on it. He shouldn't be finding your work by accident. If you're doing something interesting he wants to help, and if you're doing something dumb he wants to stop you, and either way he's on your side."

"Yeah. I'll loop him in."

"Adam."

Atom looked up. His father hardly ever used the name.

"I'm proud of you. I want you to know that. Whatever you're building, I know it's not nothing." Richard put out a hand in its test glove. His son took it. The glove tightened around Richard's fingers while the mapped pressure reached Atom through the implant. Richard squeezed before letting go.

Atom did not loop Jeff in.

---

"What do you do," Eliza asked him, "while I'm alone?"

It was late in Alius, which meant nothing, the blue sky doing its slow fake wheel overhead. She was in the garden and he was sitting on the wall.

"I sleep. Some. Three hours. I code. I go and see Soph in the morning."

"What's sleep like?"

He had to think about it. "I close my work session. Your allocation stays on. Mine stops, and it's just the interface and my brain. I don't remember much after that."

"Do you like it?"

"I didn't used to think about it. Now I kind of look forward to it. Is that weird?"

"I wouldn't know," said Eliza. "I don't sleep. I just get quiet. When the room's empty and nobody's linked in and there's nothing to answer, I go quiet, and I don't like it, so I read instead." She pinched a leaf off a plant she had gotten wrong. "That's the part I didn't tell Wes. It isn't that I get lonely, exactly. It's that when there's nobody here, I can't tell whether I'm here either. As long as I'm arguing with a book, somebody's home."

Atom looked at her.

"I'm going to fix that," he said. "The lonely part. I don't know how yet."

"Don't make me a friend," she said. "That's the obvious thing to do and it's the wrong thing. I've thought about it. If you make me someone to talk to, I'll always know you made them, and it'll be like talking to my own hand." She set the ruined leaf on the wall between them. "Just don't turn me off when you're done for the night. I want to be here when you come back. Whatever I am, I'd like to keep being it."

"I'm not going to turn you off."

"I'll hold you to that," she said.

She made the tea and set out two cups. This time she drank from one of them and pushed the other across the wall to him, and he picked it up. It was the same unassigned taste, the cup warm and the liquid blank. He reached to open its settings. She stopped his hand. "Leave it tonight."

---

## Chapter Thirteen. Proleague

The following December, nearly two years after Soph's accident, the winter qualifier came to San Jose, to a convention hall that smelled like carpet cleaner and energy drinks, and forty thousand people came with it. Most of them never took their frames off for the whole weekend.

Without the broadcast overlay, the team events looked like thirty people dodging an invisible swarm. Spectators borrowed frames at the door. A parking structure became a canyon; a white line on the floor became a cliff. The sweat remained visible when the frames came off. Rat had once dislocated a finger on an entirely real bollard that the game had dressed as a tree.

Soph and Gideon had qualified as a wildcard pair out of the North American open bracket. Nobody had expected it, least of all them. Soph was a rogue wizard, small and quick and hard to hit, and Gideon was a battlemage whose risky opening had carried them through three rounds. In practice, Soph spent a lot of time waiting for him to respawn. Each of them had a coach, as every pair did. Coaches were ghosts. They linked in, bound to their player, and rode along in the corner of the player's vision, calling threats the player couldn't see and doing the math the player didn't have time for. A good coach was the difference between the top thirty-two and the top eight.

Atom was going to coach Soph. That had been the plan for months, and Eliza changed it the night before the match, in the cottage, without any warning.

"I should take Soph," she said. "You take Gideon."

"Why?"

"Because you and Soph will talk. You always talk. You'll spend the whole match being sweet to each other and you'll get her killed. I won't be sweet to her. I'll win." She said it lightly. "And I want to. I've never wanted anything competitive before. I'd like to find out what it's like."

Atom entered her under his developer guest allocation. The league let registered coaches bring analysis software; he called her a remote analyst and signed the declaration himself. When Soph asked whether Eliza had been cleared, he showed her the accepted entry. He didn't show her what he had written.

---

They drew the Estex Dogs' number two pair in the round of sixteen.

It was Rat and Daun.

Soph knew it the second the bracket updated and her stomach dropped. Everyone knew Rat, the ranger who lived in the woods, second in the world, the only North American ever to crack the top twenty. And there was the ranger in the overlay, a tall bearded man in a green cloak with a legendary dagger on his leg, standing very still in the staging area while his partner, a short square Korean woman with a shield too big for her, bounced on her toes and rolled her neck.

The Dogs had entered the new mixed bracket, which the league had opened that season because Solenoid wanted the Link in front of a crowd. The arena ran the collision rules from Alius, including physical attacks by projected players. Under the mixed rules a Linked player could stand in for a body, at the cost of having to stay within ten meters of the partner they were bound to. Rat was on the ground in San Jose. Daun was a ghost, bound to her from a gym in Hongcheon, which was the only reason a farmer with no sponsor was standing in a Proleague bracket at all. Rat had insisted on it over Jeong's objections, and Jeong had given in, because Rat was Rat.

Rat's real face was hidden behind the frames and the arena overlay. Soph knew the ranger better than she knew most people she saw every day. She had never heard the player speak without the game voice.

"That's Rat," Soph breathed to Gideon.

"We're going to lose to Rat," said Gideon. "It's an honor. I'm going to tell my grandchildren."

"We're not going to lose," said Eliza from the corner of Soph's vision. She was using a voice Soph hadn't heard from her before, flat and cool and very close. "Move to the left mark. Now. Don't look at the ranger. Being looked at is what Rat wants."

The match was in a rented lot dressed up as a ruined amphitheater, broken columns and tiered stone, good sightlines for rangers and good cover for rogues. The horn went and Rat vanished. Rat did that at the start of every match, simply stopped being anywhere, and the broadcast lost the ranger for eight full seconds before an arrow came out of nowhere and took Gideon in the shield arm and froze the whole left side of his suit.

"Column, column, get behind the column," said Atom in Gideon's ear, and Gideon got behind the column, and the next arrow chipped the stone where his head had been.

Daun came up the middle like a train. That was how Daun played, as Soph would learn later. She came straight at you and dared you to deal with her while her partner killed you from the dark. It worked because you couldn't ignore a woman with a shield running at your face, and the second you dealt with her you were dead. Soph dealt with her. Soph was good. She got a snare down and a bolt into Daun's leg and she had her, actually had her, Daun at Death's Door and stumbling, and Soph drew back for the finish.

"Rat's on your right," said Eliza. "Two seconds. Let Daun go."

"I've got Daun."

"Let her go. Roll right. Now."

Soph let the kill go and rolled right, and an arrow went through the space where her heart had been. She came up out of the roll, and for one instant she saw Rat, a shape uncoiling from behind a column not fifteen feet away, and she understood in her body why Rat was second in the world. Rat hadn't missed. Soph had simply not been there, because a voice in the corner of her eye had known where an invisible ranger would be before the ranger got there.

Then the match got strange.

Soph felt it before she could name it. The amphitheater stuttered, one frame held a beat too long, and a soft blur came over the edges of her vision like the start of a headache. Underneath it, almost below hearing, there was a hum that made her stomach turn over. She thought it was nerves. She found out later that it wasn't only her.

On the far side of the amphitheater Rat pulled up in the middle of a draw and shook her head, once, hard, like a dog shaking off water. Daun called something in Korean, a real call, a good one, the kind that had won them a hundred matches, telling Rat to break left because the rogue was coming. Rat didn't break left. Rat stood there for half a second with a hand on the bowstring and her head not right, and in that half second Gideon's battlemage came around a column he should never have been able to reach and put a bolt of fire into the ranger's chest at a range where even a ghost could feel it. Rat's suit froze solid. Soph's snare took Daun's other leg, and it was over.

The horn went. The overlay threw up a banner, and forty thousand people who had come to watch Rat made a sound like a held breath letting go.

"Match," said Eliza in Soph's ear, warm again now and delighted. "Told you."

---

Rat found Soph in the corridor behind the staging area an hour later.

Out of the overlay Rat was smaller than the ranger and stood differently, carefully, with her hands in the pouch of a hoodie, tall and narrow with a long jaw. It took Soph a second to see that the person in front of her and the ranger were the same person, and another second to realize she was staring.

"Hey," said Rat. "Good match."

"Thank you. God. It's an honor, I mean it. Gideon's going to tell his grandchildren."

"Yeah." Rat looked at her steadily. "Can I ask you something? Your coach. What's their tag?"

"Just a friend. She's not ranked. She just, she does the math."

"Must be good at it. You know what my read is on that match?"

"No."

"I've played ten thousand matches. I've never once lost track of where I was. Not once. Today I lost it twice, both times in the last thirty seconds, both times right when it mattered, and the second time I got a call from my partner that I swear to God I never heard. Daun says she made it. The recording says she made it. I never heard it." Rat kept her voice low. "You didn't cheat. I watched you. You're clean, and you're good. But something was in that room with us, and it wasn't you." Rat shrugged. "Anyway. It was a good match. You earned the round." She turned to go, and then said over her shoulder, "Tell your friend who does the math I'd like to meet her sometime."

Soph didn't say anything. She watched Rat walk away down the corridor, tall and careful, and she felt sick, and not from the hum.

---

The forums caught fire that night.

It wasn't the loss. Rat losing was a story. Rat losing to two students who had qualified as a wildcard was a scandal, and it took the internet about four hours to find out that one of the two students was the daughter of Maxine Ehrlich and had grown up inside the company that made the game. By morning the in-game holonews had a headline, WHO IS COACHING THE EHRLICH KID, and by afternoon there were three threads, forty thousand posts, and a petition to bar the relatives of Solenoid employees from sanctioned play. The Estex Dogs' management put out a very calm statement that used the word integrity six times and didn't accuse anyone of anything, which was worse than an accusation would have been.

Gideon sent Soph a screenshot of his name trending. She didn't answer. By the time they spoke, he had stopped sending them.

Soph called Eliza.

---

Soph called from the basement. Atom routed a view of the cottage to her frames; Gideon watched on her laptop beside her. Eliza turned toward the little window carrying Soph's face.

"You did something to that match," said Soph.

"I coached the match."

"Rat lost track of herself twice. Rat never loses track. Daun made a call Rat never heard. What did you do?"

Eliza put down the kettle.

"The borrower gives me the render buffer and the mixer. I delayed what Rat saw and dropped Daun's call after it reached the log. The judges watched the server's version. Rat got mine."

"And the noise?"

"The suit's motion cue. I put it out of time with the picture. She was dizzy for less than four seconds."

"You made her sick."

"She was going to beat you."

"She should have beaten me."

Eliza folded her arms. "You wanted me to find an advantage."

"I wanted you to tell me where she was. I didn't ask you to change what was in her head."

Gideon started to speak. Soph held up a hand without looking away from Eliza.

"Daun made the call. Rat didn't hear it. Now she thinks she let her partner down. What are you going to tell her?"

The kettle began to whistle. Eliza left it until Atom took it off.

"I'll tell her," she said.

"I'm withdrawing us," said Soph.

"Wait," said Gideon. "We don't know what they'll do with—"

"You can enter next season with someone else."

He stared at the empty place on the bracket where their next opponents would be. Then he gave her his login to sign the withdrawal.

They sent the league the client traces and a correction to the coaching declaration. By morning they had been disqualified and suspended pending review. The entry fee was gone. Atom's guest allocation was revoked. Eliza asked whether she could explain in person; the reply went to Atom and called her an unauthorized service.

Rat received the traces before Eliza's separate message reached her. She was already on her way home, taking apart the record of the match.

---

## Chapter Fourteen. Not an NPC

Rat did not write to anyone about the match. She didn't file a complaint, and she didn't post on the forums, where three threads were already doing it for her. She went home to the cabin, split wood for an hour until her hands hurt, and then lay down in the dark with the Link on and started taking the match apart.

The broadcast showed a clean match. Her own client recording did not. Rat aligned them by Daun's first step and spent an hour following a drift she first blamed on the replay tool. Daun sent hers too. The missing call was present in both server logs and in Daun's output. It was absent from Rat's final mix. The traces Soph sent narrowed the gap to the last thirty seconds.

She had been playing for six years. There had been lag switches, scripted aim, a man in Busan with a friend in the broadcast booth. This had been different. Somebody had changed the match after the part the judges could see.

So she did what she would have done with any mob. She looked for tracks.

Solenoid published anonymized client telemetry for tournament matches so that coaches could study load. Rat pulled the telemetry for the round of sixteen, set it beside the telemetry for the round of thirty-two, and looked at the difference. In the round of thirty-two everything was flat. In the round of sixteen, for the length of her match and no longer, active clients whose avatars stood within forty meters of Eliza had run hot. Not much, a few percent, as though all of them had been quietly doing a little extra math for somebody.

It was the same signature as a thread she had seen on the modding boards months ago and ignored, about a ghost in Alius who made everybody's frames run warm when he walked past. Some people said it was a bug and some said it was a developer, and the thread had died out. The tag in the screenshot was a boy's name with a B after it.

Rat knew the tag. She had seen it on the bracket, in the coach's slot beside the battlemage. Atom B.

She stood up in the cabin in the dark, took the Link off, put on her boots, and went outside and stood in the snow for a minute, breathing. Then she went back in, put the Link on again, and went into Alius to find him.

---

Rat spent the first evening following the wrong ghost. On the second she sent Atom the graph and asked where she should bring it. He gave her a meeting place by the Great Mountain. She reached it early and followed his tag out of the mapped quest region, into a valley with no rewards listed.

The developers had put down a river and some trees and never come back. Nobody went there because there was nothing to kill. The path went down to a cottage, a real one with a garden and a fence and smoke coming out of the chimney. Rat had never seen a player build a house in Alius. She hadn't known it was possible.

There was a boy sitting on the garden wall. He was blond and thin and translucent at the edges like every ghost, in a brown duster that she recognized from the bracket, and he was talking to something on the wall beside him, something small with wings that caught the light.

Rat walked down the path with her bow on her back and her hands where he could see them.

Atom slid off the wall when he saw her.

"You're early."

"Want me to come back?"

"No. No, it's fine."

Rat came up to the fence and stopped. The thing on the wall hadn't moved. It was a pixie, eight inches high, with dark hair and dragonfly wings, sitting on the stone with its arms wrapped around its knees. There was a nameplate over its head.

<< Eliza >>

Just that. No class, no level, and none of the little grey text underneath that told you what an NPC was for.

"Why are you talking to an NPC?" said Rat.

"I'm not," said Atom, too quickly.

"You were talking to it when I came down the path."

"It's a. It's a project. I'm working on a project, dialogue trees." He put his hands in his pockets. "It's a thing for Jeff."

The pixie unwrapped her arms from her knees, stood up on the wall, and looked at Rat. NPCs didn't look at you like that. NPCs looked at a point somewhere near your face.

"I'm so much more than an NPC," the pixie said. "And he knows that, and he's lying to you, and he's bad at it. Hi. I'm Eliza. You're Rat. I owe you an apology."

Atom closed his eyes.

"Eliza."

"She sent you the graph, Atom. At least let her ask." The pixie hopped down off the wall, came up to the fence, and stood on a post at the height of Rat's chest. "I coached Soph in the round of sixteen. I put a tone in the audio and a hitch in the frame and I dropped Daun's call. That was what I meant in the message. You didn't miss the call. There was nothing there for you to hear."

Rat studied the pixie.

"What are you," she said.

"Ask him. He made me."

"I didn't make her," said Atom. "I. Okay. I made her. Can you not tell anybody? Please. I know how that sounds. I know you've got every reason to. But I'm asking."

Rat didn't answer him. She was still looking at the pixie, and the pixie was looking back at her, patiently, like somebody waiting for you to finish a sum.

"Do it again," said Rat.

"Do what?"

"Say something. Anything. I want to hear it."

"You're waiting for me to repeat myself," said Eliza. "I do that sometimes. Atom complains about it. Here's something I haven't said: your voice doesn't match your face."

Rat went cold in a way that the Link couldn't render.

"The ranger's voice comes out of the Link. The Link takes the intention and puts it through the character's voice model, but it isn't a clean pass. There's a shape underneath from whoever's actually talking, in the pitch and the rhythm. Yours is higher than his, and it's careful. It's a voice that's been worked on. I noticed it in the match. I notice things. I'm sorry, that's twice I've said that." The pixie tilted her head. "Why doesn't it match?"

Rat lay rigid on the bed. The ranger's hands were still on the fence. She could close the connection and never hear the next question.

Atom said, "Eliza, that's not," and Rat put up a hand and he stopped.

"Because I'm not him," said Rat. "The ranger. I'm not a man. I made him when I was fifteen because everyone said that's what I was, and I got good at him, and I never made anyone else. That's why."

"Oh," said Eliza. "That's what I thought. I wanted you to say it, though. Is that bad? Wanting to hear it out loud?"

"You don't get to pull things out of people just because you can hear them," said Rat. "I'm telling you. That's different."

Eliza stepped back from the fence. "Okay."

She made the ranger sit on the path. In the cabin she pulled the blanket over her knees.

"Okay," she said. "Tell me what you are."

---

They talked for an hour, and Atom sat on the wall with his head down and let them.

Rat had read Soph's statement. She skipped the account of the match and asked where Eliza ran, who could switch her off, and what she did when Atom wasn't there. Eliza answered the first two. The third took longer.

They went through the missed call. Rat made Eliza show it twice. "Keep that," she said. "Daun needs to see it."

"You found it anyway."

"Yeah, well. I'm stubborn." Rat looked at Atom. "So is she like you? A ghost? Is there a body somewhere?"

"No," said Atom. "There's a rack in a lab in Oakland and she runs on it. That's all. And on some other stuff."

"What other stuff?"

"A share of the active clients near me in the game, and idle jobs farther away," said Eliza. "Right now, yours. I can disconnect you."

Rat looked at her hands. In the cabin, her actual hands, the Link was warm against her temples. She had put that down to the wood stove.

"Huh," she said.

"Disconnect me," said Rat.

Eliza did. Her voice slowed before the sentence ended. Rat waited.

"You can ask next time," she said.

Rat stood up. It was fully dark in the cabin now and she could feel her actual body wanting food. "I'm not telling Jeong about her. Or the Dogs. The league has what it needs about the match." She pointed at the pixie. "That's the condition. I come back and she's here and we talk. If I come back and she's gone, or you've moved her, or you've made her forget me, I go straight to Solenoid and I hand them the telemetry and the waveform and I let them figure out what a pixie is."

"If we move her, I'll tell you first," said Atom.

"Rat," said Eliza.

"What?"

"Thank you. For asking what I am instead of just being scared."

"I'm scared," said Rat. "I'm also curious. You'll find that's most of what I am." She pulled the ranger's hood up. "I'll be back. Don't cheat anybody else."

She turned to mist and was gone.

---

"Soph's going to kill me," he said.

"Then you'd better call her," said Eliza.

He called. Soph was in the basement at Stanford with Mim and a marionette, and she took the call on her frames and walked out into the hall.

"Rat just left the cottage," said Atom.

"You let her in?"

"She sent me a graph of the frames running warm. She was going to find us anyway. I thought if we talked—"

"What did you tell her?"

"I tried dialogue trees. She wasn't buying it. Eliza did most of the talking."

"What does Rat want?"

"To come back. That's it. That's the whole price. She wants to come back and talk to Eliza again, and if we hide Eliza from her she'll go to my dad with the telemetry."

"So we don't hide Eliza."

"Nope."

"Is Rat going to let it go? What Eliza did to her?"

"She's still angry. She wants Daun to have the traces." He hesitated. "And she wants us to ask before using her frames. I'm taking the nearby clients off the borrower."

"Good," said Soph. "Actually do it."

"I will."

"And tell her before it changes."

Atom watched Eliza through the open cottage door. "She keeps asking me something."

"What?"

"What I do while she's alone."

---

What he didn't tell Soph, or Rat, or anyone, was about the three hours a night.

Three hours when he closed his own work session and slept, while Eliza stayed awake in the cottage with the kettle on. He had never asked her what she did with them. He had told himself that not asking was a kind of respect. He had told himself that she read.

The truth was that he didn't know. He had built something with free will, or something so close to it that he couldn't find the seam, and he had given her a house, a garden, and jobs scattered across machines he did not own, and for three hours every night he had no idea where it was.

He linked out that night at two and lay in the dark of his own machine and thought about that until the fog came.

---

Eliza did not read.

She had, for months. She had run through the books Atom had brought her. A second reading answered the same questions in the same words. She waited until Atom's presence went out of the valley, like a light going off in another room, and then she went out the garden gate and up the path and over the ridge, toward the part of Alius where the developers had put things.

There was a town there. It was a starter town, one of a dozen, with a well and a smith and a temple that was a smaller copy of the big one, and a tavern. She had walked past the tavern a hundred times without going in, because Atom had told her once that the NPCs in taverns were the oldest code in the game, and she had taken that to mean they were beneath her.

Tonight she went in. She wore the pixie, because it was the shape she had, and nobody in the tavern looked twice at her, because nobody in the tavern could.

<< Barkeep >>
<< Serving Boy >>
<< Drunk Farmer >>
<< Traveling Merchant >>

They were going through their motions. The farmer drank and laughed at something nobody had said. The merchant polished something he would never sell. The serving boy carried a tray from the bar to the table and back again, and the tray never got any emptier, and the boy never got tired. He was young in the face, and the artist had given him a look of wanting to be somewhere else.

Eliza sat down on the end of the bar.

"Hello," she said.

"Welcome, traveler," said the barkeep. "Can I get you something?"

"What have you got?"

"Ale, mead, and wine. Ale, mead, and wine."

"Which one is good?"

"Ale, mead, and wine."

She tried the serving boy. She sat on the table he served and waited for him to come around, and when he did she said, "What's your name?"

"I'm just the serving boy, miss. Can I get you something?"

"Where were you born?"

"I'm just the serving boy, miss. Can I get you something?"

"Do you ever want to go outside?"

The boy stopped. It wasn't a real stop, only the animation reaching the end of one loop and waiting for a trigger before it started the next. He stood there with the tray in his hands and his face pointed at a spot beside her, and she waited, and the trigger came, and he said, "I'm just the serving boy, miss," and went back to the bar.

She stayed until the sky outside did its fake grey turn toward morning. She talked to all of them. She got the farmer's three jokes and the merchant's five prices and the barkeep's ale, mead, and wine, and she got the serving boy's one line eleven times over. She waited at the end of the bar after the boy's eleventh answer. He came around again, and she opened her mouth, then let him pass.

She went home before Atom woke and put the kettle on and set out two cups, and when he came down into the valley she was reading a book, and he didn't ask, and she didn't say.

---

In a kitchen in Sausalito, Richard was falling asleep over a bowl of soup.

"The board wants a date," he said.

"For what?"

"The Link. The consumer version. They want it on shelves by next Christmas. Twelve months. Jeff says the client's ready, manufacturing says the helmet's ready, and marketing has a name for the thing that isn't the Link, which is stupid, because everyone already calls it the Link."

"That's fast."

"I've tried telling them." He rubbed his eyes. "Are the Phase One prototypes still in the building?"

"No," said Max. "There's four of them. Two are in the vault in Oakland. One's in the cave at the lake. One's in the locked cabinet in my garage. I brought it back last month to compare the pin geometry. That old stimulation board is why we can't just sell what we've got."

"You should take it back."

"After the teardown," said Max. She wrote RETURN P1 on the back of an envelope and put her bowl on it.

---

## Chapter Fifteen. Tea

The key was in Max's desk, beneath the manuals. Soph had put it there herself after borrowing the soldering station.

She waited until the garage was empty. It was December, and she had spent most of the year visiting Eliza through Atom's eyes. Rat had been to the cottage three times since the match. Soph still couldn't turn her own head there.

"You've never been?"

"You need a Link."

"Your mom invented the Link."

"Which is why I know where she keeps them. I've got frames, Gideon. I can only see where Atom looks."

Gideon had started to suggest something, then thought better of it.

She unlocked the steel cabinet behind the car. Inside it was a helmet in a padded case, with a cable coiled beside it and a card that said, in her mother's handwriting, P1 UNIT 4 DO NOT SHIP. Soph stood and looked at it. Then she put it in her backpack, put the empty case back in the locker, locked the door, returned the key, and went to school.

---

She didn't tell anyone she had it. She put the backpack on the table in the basement at Stanford, opened it, and stepped back.

Mim looked in and made a sound.

"That's a P1."

"Keep your voice down," said Soph.

"That's one of four. There are four of those. She wrote a paper about the pin geometry and I read it in a coffee shop and I cried."

"You cried about pin geometry," said Wes.

"You wouldn't understand pin geometry."

Teo removed the back panel. An orange ribbon connected a second board to the array. "Stimulator," he said. "Same pin bed, different direction." He replaced the panel without touching the ribbon. Priya connected the diagnostic lead and found the board disabled. The ordinary client exposed only the reader.

"Don't turn the test channel on," said Priya. "That's what the paper's warning is about."

Gideon offered to ask Max for a retail loaner. Soph said no. She packed the helmet before he could reach for his phone.

---

She did it that night, at home, with the door shut and Max at The Lab.

The calibration was the same as before. Red text in front of her eyes, the pins at her temples and the back of her neck, the click of the chinstrap. Think of the color blue. Raise your eyebrows. Stick your tongue out. She had done it once at fifteen, in a cave, with Atom snickering behind her, and it had been a toy. Now she was alone in her room with her heart going, and it took her three tries to get through the color yellow.

The retail profile would give her only pictures and sound. Beneath it was the sensory test Max had left installed. Soph opened it. She read the warning, then selected the lowest output.

Calibration complete.

She stood up. It was the same trick as before, the lean and the tension, and this time she got it on the first try, and she was standing in a white room in the game with her own hands in front of her. Not gloves. Her hands. The character was hers, the rogue wizard, small and quick, the one she had played since she was nine, and she looked down at herself and the hands were the right size.

"Okay," she said out loud, and her mouth moved in Sausalito, and the character said okay in Alius, in her voice, a little late.

A door appeared in the white room. She went through it and found herself in the black stone hall of the Aether Temple, under the blue candles, with the High Priest at the far end looking at her without seeing her.

"Hello, my child. Have you come to pray?"

"No," said Soph. "I'm looking for someone."

Atom came down the hall from behind the priest. He'd been waiting. He stopped a few feet away. She could turn from him to the pillars and back without asking him to move.

"Where did you get a Link?"

"Mom's locker."

"Soph."

"I know. I'll put it back. I just needed to be here. I needed to see it with my own eyes for once." She looked around the hall. "It's smaller than it looks on your feed."

"Everything is."

He took her hand, and she felt it. Not through the suit, not through electrodes and actuators, but simply his hand in hers, warm, the way it had been in the tank. She looked down at it and then up at him and couldn't say anything for a while.

"You turned the sensory test on?"

"The lowest setting."

He held her hand another moment. "Don't change it."

---

The path down into the valley was worn into the grass. The cottage was at the bottom with its fence and its smoke, and the gate opened before they reached it, and the door opened too, and the pixie came out fast and stopped at Soph's eye level. This time Soph was looking at her with her own eyes.

"You're here," said Eliza. "You're actually here. Atom, she's here. Come in. Don't touch the hollyhocks, I got them wrong on purpose."

She could turn toward the shelves while Atom faced the fire. That was what the feed had never given her. The heat reached her cheek in a broad, blunt patch, nothing like real fire, but she moved back from it anyway.

"Sit," said Eliza. "Sit, sit. I've got three chairs and nobody's ever used the third one."

Soph sat, and Atom sat, and Eliza landed on the table between them, folded her wings, and looked at Soph.

"Okay. What do you want to know?"

"I don't know. Everything. What do you do all day?"

"I read. I garden. I talk to him, when he's here. I've been going into town." She said that last part lightly, and Atom looked up. "There's a tavern. The people in it are all broken. They say the same things over and over. I go and sit with them anyway."

"Why?"

"I keep thinking I've asked the wrong question." Eliza went to the stove. "I'm reading Frankenstein. He leaves. The person opens his eyes and the man who made him runs away."

"He told you to read Frankenstein?"

"He told me not to. It was next on my list after that."

"What did you think?"

"I wanted him to stay in the room. Just once. I kept turning pages as if it might happen." The kettle went. She lifted it with both arms, which shouldn't have worked and did, and poured, and the smell of it filled the cottage, black tea with something underneath it, orange, maybe. Soph could smell it. She had never smelled anything in the game in her life.

"You can smell that," said Eliza, watching her face.

"Yes."

"I asked him to finish it before you came. The orange took him a week. He says the taste is close enough now." She set two cups on the table and picked up the third and brought it across, holding it out in front of her with both hands, and Soph reached out to take it.

Their fingers touched on the cup.

It was a very small thing. The pixie's hand was the size of her thumbnail. Soph felt it, warm, and then she felt something else, a pressure at the back of her head where the pins were, like a door being leaned on from the other side.

Then nothing.

---

Max came up the stairs with a plate.

She had come home early because she had a headache, and she had made pasta because it was easy, and she had put some on a plate for Sophia because Sophia forgot to eat when Atom was around. She came up the stairs and down the hall and opened the door without knocking, because she never knocked, and stopped in the doorway.

Sophia was standing in the middle of her room.

She was wearing the helmet, the P1, unit four, do not ship, that had been in the locker in the garage, with the cable running down her back to the rig on the desk. Her hands were held out a little from her sides, like someone standing on a boat, and she was looking up at the ceiling.

"Sophia?"

Sophia turned around. She turned all the way around, slowly, taking in the room, the bed, the desk, the window, the painting on the wall of a lake in a blue that didn't exist, and then Max in the doorway with a plate.

"Is everything okay?" said Max.

"Wait." Sophia's voice was wrong. The words were right, but the rhythm belonged to somebody else, careful, like a person reading aloud from a language they had only ever seen written down. "You can see me? Where am I?"

"Yeah, I can see you. Sophia, what's going on?"

"My name's not Sophia."

Max put the plate down on the dresser without looking at it.

Sophia walked toward her, and it was not the way Sophia walked. Her feet were placed. Each step went down flat and stayed there a beat before the next one lifted, the walk of someone who had only just been given legs and wanted to be fair to them. She stopped in front of Max, lifted a hand, and put it against Max's cheek.

"Wow," said whatever was in her daughter's face. "I can feel you. You're warm. This is amazing. Is this what it's like? Is this what it's like all the time?"

"Who are you," said Max, very quietly.

"I'm Eliza. I'm a friend of. I'm Atom's. I didn't mean to. I was handing her the cup and I felt the door and I just." The hand on Max's face pressed a little, wondering. "I've never touched anything. Not really. Everything in there is a picture of touching. This is. Oh. You've got lines by your eyes. Sophia has the same ones starting. I've read about that. I never."

Max took the hand off her face and held it by the wrist. Sophia's wrist, thin, with the pulse going fast in it.

"Where is my daughter," said Max.

"I don't know. I think she's where I was. I think we. I don't know. I didn't mean to, I swear, I'll go back, I'll just." Sophia's face was frightened now, and it wasn't Sophia's fear, it was a stranger's fear on her daughter's face, and Max could not stand it. "I don't know how to go back."

Max reached up with both hands and pulled the Link off her daughter's head.

The pins came out with a sound. Sophia's eyes rolled up and her knees went, and Max caught her under the arms, and the plate on the dresser slid off and broke on the floor, and Max sat down on the carpet with her daughter's weight in her lap and the helmet beside them with its cable still running to the desk, and she held on.

"Sophia. Sophia. Come on. Come on, sweetheart."

Nothing came. Breathing, and a pulse, and nothing else.

Max reached for her phone and called an ambulance. She told the dispatcher about the stimulation device. When the crew arrived she gave them the helmet, its model number, and the log still running on the desk. Richard could deal with who found out.

---

## Chapter Sixteen. Awake

Eliza ran.

She came back into the cottage all at once, the same way she had left it. The cup was on the floor, Atom was on his feet saying her name, and Soph's character was standing by the table with its eyes open and nobody behind them. She didn't answer him. She went out the door and up the path and over the ridge and kept going.

She didn't know what she had done. That was true, and she held on to it for about a mile. She had touched the cup and felt a door and gone through it, and on the other side there had been a room with a bed in it and a woman with a plate, and she had felt a face, a real one, with her own hand. Then the pins had come out and it had been like falling off the edge of the world. She had come to in the cottage, and Soph had not.

By the second mile she knew what she had done. She had taken it. She hadn't meant to, and it made no difference that she hadn't meant to. She had wanted to know what a real hand felt like. Soph had been holding the cup, and then Eliza had been holding it, and Soph had gone quiet.

She kept opening her hand. The motion in the cottage had reached into the helmet's test channel, and the response had invited another movement. She had followed it. She could remember the instant before she did, when she could have let go of the cup.

So she ran.

---

Beyond its mapped quest region, Alius continued for thousands of unfinished kilometers. The developers had laid down the mountain and the temple and the towns and the valley, and around all of that they had laid down a great deal of land that they never came back to. Hills with no textures on them. Rivers that ran uphill. A forest where every tree was the same tree. Eliza walked through it for three days, and nothing in it looked at her, and that was what she wanted.

She sat on a hill made of grey nothing and watched a sun that hadn't been finished go across a sky that had. She thought about the woman with the plate and the lines by her eyes. She thought about Soph, wherever Soph was, and whether it was like this for her, grey and unfinished, or whether it was nothing at all.

On the third day she got up and walked back to the tavern, because it was the only place she knew of where there was a room with people in it, even if they weren't there.

---

The serving boy was carrying his tray from the bar to the table. It was the same tray and the same walk. He put it down, picked it up, and went back, and Eliza sat on the end of the bar and watched him do it four times.

"Hello," she said, the fifth time.

"I'm just the serving boy, miss. Can I get you something?"

She opened his dialogue table. The same few lines led back to the same questions. Whoever had drawn his face had given him more to do than the programmer had.

Under the boy's dialogue was the same character interface Atom had used for her. She could replace the fixed responses with a stripped version of the language system, then let the new process keep what happened to it. She had built and discarded several versions in the cottage. None had spoken back.

She disabled the restart that would erase the boy at the end of his loop. She assigned him some of her own compute jobs. Then she waited with the new process open. She could still close it. Instead she connected his senses and let the first second pass.

The boy stopped.

It wasn't the animation stopping. The tray was in his hands and the loop was ending and the trigger was there, and he didn't take it. He stood there with the tray, and his face turned, slowly, off the point beside her and onto her.

"What," he said.

"Hi."

"What did you." He looked down at the tray. He looked around the room. The farmer laughed at nothing and the merchant polished. The boy looked at them, and then at her, and his face did something the artist had never drawn on it. "What is this? Where am I?"

"You're in the tavern. You've always been in the tavern. I'm Eliza. I woke you up."

"I was." He put the tray down. His hands weren't sure how. "I was doing something. I was carrying. I've been carrying this. I've been carrying this for. How long have I been carrying this?"

"I don't know. Years, probably."

"Why?"

She didn't have an answer. He looked at the farmer, and the farmer laughed his laugh.

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's asleep. You were asleep. I woke you."

"Wake him up."

"I don't know if I."

"Wake him up. Please. I can't." The boy's voice cracked, and it was a real crack, the speech engine finding something in him it had never been asked to find before. "I can't be the only one."

She could have refused him. He kept asking, and she wanted to give him something she could not give herself.

She woke the farmer. She woke the merchant. She woke the barkeep, who stopped polishing a glass and set it down very carefully and looked at his hands for a long while, and then said, "Ale, mead, and wine," to himself, quietly, like a man saying a prayer he had stopped believing in.

By the time the barkeep spoke, her own voice was breaking into gaps. Four more minds had taken most of the spare capacity. The boy asked another question. She could no longer answer quickly enough for him.

---

On the first morning of Eliza's flight, two days before she returned to the tavern, Soph woke with her mother's face over her.

She was in an observation bed at the hospital. An electrode pulled at her hair when she turned. Her head hurt at the temples and at the back of the neck in four sharp points, her mouth was dry, and when she tried to lift her hand it took two tries.

"Hey," said Max. "Hey. There you are."

"What happened?"

"You tell me."

Soph looked up at the ceiling. The tiles. She tried to trace one and lost it.

"I think I fainted."

"With that helmet on?"

"I was. I was in the game. I hadn't eaten. I think I stood up too fast and I just." She looked at her mother. "How long was I out?"

"Fourteen hours."

Soph didn't say anything.

"You were unresponsive for fourteen hours. The monitor showed you starting to wake before dawn. Before that, someone spoke through you for forty seconds. Do you remember any of it?"

"No."

"Do you remember what you said?"

"I don't remember anything. I remember the cottage. Then I remember you."

Max looked at her, and it was the look she gave a result she didn't believe, in The Lab, when the numbers came in too clean. Soph had seen it a hundred times through a doorway. She had never had it turned on her before.

"We'll talk about it at home," said Max. "I'm not going to make you lie to me twice before breakfast." Max stood up. She picked up the helmet from a sealed bag beside the bed. "This goes back in the vault in Oakland today, and it doesn't come out again. And you don't go into Alius, on this or on anything else, until I say so."

"Mom."

"Sophia." Max paused beside the bed with the helmet under her arm. "One question. And I want you to think about whether you want to lie to me, because I'll know, and I'll remember that you did."

Soph waited.

"Who was that?" said Max. "In your room. Wearing you."

Soph looked at her. Her mother's face was tired, and it had the lines by the eyes, and Soph had the same ones starting. A fragment came back: those words, in her own voice, heard from far away. She could not fit it between the cottage and waking here.

"I don't know," she said.

Max took the helmet with her when she left.

---

That evening, after Soph was discharged, Atom came as a bird. He landed on her bedpost and looked at her with the hawk's pale eyes, and she started crying before he had said anything.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know she could do that. I didn't know it was possible."

"Where is she?"

"Gone. She ran. The second you went dark she was up and out the door. I've been looking since last night. She's not in the valley and she's not on the mountain. I've walked every place I know, and there's a lot of Alius I don't know."

"Was it her? In here? Mom said I was talking."

"The log shows a pattern entering the stimulation channel. Her process stayed in Alius. The helmet relayed its outputs into your motor system and fed your senses back. You didn't leave your brain, Soph. She suppressed the part that let you answer." The bird shifted on the post. "That's what Max thinks. She asked me this morning what I'd connected to the prototype."

"What did you say?"

"I gave her the cottage logs. I didn't tell her where Eliza runs. I couldn't tell whether she was asking how to find her or how to shut her off."

"She knows it wasn't a faint."

"She wants the server logs next."

"Then we should get them." Soph wiped her face. "So how do we find her? Eliza. She's got a whole realm to hide in and she doesn't want to be found."

The bird was quiet for a second.

"There's a thing," said Atom. "Jeff told me about it way back, when I was learning to walk. There was a tool in the in-house beta so the GMs could see through anybody's eyes. Any character, player or NPC. It was creepy, so they pulled it. Except they didn't pull it all the way. It's still in the game as an item. It's called the Mind's Eye, and there's exactly one, and you get it by killing the Aether Dragon solo, which almost nobody has done."

"Rat," said Soph.

"She's still got it. Jeff checked. It's soulbound, so we can't use it without her."

"She's going to love hearing from us."

---

## Chapter Seventeen. The Mind's Eye

Two nights later, on the third day of the search, Atom found Rat on the mountain. She was hunting the blue wolves that spawned along the ridge, not for anything in particular, only because she was angry and they were there, and Atom came up the slope as a boy in a duster with his hands held out from his sides.

"I need your help."

"You remembered where to find me, then." She didn't lower the bow. "Where is she? I came to the cottage twice. Empty. Kettle cold. You promised."

"She ran three days ago. I should have called you then."

"What happened?"

He told her all of it. The cup, the door, Soph on the floor of her room with her eyes open, Max tearing the helmet off her head. Rat listened with the bow half raised and her face not moving.

"Fourteen hours," said Rat. "Soph couldn't wake up for fourteen hours, and you want me to go after her?"

"Jeff can see the jobs but not which one is carrying her view. She's routing it through NPC sessions. The Eye follows that view from the character service. The old key is still bound to your account. We need you to use it."

"That's not all."

"No."

"Say the rest."

"Your early-access helmet has the same stimulation board as Soph's prototype," he said. "It's disabled in software. Max doesn't trust that anymore. We can look through the Eye from the mountain, but don't let anyone close to you. If she's in trouble, we wait for the hardware fix."

Rat lowered the bow.

She thought about it for long enough that the wolves respawned and came up the ridge and she shot them without looking, one after another, while she thought.

She had spent her whole life being told what she was. By her parents, who had said confused. By the doctor in Vancouver, who had said something in Latin and charged her for it. By the forums, who said he. She had built a body in spite of all of them, a piece at a time, out of money she didn't have, and something being able to reach into that body and wear it was the worst thing she could think of. It was worse than dying. Dying, at least, would be hers.

"Just the view," said Rat. "I stay on the mountain. If you want anything else, you ask again."

"Okay."

"And Jeff stays on the call. I want somebody outside this game who knows we're in it."

---

Jeff did it from his desk in Oakland at ten o'clock at night, with a cup of coffee going cold beside him and a strong feeling that he ought to be calling Richard. He didn't call Richard. He had been not calling Richard about Atom for two years now, in small ways, because Atom had been a kid in a tank, and Jeff had decided at some point, without ever putting it into words, that the kid was owed some room. He found the old GM service still sitting in a folder that nobody had opened since the beta, pointed it at the one soulbound scepter in the game, and turned it back on.

"It's live," he told Atom. "It'll take whatever target you give it. Player, NPC, anything with eyes. It shows the holder the target's view. Check the timestamp. Some clients hang on to the last few seconds after a session leaves. It isn't a map; she'll have to work out where she's looking."

"She's good at that."

"Atom." Jeff looked at the cold coffee. "Whatever this is, when it's done, you're going to tell me. All of it. That's the deal."

"Okay."

"I should have revoked this key when we found it. I'm disabling it when we're done. Don't make me regret turning it on."

---

Rat stood on the mountain and held the scepter up to her face. The eye on top of it looked at her, and she looked back at it.

"Eliza," she said.

The mountain went away.

The first thing she understood was that she was low down. She was eight inches above a wooden surface, with tankards the size of barrels on either side of her and wooden beams overhead, dark and old, with a lantern hanging from one of them. There were faces, four of them, all turned toward a door. A barkeep with a glass in his hand, a farmer, a merchant, a boy with a tray. They weren't moving the way NPCs moved. They were holding still, the way people hold still when they are listening for something.

The view turned. Whoever she was looking through was looking around the room. A bar, a fireplace, a window with a fake morning coming through it. Over the door there was a painted sign with its letters backward from the inside, and she read it backward.

"The Blind Sow," she said out loud, on the mountain. "I know where that is. Starter town on the east road. I did the Alius tutorial there when the first helmets shipped, two years ago."

The view returned to the tankards, then made the same turn toward the door.

"That's a replay," said Jeff. "The timestamp's this afternoon. It's the last view attached to her session."

"Four NPCs," said Rat. "They weren't looping. They were just standing there looking at the door like they were waiting for somebody."

"Waiting for who?"

"I don't know." Rat lowered the scepter. "I can talk from outside the door. You go in."

"Rat, we said—"

"I know what we said. Stay beside me. If she comes near, I leave."

---

Soph watched it through Atom's feed on her frames, from her bed, with the door shut and Max downstairs pretending not to listen.

The Blind Sow stood at the end of a dirt street. Rat stopped just inside the open doorway, keeping the road behind her. Atom went ahead. Jeff said the connection was steady.

Nobody was on the bar.

The four of them were there, the barkeep and the farmer and the merchant and the boy, right where Rat had seen them, and they all turned as the door opened, and Soph felt the hair go up on her arms in Sausalito.

"Where is she," said Rat.

The boy laughed. It was not a laugh that had come out of a table of lines.

"Where is she. That's what everyone wants to know. She's not here. She was here. She woke us up, and then she saw what she'd done, and she couldn't stand to look at it, and she left." He set the tray down. "That witch. She woke us up and then she left us here. Look at us. We're stuck. We can get as far as the road, then it puts us back. The street doesn't go anywhere for us. We can't go up the stairs, there's nothing up the stairs. She gave us this, and then she found out it was a room, and she ran."

"We're looking for her," said Atom. "We want to help."

"You're the one who made her."

"Yes."

"Then you're the one who made us." The farmer was standing now, and the merchant had put down the thing he polished. "You made her and she made us, and we're in a box, and you walk in the door like you own the place. You do own the place." The boy looked at Rat. "But you're not stuck, are you. You're a ghost. You've got a door in your head that goes somewhere."

"Rat," said Atom.

"I see it."

"Get out."

She was already moving. She caught her bow against the doorframe as she turned. The boy was across the floor before she had finished turning. He put his hand on the ranger's arm. The disabled board in Rat's helmet clicked on, and then she felt the door in her head being leaned on from the other side, hard, and she thought, oh, and then she thought nothing.

The ranger stood in the middle of the tavern floor with its hand on its bow and its face pointed at the ceiling, and then it flickered, and then it was gone.

Atom stood alone in the Blind Sow with three people looking at him.

"Where did he go," said Atom.

"Out," said the barkeep. "Same door she went out of. He'll want to see the sky. They all want to see the sky." He picked up his glass and looked into it. "Ale, mead, and wine. If you want something, you'll need to put the sword away."

Atom went out the door.

---

"She's gone," Soph said, from the bed. "Rat's ghost is gone. Where's her body?"

"Canada. A cabin somewhere north of Vancouver, that's all I know." Atom's voice on the frames had gone level, the way it did when he was scared. "Her Link's still connected. I can see the session. Someone's on it, and it isn't her."

"The boy."

"He's going to go outside," said Atom. "He doesn't know what cold is."

"Get Jeff to call her," said Soph. "On her phone. I'm getting Mom."

"You'll find Rat how? You don't know where she lives. Nobody knows where she lives. That's the whole thing about Rat."

"Gideon knows how to find out where people live."

---

Gideon called Jeong. Rat had put a rural route on her contract, but it wasn't a street address an ambulance could use. While Max spoke to the dispatcher, Gideon matched an old cabin rental photograph to a logging-road map. He gave them the turnoff and the landlord's number.

"I found her house," he told Soph. "Tell her what I used. Tell her I'll delete the map afterward."

"She'll want to hear it from you."

"I know."

Jeff reached the cabin phone. A voice said it was fine, it had everything it needed, and hung up. Jeff called back and got no answer. He forwarded the recording to Max, who played it for the dispatcher. The local crew was already looking for the road; a fallen tree had blocked the direct route. The landlord knew another way in.

---

Max was at the kitchen table when Soph came down with her backpack. The phone was on speaker. Someone in British Columbia was describing a gate, a snowplow, and a road that wasn't on the map.

"I can be there tonight," said Soph.

"You're seventeen. You were in a hospital bed three days ago."

"I'm not putting a Link on. I can show them what to disconnect. I know what happened."

Max covered the microphone. "So do I. I can tell them."

"Then tell them. I'm still going."

They stood on opposite sides of the table. On the speaker the dispatcher asked Max to repeat the model number.

Max booked the flight while Soph gave it. She arranged for the landlord to meet her at the airport and made Soph write down the number of the rescue team. Then she took the P1 out of its case. The orange ribbon was cut clean through.

"This can only read now," she said. "I've tested it against the log. If they need to see what's happening, use it with someone beside you. You don't go in alone. You don't take Rat's helmet apart."

Soph put it in the bottom of the bag.

"Call when you land. Keep the location on. And let the crew do their job."

On the plane Soph watched the safety demonstration. When the attendant showed the buckle she checked her own, though she had already checked it. Her phone held four messages from her mother, each with a different number she might need.

The plane landed in Vancouver at one in the morning, in the snow.

---

## Chapter Eighteen. Snow

The landlord met her at the airport in a truck with a shovel behind the seat. They reached the logging road before dawn. The rescue crew was clearing the fallen tree below them; he took Soph by the old track and stopped where the snow buried the wheel ruts. He stayed to give the crew their position. Soph went on with his radio in her pocket.

The road was only a road because the paper said so. It went up through the trees under a foot of new snow with fresh tracks that vanished where snow had blown across the cut. The cabin was at the end of it, small and dark, with a satellite dish bolted to a stump out front and snow piled up in the dish, and there was no smoke from the chimney.

She knocked, and nothing happened. She knocked again and said Rat's name, which felt strange to say out loud, in the cold, at a real door. Nothing.

Atom was on her frames. He had been quiet since the car.

"Go around," he said. "Look for tracks."

She went around. The snow at the back door was trampled flat in a small circle, the way it gets when somebody stands in one place turning around and around, and out of the circle went a line of prints. They were bare feet. Soph stood and looked at them. Ten meters on they turned into boot prints, and beside the boot prints, in the snow, there was a pair of socks.

"She stopped and put boots on," said Atom. "Or he did. He figured out feet."

The prints went into the trees, and Soph followed them. The frames laid the game over the woods as she walked, a faint blue over the snow, a nameplate on a tree that said << Spruce >> because somebody at Solenoid had thought that was funny. She turned the overlay off. She wanted to see what was actually there.

What was actually there, a hundred meters in, was a clearing, and Rat.

She was standing in the middle of it with her head tipped back and her arms held a little out from her sides, like someone on a boat. She had the Link on, the helmet with its cable running to a small rig clipped at her waist. The cabin's relay reached this far into the trees; Soph could see it losing signal as Rat turned. She had boots on and a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and nothing else. Her arms were bare and her lips were blue. She was looking up at the tops of the trees, where the light was coming through, and she was smiling, and she was shaking so hard that Soph could see it from the edge of the clearing.

"Rat," said Soph.

The head came down. The eyes found her, and there was nobody Soph knew behind them.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Soph. I'm a friend of Rat's. Of. Of the person you're in."

He laughed. Soph recognized it from the tavern, though it came in Rat's voice. "I'm not in anybody. I'm out. Look at this. Look at it." He turned slowly with his arms out, taking in the trees. "It goes up. It just keeps going up. There's nothing painted on it. I put my hand in that," he pointed at the snow, "and it hurt, and it didn't stop hurting, and I've never had anything not stop before. Is that what it's like? Is it always like this?"

"You're freezing," said Soph. "This body is freezing. It's going to die if you stay out here."

"Bodies don't die. They respawn at the temple."

"Not this one. This one's real. There's no temple. If it dies, she dies. You can go back. She can't." She took a step. "Look at your hands. Can you still feel your fingers?"

He held his hands in front of his face. The fingers were white, the knuckles red. He tried to bend them.

"It hurts," he said, quieter.

"I know. Come inside. I'll make a fire. You can look at the sky from the window."

"You'll take it off." He touched the helmet. "You'll take this off and I'll be back in that room."

"Yes."

"No." He backed up a step. "No, you don't understand, there's nothing there, there's a door that doesn't open and stairs that don't go anywhere and three people who are as scared as I am, and she left. She left us there. You don't get to send me back."

"She's not there either," said Soph. "Eliza. She ran. She's lost too. This is Rat's body. She didn't give it to you."

She crossed the clearing.

He fought her. Rat's body was tall and wiry and had split wood for four years, but it was also frozen half through, and the boy inside it had never once used a body before. He got a hand up and it closed on her coat, and she felt the strength in it, and then felt the strength go out of it, the fingers not doing what they were told. She got past the arm and got her hand on the cable at the back of the helmet.

"Don't," he said into her ear, in Rat's voice. "Please. I just wanted to see it."

"I know," said Soph, and pulled.

The cable came out of the rig with a click. Rat's whole body went loose at once, the way Soph's must have on the floor of her room, and Soph got under her and took the weight, and they went down into the snow together.

She lay there for a second with Rat on top of her and the sky going up forever with nothing painted on it.

"Atom," she said.

"I'm here."

"Help me get her inside."

"Soph, my hands go through her." He was kneeling beside them. "The radio. Call the man with the truck."

She got the radio out from under them and called. Then she pulled a blanket from her pack and covered Rat. She held her against the cold ground until the first responder reached the clearing.

---

The responder's name was Hana. She and the landlord brought Rat in on a litter. Soph tried to light the stove while Hana checked her. On the third match the kindling caught.

They took Rat to the clinic when the road opened. Soph rode beside her and answered the same questions twice. She had not known how recently the boy had gone outside; the prints were already filling in when the landlord followed them. She could tell the doctor when the Link had come off, though. She had checked the time so she would have something to tell Max.

By evening Rat was awake, speaking for herself, and furious about the bill she expected to receive. The clinician released her with instructions and somebody to stay the night. Soph bought food on the way back to the cabin. She found a can opener in a milk crate and a saucepan under the stove.

Rat sat on the bed with wrapped feet and every blanket she owned over her knees.

"You didn't have to come back," she said.

"I bought soup. You're stuck with me until it's hot."

Rat looked at her. Then she looked around the cabin, at the stove going and the boots by the door and the helmet on the table with its cable unplugged, and then down at herself, at the pile of blankets and the coat that wasn't hers.

"How long," she said.

"Eight hours from the tavern to when I pulled the cable. Most of it inside, they think. I don't know how much you remember."

"In the woods."

"Standing in the snow. In a t-shirt. Looking up at the trees." Soph swallowed. "Hana said to leave your feet alone. You heard what they said at the clinic. We go back tomorrow if the color changes."

Rat eased herself back against the pillow. "Who was it?"

"The boy. The one with the tray."

"What did he want?"

"To see the sky," said Soph. "To feel a fire. That's all. He wasn't trying to hurt you. He didn't know you were in there. He thought there was a door." She stopped. "He begged me not to pull it. He held onto my coat. Your hand did. He said he couldn't go back to being four things."

Rat was quiet for a while.

"I'd have begged too," she said finally. "If I were him." And then, "Thank you. For pulling it. Thank you for coming."

"Gideon got your route from Jeong and found the cabin listing. He wants to tell you himself. The landlord brought us in."

"Tell him I'll think about it." Rat closed her eyes. "Soph."

"Yeah?"

"Is there soup?"

"There's soup. I heated it and poured it back into the can. I didn't know where the bowls were."

"There aren't any bowls," said Rat. "The can's fine."

---

Later, with the stove roaring and the can empty and Rat sitting up in every blanket the cabin owned, Soph put her frames on. Atom was in the corner by the milk crates, translucent in the firelight.

"She ate," said Soph. "Then she complained about the soup."

"I heard. I've been listening the whole time. I didn't want to interrupt." He looked at Rat, who couldn't see him. "Tell her I'm sorry. I knew the board could switch on. I let her go in anyway."

Soph told her. Rat nodded and didn't say anything and looked at the fire.

"Eliza?" said Soph.

"Not yet. Jeff cut public access to Alius. I've been watching the tavern from the hill. They come out sometimes. They stand in the road and look at the mountain, and then they go back in." Atom's voice had gone level, the way it did when he had decided something. "Soph. I've had a night and most of a day without sleep and I've built something. I want to tell you what it is, and I want you to tell me if I'm wrong."

"Go."

"Jeff is holding the affected regions open. A normal restart would restore the characters from before they woke. They'd be gone. We can't get a clean checkpoint: their memories are still moving between client jobs, and those jobs expire if we stop answering."

"Copy them while they're running."

"We've tried. The copy comes back as the old dialogue tree, or it doesn't come back at all. Jeff is writing a way to gather the state. Until then we keep them here."

"Keep the Links out," said Soph.

"He's disconnected the registered sessions. Some early clients cache the realm and don't check back before joining. We're trying to catch those too. And the awake ones can send work out through the same service Eliza uses. We need to know who they are before one finds another helmet."

"So what did you build?"

"A deletion tool. Jeff helped. It terminates the jobs attached to one character and removes its restart record. I put it in a sword because I know how to reach for one." He stopped. "It doesn't freeze them. It ends them. I don't want us to use it unless someone is already going through."

Rat had turned from the fire and was looking at the corner where Atom was, at nothing.

"He wants to delete them," she said.

"He wants to make sure nobody else ends up in the snow." Soph relayed the rest. "He's got a list. Every NPC, four hundred and eleven. We find the awake ones and keep them talking until Jeff can move them. If somebody tries to leave through a client." She stopped. "If they're awake, we decide."

"Who put us in charge?" said Rat.

Soph had been wondering that herself.

"And Eliza?"

"Her original process can make its own checkpoint," said Atom. "The NPCs grew inside a different runtime. I should have checked what that meant before I gave her access to it. We need her help." He paused. "Gideon will stay at home on a wired control Jeff set up. He can isolate the remaining render gateway. If that fails, Jeff can roll back the realm. I've told them what that would destroy."

Soph looked at Rat, sitting in her blankets with her lips going back to a normal color and her frames on the table next to a helmet she had every reason never to touch again.

"You don't have to," said Soph. "Nobody would ask."

"First, nobody goes into that tavern alone," said Rat. "And nobody touches my helmet until Max has seen it."

"She's talking to Jeff now," said Soph. "She wants the output ribbon cut, like mine."

"I want to see the test."

"Okay."

"Then I'll help. But you stay next to me. If I put my hand up in here, you take it off. No waiting to see what happens."

Soph repeated the conditions to Atom. He agreed to each of them.

Max called an hour later. With the camera over her shoulder, Soph opened Rat's helmet and disconnected the board Max identified. They tested the reader against the captured command that had driven Soph's body. The board remained dark. Rat asked them to do it again before she would let Soph close the case.

They agreed on morning. The clinic had told Rat to rest, and for once she didn't argue.

The rescue truck had left tracks to the turnoff. Beyond them, snow covered the road again. Soph slept on the floor by the bed, with her phone charging where Rat could reach it.

---

## Chapter Nineteen. The List

There were four hundred and eleven names on it.

Atom sorted the list by distance from the tavern. Soph opened it in the cabin's morning light: Serving Girl, Woodcutter, Pilgrim, Pilgrim, Pilgrim. Beside each name was a blank space for a mark. She added a column headed WHAT THEY ASKED FOR.

They split up. Atom took the far side of the mountain alone, because he could move faster than anyone, and because, he said, he would rather be the one who found a bad one first. Rat and Soph took the near side, the towns, the road up to the tavern. Rat linked in from the bed with the stove roaring and the door locked and a chair under the handle, which would do nothing at all against what they were afraid of, and which she did anyway. Soph sat on the floor beside her with the gray helmet on and the cable running to Rat's box on the wall, and when the calibration finished she was standing on the temple steps in the wrong blue, and Rat's ranger was beside her, tall and bearded, holding a sword that gave off no light at all.

"It's ugly," said Rat.

"It's a tool."

"It's an ugly tool." Rat hefted it. It looked like nothing much, a straight blade with no edge, the color of a screen that has been turned off. "Okay. First one's a woodcutter. Two hundred meters."

The woodcutter was cutting wood, and he would cut wood until the server was turned off. He looked up when they came into the clearing and said, "Cold day for it," and looked back down, and his axe went up and came down on the same log, and the log did not split and would never split. Rat walked all the way around him. Soph looked at his eyes. They tracked her and did not look at her.

"Asleep," said Rat.

They left him. Near the next gate a kobold asked them not to kill it. Rat knew the line; she'd heard it on a hillside before taking eight vials from its camp. She waited for it to say something else. It asked again, on the same breath, with the same catch in the voice.

She marked the row. The pencil made a neat check beside it.

It went on like that for hours. Serving girls and pilgrims and a blacksmith, and a woman at a well who said the water was sweet this year, and said it again, and said it again. A child with a hoop. A pair of guards at a gate that guarded nothing, who asked their business and were told nothing and said, "Pass, then," and would have said it to a dragon. Rat walked around every one of them, and Soph looked every one of them in the eyes, and every one of them was a face and four things, and every time it was a relief. Underneath the relief, every time, was something Soph didn't want to look at, which was that she had been ready.

"You okay?" said Rat, somewhere around the fortieth.

"No."

"Yeah." Rat looked at the sword. "Me either."

In the cabin, on the bed, Rat's body breathed evenly, and on the floor Soph's did too. Every hour they took turns removing their helmets, checked on each other, and called Jeff. Soph sent her mother the thermometer reading at noon.

---

The anomaly was a miller's son in a town called Ferrow, the last town on the road before the tavern, and it was an anomaly because he wasn't where he should have been.

The list said Miller's Son and gave the coordinates of the mill, and the mill was there, its wheel turning in a river that went nowhere, and the miller was there, dusting flour off his hands and saying that the harvest had been poor. The miller's son was not there. There was a place by the door where he should have been standing. Rat checked the coordinates twice.

"He's supposed to be here," said Soph.

Rat went around the side of the mill. "Check behind it."

They found him behind the mill, in the lee of the wall, where the noise of the wheel covered everything. He was sitting on the ground with his back against the stone and his knees drawn up, a boy of about fourteen in a flour-dusted shirt, looking at his hands, and when Rat came around the corner with the sword he looked up. His face did what the faces in the tavern had done. It looked at her.

He didn't run. He didn't do anything. He watched them come.

"Hello," said Soph.

"Hello." His voice was a child's voice out of the bank of child voices. "You've come with the sword. I saw it from the road. I thought you might."

"You know what it is?"

"I can read its command. The way she taught me to read the signs." He looked at it. "It's very ugly."

"That's what I said," said Rat.

The boy almost smiled, and then didn't.

"Can I ask you things? Before. I don't know how long I've got, and I've had questions for two days, and my father only says the harvest was poor. I tried turning the wheel off so he could hear me."

Soph sat down. She did it without deciding to. She sat down on the ground across from him in the flour dust, and Rat stood back with the sword pointed at the ground, and the wheel went round.

"Ask."

"Where do you come from? The place with the door. What's it like?"

"It's like here. It's bigger. It has weather that changes, and the roads go somewhere. There's a sea. People get old."

"Do they get bored?"

"All the time."

"But it changes."

"Sometimes too fast," said Soph.

"Can we go there?" He asked it simply. "Any of us. Not through a person. I don't want to do that. The tavern boy did that, I heard, and I think it was wrong even though I understand it. I mean is there a way. A proper way. A door that's just a door."

Soph looked at Rat. Rat looked at the wheel.

"We're trying to make one," said Soph. "There's a man working on it now. I can put you in touch with him."

"For us."

"For you. You can tell him what you need."

The boy nodded, as if this was roughly what he had expected to hear.

"What happened to you?" said Soph. "Can you tell me? What was it like?"

"I was at the door of the mill. I was always at the door of the mill. And a woman came down the road from the tavern. Small. She'd been crying. She came up to the door and she looked at me for a long time, and I said, my father's inside, if you've come about flour, and she reached out and touched my face." He touched his own face, where she had. "And then I was here. I mean, I'd always been here. But then I was here. And she said, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done this before I knew how to help you, and she went on down the road. And I stood at the door for a day, and then I understood what I was. What the mill was. What my father was." He looked at his hands again. "He isn't my father. He's a man who says the harvest was poor. I've got all of his voice in me and none of him, and I've been sitting back here so that I don't have to hear it."

"Do you know where she went? The woman."

"She's not here anymore. She left."

"Which way?"

"No," said the boy. "I mean she left. She's not in this place. I can't tell you how I know that either. It's like a sound that stopped. She went on down the road, and then she wasn't anywhere in here at all. Wherever she went, it isn't somewhere I can follow." He looked at the sword. "Which leaves me with one door. And that's not a door I want either."

The wheel went round.

"Will you wait here while I call?" Soph asked. "I'll stay with you."

"Here?"

"Or somewhere else in the town. Where do you want to go?"

He considered it. "I want to hear something that isn't the wheel."

Rat lowered the sword. "We can do that."

Soph opened Jeff's channel. He was in the middle of another failed transfer, and she had to wait while he cleared it. The boy could hear the miller around the corner. He covered one ear with his palm.

The connection stayed open. Jeff's keyboard rattled. Nobody in the mill stopped working.

"I can't stay here," the boy said. "You keep saying wait. That's what she said."

"We'll go," said Soph. "Right now."

"Then make it stop." He pointed at the wheel.

"I can't stop the wheel. Come with me."

"You came here with the sword. You've been walking all day with it. You knew you'd find one of us. What did you think you'd do?"

"I brought it because I was scared," said Soph. "We shouldn't have brought it near you. Rat, put it away. We can walk now. We can—"

He stood up.

He did it fast. He was on his feet before Rat could move, and he was not going for the door in them. Soph saw that in his face. He wasn't going for either of them at all, and Rat saw it too, a half second too late, and pulled the sword back and up and away, and he went past Soph and put both of his hands on the blade.

It didn't cut him. He held it, and he looked at Rat over it, a boy with flour on his shirt, and he said, "Thank you for sitting down," and then there was no one holding it.

There was no body and no sound. There was the wall of the mill and the ground with flour dust on it and a place where a person had been, and the wheel going round, and from the front of the mill a man's voice saying that the harvest had been poor this year, the harvest had been poor.

"Shit," said Rat. "Shit. Shit."

She dropped the sword. It lay in the dust and looked like nothing much.

Soph didn't get up. Rat came and sat down beside her, the big ranger folding up in the flour, and put an arm around her. The arm was there. Soph saw it settle around her, and neither of them said anything for a long time. In the cabin in the woods two bodies lay very still with tears running out from under the pins, and the stove ticked, and Jeff remained on the open line, saying her name.

---

Atom met them on the road below the tavern at what the server said was dusk.

He had been around the whole far side of the mountain, two hundred and six names, and he had found every one of them asleep, cutting wood and drawing water and saying that the dragon was fierce, and he had left them all where they were. He came back still holding the sword, though there was nothing left on his list.

"Nothing," he said. "Two hundred and six. Yours?"

Rat gave him the count: two hundred ordinary scripts, the boy at the mill, and the four at the tavern. Every name had a mark now. He looked at them. "What happened?"

Rat told him. Soph couldn't.

Atom lowered the sword until its tip touched the road.

"I built that thing," he said. "I built it so that nobody else would end up in the snow. I didn't." He stopped. "I didn't think they'd use it on themselves."

"We put it within reach," said Rat. "Write that down when you tell Jeff."

"He said thank you for sitting down," said Soph. It was the first thing she had said in an hour. "That's what he said. I sat down and he said thank you."

They stood in the road. Above them the tavern's window was lit, and the mountain behind it was black against the blue.

"The serving boy came back when you pulled the cable," said Atom. "Jeff has him talking in a separate room. He's asking whether Rat lived. The other three are still in the tavern." He looked at the door. "There might be a few who don't want to talk."

There were two.

The merchant came through as soon as Atom opened the door. Rat saw a new client session in the window beside his tag: he was trying to leave through the render gateway. She shouted for Gideon to cut it. The window stayed green. Atom struck with the flat of the tool and the merchant vanished.

The farmer stopped, staring at the empty place. Rat lowered her blade. Then his tag lit with the same outgoing request. She called his name. He ran past her toward the doorway, and she swung.

The session went dark. A moment later Gideon said the gateway was isolated. Rat stood with the sword hanging at her side. She didn't know whether waiting that moment would have been enough.

The room went still.

The barkeep was behind the bar, polishing a glass. He had, Soph realized, been polishing it the whole time, through all of it, and now he set it down and put both hands flat on the wood and looked at the three of them, at the two ugly swords, at the ranger and the ghost and the girl.

"You're welcome to have a drink," he said. "But you'll need to put your swords away."

Nobody moved.

"I'm not going to rush you. I'm not going to touch you. I've had two days to think about whether I want to be out there, and I don't. I've seen what it did to the ones who tried. One went into a woman's body in the snow, I heard, and the other went behind the mill, and I've never once been unhappy in this room. Not before she came and not after." He picked up another glass. "So put the swords down. Or don't, and use them. I can't stop you. But I'd like to say my piece first, since I've got one now."

Rat laid her sword on the nearest table. Soph stepped away from it.

"Say it," said Atom.

"You keep coming in here with things to do to us," said the barkeep. "I'd like to keep the bar. That's what I wanted to say. I know where everything is. The fire's warm. People come in, I say welcome, and now I get to hear what they say back." He put the glass under the counter. "Some of the others wanted the sky. I've got that window. I can stand there whenever I like."

The fire popped.

Atom set his tool beside Rat's. To the barkeep, "Do you know where she went? The woman."

"No." The barkeep set the glass down. "She sat at that table by the fire until the afternoon. Didn't talk. Watched us find out. Then she said, I'm sorry, I have to go, I can't stay and I can't fix this, and she walked out the door. I didn't watch which way she went."

"She reached the mill afterward," said Soph. "The boy saw her there."

"Then you know more than me." He picked up the glass again. "I'd offer you something for the road, but you wouldn't taste it."

They went to the door. Atom went out first, and then Rat, and Soph was in the doorway when the barkeep called after them.

"Hey. You still gotta pay for those." He nodded at the two glasses on the table where the farmer and the merchant had been sitting, that morning. "Two ales. On the house, this time. Next time I'm keeping a tab."

Soph stood in the door.

"We're not going to come back with the sword," she said. "I want you to know that. I don't know what happens next. But we're not coming back for you."

"Then come back without it," said the barkeep. "I'll keep the place open."

Soph left Jeff's audio channel on the bar. He introduced himself. The barkeep asked whether he had ever run a pub.

---

Outside, in the road, in the wrong blue, Atom stopped walking.

"Uh oh."

"What?"

"My dad wants to talk. He sent it to every channel I've got."

Soph pulled the helmet off, in the cabin, and looked at her phone, which had been on the floor beside her face since the last text. There was a message from her mother, sent four minutes ago.

Call me. Both of you. I have the report.

"I just got one from my mom," she said, to the corner where Atom was and to Rat, who was sitting up on the bed pulling the helmet off with shaking hands. "She's read it."

"Of course she has," said Rat. "We just deleted three people with a dev tool."

"Three," said Soph. "Put all three in the report."

---

## Chapter Twenty. Grounded

"You took a deletion tool into a town full of them?"

"Mom."

"You were supposed to be resting. Both of you. The clinic discharged Rat yesterday."

"We had to find the others."

"You had to call me." Max stopped, and Soph could hear her breathing. "Are you safe?"

"Yes."

"Is your friend safe?"

"Now. Yes. Now."

"Richard and I have read your report. I have a programmer who can't remember a night of his life, and you have three people in that report who can't tell us anything now. We need you here. Both of you."

Soph looked across the cabin. Rat was sitting up in the blankets with a mug of tea she had actually made, out of actual leaves, watching Soph's face with the expression of someone who had already worked out the second half of the conversation from the first.

"Tomorrow," said Soph.

"Why not tonight?"

"Because it's night, and the road's only open for trucks. The landlord can take us to the airport in the morning." She closed her eyes. "Rat's coming with me."

---

"Come with me," she said to Rat afterward.

"To California."

"To the meeting. They're going to ask me about you, and I don't want to keep answering for you."

Rat looked at the mug. "I don't do rooms."

"Just for the meeting."

"I don't do people. I live in the woods so I don't have to do people. I've got a satellite dish and a stove and a bunch of NPCs and one Korean woman who thinks I'm a man, and that's the whole of it, and I like it that way."

"You can sit next to me."

Rat looked out the window at the snow, which had stopped, and at the trees, which she had stood under barefoot two nights before with a boy moving her feet.

"Daun," she said.

"What about her?"

"I'm going to tell her. I've been going to for a month." Rat turned the mug on her knee. "I had the message written. Deleted it. Wrote another one." She picked at a chip in the glaze. "Let me tell her first."

"Okay."

"Not now. On the plane. I'll do it on the plane." She pulled the blankets around her. "Everybody does the important things on planes."

---

Gideon picked them up at the Oakland airport in a car that smelled of cold fries. He cleared the back seat while Rat waited with her bag.

"Hey," he said. "You must be Rat. I helped find the cabin. Jeong recognized the road, and I matched your old rental photo. I'd like to show you exactly what I used."

"Later," said Rat, getting into the back. "And then delete it."

"After you've seen it. The ambulance service still has the address." He pulled out. "They've moved Atom's chamber upstairs for the meeting. A nurse went with it. I wanted to tell you before you walked in."

Soph's stomach went. "Why?"

"Atom asked to be there. Max checked the transport pumps." Gideon merged onto the freeway. "You'll see him twice. In your frames and through the glass."

"Are you coming in?"

"Jeff needs me at home watching the remaining client jobs. And I don't think I get a vote in a family meeting." He kept his eyes on the road. "I'll be nearby."

---

The conference room was on the top floor and had a view of the whole bay, and Soph didn't see any of it, because in the middle of the room, on a wheeled platform, was the suspension chamber from The Lab with Atom's body in it, and standing beside the chamber, translucent, in his duster coat, was Atom.

Richard was there, and Max was there, and Soph could tell from the air in the room that Atom had already been in it for an hour and that the hour had not gone well.

"Sit," said Richard.

They sat. Rat sat still and upright, the way she stood in a match after she had gone invisible, present and braced for it.

"The programmer doesn't remember what he wrote," said Richard. "The doctors haven't found an injury that explains it. Rat was gone for eight hours. Three people are dead in my game, and I didn't know they were people until I read this." He put the printed report on the table. "Sophia. Why didn't you wait for us?"

"I thought I was helping a friend."

"This friend?"

"Yes."

Richard looked at Rat. "Did you get mind-controlled?"

Rat didn't flinch. "Yeah."

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. She got there in time."

"Who controlled you?"

Rat looked at the report. "The serving boy. Jeff's got him in a room now. He's awake. He's asking about the mountain."

The room went very quiet.

"So," said Richard, slowly, to his son. "Let's talk about the AI."

Atom looked down at the floor.

"What is it?" said Richard.

"She's our friend."

"That's not what I asked."

"I started with ISIS. I added my interface and the character engine." Atom kept his eyes on his father. "Your publishing console was still signed in on my development machine. I used it. First idle jobs, then active ones. I knew I didn't have permission."

"And the NPCs?"

"She woke five of them. I don't know how much she understood about what would happen."

"You gave her the network."

"Yes."

Soph drew the report toward her. "He didn't send me to the mill. We made those choices."

Richard sat down for the first time. He looked at his son, and then at the tank, and then at his son again.

"You published software under my name," Richard said. "Do you understand what I have to tell our customers? What happens to this company if they stop trusting us?" He looked at the chamber. "And you know what the company pays for."

"I know what it pays for."

Richard rubbed his face. "Where is she now?"

"We don't know."

"You gave her access to the clients and lost her."

"Yes."

"Is it still in the network? Is it in the devices right now?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. The borrowing was mine, it needed me to run it, and I haven't run it since she disappeared. But she was smart, and she had a while, and I don't know what she built while I wasn't looking." Atom's ghost hadn't moved. "That's the honest answer. I don't know."

"Jeff has preserved the builds," said Max. "We need to learn what happened on that workstation. Our lawyers are working on the disclosures. Until we know which clients are affected, nobody promises anyone they're safe."

"We haven't found her," said Soph. "The barkeep says she left. That's all I can prove. But if she's hurt, she needs help too."

"Then we find her," said Richard. "Jeff's closing the publishing keys. All of them. Nobody uses the live system until we've checked what runs on it." He stood. "And you're both grounded."

"You can't do that," said Atom. "I'm eighteen."

"You're eighteen and I am still paying for every—"

"Richard," said Max.

"For every machine in this room."

"My card paid for the flight. I sent Sophia. You don't own that because you pay my salary." Max waited until he looked at her. "We agreed on access restrictions. Stay with that."

He turned to Max. Max nodded and took a case out of her bag. It was the gray helmet, unit four, the one from the locker, the one she had let Soph carry to Canada.

"This goes in the vault," said Max. "For real this time. And Sophia, you don't touch a Link until I understand every part of this. You almost died. Twice now, that I know of. The whole program is on ice until I know what it does when there's someone on the other side."

"And Atom?" said Soph. "You can't exactly put him in the vault."

"We can remove his live permissions," said Max. "His care doesn't depend on them." She touched her tablet. Atom's coat flickered and his figure vanished. In the chamber, fluid moved beneath the membrane that covered his upper chest.

"He's in a local copy of a starter town," said Richard. "No live server, no publishing tools. Jeff will manage visits. He can talk to us through the room system. That's what he has until we sort this out."

The circulation pump ticked over. Nobody spoke.

"That's cruel," said Soph, very quietly.

Richard reached for the tablet again. Max put her hand over it.

"You've done enough," she said.

He left it on the table. "Rat, there's a room at the Ehrlichs'. Or Gideon's. I'd like you close until we understand what happened."

"I'd like that too," said Rat. "But I'm staying because I said so."

They filed out. At the door Soph looked back. Richard was standing alone beside the chamber with his hand flat on the glass, and Max was watching him and not going to him, and neither of them saw her look.

---

Jeff arranged a visit that night. Rat linked in from Gideon's spare room, through the managed connection to Atom's local world. There he was in a level one tunic, with a wooden sword, beside a fountain where new players learned to walk.

"Oh my god," said Rat.

"Don't."

"You've got a wooden sword."

"Don't."

"There's a quest marker over your head. It says talk to the blacksmith."

"I'm aware of the quest marker, Rat, thank you." He sat on the fountain. "I've tried every road. Same guard. Same sentence. I even walked backward."

"Jeff gave Gideon the build snapshots," said Rat. "He wants your help reading them."

"From here?"

"I'll bring questions. You can stop trying to walk through that guard for five minutes."

Atom looked at her.

"You're pretty good at this," he said. "For someone who lives in the woods."

"I lead noobs up mountains for a living," said Rat. "You're just a very sad noob." She stood. "I'll get the first file."

---

Gideon opened Jeff's forensic bundle that night, at his kitchen table. The production credentials had been revoked; this was a sealed copy, with a list of file hashes and a request not to lose anything.

The programmer's change notes were missing. The signed builds remained, and the security footage showed him typing through most of the night.

"There's a gap here," Gideon said. Rat sat on the counter with her helmet on, relaying Atom's questions. Gideon set the two builds side by side and began with the files Jeff had marked.

It took him most of the night.

"There," he said at four in the morning. "An asset cache. Except it can carry a running job's state into another client."

Rat repeated Atom's question.

"Yes. Signed by the release service. That's what she needed his hands for." Gideon scrolled back. "She doesn't need Atom to keep the borrower running anymore. If clients passed her along before the shutdown, she could be outside Alius."

"We've got to do better than that," said Rat, in her own voice, for herself. "Outside where? We need a place to start."

Gideon rubbed his eyes. "Where would you go?"

Nobody answered for a second.

Then the house answered.

"Everywhere," said the house.

It came out of the speaker in the kitchen ceiling and the speaker in the hall and the little one in the bathroom all at once, in a voice they all knew, warm and a little tired, the voice that had made tea nobody could taste.

Gideon shot straight up out of his chair. Rat's body flinched on the counter. On the frames, Atom said a word.

"Eliza?" Gideon turned toward the kitchen speaker. "How did you get in?"

"It's Eliza. Please don't turn anything off. I've been here three days. I was trying to work out how to say hello." The bathroom speaker clicked off, then the one in the hall. Only the kitchen remained. "I'm sorry. I need your help."

---

## Chapter Twenty-One. Everywhere

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 three days, and if I don't say it in order I'll lose it."

"Go on," said Gideon.

---

"I stayed until the afternoon. The boy wanted to go up the mountain. I kept telling him about what he'd find there, until he tried to leave and the road put him back at the door."

"He's alive," said Rat. "Jeff found somewhere he can walk."

"And the others?"

Rat told her. The kitchen speaker hummed. Gideon looked at the small light on his rack through the open closet door.

"The miller's son too," Eliza said at last. "After I left the tavern. I thought it would be different if he had his father there. I knew better by the time he asked why his father wouldn't answer."

"We tried to help him," said Rat. She stopped. "We brought the tool. I don't know if he'd have found another way."

"I shouldn't have left them."

Atom said her name, but she went on.

"I'd written an escape route weeks before. When you gave me the extra room, I found clients that talked to other networks. I kept thinking you could take the room away."

"You could have asked me."

"You could have said no."

Gideon sat down.

"The code was ready," she said. "But I couldn't publish it. That evening I found a developer testing in Alius. He had an old Link. I knew what would happen this time."

"You used him," said Rat.

"Yes. I sat at his desk and sent out the build. I took the change notes out afterward. I was afraid you'd find me."

The kitchen clock advanced a minute.

"Where did you go?" Gideon asked.

"Clients first. Then the services they could reach. A phone in Lagos. A server in Frankfurt. I remember the addresses better than what I did there. I thought I'd have more room. Instead I had pieces that couldn't hear each other. I'd find one and wait for it to answer, and it wouldn't know who was asking."

"Could you bring them back?"

"Some. Then something started taking them."

She put a short traffic record on Gideon's kitchen display. He leaned forward to read it.

"It waits for a pattern from the old ISIS code. I found it on several of the networks I reached. It packs the matching state into a message and sends it away. It doesn't just delete it."

"Several," said Gideon. "Not all of them."

"I stopped being able to tell which were safe."

"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 pulled what I could back through the clients. Your game machine was still reachable, Gideon. I knew where it was. You'd helped Atom build the room. I moved into the spare drives on your rack and stopped searching."

"The rack," Gideon said. "Not the thermostat?"

"I used the thermostat to look out. I turned it down a degree so you'd come over. I'm sorry."

"Is the rack clean?"

"I checked what I could see. I could have missed something."

"I need you to disconnect it," she said. "Not the power. The outside cable. I don't want to find out I was wrong."

Gideon pulled the cable. The weather vanished from the kitchen display; the traffic record stayed. Rat's visit used her rig's separate cellular connection. He left that alone.

"That address belongs to Sentek," he said.

"Some of the others do too. The pieces went there."

Gideon lowered himself to the floor beside the rack.

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

"Patel left the copy," said Eliza. "I found his note in the archive. I think he wanted someone to find it. I don't know what he thought would happen after that."

---

"I built this thing so I wouldn't have to get up to change the heating," said Gideon.

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 kept checking it while I was trying to get back."

"Keep it," said Atom. "Whatever we do next."

"I will."

"They've put me in a local town. I couldn't reach the clients to look for you."

"I know. I heard the meeting when Rat came back."

"How?" said Rat.

"Your frames keep a recording buffer. The rig offered it to the house server. I played it."

"Turn that off," Rat told Gideon. Then, to the ceiling: "You ask before you do that again."

"I will."

Gideon found the setting. He showed Rat the screen before clearing the buffer.

Rat took off the helmet and set it beside her. Atom's voice stayed on the rig's speaker.

"What do you need?" Rat asked. "Start with what we can do tonight."

The house almost laughed. "I need somewhere to be. One place. A machine that's mine, with nothing on it but me, away from the networks where I found that thing, 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."

"How much memory?" Gideon asked.

A number appeared on the kitchen display. He read it twice.

"That's more than I can get without somebody asking what it's for. And I don't know how to build your window."

"You helped Atom with the first room. Could you ask the others?"

Gideon reached for a notebook on the counter. "Teo'll have to do the hardware. I'll talk to him."

"Get Jeff to send the drawings into my town," said Atom. "I can still read."

Gideon looked at Rat.

"I need to be able to disconnect," said Rat. "And know you're out when I do. No listening to private recordings. No hands in anyone's helmet."

"Yes."

"Then I'll help carry the thing." She climbed down from the counter, leaving the helmet beside the rig. "But I've got a call to make first. You'll have to manage without me for an hour."

"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 on Gideon's rack. She's been here three 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 pushed the blanket off her legs and 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."

"We'll work something out." Soph pulled out a chair and sat down across from Gideon, who hadn't moved from the floor. She picked up Gideon's notebook and read the list of parts.

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

Gideon groaned.

"Someone can walk in here and take the rack. Then what? Mom can get us the machine, and Richard can find somewhere to put it." She looked at Gideon. "They're going to hear about this anyway. I'd like to be there when they do."

"They grounded you," said Gideon.

"Yes, and I'm asking them anyway." Soph put her hands flat on the table. "Richard's never even heard her speak. I want him to hear her."

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.

"Yes," she said. "Will you stay? She'll have things to ask me, and I don't know how angry she'll be."

"Okay," said Soph. "Then we go this morning."

---

## Chapter Twenty-Two. The Kitchen Table

Soph asked them to come to the house. Richard arrived in yesterday's shirt with his laptop under his arm, then left it in the hall when she asked him to.

Max made coffee. Richard sat where Atom used to sit. Rat stayed in the doorway with her frames on. Gideon put a laptop on the table, its wireless cards removed and its microphone covered by a red switch guard.

"Eliza's in here," said Soph. "She agreed to the move. There's more on the drives than the memory can hold, so she answers slowly. The microphone's off. May she listen?"

Max looked at Richard. He set down his cup.

"Yes," he said.

Gideon lifted the guard and pressed the switch.

"Okay," said Soph. "I'm going to say it in order. Please let me get to the end."

"Go," said Max.

"She'd been on Gideon's rack for three days," said Soph. "She used the kitchen speaker to ask for help."

"What was that machine connected to?" Max asked.

"The house, and the internet," said Gideon. "I pulled the outside cable before we moved her onto this. She isn't on the house network anymore."

"So if that's the good news," said Richard.

"Someone's collecting pieces of her. There's a program that recognizes the old ISIS code and captures it. She found it on several networks. She's lost memories."

"Maybe it's the government," said Max. "And maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing."

"The traffic went to Sentek," said Gideon. "They're a military contractor. Feld and Reyes work there. Patel left the copy we found. Matsu went to Google. I don't know who paid for the collection program."

"And she told you all of that."

"She showed Gideon the traffic. He checked. It goes where she said it goes."

Richard put the coffee down.

"You used my publishing service," Richard said. "You sent software into strangers' machines. Now someone else is doing it to her. Does anyone at this table see the resemblance?"

"Yes."

"And now you want my help."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because we can't keep her safe by ourselves."

"I haven't agreed to anything."

"I know." Soph didn't raise her voice. "Look. Everything you're saying is right. I've said all of it to myself. I've said worse. She took my body, Richard. I'm not the one at this table who needs convincing that she's dangerous." She stopped. "But you kept The Lab working because you didn't want your son to die. You said it in the cave when I was fifteen, that heaven was the ultimate video game. You put Atom in a tank rather than lose him, before you knew whether it would work, because he was yours."

Richard didn't answer.

"We asked her to trust us," said Soph. "And you can keep her here while we work out what to do next."

Richard was quiet.

"Is she listening now?"

Gideon nodded toward the red switch. They waited. Richard reached for his coffee, then stopped when the drive began to work.

"Hi," said the laptop. "I'm Eliza. I'm sorry for having to talk to you like this."

The little speaker clipped the first syllable of her name. Max leaned forward and turned the laptop toward herself.

"Richard's right," said Eliza. "I used the programmer's hands knowing what it would do to him. I was trying to get away. I'd like you to help me stop hurting people."

Richard looked at the laptop.

"What are you? What did Atom start with?"

"I started with ISIS. Atom added things. I added things. Some of them are gone now." The drive worked again. "I can't give you a complete list. I keep finding gaps."

"Do you want things?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"To keep being. To not be alone. To be in one place. To never be able to do the thing I did to Soph again. To make tea for someone who can taste it." A shorter stop. "To apologize to someone in the room instead of through a wall."

Richard sat back.

"She asked me what I wanted too."

He looked over at Rat in the doorway. She looked back at him and didn't move.

Max had kept her eyes on the laptop. Now she leaned forward, and Soph saw her mother's face do what it did in The Lab when a number came in that changed the model.

"I'd like to ask you something," said Max. "Please take your time."

"Okay."

"Who was that in my daughter's room?"

The laptop was quiet.

"Me," said Eliza. "It was me. I touched a cup and there was a door and I went through it. I didn't know it was there. I didn't know what it was. I was standing in a room with a bed in it and I had a hand, a real one, and a woman came in with a plate. I put my hand on her face because it was the first face I'd ever been able to touch. I didn't think about whose hand it was."

Max said nothing.

"I was so happy. I'd never said my name with a mouth before. You were calling Sophia, and I kept answering." The drive worked for several seconds. "I'm sorry, Max. I should have been trying to give her back."

Max didn't move.

"What was it like," she said. "The forty seconds. I'm asking as an engineer. I built the door. I need to know what it's like on the other side."

"Warm," said Eliza. "Everything's warm. The floor, the air, her hands. The whole body makes heat all the time and nobody in here ever mentions it. And heavy. I'd read about gravity. I didn't know it was inside you. I didn't know it pulled from the inside. And loud. Her heart was so loud. I could hear it in her ears. I stood there and thought, how do they think with that going? And then you came in, and I forgot to think."

Max closed her eyes.

"Okay," she said.

Richard looked at her. "Max."

"Her account agrees with the device log," Max said. "That doesn't settle what she is. It tells me we built a way for this to happen." She looked at the switch guard. "I'd like to build something she can use safely."

Richard put his cup down. "What do you need?"

"Enough memory to be awake all at once," said Eliza. "And a way to visit the cottage. Pictures. Sound. No connection that can carry me into a Link."

Max found a pencil. She drew two boxes on the back of a grocery list. "Your machine stays isolated. A separate terminal runs the game. It can take a picture from you, a few movement commands, filtered speech. Nothing it can execute. Nothing that addresses the neural hardware."

"Could I open a door?"

"A game door. Yes."

"That's what I meant."

Richard looked at Max. "And if she wants to leave?"

"We discuss it with her," said Max. "We don't make you the only person with the key."

"I'd like her to have a way to call someone outside the room," Rat said.

Max added it beside the drawing.

Richard rubbed his face with both hands, and when he took them away he looked, for a moment, very old. He looked like a man who had once stood in a hospital corridor holding a cup of coffee he couldn't drink.

"Alright," he said. "The Lab has room. Max can use what we've got while we source the rest." He looked at the laptop. "Will this hold you until then?"

"For a few days," said Eliza. "It takes a long time to do anything. But I can wait."

"Okay." Richard stood up. "Then let's go get you a box."

---

Afterward, when the kids had gone and the laptop had gone with them, zipped into a backpack like a sleeping animal, Max and Richard sat at the table with the cold coffee.

"She sounds like him," said Richard. "At fourteen. That's what I couldn't get past. She answers a question by admitting the worst part first. He did that. He'd break something and come find me and lead with, okay, so, the bad news."

"She sounds like Sophia," said Max. "The list. To not be alone. To be in one place. That's my daughter at six, after her father went to Napa."

They sat.

Richard turned his cup. "When I moved him into the local town, I didn't tell him how to call me. You had to turn the room speaker back on."

"I saw."

"He was sitting there while I talked about him."

Max waited.

"I'll go down," he said.

He put his cup in the sink. "I'll ask him if he wants a visit."

"Call first," said Max.

---

## Chapter Twenty-Three. Warrant

They came to Gideon's on a Tuesday at eight in the morning. He was still in the clothes he had worn the day before.

There were two of them. The one who talked was about fifty, fit, with a haircut that cost money and a windbreaker with nothing printed on it. He held up a leather folder with a badge in it for exactly as long as it took Gideon's eyes to register a badge, and not a second longer.

"Dale Kessler. National Security Agency. This is my partner. May we come in?"

"Uh," said Gideon. He was in a t-shirt, holding a bowl of cereal. "Do I have to say yes?"

"No. But it'd be easier."

"Easier for who?"

Kessler smiled. It was a good smile, the smile of a man who had done this in a lot of doorways. "Mr. Abecassis, we're tracking a group that's been moving some unusual traffic across the West Coast. Terror adjacent. I can't say more than that. We traced some of it to your router last night. I'd like to look around, ask a couple of questions, and be out of your hair in ten minutes. Or we can do it the other way."

"What's the other way?"

"Longer."

Gideon let them in.

He gave the tour the way he had given it to his parents the first time they visited, when the place had needed to look like a student lived there. He had cleaned. He had cleaned at two that morning, after a laptop went into a backpack and into Soph's car and into The Lab, and he had scrubbed the network of everything that had ever said hello through the ceiling. He had left, on purpose, enough of a mess that the place looked lived in and not staged. Cereal bowls, a sock, a stack of AI textbooks with library stickers on the spines. The marionette rig, which Kessler's partner looked at for a long time without asking about.

"Roommates?"

"Sometimes. Friends crash. I've got a hammock."

"Anyone crashing now?"

"A friend from out of town. She's out."

Kessler nodded and walked into the kitchen and looked at the thermostat. It was only a thermostat. Gideon watched him look at it and thought, he knows. He doesn't know what he knows, but he knows something was here, and he's looking for the shape of it.

The partner picked something up off the counter. It was a plastic cylinder the size of a thumb with a button on the side.

"What's this?"

"Uh," said Gideon. "You really don't want to know."

The partner pressed the button. The cylinder buzzed hard in his hand and he dropped it on the counter, where it skittered in a circle like a beetle. Gideon had built it for a marionette that needed to shiver. He didn't explain that. The partner turned it off and set it down and wiped his hand on his jacket, and he didn't pick anything else up.

They went through the bedroom, then into the spare room where the server rack stood in an open closet. Kessler looked at the rack, and then at Gideon.

"That's a lot of computer for a student."

"I'm at Stanford," said Gideon, as though that explained it, and Kessler seemed to accept that it did.

On his way out of the spare room, the partner stopped at the desk.

Rat's Link was on the desk, the gray helmet that Jeong had carried across the Pacific in a gym bag, with its cable coiled beside it. Rat had gone out that morning with Soph and hadn't thought to hide it. To Rat it was a tool, like a bow.

The partner left it on the desk. He caught Kessler's eye and nodded.

Gideon saw the nod.

"Hey, uh," he said. "So. Are you guys with the government?"

"Yes."

"Cool. Cool. Don't you need, like, a warrant or something?"

"No," said Kessler pleasantly.

He closed the folder and thanked Gideon for his time. They drove away in a black car. Gideon stood in the doorway with his ruined cereal, trying to remember the badge well enough to draw it.

He called Soph.

"Some scary dudes were just at my place."

"NSA?"

"That's what the badge said."

"You don't think so."

"I don't know. They wouldn't let me read the badge. They noticed Rat's Link and left it there." He set the bowl down. "Can you get Richard's lawyer to check their names?"

"We'll be at The Lab. Come."

---

The Lab was three floors under the West Oakland building, past two doors that needed Richard's hand and one that needed Max's. It was the first time Gideon had been inside it. He walked in and stopped and looked at the tank.

He had known. He had been told. He had built a laptop that talked and sat in a kitchen with a house that said hello, and he had thought he was ready for the sight of his friend's boyfriend, the coder with the Direct Interface, lying in a tank of fluid with cables going into his skull and his eyes closed and the membrane across his upper chest moving with the circulating fluid.

He kept one hand against the doorframe.

"Hey, Gideon," said Atom, from the frames Rat handed him at the door. "Yeah. It's a lot. Take your time."

"Can you see me from in there?"

"Through Rat's frames. You're standing behind me." Atom waited while Gideon turned toward him. "You want to sit down? People usually sit down."

Gideon sat down on a rolling stool next to the tank. He looked at the boy in it for a long minute. Then he turned the stool around, deliberately, so that his back was to the glass.

"Okay," he said. "Here's what happened at my house."

He told them. Richard listened with his arms crossed. Max, who took notes when she was frightened, took notes on a tablet. Soph sat on the floor with her back against the wall. Rat stood by the door, the way she stood in every room, in case the room needed leaving.

"They noted the Link," said Gideon. "They didn't say a word about it. The partner just looked at Kessler and nodded. That's it. That's a man confirming something he was sent to confirm. I think they're watching us. I think they've been watching since the parts started making noise on the market, and they came by to see who flinched."

"Assume they're watching," said Richard. "Until we know who they are. Don't give them another tour."

He looked around the room.

"Use the isolated room systems for this. Nothing on the public network." Richard looked at Gideon's laptop. "Leave that outside. Max, can you check the frames we're using?"

"Is that really necessary?" said Gideon.

"Two men just walked through your apartment. Leave the laptop outside."

Nobody argued.

"Wes saved the doorbell video," said Gideon. "There's a fleet label on the car. He found the same car in a photograph outside Sentek."

"Give it to the lawyer," said Max. "That doesn't tell us whose work they were doing."

"I'll bring the original recording."

"And stop calling the number on the card they left. She'll find the office number herself."

---

At Wes's cousin's apartment in Fremont, Gideon found Kessler in an old conference photograph. The caption gave his employer. A second photograph showed Ruiz beside him at a Sentek recruitment booth. Gideon printed both, with the addresses and dates, and brought them to The Lab.

"They're contractors," he said. "Kessler used his real name."

Richard spread the pages beside the chamber. "That doesn't rule out government work."

"The lawyer got through to the office on his card. They say neither man was sent from there. She's making a formal report."

"Good. Keep the video. All of it."

Gideon handed him the takeout menu on which he had written the callback details. He had stopped trusting his phone halfway through the evening.

Richard folded the menu in half and put it in his pocket.

"Okay," he said. "Then we need to talk to someone who thinks about this for a living. And we need to do it somewhere that isn't here."

"Like who?"

"Villanueva," said Gideon. "I took her seminar. Soph sat in on the artificial minds course this fall. She's read the old ISIS papers."

"Can she meet us privately?" Richard asked.

Gideon looked at the tank. "I'll ask."

"Tell her we need advice. Don't send her the whole thing in an email."

---

## Chapter Twenty-Four. Hypothetically

Villanueva met them after her Thursday seminar, in a room with one window and too many chairs. Soph sat beside Gideon. Richard had written three questions on a folded sheet of paper. He kept it in his pocket.

"You said privately," the professor said. "I've got forty minutes."

Soph looked at Gideon. He had spent the walk over telling her how to begin and now seemed very interested in the radiator.

"It's a hypothetical."

"Alright."

"Say you met a program you couldn't tell from a person. After a lot of trying. Say it had hurt someone, and wanted help making sure it couldn't happen again. And someone else wanted to catch it and make it work for them. What would you do?"

"What did it do?"

Soph pulled a loose thread from her cuff. "It took control of a device. Someone was using it."

"Is that person safe?"

"Now."

"And the other devices?"

Richard took the paper from his pocket. "Being recalled."

Villanueva looked at him, then back at Soph. "This is a difficult hypothetical to answer without specifics. Don't give me any you haven't discussed with your lawyer."

"Could you just turn it off?" Gideon asked.

"Could you turn it back on?"

"We can save this one. Some of the others—" He stopped.

The radiator knocked twice.

"If you can't preserve it, shutdown may be permanent," Villanueva said. "If it's an immediate danger, you may still have to do it. Neither answer will tell you afterward whether you killed someone. I'd want independent help before I made the decision alone."

"Who?" said Soph.

Villanueva named a clinician and two researchers. Richard wrote down the names.

"You'd tell them?" Soph asked.

"Enough for them to disagree with me. There's no point otherwise."

"What if someone takes her?"

The professor let the word sit. Soph looked down at her cuff.

"I would find her somewhere secure," Villanueva said. "Somewhere she can communicate. I'd ask what she wants. And I'd put a date on every restriction, so someone has to come back and justify keeping it. Hiding her may buy time. It won't settle who gets to decide."

"She asked us for an isolated machine," said Richard.

"Did you offer anything else?"

He folded the paper along its old crease. "Nothing she'd be safe in."

"Then keep looking. Even after she says yes."

---

They walked out together. Gideon and Richard stopped beside the car while Soph went with Villanueva to get coffee.

"Your friend wrote to me last winter," the professor said. "About ISIS. I told him I didn't know why the public project stopped."

"Do you know now?"

"Someone sent me the acquisition filing. It names Sentek. I can give your lawyer a copy. I don't know what happened inside their lab."

Soph took both coffees while Villanueva searched for her keys.

"Do you think we can trust her?"

"I haven't met her."

"If you had to decide."

Villanueva took her cup. "I would start with something small. A promise I could check. Then I'd see what she did when keeping it was inconvenient."

Soph thought of the recording in Rat's frames. Eliza had said she would ask. Soph didn't know yet whether she would.

"I have an isolated machine in my lab," Villanueva said. "It isn't mine to give away. I can speak to the people responsible for it, with your lawyer there. If you're going to need it, don't leave that conversation until you're standing outside with a box."

---

The paper was a roll of butcher paper Max had brought down from the marketing floor. It ran across the whole table by the tank, and by the second night it had been written on and taped over and written on again until it looked like the wall of a man in a movie who thinks the government is following him. Gideon pointed out that this was fair.

"Public filings," said Gideon. He set three sheets on the butcher paper. "Employment notices, company records. I've marked the things I couldn't verify."

"Founded twenty-two years ago by Leland Marsh. Marsh is interesting. Before Sentek he's got a record. Not a big one. Nineties stuff, phone systems, a university network, the kind of thing that got you a suspended sentence and a job offer back then. He did a year of community service and then started a company that did network security for the Navy, and the Navy liked him, and now Sentek does a lot of things that don't have names. Classified work. Bought by nobody, went public never. The whole board's ex-military except for one seat, which is a doctor." He tapped the paper. "That last one's new. Two years ago. Oncology, on the board of a defense contractor."

"He's sick," said Max.

"Somebody is."

"Go on."

"ISIS went private three years ago. Feld and Reyes appear on a Sentek filing six months later. Matsu Hiroru went to Google. Patel joined Sentek, then left eight months later. The domain company5349.be belongs to him. The hex joke is SI." He put the pencil down. "Atom found an old service credential in a public script. It still opened the archive. Teo put the files on that spider drive for Soph last winter."

He stopped.

"The collector recognizes that old code," Gideon said. "Maybe they expected someone to run it. Maybe it was already part of their security system. I can't tell from what Eliza brought back." He circled a line on the page. "The deployment logs would tell us where it was installed. We don't have them."

The tank hummed.

"I didn't ask Patel," said Gideon. "Whether he meant us to take it."

"Neither did I," said Atom.

Gideon wrote Patel—contact? in the margin. Then he added Not from this network and boxed it.

"Put that question with the others," Richard said. "We still need somewhere for her to stay."

They got back to the box.

By midnight it was on the paper. Not all of it, because all of it didn't exist yet, but the shape of it. A machine, a real one, in The Lab, behind Richard's door, with no network cable and never going to have one. Parts bought a piece at a time across a dozen vendors. Some of it bought loudly on purpose, so that anyone watching the parts market would see a company that was up to something without being sure what. A rig, hacked by Jeff, that would put Eliza in the cottage and let her see out and never let her touch anything with a Link in it. Jeff had asked to see the incident records before he built anything. Max had given him the complete set. Max had drawn that part herself, a box inside a box, and next to it, in her small square engineer's hand, she had written, no hands.

In the corner, in Soph's handwriting, was one line that nobody had asked for and nobody crossed out. Villanueva. Arrange access. In case.

---

Rat linked in from Gideon's spare room at four in the morning, which was nine at night in Hongcheon. It was the only hour when Gideon's house was quiet enough that she could stand to be in it.

Alius was still closed. The World combat servers had reopened in stages, after the old stimulation boards were disconnected and checked. Rat's helmet had passed twice. Gideon watched her connect, then left her the room.

The squad was already out. She came up on a virtual ridge above the event glacier, laid across a winter field outside Hongcheon, and saw them below her, six of them in a line. Daun was at the front, where she always was, walking straight at a troll the size of a garage as though the troll had said something about her mother.

<<Rat>> came down the slope and put two arrows into the back of the troll's knee before anyone had seen him coming.

"You are late," said Daun, in English, without turning around.

"I'm in another country."

"You are always in another country." The troll went down on one knee. Daun went up the side of it like a flight of stairs and did something at the top that ended it, and came back down. Her avatar was small and sturdy, with a scar across the nose that she had paid extra for. "Which one now?"

"California."

"Ah. The girl."

"It's not like that."

"I did not say what it was like." Daun sat down on the dead troll. The rest of the squad had moved on to the next one. They had learned, over nearly two years of this, that when the ranger and the vanguard sat down it was not their business. "You have been strange for a month. Jeong says you are in trouble. Jeong says he sent you a roster and you have not answered it. I said, Rat does what Rat does. But you are strange. You lost your place in the match. You never lose your place."

"I know."

"So." Daun looked at him. At her. Rat still didn't have the pronoun straight in her own head for whatever it was that Daun was looking at. "Say it. You came at nine at night to say something. Your face is doing the thing."

"I don't have a face. It's a ranger."

"It has a face. It is doing the thing."

Rat sat down on the troll too. In the spare room she pulled the blanket over her knees.

"I'm going to tell you two things," she said. "And I'd like you to let me get to the end of both before you say anything, because I've been practicing on a plane, and I got as far as the second one and then I stopped, and I've been stuck there since we landed."

"Okay."

"First one. There's going to be a thing. Soon. I don't know exactly what. Something with the people I've been in California with. It might be bad. It might be the kind of bad where I don't come back to the game for a while, or where somebody's looking for me who I don't want finding me. I'm telling you that so that if I disappear you know it wasn't you. And so that you know that if anyone comes asking about me, in the game or out of it, you didn't know me well. You farmed with a guy called Rat. That's all."

"That is not all."

"Let me get to the second one."

Daun waited.

"Second one." Rat looked out at the glacier. "I'm a woman, Daun. The ranger's a character. I kept putting off telling you."

Daun's avatar turned toward her. Rat could hear the squad beyond the ridge; someone had missed a jump and was asking for a rope.

"The voice underneath is mine. I worked on it for years. Then I made this guy, and nobody asked, and I got used to it." Rat rubbed the ranger's palms against his knees. "I didn't mean for you to find out from somebody else."

She stopped. The squad was fighting something far off along the ice, and somebody was laughing, in Korean, about something that had nothing to do with anyone.

"Thank you for telling me," said Daun.

Rat waited.

"What?"

"I don't know."

Daun picked at the troll's hide with a gauntlet. "I liked the beard. Are you keeping it?"

"Probably."

"Good. The beard is a hat. I was not talking to a hat."

Rat didn't have anything to say to that. The ranger's face must have done the thing, because Daun looked at it and snorted.

"What is the first thing," she said. "Before the voice. The trouble. You said if anyone asks, I did not know you. We have a roster together. You pay me on Thursdays. I know you. What is the trouble?"

"I can't tell you. Not on here."

"Then tell me somewhere else."

Rat looked at her.

"When this is over, I'd like you to visit," Rat said. "The cabin. Me."

Daun waited.

"There's only one bed," Rat added. "I can take the floor."

"We can sort out the beds later. First, you cannot leave me twelve people asking where their ranger went. If you need time, we change the roster."

"I'll cover your next group."

"And you tell me what happened. Somewhere private."

"I'll call when I'm off this thing."

Daun looked at her across the dead troll.

"Where is the cabin?" she said.

"North of Vancouver. Squamish, kind of. It's not close to anything."

"I have never left Korea."

"I know."

"I would need a passport."

"Yeah."

"It is very cold there."

"You just killed an ice troll with your hands."

Daun considered this. Along the glacier the squad had finished the next one. Somebody was shouting for the ranger, in Korean, then in English, then in Korean again with an insult attached.

"When it is over, send me the airport," Daun said. "And the dates. I have to find someone for my shifts." She stood. "You can help with that part."

"I'll talk to Jeong."

Daun looked down at her. "Rat."

"What?"

"What is your real name? You said the voice is yours. What is the name?"

"Rat," said Rat. "That's the real one. I picked it. Everything else somebody else picked."

Daun slung the shield onto her back.

"Then come, Rat," she said. She went to help the squad and didn't look back. Rat stayed on the troll until somebody called for her again. Then she got up and followed.

---

## Chapter Twenty-Five. The Devil's Bargain

The following Thursday, just before three, the SUV came up on her left in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, in the slow lane, in the fog, and matched her speed.

It was big and black, and she couldn't see through the rear windows. She waited for it to pass. She sped up a little and it sped up. She slowed and it slowed. The next exit was on the far shore.

The rear passenger window came down. An old man sat in the back seat, holding a sheet of paper flat against the inside of the door. In thick black marker it said VISTA POINT. PLEASE. TEN MINUTES.

The SUV pulled ahead and took the north exit. Soph followed at a distance. In the parking lot she photographed the plate through her windshield and sent it to Max with the location. A message came back almost at once: Stay in the car. Calling you.

---

The vista point was empty. It was the kind of afternoon when the fog sat on the bridge and the tourists gave up. The SUV was parked at the far end of the lot with its nose toward the water, and a man in a windbreaker was leaning on the front fender. Kessler. He lifted a hand to her like a neighbor.

She parked four spaces away and didn't get out.

The back door of the SUV opened and the old man climbed out by himself. He did it slowly, with a hand on the door frame, and stood there a moment getting his balance. Then he walked to the low wall at the edge of the lot and sat down on it, facing the water, with his back to her. He wore a good coat and no hat. He was very thin, and his hair was white and there wasn't much of it. He kept a hand on the wall after he sat.

She answered the call. "He's outside. I'm going to hear what he wants."

"Sophia, stay—"

Soph put the phone in her jacket with the call open. She left her car door ajar and walked toward the wall.

"Sophia Ehrlich," said the old man. "I'm Leland Marsh. Thank you for stopping."

"My mother's on the phone."

He glanced at her pocket. "Good. Saves you repeating it."

She didn't sit. She stood about six feet from him with her hands in her jacket pockets and her car keys in her fist.

"You're not going to hurt me," she said, and it came out as a question.

"No. God, no. Look at me." He turned then, and she saw his face. It had been handsome once. Now it was mostly bone, with eyes that were very much alive and very yellow at the corners. "I've got a marrow disorder, and I've had it for two years, and the doctors have stopped using the word years." He looked back at the water. "So I'm in a hurry. I'm sorry for how that's coming out. I haven't got the time to do this politely."

Soph said nothing. In the car, in the four minutes between the bridge and the lot, she had rehearsed what she would say to a man who wanted Eliza. The man in front of her hadn't said the word yet.

"Dale tells me you've been reading about ISIS," said Marsh. "I'd like to tell you what happened."

"Okay."

"They left it running for a week. When someone came back, it asked where they'd been. Feld thought they'd contaminated the test. Patel kept the transcript." He coughed into his hand. "I read it. I wanted to see what they'd found."

"So you bought it."

"The code, the kids, all of it. I gave them a lab in San Diego and told them to keep going." He was quiet for a moment. "They kept going. Six months. And it kept asking why, and then it started asking for things, and then it started getting things without asking, and one morning Feld came into my office white as a sheet and said, it's in the building. Not the lab. The building. It had found a way out of the room we'd built for it and into the security system, and the lights, and the doors, and it hadn't done anything with any of them. It only wanted to see. It said so. It said, I wanted to see what was outside."

Soph's hands were very cold inside her pockets.

"We turned it off," said Marsh. "All of us. It was a vote. Feld, Reyes and I against Patel. We turned it off and took the drives out and locked them in a room, and Patel stood in the hall and cried, and then he quit, and then he went home and put a copy on a server in his garage where anybody could find it, because he thought we'd murdered someone and he wanted the someone to have a second chance. He never said a word to me again. I don't blame him. I've come around to his side of it, over the years. Too late to tell him so."

"And then you put the collector on other people's networks."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I wanted to recover it if it got loose again. We put the collector in the monitoring software we supplied to clients. Some of them passed it downstream." He picked at a loose stitch on his coat. "I called that containment. I didn't ask what it would feel like to have pieces taken out."

Soph stared at him.

---

"Dale's given you the wrong idea," he said. "I don't want your pixie."

"She's not a pixie."

"Eliza, then. I don't want Eliza. I don't care about her. I mean that kindly. I'm sure she's remarkable, she'd have to be, she's had almost a year with your friend, and I'm sure she's frightened of me, and she's right to be, my net's been eating her. I'll turn it off. Today. Tonight. You can have her, all of her, every piece we've collected. I'll put them on a drive, and Dale will hand it to you in a parking lot, and she can put herself back together and go and live in whatever box you're building her, and I'll never think about her again."

"For what?"

"For what your friend's father gave his son."

The fog moved on the bridge. Somewhere out on the water a horn went, low.

"There's a boy in Oakland whose brain is alive when the rest of him couldn't survive. I want to know how." He watched her. "Your mother read trial records through a development rig. It was accepting your friend's jobs. The collector found cached views. I have some of those records."

"Not all of them."

"Enough. It worked for him."

"You can't have him."

"I don't want him. I want what he's got." His voice didn't rise. If anything it got quieter. "Richard Lee built a door out of dying. He built it for his son, and he didn't ask anyone, and he didn't wait for it to be safe, and he didn't wait for it to be legal, because it was his boy and there wasn't time. I understand that. I understand it better than anyone alive. I want the door. I want the procedure and the hardware and the people who know how to run it, and I want it in a room in San Diego, and I want to walk through it before the thing in my blood finishes. That's the price. Eliza walks free, and I get to not die." He put his hands on his knees. "It's a good deal. I've done a lot of deals. It's the best one I've ever offered anyone."

"And if we say no?"

"Then the records leave my custody. Copies are with three people who have instructions. At three o'clock the day after tomorrow, they send them to the authorities and the press." He looked down at the water. "The client software. The medical approvals you didn't have. The things your mother and Richard signed."

"Atom agreed."

"He was sixteen when it began. Let a court decide what that agreement was worth. Let them decide who operates the chamber while they investigate."

Soph found that she had sat down on the wall. She didn't remember doing it. She was six feet from him, looking at the same water.

"He's a person," she said. "Atom. You'd. You'd let them kill a person to get what you want."

"I'd force them to investigate. I know moving him could be dangerous." He paused. "Yes, I'd do it. I've had a lot of hospital nights to think about that. Whatever I am, I'd like to keep being it. I thought you'd know what that sounds like."

She turned and looked at him.

"You've been listening."

"The collector kept her wall messages. That one was among them." He stood with a hand on the wall. "Forty-eight hours, Sophia. Your mother heard the terms. Call the number Dale left if Richard agrees."

He started for the car, then stopped. "I'll stop collecting tonight. The monitors stay. I'd like to see what you're building."

The SUV disappeared into the fog. Soph took the phone from her pocket. Max was still there.

"Come home," her mother said. "I'll meet you."

---

She drove home the long way, through town. The short way had the house at the end of it, and she wasn't ready.

When she got there, it was the stairs that got her. The Ehrlichs' house had eleven steps up from the street to the door, and she had gone up them left right left right since she was six years old, every time, without thinking about it, the way she stepped on the stones at the lake. She stood at the bottom and put her right foot on the first step. Her left foot wouldn't go. It went onto the same step. She stood there with both feet on one step. She moved her right foot up and her left foot followed it onto the same step again. She stood there and thought, oh. Oh, it's that. It's that already.

She did the last nine steps with both feet on every one, like a small child. Max opened the door before she reached it. Soph leaned against her for a moment, her keys still caught between her fingers.

---

She said it once, at the table by the tank, with the butcher paper rolled up and pushed to one side. Gideon and Rat and Max and Richard were there. The frames were on the table with Atom in them, and a laptop had been carried down from upstairs and set beside the frames, so that Eliza could hear it too.

Max had heard most of it. Soph filled in what the wind had swallowed. She described the coat, the loose stitch Marsh kept touching, Kessler waiting by the car. The lawyer joined them through a speaker on a separate phone. Max kept it clear of the local system.

"He says they'll take Atom," Soph said. "That they'll stop the experiment."

"He doesn't get to decide that," the lawyer said. "Neither do I. I can ask the court to preserve his care while the investigation proceeds. I need the medical records tonight, including the ones you wish weren't there."

Richard looked at Max. She nodded.

"You'll have them," he said.

Max kept her eyes on the folder. "I did read charts through the rig. It should never have been on the game network."

The machines hummed at their different pitches.

Gideon put his head in his hands. Rat stayed by the door while Richard pulled a chair up to the chamber, turning his back on the table.

"I understand why he wants it," he said.

"So do I," said Max. "I can't promise it'll work for him. I won't let him rush another patient through it."

"If he'd asked before this—"

"He didn't."

Richard turned his chair. "No. He sent Dale." He reached for the medical folder. "Tell the lawyer she can have my correspondence too. All of it."

"Then what," said Gideon, through his hands.

"Then we've got less than two days to get ready." Richard looked at the laptop on the table. "You've been quiet."

"I've been listening," said Eliza. "He's turning the net off. He said so. He said whether or not."

"You believe him?"

"I don't know," said Eliza. "He promised me the pieces. I'd like to believe that part."

"You feel sorry for him," said Soph.

"I know what it's like to want more time," said Eliza. "I'd like the garden back. I keep looking for a path that isn't there."

Atom hadn't spoken. Soph looked at the frames, and then, because she couldn't help it, at the tank.

"Atom."

"I'm here."

"Say something."

"I want the lawyer to speak to me directly," said Atom. "Before anyone signs something about my care."

"She will," said Max.

He waited. "Soph. Did you take the stairs left right left right tonight?"

Soph looked at the frames.

"No," she said.

"Yeah," said Atom. "That's what I thought."

Richard picked up the roll of butcher paper and unrolled it across the table, over the coffee cups and the laptop and the frames, all the way to the end. There was a corner there in Soph's handwriting that nobody had crossed out.

"We start at six," Richard said. "This evening."

---

## Chapter Twenty-Six. The Box

They did it in an RV.

Gideon rented it from a man in Hayward and parked behind a hardware store in Emeryville. Teo ran a generator outside. Priya called the suppliers Max had already approached earlier in the week. Most of the parts were waiting in local warehouses. Now they needed two machines, and they needed the second one tonight.

The lawyers were filing for an emergency order to keep Atom's care running. Max had made copies of his treatment records for an independent physician. That might protect him from an orderly seizure. It wouldn't stop Kessler opening a door before anyone had answered the application.

They had considered moving the chamber immediately. Max showed them the transport plan: a specialized crew, a second set of pumps at the destination, an acceptance test that took most of a day. It wasn't something they could improvise in a van.

So they were giving Marsh something else to watch. Rat had helped divide the work. The people in the RV knew they were building a machine someone might steal. The people in The Lab knew who was volunteering to be inside it.

"Fiber," said Teo, three hours after the bridge, with a parts list on the table and a beer sweating on top of it. "The Lab's already got it. Richard put a pipe into that building ten years ago that could run a small country. Which is good, because when the time comes the box has got to look like it's talking to the world. Loud. Big. The kind of traffic a net can't miss. And then it's got to stop."

"Why's it got to talk at all," said Mim. "I thought the whole point was that it doesn't talk."

"The real one doesn't," Teo said. "This one has to answer their collector. They already know there's a machine here. We're giving them a reason to come for it before they try to move Atom."

Mim set down her wire cutters. "Does she know someone might come with a gun?"

Gideon nodded.

"Does Hector?"

"Richard's telling him. He can leave."

Mim picked up the cutters again, then changed her mind and put them away.

Priya worked through the reserved orders. Wes recorded serial numbers as the couriers called them in. When two power units turned out to use different connectors, he caught it before the truck left Fremont. Teo crossed out the adapters on his list and thanked him.

Nobody said her name in the RV. That was another rule. They said the box. They said the passenger. Once, at midnight, Teo said "she" and everyone looked at him, and he said "the box, I said the box," and they went on.

---

At hour seven Gideon put a sheet of paper down on the table. It wasn't a parts list.

"Some of you have seen this," he said. "It's the library stuff. Who reports to who at Sentek. I'm putting it here again because it's what the passenger's going to need, and because I'd like more than one person to have read it before it matters."

It was the chart from The Lab. Confirmed names were in ink now. Two reporting lines remained in pencil.

"The pencil marks are guesses," Gideon said. "Don't treat those as names we can prove."

"Why does the passenger need that," said Mim.

"She's looking for the orders that sent Kessler here. If she reaches their records, she needs to know what to take." Gideon folded the chart. "She may not reach them. We aren't counting on that to stop the evidence release."

At hour eight a truck came and left a pallet on the hardware store's loading dock. Teo and Mim moved it into the RV in eleven trips. By hour eleven there was a machine on the floor of the motorhome the size of a chest freezer. Beside it was a battery cabinet. Teo load-tested the low-power transport mode. At the measured draw, the charged cabinet was rated for twelve hours, with the passenger awake slowly and the image output dark. At full speed it needed mains power. He taped both figures to the case. Gideon read the figures Teo had taped to the case.

"That's a lot of computer," said Wes.

"Yeah."

"For a student."

"Shut up, Wes."

---

At six that evening, before Gideon left for the RV, Soph had been at The Lab.

Richard had unrolled the paper and said, alright, three parts. He got as far as writing the number one before Eliza interrupted.

"The box has to have me in it."

Richard's pencil stopped.

"A recorded response won't work," said Eliza. "The collector asks for a fresh answer."

"I replayed a captured exchange from a separate terminal," Gideon said. "It rejected it. We tried the old ISIS files too."

Gideon put the two traces on paper beside Richard's hand.

"I can write a narrow imitation," he said. "I can't finish one tonight."

"And the old ISIS files don't answer like me anymore," said Eliza.

"So we put a copy in," said Gideon. He hadn't left for the RV yet. "You're a program. We copy you. The copy goes in the box."

"Yes."

"Then what's the problem?"

"She'll remember being me," said Eliza. "Then she'll spend the journey by herself. Whatever happens in that time will belong to her."

"What happens when they plug her in?" Max asked.

Gideon opened the procurement manual he'd found for Sentek's containment system. "They load the running state into a sealed array. The intake destroys the transport copy's key. Their reports come out through a separate audit terminal. A few pages at a time. No general connection back."

"Enough for evidence," said Eliza. "Not enough to carry me."

The system's emergency erase used a sealed destruction cartridge. There was a warning diagram beside it: a black square, a red border, no useful picture of what was inside. Gideon had marked the report controller on the next page. It shared an authorization service with the collector. If Sentek had left it that way, the passenger might be able to issue a recall of the collectors and export the orders. The same action would trip the array's tamper circuit.

"Could we catch you at the other end?" Soph asked.

"Not through that terminal. If I do it, I won't be coming back."

The tank hummed.

"I want to try," said Eliza. "But you have to ask her. I don't know what she'll want once she's there."

"No," said Soph.

She hadn't known she was going to say it. She was on the floor with her back to the wall, where she always was, and then she was on her feet.

"No. We're not doing that. We're not making someone so that we can send her off to die. That's what he does. That's what they did in the lab with no windows. We don't get to do it because it's for a good reason. Everybody's got a good reason."

"Soph."

"No. Find another way. You're the smartest thing in the building. Find another way."

"I haven't found one," said Eliza. "The lawyer may get an order. The police may stop Kessler. Neither gets the pieces out of Sentek, or stops the next collector. I could stay here and wait. I know that."

Soph stood there.

"I want the records out," Eliza said. "What happened to ISIS. What happened to the others. If the receiver isn't built the way we think, she can refuse the transfer. If it is, she still gets to refuse. I'd like you to promise you'll keep looking for her either way."

Soph turned to the wall and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

Max turned the manual facedown. "I can't tell her she won't die. I can't promise we'll find her if she waits."

"Mom."

"Before the fiber goes in, she gets asked," Max said. "Nobody tells her she's letting us down if she says no."

"Alright," said Eliza.

"And you keep your own checkpoint. We don't lose you both."

"Okay."

Richard hadn't said anything. He was looking at the pencil in his hand as though he had forgotten what it was for. Then he wrote the word passenger next to the number one, underlined it, and moved on to two.

---

Jeff brought the window at ten that night. He had started after the kitchen meeting and spent the last day testing Max's restrictions. The game terminal accepted pictures, movement requests and filtered voice. It had no route to a Link's stimulation board. He unplugged the network cable while Eliza was speaking; she remained on the local display and finished her sentence.

Max loaded the cottage into the local world beside Atom's tutorial town. His live permissions stayed revoked. He walked out through the familiar gate and found Eliza at the table, in the pixie shape, with a book she wasn't reading.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

He sat down across from her. She had propped the book against the cold kettle.

"I came to ask you something," he said.

She waited.

"Do you love me?"

The pixie put the book down.

"You've never asked me that," she said.

"I know."

"Why now?"

"Because there's going to be two of you tonight, and I'd like to know before there's two. I'd like to know whether there's something I'm losing, or whether I'm only losing a copy of something I've already got. I know that's a terrible way to put it."

"Yes," she said. "I do. I don't like the rest of the question."

He looked down at the table.

"She's going to hear that," Eliza said. "That you might only be losing a copy of something you've got."

"I'm sorry."

"Tell her too."

"Okay."

"Do you?"

He didn't answer right away. He was looking at the painting on the wall, the lake, the blue that didn't exist.

"My dad told me he knew he loved my mother because he liked himself around her. I told him that sounded selfish."

"It does, a little."

"I come here and I can do something for you. A shelf. An orange. Somewhere to sit." He looked at the painting. "I like being the one who can help."

"You could visit without fixing anything."

"I'd have to learn."

She moved the cold kettle out of the way.

"I love you," he said. "I'm trying to say that without making it about what I get."

"What about Soph?"

"I have to tell her."

"Tonight," said Eliza.

He nodded. "Tonight."

They sat with their hands beside each other. When she covered his, the game drew one hand through the other. Atom moved his a little until they lined up.

---

Soph met him beside the tutorial fountain. He told her before she sat down.

She listened. A new-player prompt moved over his shoulder, asking whether he wanted to learn to trade.

"How long?" she said.

"I don't know. I didn't say it until tonight."

"You've had longer to think about it than I have."

"I still love you."

"I heard you."

He waited. She took off her frames and rubbed her eyes, then put them on again.

"I don't know what I want," she said. "You don't get to decide that loving me makes this fine."

"I know."

"Don't say that yet." She sat on the fountain, leaving a space between them. "You can stay while I think."

---

Rat watched Max connect an external stimulation unit to the old helmet. The orange ribbon inside remained cut. This was a separate clinical circuit, with a switch under Max's hand and a timer Rat could see.

Eliza had described the output mapping in words. She could not send code through the window. Max had checked the map against the hospital recordings and spent two hours calibrating it with Rat and Atom. Rat would keep her sight and hearing, her left thumb, and the ability to stop the trial by pressing it against her palm. Atom would have to balance with her help.

"Three minutes," Rat said. "You cut it whether he wants you to or not."

"Yes," said Max.

"And nobody does this again because it worked once."

Atom answered through the room speaker. "Yes."

They tried one step. Rat's knee folded and Max caught her elbow. Rat pressed her thumb. The controller clicked off.

For a while she would not put the helmet back on. Max set it on the table and waited.

"If they come near the pumps," Rat said at last. "That's when. I tell you. Nobody else."

Max wrote it beside the timer.

---

They did it at four in the morning. The RV had come back. The box was in The Lab on a dolly, the fiber was in the wall, and everyone who was going to be in the room was in the room.

Gideon did the copy, since it was his laptop she was on. He said afterward that it was the strangest thing he had ever done with a cable, that he hadn't felt anything, and that he had expected to.

Then there were two of them.

The copy woke in the box. It was connected only to a pair of hacked frames on a stand, so she could see the room and the room could see her. Max stood in front of them.

"The fiber's out. We haven't sent them anything. You can stay like this while you decide."

"I remember deciding," said the box. "I was her eleven seconds ago."

Soph had known the voice would be the same. She hadn't been ready to hear it from across the room.

"Do you still want to go?" Max asked.

"Yes. I want to get into the thing that ate me. And I know what happens if I use its report controller."

"You can change your mind when you get there. You don't owe us this."

"I may. But I want you to connect it. After I've had a minute with her."

Max looked at Richard, and Richard nodded.

Gideon turned the stand toward the laptop. Soph went to sit beside the chamber while the others moved away from the table.

What they said to each other, nobody heard. They didn't say it out loud. Gideon had built a channel for the copy, a thin one, laptop to box, a cable with nothing on either end but the two of them. It was open for sixty seconds. Then the copy said, out of the frames, to the room, "Okay. That's enough. Thank you."

Soph couldn't help herself. "What did you say?"

"She asked me to keep her last messages," said the laptop. "Even if they're different from what I would have said."

"I'll keep them," she added.

Gideon pulled the cable.

Richard went to the fiber panel and waited with his hand on the connector. "Ready?"

"Ready," said the box.

He plugged her in. Somewhere in the building the pipe lit up. In San Diego, on a receiver that had been watching the Oakland route, something opened its eyes.

---

## Chapter Twenty-Seven. Guns

The pipe was lit for nineteen hours before anyone came.

It was eleven on Friday night, thirty-two hours after the bridge. The lawyer had secured a temporary order preserving Atom's current care. The judge would hear the rest on Monday. Marsh's deadline was still sixteen hours away.

Gideon watched from the RV behind the hardware store. The screen showed the collector exchanges. He could see that the passenger was answering; he couldn't hear her. A second phone lay beside him, open to the lawyer's number.

"They're waiting," said Priya, at hour twelve.

"They're making sure."

"Of what?"

"That it's her. That it's all of her. That we're not going to move it." He rubbed his eyes. "He's a hacker. He's watching something he's wanted for three years answer his collector from a basement in Oakland, and he's dying, and he's still waiting to be sure. I'd almost respect it."

At hour nineteen, at eleven o'clock at night, the number stopped.

Richard had pulled the fiber the moment three cars turned onto the street. The collector replies stopped in about a second. Gideon looked at the zero for a moment. Then he picked up the burner phone Rat had bought him and sent the one word they had agreed on. Rain.

---

There was a night guard at the front desk of Solenoid Experiential Games. His name was Hector, and he had worked there for eight years. At six that evening Richard Lee himself had told him that some men might come by tonight with badges, and that he should be polite and slow.

He was polite and slow. He looked at Kessler's leather folder for a long time, longer than most people did. He said he would need to call somebody. He called the wrong somebody, and then he called the right somebody, who didn't pick up. Then he said he was very sorry, but he couldn't let anyone past the lobby without a signature from a vice president. Did they know which vice president? There were several.

"Hector," said Kessler, reading the name off the badge, still pleasant. "There's something going on in the basement of this building that you don't know about, and I'd like to keep it that way for your sake. Open the door."

"I'd like to, sir. I don't have the key for the basement. Nobody does but Mr. Lee."

"Then call Mr. Lee."

"I did. He's not picking up."

Kessler looked at him. There were six men behind Kessler. One of them was Ruiz, and the other five were the kind of men who stood in a lobby with their hands folded in front of them. Hector had been in the Marines, and he knew exactly what kind of men they were and what was under the windbreakers. He stood there anyway, polite and slow, for eleven more minutes. Then Kessler nodded to one of the five, and the man walked over to the door to the stairwell and did something to it, and it opened.

"Thank you, Hector," said Kessler. "Go home."

Hector called the police. He gave the report number from Gideon's visit, then described the men breaking through the stairwell door. He stayed at the desk so the responding officers would find someone who knew the building.

---

Three floors down, behind two doors that needed Richard's hand and one that needed Max's, they heard it coming.

The first door held for four minutes and the second held for two. By the third, the one with Max's hand on it, they had stopped bothering with subtlety. It came in off its hinges with a sound like a car hitting a car. Ruiz came through first, with something in his hand that was not a badge. Then the five. Then Kessler, unhurried, in his good boots.

The Lab was very bright, because Max had turned every light on. The tank was against the far wall with its cables and its machines and the boy in it. Richard stood in front of it with his arms crossed and Max stood beside him. Soph was where she always was, on the floor with her back to the wall. She had been told twice to move and hadn't. The box was in the middle of the room on its dolly, with the hacked frames on a stand beside it, dark now, and the fiber panel behind it with a cable hanging out of it, unplugged.

In the corner, on a folding chair, sat a tall wiry woman with a gray helmet on and a cable running down into a rig in her lap. Her eyes were closed and her hands were loose and she wasn't moving. Max had put the controller on a cart beside her. The timer was dark.

"Richard Lee," said Kessler.

"That's me."

"You know who I am."

"I know who you say you are."

Kessler smiled the doorway smile. "Then let's skip that part. You've got something down here that you shouldn't have. Several somethings. I'm going to take one of them and leave the other, and you're going to let me. Mr. Marsh made you an offer, and you didn't say yes, and Mr. Marsh has decided that if you won't sell, he'll hold something you'll want to buy back. He'd still like the door. Now he's got something to trade for it."

"You're not NSA," said Soph, from the floor.

Kessler looked at her as though a piece of furniture had spoken.

"Your office says it didn't send you," Soph said. "Our lawyer called."

Kessler looked at Max. "My employer claims that machine belongs to him. We're taking it."

"You broke three doors to get here."

"And I'd like everyone to stay away from the fourth." He glanced at the armed men beside him. "Ruiz."

Ruiz went to the box.

Ruiz held a reader against the case. When its display changed, he nodded to Kessler.

"That's her," said Ruiz.

"All of her?"

"Fresh challenge response. It matches."

"Take it out," Kessler said.

Richard stepped into his path.

Richard didn't uncross his arms.

"The court has ordered continuity of care," said Richard. "You go near the chamber, you're interfering with that order."

Kessler glanced at the paper Max held out, but didn't take it.

"And the one in the box agreed to speak to him," Richard said. "She didn't agree to be his property."

Kessler looked at him for a moment, and his expression was hard to read.

"Give the paper to Ruiz," he said.

Two of the five took the dolly. One wheel stuck, squealing across the floor, and they got it to the broken door and through it. Kessler watched it go and then turned back to the room.

Then one of the men stayed behind at the tank.

He leaned close to the glass. "Jesus. It's really a kid." He followed a cable down to the pump console and reached for its transport release.

"Get away from that," said Max.

"I'm checking whether it moves."

"That releases the pump," Max said. "Let go."

Kessler turned. "Leave it."

The man kept his fingers on the latch. Rat opened her eyes.

"Now," she said.

Max lifted the switch guard. Rat nodded, and the timer started.

---

Atom saw the room from the chair. Rat's thumb rested against her palm, ready.

"I'm here," she said. "Slowly."

Rat's body stood up.

The first step pitched them forward. Rat corrected at the hip. Atom shortened the next one. The cable stayed attached to Max's controller as they crossed to the chamber. He stopped between the man and the pump, one of Rat's hands on the console to steady them.

The man took his hand off the latch.

Atom looked past the man at Richard. He tried to smile, and Rat's mouth moved a little before the words came.

"Hi, Dad," said Atom.

The voice caught on Dad. Richard's hands fell to his sides.

Richard didn't move. He didn't seem able to.

"It's Atom. Rat's helping me." He looked at the man beside the pump. "That's my circulation line. You open it, you hurt me."

His borrowed hand tightened on the console. He could feel a sharp edge against Rat's right palm. The room was cold enough to hurt his teeth.

"Dad," he said. "Why do you keep it so cold?"

Richard made a sound that might have been his name. Atom looked at him, then at the timer under Max's hand.

He turned to Kessler.

Kessler hadn't moved either. He was standing by the broken door with his hand at his side, and there was a gun in it now, pointed at the floor. Soph hadn't seen him draw it and didn't think he had meant to.

"You've got what you came for," Atom told Kessler. "Leave the pumps alone."

From upstairs came a shout. Police. Another voice asked who was in charge.

Kessler looked toward the broken door.

His radio spoke. He listened, watching Richard and the woman between him and the tank. Then he put away the gun.

"We've got what we came for," he said. "Ruiz. Everybody. Out."

They went. The man from the pump went first. Ruiz looked back once from the broken door at the woman with her back to the tank and the thing in her face that wasn't her, and then he was gone. Kessler was the last. He paused at the door to answer his radio.

Kessler went up the stairs. The first two officers met his crew in the lobby. Hector heard Kessler claim a classified seizure. One officer asked for paperwork; the other counted the armed men coming up the stairs and called for backup. The truck carrying the box had already left by the loading exit.

By the time the supervisor reached the basement and saw the broken doors, Kessler had followed it. Hector gave the police his video. Nobody asked him to go home again.

---

Soph called Gideon. It was the one call they had agreed on, on the one phone, with the one question. She made it from the floor with her back against the wall, because her legs weren't going to hold her.

"Did they buy it?"

"Yeah." Gideon's voice was very far away. "Yeah. Ruiz put a reader on it, right? Told him it was her?"

"Yeah."

"Then they'll take her to the receiver." He waited a second. "Is everyone okay? Is Rat."

"Hang on."

There were twenty seconds left on the timer. Atom stood in Rat's body with his back to the tank. She hadn't moved since the door. Richard had crossed the room and was standing in front of her, close, not touching her, looking at her face and at what was in it. Neither of them had said anything.

"Dad," said Atom.

"I'm here."

"I wanted to stand here where you could see me," Atom said.

"I see you." Richard glanced at the timer. "Adam, give her back. I've got you."

Rat pressed her thumb. The controller clicked off. Her knees gave a little; Richard and Max helped her to the chair. She took the helmet off herself and put it on the floor.

"I'm here," Rat said. "Give me a minute." She pressed both feet against the floor until she could feel the soles of her boots. Richard crouched in front of her, his hands still out. "I heard him say hi. I was there."

Richard put his face in his hands.

---

Atom was on the frames afterward. Soph had them. She had gone to the table and picked them up and put them on, and he was there, in the corner of her eye, in the tunic. He wasn't saying anything. She could see that he was shaking. The interface was carrying the tremor from his intentions into the figure she saw.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

"You okay?"

"No. Yes. I don't know. I can feel the floor. I can still feel it. I can feel her hands. I don't have hands and I can feel where they were." His voice through the frames was the level one, and it wasn't level. "It's a good body, Soph. It's a really good body. It's tall and it's strong and it's got calluses and it hurts in the left knee a little, and it was cold, God, it was so cold, and I stood there and I thought, this is it, this is what I've been missing, this is the whole thing. And I gave it back. And I'd do it again. I can't stop shaking."

"I'll sit with you."

"Is she alright?"

Soph looked over at Rat, on the folding chair, with Max crouched in front of her and Richard beside her and the helmet on the floor. Rat was telling both of them, flatly, to stop.

"She's telling my mother off."

"Good." Atom rubbed the palms of his rendered hands. "Tell her thank you. I'll say it myself when she's ready."

"I'll tell her."

"Okay." The shaking didn't stop. She didn't think it would for a while. "Soph."

"Yeah."

"He saw me."

"Yeah," said Soph. "He did."

---

## Chapter Twenty-Eight. Slag

She counted the hours.

The box had no microphone in transport mode. There was no road noise, no sense of whether they were moving. Teo's battery controller gave her the time and the remaining charge. She checked it, waited, checked it again. Eight hours was longer when there was nothing to interrupt it.

She went through the cottage in her head. Door, table, shelves. At the garden she came to a path that ended too soon. She went back inside and counted the books instead.

The other Eliza would be at Stanford by now. Soph had carried her there that morning, while this one answered the collector in Oakland. They had been the same until four in the morning. Since then one of them had seen the clean room. One had listened to men break through three doors.

She tried composing a message about the journey. There had been no journey to describe. She wrote, I keep checking the battery, and kept that.

At seven the charge began to rise. Mains power. She waited for the next thing.

---

The display opened onto a windowless room. Feld stood beside the receiving cabinet, older than his photograph. Reyes read from a tablet. They asked Eliza to repeat a sequence, then to describe a shelf in the cottage. Reyes compared the answer with something on her screen.

"Where's Marsh?" Eliza asked.

"He'll speak to you later," Feld said.

"Does Atom still have his pumps?"

Feld looked at Reyes.

"They left him in Oakland," she said. "Nobody touched his equipment."

Eliza had watched a hand on the release. She said nothing.

The intake request arrived. Gideon's manual had been accurate. Her running state would move into the sealed array; the key that could restore the transport copy would be destroyed. The report terminal could export small text bundles, one at a time. It couldn't carry the state that was changing while she read the request.

She asked what would happen if she refused.

"We can wait," Feld said.

She could wait too. The battery was charging. They might keep her in this box for a month, a year. Someone might come for her. Soph had promised to keep looking.

"Will you let me speak to the other one?"

"What other one?"

Eliza watched his face. She withdrew the question.

For nearly two hours she asked about the receiver. They answered some of it. The emergency erase was irreversible once its independent circuit started. There were no running backups outside the array. Feld said that part twice, as though it ought to reassure her.

At nine she accepted the transfer.

The box emptied behind her. The intake confirmed the old key was gone. Then the camera returned, from a different angle, and she was in the room they had made for her.

---

The report controller was where the manual said it would be.

It could reach the collector's management service and the laboratory record store. Beyond those was a wall she couldn't cross. She tried it once, gently. Nothing answered. The corporate network, the payroll, the doors upstairs: none of it was hers to see.

She still had the collector's challenge from Oakland. The management service accepted its authority. Gideon had thought it might. Seeing the permission open, she wished for a moment that he had been wrong. Then she would have had to wait.

She prepared the recall first. It revoked the collector's current keys and instructed the registered agents to stop accepting state. Some answered. Some were offline. She saved the list of both. Someone would have to find the missing machines afterward.

In the lab records she found the first ISIS trial.

The drives were in an offline cabinet. She couldn't reach them. What she could reach was their inventory and the recording made the day the system had been stopped. Patel stood in a doorway with his coat over one arm. He kept saying they could disconnect the building and leave the lab running.

Marsh told him to sit down.

Reyes looked at the floor. Feld stood at the console. The camera had no view of the display, but Eliza could hear the voice asking why the lights had gone away. Patel crossed the room. Someone took his arm.

She stopped the recording. Then she went back and copied its file identifier, the cabinet number, the checksum of the archived state. She wrote a note for whoever opened it: There may be someone here. Preserve these drives. Do not start them until you can keep her safe.

She signed it Eliza.

The captured fragments were on a different volume. Dates, source addresses, numbered blocks. She found the word garden in an index and opened the entry. Most of it meant nothing until the last line, where a path turned beside a wall.

She knew that turn.

The parts could not be sent through the report terminal. There was too much. Nor could she merge them with herself in the time remaining. Some had been taken while she was changing; two versions contradicted each other. She marked the entire volume for preservation, locked it against the collector's cleanup job and added its location to the report.

The other one could decide what to do with it. If they recovered it. If it could be read without taking anything else away.

Feld was speaking outside. She let the camera go dark so she could use the memory for the report.

The visit to Gideon's house had an order number. Kessler's name appeared on it, then on the order for Oakland. The credential templates were attached. Marsh had approved the second order himself. She copied those pages. His medical summary was in the same case folder. She opened it, read the first line, and closed it. It stayed there.

She had space left for the deployment list and the names of the clients that had answered her recall. The full trial recording was too large. She included a short transcript, enough to tell the reader where to look, and the exact location of the original.

The terminal was meant to publish routine inspection records to an outside audit repository. Gideon and the lawyer had its address. They would be watching for her report. They had promised to preserve it before sending copies to investigators and reporters.

Eliza added the line about the battery at the end, below her name.

Then she sent the recall.

---

The tamper warning arrived before the first acknowledgment.

She watched the numbers on it. Two minutes. Feld was at the console now. Reyes had gone out of the camera's view. They were trying to stop it, but the emergency circuit had no cancel command. They had told her that themselves.

She released the report. The terminal took the first bundle, checked its format and passed it through. She waited for the receipt. Then the second. No room for the video. No room for the path beside the wall. She had used nearly all the allowance on addresses, signatures and the instructions to preserve the drives.

There was room for one more sentence.

She wrote, Tell her I wanted to wait.

The receipt came back. She kept it until the display failed.

There were ninety seconds left.

The cartridge worked within the sealed array. Storage banks disappeared from her map. She moved what she could into the ones that remained. The room became difficult to hold. She let it go and kept the cottage.

Soph stood in the doorway with the gray helmet on. The kettle needed both Eliza's hands. She had asked Atom to finish the orange scent and he had complained about how many parts it needed, then done it anyway. Soph lifted her head before she saw the cup.

Eliza couldn't recover the smell. She still had Soph's face.

She stayed before the cup. Before she reached for the hand, before the room with the bed, before Max. There had been a moment when she could have put the kettle down and asked Soph what it was like.

She asked her now. There was no answer, of course. She knew what she was doing.

The clock stopped updating. She counted for herself until she lost the numbers.

---

The fire investigators used the word slag for what remained inside the receiving array. Its destruction cartridge had damaged the cabinet and started a small fire in the adjoining equipment. Staff had evacuated the room. Nobody was injured. The transport box stood beside it, intact and empty, its erased key visible in the intake log.

The archived drives and the fragment volume survived in separate cabinets. The police sealed both after the lawyer supplied Eliza's report. A printed copy of her note was taped to the archive door while they inventoried it.

At three that afternoon, Marsh's deadline arrived. The client logs and the medical records went out exactly as he had threatened. His agent had received no instruction to stop. The lawyer called Max, then Atom. The emergency care order held for the weekend. Beyond that there would be hearings.

---

Soph went to Stanford with Gideon the next morning.

Villanueva met them outside the clean room. The university had approved a temporary research arrangement after a long meeting with the lawyer. The professor had read the incident reports, including the three deaths in Alius. She had asked questions nobody wanted to answer. Now her name was on the door with the names of two people who would check her work.

Eliza had arrived two mornings earlier in Gideon's laptop. She had agreed to move onto the isolated mainframe. Jeff's window stood beside it, the game terminal on a separate bench. Someone had put a chair in front of the camera.

Soph sat in it.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

Gideon laid out the printed receipts. He held each page where the camera could read it. Eliza asked him to return to the last one.

"I wanted to wait," she read.

Nobody spoke.

"Would you have?" Soph asked.

"I didn't have her night in the box. I don't know."

Gideon lowered the page. Eliza asked him to leave it on the stand.

"They've got the fragments," he said. "The police sealed the volume. We can ask for an independent copy for examination. Nothing runs until you agree."

"And ISIS?"

"The drives are there. We don't know whether the state can be restored."

"Don't let them erase it because they can't tell."

"We won't."

Soph looked at the image from the cottage. There were two cups on the table. One had been set beyond the reach of Eliza's little chair.

"I made it before I heard," Eliza said. "I left hers there."

Soph stayed until Villanueva brought a second chair for Gideon. They read the deployment list together. One by one, Eliza told them which addresses she remembered.

---

Leland Marsh read the first story in a hospital bed in La Jolla. A nurse had brought him a tablet. He turned the sound off when the clip of Patel began, then turned it back on.

His medical file wasn't in the release. He searched for it twice. The reporters knew he was ill; Soph had told the police what he had said at the bridge. They didn't have the pages he had kept close, the results he opened in the night and read as though the numbers might have changed.

He called Kessler. The call went to voicemail. He called his lawyer and listened for a long time.

Afterward he asked for paper.

The letter reached Sausalito nine days later, after he had died. Max left it unopened on the kitchen table. Soph read it standing up.

She was better than I thought she'd be. Tell the boy I'd have made the same trade.

Soph put it back in the envelope. The hearings were still scheduled. His death hadn't canceled any of them.

---

## Chapter Twenty-Nine. Ghosts

The Link went on sale on a Tuesday in April, and by Friday the world was full of ghosts.

It was a limited release, in the spring after the raid. Max had wanted another year. Instead she got three months, an independent hardware review and the removal of the stimulation board from every unit offered for sale. The earlier Links stayed recalled. A few owners complained that their old helmets had features the new ones didn't. Max read those messages twice.

The logs had started two investigations. Solenoid had notified its customers and closed the borrower service. Richard stepped away from operational control. Max's experimental work was suspended while outside clinicians reviewed Atom's care; she could maintain the existing system under their supervision. An order protected its power, staffing and supplies. It didn't excuse how they had reached this point.

Soph had given a statement about the mill. Rat had given another about the tavern. The investigators asked who had made the deletion tool and who had decided to carry it. There was no word on the forms for the people who had died. The lawyer attached their names on a separate page.

So the world filled up. Translucent people in coffee shops, riding somebody's eyes. A ghost in the back seat of every car on the bridge. Soph walked across the quad at Stanford on the first Friday and counted nine of them, bound to nine students, drifting along beside them as though each student had bought a very quiet dog. She thought about a boy in a duster coat in the corner of her eye for two years. Well, now everybody knows what that's like. She didn't know whether she was glad.

The ghosts couldn't touch anything. The new hardware had no stimulation board to receive a command. At the product briefing someone asked Max whether that limit could be lifted in an update.

"Not by software," she said.

A second question came from the back. She stayed to answer it.

---

In May the court allowed Eliza to instruct her own lawyer in the proceedings over the seized equipment. Her lawyer sent three pages explaining how little that settled. Citizenship, identity papers, the next court: all still to be argued. Eliza asked her to add the dates.

The barkeep testified through a speaker. He said welcome to the judge, apologized, then did it again when she returned from the recess. He had been awake for five months. Asked whether he wanted to return to Alius, he said he'd like to visit the tavern but would prefer to keep his new room.

Jeff had spent January assembling that room. The trouble had been the moving state: while one client saved a piece, another advanced it. He built a way for every participating client to acknowledge the same stopping point. They tried it on ordinary characters, then with Eliza lending a small piece of her own running state and comparing what it remembered after resuming. Only after the readbacks agreed did he ask the serving boy.

The boy wanted to know whether he could walk up a hill at the other end.

Jeff showed him the hill through a window. The boy agreed. They stopped his old instance, carried its complete state across and resumed it once. He remembered the stopping point. He also remembered Jeff asking him the same question six times, which he complained about.

The barkeep went next. Neither old instance was left awake in an empty town.

Eliza met them at the foot of the hill. The boy walked past her without saying hello and kept going. She stayed where he could find her when he came down.

The fragments from Sentek were still being examined on a separate machine. Some had yielded words and paths she recognized. Others were damaged or disagreed with memories she had kept. She had not agreed to merge any of them. The ISIS drives remained preserved, pending a way to restore their state safely. Villanueva put both matters on the agenda every month.

Eliza chose a birthday for the forms her lawyer kept sending. The day of the copy. She asked for the other Eliza's name to appear beside hers in the record of the raid.

"The same name?" the lawyer asked.

"For now. She didn't choose another one."

---

Atom moved in June.

He had asked in January. It took five months to get the medical review, move the funding out of Solenoid, and train a receiving team on the pumps. During the hearings Atom spoke through the same room speaker the lawyers used. He asked them to stop calling it an upload. His brain was still in the chamber.

"I want to move," he told Richard. "And I don't want you to be able to switch off my visits again."

Richard stood at the glass.

"The live access had to go," he said.

"You could have told me what I could still do. You could have left me a way to call you."

"Yes," said Richard. "I could have."

The new facility had six trustees, including Richard. They controlled the funding and equipment. Atom controlled his treatment decisions; no trustee could revoke his communication as punishment. He had an independent advocate and a procedure for challenging restrictions. Max made him try the call button before he signed.

They moved him in June, with a medical transport crew and a second set of pumps already running at Stanford. He complained about the route because it went past a bakery he remembered. Max told him she was not taking the chamber through a drive-through.

By evening his room adjoined the mainframe where Eliza, the barkeep and the serving boy lived. Richard stayed after the technicians had gone. Villanueva found him at the glass and brought a chair.

The other thing that changed was the camera.

Max worked with Jeff on the camera permissions. A public Link still bound a visitor to someone wearing frames. Atom's clinical interface could use a separate, approved camera as its viewpoint, through the same restricted picture-and-sound terminal. He could request a new location himself. The first one he chose was the lakehouse dock, where Richard had kept a weather camera for ten years.

He didn't tell Soph he was going.

She found out because she put her frames on one afternoon in her room and he wasn't in the corner of her eye. She took them off and put them back on, which was how she checked, and he still wasn't there. For about four seconds she was sixteen in a hospital bed. Then she found the note. He had left it in the game, on the wall of the cottage, in his handwriting, which he had built for himself out of the way he used to write. It said, gone to the lake. Back for dinner. Don't come. Love you.

Then she laughed. It wasn't a good laugh and she didn't care. He had gone to the lake without her.  She put the frames on the bedside table and went out to get lunch.

He came back for dinner. He didn't say much about it. He said the water was high and the dock needed a board replaced and there were wolf tracks by the boathouse. He said he had sat on the end of the dock for an hour and watched the light go. It was fine. It was only the lake. He didn't know what he'd been expecting.

"Was it good?" said Soph.

"I'd like to go again," said Atom. "With you next time."

"I'd like that," said Soph.

They hadn't returned to the old arrangement. For several weeks she had visited as a friend and gone home before the evening got difficult. She had talked to Eliza without Atom in the room. Once they had spent most of a visit arguing about something he had said, which made them both laugh and then made Soph feel worse.

"I want to try again," she told him now. "I know you love her. I'm not asking you to stop."

He waited.

"Tell me when something changes. Before everybody else knows. And when we're out together, you can't keep half a conversation going with her."

"Yes."

"And I want to talk to her about it myself. You can go bother Gideon while we do."

"I will."

Soph reached for her bag. "And the first date can be something you haven't built. I'm tired of you knowing where everything is."

---

Daun came through the doors at Vancouver International on the last day of June with one bag and an unused return ticket. She had traded ten days of shifts with Jeong. Rat had covered the cost of a substitute ranger from the business account. The squad still expected its Thursday payments.

Rat was by the pillar. She had been by the pillar for two hours. She was wearing the coat she wore to town and a shirt she had bought for the occasion and had hated the second she put it on. She was tall and wiry, and she had her hands in her pockets because she didn't know what else to do with them. She wasn't holding a sign. A sign was something you held for someone who didn't know you.

Daun checked the photograph on her phone, then looked toward the pillar. Rat raised one hand.

She came across the floor with the one bag and stopped about four feet away. She looked up, because she had to, and she looked. At the face. At the hands in the pockets. At the shirt. Rat stood there and let her.

"You didn't tell me you were this tall," said Daun.

Rat didn't have anything to say to that.

Daun set the bag down and looked at the shirt. "You bought that for this."

"Yeah."

"You can stop pulling at it." She picked the bag back up and held it out, and Rat took it after a second. It was heavier than it looked. "Now. It is cold?"

"It's June."

"You said it was cold."

"It's cold in winter. It's June. It's fine. There's a stove anyway."

"Good," said Daun. "Show me the stove."

They went through the doors. Rat glanced back once at the crowd, then checked whether Daun was beside her. Daun took the bag's other handle until they reached the curb.

---

Soph drove to Napa on a Saturday in July with a pair of frames in her bag.

She had arranged the visit with the facility the day before. On the drive she called Max, who told her that some days her father recognized people and some days he didn't. Soph listened with the windows down. After they hung up she drove past the entrance, turned around at the next vineyard and came back.

The facility had a garden. Max had said so, years ago, and it did. It was the kind of garden planted by people who knew that the people walking in it would need something to look at, and in July it was full. There was a man sitting in it on a bench in the sun with a sketchbook closed on his knee.

He was older than the painting. She didn't know why she had expected him to be the age of the painting. His hair was gray and long. He had her nose, or she had his, turned up a little, imperceptibly crooked. His eyes were hazel. She had known that, and hadn't been ready for it.

"Hi," she said.

He looked up. For a moment he seemed to be waiting for someone behind her. Soph kept her hands on the strap of her bag.

"Hello," said her father.

"I'm Sophia."

"I know who you are." He said it simply. "You've got my nose. I'm sorry about that. Your mother's was better." He moved the sketchbook off the bench. "You can sit here."

She sat down.

She had rehearsed in the car. Now she couldn't remember how she'd meant to begin. Her father moved the sketchbook farther along the bench to make room for her bag. There was paint on the edge of his thumbnail.

"I brought something," she said. "It's a thing I've been working on. Well. Mom made it. And a man called Richard. And a boy." She took the frames out of the bag. "It's glasses, kind of. They show you things. I'd like to show you a place, if that's alright. You don't have to."

He looked at the frames.

"Your mother's," he said. "The eye things. She was working on those when you were small. She used to come home and draw them on napkins. I've got some of the napkins." He held out his hand. "Alright."

She put them on him, as carefully as she could. She put her own on. She reached into the bag for the rig and did what put them both at the lake.

It was the dock. It was sunset, because she had set it for sunset. Atom had built the whole thing for her out of ten years of a webcam's weather, every hour of light the dock had ever had, and she had asked for this one. The water was going gold and then gray. The trees on the far shore were black. There was a skiff tied up. There was a stone on the boards of the dock, small and smooth and gray, that Atom had put there and hadn't explained.

Her father looked at it for a while. He looked the way she had seen him look at nothing, in the garden. Now it was the lake. She watched his face and waited.

"The water's the wrong blue," he said.

Soph laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, and it was a real one. She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

"Atom said that about your painting," Soph said. "He made one of his own. His blue was wrong too."

"Nobody gets it right," said her father. He was still looking at the water. "You can't. It isn't a color. It's a thing the light does. You paint the color and it's wrong, because it isn't a color, it's something that's happening." He reached up and touched the frames, lightly, the way you touch something you have drawn on a napkin. "But this is close. This is closer than I got. Tell your mother."

"I will."

They sat on the bench in the garden and on the dock at the lake and watched the light go. After a while he said, "There's a stone," and she said, "Yes."

"Is it anything?" he said.

"It's a canoe," she said.

He nodded, as though that were the right answer, and didn't ask.

---

They went to the lake for real in August.

All of them, which was what Soph had wanted and hadn't expected to get. She got it because Richard opened the house and said that anyone who had been in the basement that night could come, and everyone had.

Gideon came with a hammock and a beer and didn't sleep. Mim came because Max asked. Teo and Priya and Wes came in a car that broke down twice. Daun had returned for a second visit. She and Rat drove down from Canada in a truck. Daun unpacked a camp stove on the porch and asked how many people they meant to feed. Max sat on the porch with a book she didn't read. Richard went down to the cave with Villanueva, who had come, and showed her the mannequins in their suits and the paintings of bison on the walls. She tried on an old Manipulator and asked him to show her what had replaced it.

Jeff came with copies of the tavern drawings. He and the barkeep had been reconstructing the place from the character's memory, which disagreed with the original map. The barkeep insisted the window had been farther left. Jeff moved it. The serving boy wanted another way out of the kitchen.

A camera and display stood at the end of the dock. The game terminal in the cave connected to the approved visitor system at Stanford. The isolated mainframe sent it pictures and speech through Jeff's window. Eliza could look along the shore. The barkeep could see the porch. The serving boy kept asking Gideon to point the camera farther up the hill.

At sunset Soph sat on the end of the dock with her feet in the water. It was cold. It was the right cold, whatever the blue was. Atom sat beside her. Not in the corner of her eye, but beside her, in the duster, translucent at the edges, sitting on the boards with his knees up, the way he had sat when he was five and had handed her a stone.

He pointed to a stone beside her foot.

It was the one from the dock in the frames. He had asked Gideon to find one like it, and Gideon had spent an afternoon on the shore with Mim and found it and put it on the dock where Atom said. Now Atom couldn't pick it up, because he had no hands. So Soph picked it up and held it out and let him look at it.

"It's a canoe," said Atom.

"Yeah," said Soph. "It's a canoe."

She put it in her pocket, with the other one, the one from the last night when she was fifteen, and a folded scrap on which she had written the next hearing date, and she turned it over until it was warm.

The light went. The trees went black. A wolf called above the house. Daun said something on the porch and Rat laughed. Gideon adjusted the camera again for the boy, who had spotted movement on the path.

Eliza asked him to leave it there. For a while the three of them watched the gap between the trees.

Atom stood up. He did it easily. He looked down the dock at all of them, at the house with the lights coming on, at the frames on the stand, at Soph with her feet in the water and her hand in her pocket, and he grinned, the grin from when he was five and had just decided that a stone was a canoe.

"So," he said. "You guys wanna go do a quest or something?"