Nixed Reality

Shawn Storie

Chapter One

The device looked like something confiscated at an airport.

Elliot turned it over in his hands — matte black polymer, a cranial band bristling with medical-grade electrodes on its inner surface, their silver contacts showing like exposed fillings. The processing module sat on his desk beside a cold mug of coffee, connected to the band by 1.2 meters of braided cable. He’d measured the cable three times during assembly and written the figure in his notebook as though it were data and not a spec he’d chosen himself. Three hundred and forty grams total. He’d weighed it twice. The second time because the first number seemed too small for what he wanted it to do.

His office occupied a corner on the third floor of Whitfield Hall, a limestone building the university had raised in 1961 and renovated with the frequency and enthusiasm of a man visiting his dentist. The window faced a parking lot and, past it, the practice fields where the marching band was running formations in September heat that looked liquid from three stories up. Three weeks into the semester. He had held office hours four times to no visitors. His students did not seek him out, a fact he attributed to the culture of the department and not to anything about his manner, an attribution that had survived twenty-three years of contrary evidence.

On the monitor, a strip of masking tape along the lower edge. On it, in his own handwriting: The present moment always will have been. He didn’t remember where he’d found the quote. He’d verified once that the attribution was uncertain, and he had not investigated further, because the uncertainty suited him and because verification is not always the point.

He set the band on the desk beside the processing module and aligned them parallel to the keyboard. A gesture of neatness that was also postponement.

Eighteen months. The IRB exemption filed in March of ’24 under cognitive enhancement research, no co-investigators, a category of study so dull in its administrative framing that the committee had approved it inside of two weeks. Which was fine. Elliot had not lied on the application. He had simply not described what the device did in language that would cause anyone to imagine it did what it did. This was not, in his view, dishonesty. It was precision aimed at an audience without the context to receive it.

He’d built four units. Two were locked in his lab down the hall. One sat in front of him. The fourth was in a cardboard box under the desk with a charging cable coiled on top of it, because he’d finished it and then realized he had no one to give it to.

Outside, a door slammed in the hallway. Footsteps, a student’s voice saying yeah no for sure, and then silence. Whitfield Hall emptied reliably by four-thirty. It was nearly five. The building’s heating system, which could not be deactivated without a work order that took six weeks, clicked and shuddered in the wall behind him.

He picked up the band again.

The electrodes made contact along the temporal and parietal regions, a pressure he’d calibrated to be firm without being uncomfortable, though he’d only ever calibrated it against his own head. The processing module he set in his lap. Cable looped once around his left wrist so it wouldn’t pull if he shifted. He’d practiced this sequence eleven times without powering on, the way a pianist might finger a passage with the sustain pedal up — silent, proprioceptive, building a muscle memory for the ritual of what came next.

He pressed the contact switch on the module. A faint hum, subsonic, more felt in the jaw than heard. Three amber indicators. He watched them cycle to green and thought, with the precision of someone who has rehearsed a thought until it has lost its capacity to feel genuine: this is the moment.

It wasn’t. The moment had been eighteen months ago, when he’d understood the mathematics. Or perhaps longer — when he’d been standing in his mother’s kitchen after the funeral, eleven years old, and decided, in the way eleven-year-olds decide things that govern their entire lives, that he would not simply disappear. That he would build something that remained. But the indicators were green and his hand was on the switch and the parking lot outside held six cars and none of them were Miriam’s because Miriam’s car had been parking elsewhere for two years now, and the practice field was empty, and his coffee was cold, and the masking tape on his monitor was curling at one corner, and the present moment always will have been, and he pressed the switch.

The bench is wooden. I know this because I’m sitting on it, which is not something I expected — to be sitting. I expected visuals, possibly vertigo, the phenomenology of transition. Instead I am sitting on a bench in a room I don’t recognize but which doesn’t feel unfamiliar.

The room is large enough to move in. Not generous. The size of a good office or a bad apartment. The light has no source — it comes from everywhere, diffuse, the color of overcast morning through a window you can’t find. There is a whiteboard on the wall opposite, empty, and the bench I’m sitting on, and nothing else. The floor is a surface. The walls are surfaces. If I concentrate on them they seem to acquire faint texture — something like concrete — but the texture doesn’t survive attention. It’s like trying to read a word in a dream.

I am in my body. I have hands. I look at them and they are my hands, which is reassuring in a way that tells me I’d considered the possibility that they might not be. My lower back hurts, which means the somatic layer is carrying through. I haven’t built the pain editor yet. The ache is a companion I’ve had for six years and for a disorienting moment it is the most familiar thing in the room.

I stand up. The bench doesn’t move. The floor accepts my weight with the conviction of real concrete. I walk to the whiteboard and there is a marker in a tray I didn’t notice until I needed it — a detail that should alarm me and doesn’t. I pick up the marker and write the date. September 14, 2025. Below it I write my name, which is either scientific notation or a territorial gesture, and then I stand there looking at my handwriting on a surface that doesn’t exist in a room I’m generating, and I understand that this is the thing. This is it.

I don’t know how much time passes. That’s the point — it doesn’t pass, not the way it does outside. I work. I write equations on the board, erase them, rewrite them. I’m refining the field geometry for the next iteration, work I’ve been doing at my desk for weeks in twenty-minute stretches between emails and committee obligations and the particular exhaustion of being a person in a building where other people need things from you. Here there are no emails. No committee. No other people. The equations come and I follow them and when I fill the board I wipe it and start again and the work is clean and fast and uninterrupted and for the first time in my professional life I understand what I am actually capable of when the world stops pulling at my sleeve.

At some point I sit on the bench again. Not from fatigue — I don’t think I can be fatigued here, not yet, not in this version — but because a thought arrives that isn’t an equation. The thought is: no one knows I’m here. Not here in Whitfield Hall, which is true but unremarkable. Here, in this room. In this time. No one knows this room exists. No one knows that I have been working for what feels like — I check, I genuinely cannot tell — hours? A day? The marker is half-spent and I don’t know if that’s a reliable metric or an artifact. The light hasn’t changed. My back still hurts.

The thought continues: I have been trying to build something that outlasts me. And I have just discovered a place where there is more of me. More time. More hours. The mathematics works. A hundred and twenty to one at peak dilation — forty minutes of clock time and I’ve been here for what might be two days. Two days of work. Two days of thinking without interruption. Two days during which my body sat in a chair in an empty building on a Tuesday evening and no one called and no one knocked and no one needed me and this last part is not the triumph it should be but I note it and move on.

I should feel triumphant. I feel something closer to vertigo — but vertigo of scale, not of balance. The room is steady. I am steady. The problem is that I now know what is possible and the knowing changes everything that is not this room.

I look at the whiteboard. It’s full again. I don’t remember filling it.

Then the room thins — not darkens, thins, like a signal losing strength — and the bench is less convincing and the light is pulling toward a point and my hands are

still his hands.

He was in his chair. The processing module hummed in his lap. The cable was still looped around his left wrist. The parking lot was darker — the orange of sodium lights where sunlight had been. His monitor’s screensaver had activated, a default he’d never changed: a slow drift of colored shapes against black, patient and meaningless.

Forty-one minutes. He checked twice.

He did not remove the band immediately. He sat with it on, the electrodes cooling against his temples, and looked at the parking lot. Three cars now. One of them was his. He was aware of his lower back in the specific way you become aware of a sound that has been continuous — not that it started, but that he was hearing it again.

He sat very still.

There was a notebook beside the keyboard, open to a blank page, a pen clipped to its cover. He’d placed it there before the session, anticipating this moment: the return, the rush to document. He’d imagined himself writing furiously, capturing the phenomenology before it decayed. He’d prepared.

He didn’t pick up the pen. Not for a long time. He sat and listened to the heating system and watched the screensaver and felt the weight of the band on his head and the ache in his back and the quality of the air in a room where no one has spoken for an hour.

What he was feeling was not triumph and not vertigo. It was the feeling of standing in a very large, very empty building and understanding that you are the architect and the only tenant and that no one else has the address.

When he finally picked up the pen, he did not write what he’d expected. He did not write the dilation ratio or the phenomenological observations or the field geometry refinements that were, even now, still sharp in his mind, the clearest work he’d done in years. He would write all of that later, in the lab notebook, with the rigor it deserved.

What he wrote was:

It’s enough room. There’s enough time in there.

He underlined enough twice, which was unlike him, and then closed the notebook and placed the pen on top of it and removed the band and set it beside the processing module and straightened them both parallel to the keyboard.

He turned off the monitor. The colored shapes disappeared. The strip of masking tape was invisible in the dark.

He drove home to the apartment on Ridgemont, a two-bedroom he’d rented when Miriam had asked him to leave, which she had done without raising her voice, on a Sunday, while Cass was at a friend’s house. That had been two years ago. The apartment still looked temporary. He’d brought his books but not his bookshelves, so they sat in stacks along the walls of the living room, organized by a system that had been logical during the move and was now merely archaeological.

The drive was eleven minutes. He made it in the usual eleven minutes and remembered none of it.

In the kitchen he reheated leftover rice in the microwave and stood at the counter eating it from the container and looking at the window above the sink, which showed his own reflection and, behind it, the parking lot of the apartment complex where other people were arriving home to apartments that contained other people. His reflection chewed. He watched it the way you watch a stranger performing a familiar task — not with interest but with the faint recognition that this is something humans do.

His phone showed two notifications. An email from the department chair about the colloquium schedule. And a text from Cass, sent at 4:47 PM:

hey can you call me later? not urgent just want to talk

He looked at the timestamp. 4:47. He’d been inside by then. His body had been in the chair, his mind in the room with the bench, and Cass had been somewhere in the world sending a text to a father whose phone sat face-down on a desk in an empty building.

He typed: Hey Cass. Just saw this. Will call tomorrow. Love you.

He read it twice before sending. It was accurate. It was also, in a way he could not yet articulate, the first in a series of messages that would say I’m here while meaning I was somewhere else.

He rinsed the container and set it in the drying rack beside yesterday’s container and turned off the kitchen light and stood in the dark for a moment, listening. The apartment was silent in the way that apartments are silent when they contain one person who is not making sound: completely, but not quite.

In the bedroom he undressed and brushed his teeth and set his alarm for 6:15 and lay on his back in the dark and thought about the room. The bench. The whiteboard filling with equations he didn’t remember writing. The quality of the light. The pain in his back, faithfully reproduced, a tether to the body in the chair. He thought about the two days — if it was two days — and how they fit inside forty-one minutes, and how forty-one minutes fit inside a Tuesday evening, and how a Tuesday evening fit inside a life that was, from certain angles, not going particularly well.

He thought about enough. Enough time. Enough room. Enough of himself, uninterrupted, to do the work that would make him someone who was not simply erased.

He did not think about what he would be doing — what his body would be doing — while he was inside. Not yet.

The heating system in the apartment clicked on. Outside, a car door. Then quiet. He closed his eyes, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, his last thought before sleep was not about what he hadn’t finished. It was about how much room there was to finish it.

Chapter Two

Five months, and the ritual had become the only part of his week he planned around.

He arrived at Whitfield Hall at quarter to five on Tuesdays and Thursdays — sometimes Saturdays, if the department’s weekend lethargy was deep enough that no one would be in the halls to notice his hours. The band, the cable, the processing module aligned on the desk. The door locked. The building emptying around him like a theater after the show. He kept a log: session number, start time, duration in real minutes, estimated subjective duration, notes. The notes were becoming less rigorous. Not because he was less careful, but because the experience was less novel, and what was most important about it — the time, the uninterrupted thinking, the quality of attention the inner lab permitted — was not the kind of thing that fit in a column.

Session forty-seven. February 10, 2026. A Tuesday. Outside, the parking lot was glazed with the thin, non-committal ice that central Illinois produced from November through March — not enough to cancel classes, enough to make the walk from the lot to the building an act of controlled faith. He’d stopped noticing the weather when he entered the building. The building’s interior was seasonless.

He set the notebook beside the keyboard, open to a fresh page. The pen he placed horizontally across the top of the page, capped, a small discipline he’d adopted after session twelve, when he’d accidentally left it uncapped and returned to find a slow ballpoint bleed soaking into the paper. Since then: cap on, pen perpendicular to spine, notebook square to the desk edge. The ritual within the ritual.

He put on the band. Processing module in his lap. Cable around the wrist. Contact switch. The hum in his jaw. Amber to green.

He pressed the switch.

The whiteboard is empty. It is always empty when I arrive — this version of the device does not remember. Every session starts from nothing. I have filled this whiteboard four hundred times and it has never once retained a mark.

This used to bother me. Now I find it clarifying. There is something disciplined about a workspace that forgives nothing forward — no half-finished diagrams to inherit, no yesterday’s notation to misread. Every session I reconstruct from memory what matters and discard what doesn’t, and the reconstruction is itself a form of thought. I am refining not just the work but my understanding of which parts of it are essential.

Today I am working on the field geometry for miniaturization. The current unit — 210 millimeters of cranial arc, 28 millimeters wide, a module the size of a deck of cards tethered by cable — is a laboratory instrument. It does what I need it to do and it cannot be what it needs to become. I have been thinking about this for six subjective weeks: how to collapse the processing module into the band itself, how to reduce the electrode array without losing the temporal resolution that makes dilation stable. The mathematics is not cooperative. I am asking a system to become smaller while remaining equally complex, and systems, like people, resist compression.

The whiteboard fills. I erase. It fills again. I am aware of time passing the way you are aware of weather through a closed window — it is happening, elsewhere, to someone. My back hurts. This is now so routine that the pain has become structural, like the bench. It’s the room’s way of reminding me I have a body. I ignore it the way I ignore the body: thoroughly, and with practice.

I work for what feels like a long time. The equations reach a point where they stop yielding and begin repeating, which is how I know I’ve extracted what this session has. I sit on the bench. I think about the field geometry. I think about the cable around my wrist, out there, in the real — how the device tethers me to a body I’m not using. I think about the pen on the notebook and the blankness of the page and how the log has become a record of diminishing surprise.

The room thins.

He opened his eyes. The hum in his jaw faded. The parking lot was dark, the ice catching orange from the sodium lights in a way that made it look like the surface of something molten and cooling.

Thirty-eight minutes. He checked.

He reached for the notebook to log the session. And stopped.

The notebook was open, as he’d left it. The pen was on the page, as he’d left it. But the pen was uncapped. And it was not horizontal across the top of the page. It was in his right hand.

On the page, in his handwriting, were equations.

He did not recognize them immediately. Then he did. They were not the miniaturization geometry he’d been working on inside — not exactly. They were a variation. A lateral approach he hadn’t considered, applying a compression transform to the electrode array rather than the processing architecture. The notation was his. The letter forms were his. The slight leftward lean of his integral signs, the way he closed his sigmas — unmistakably his hand.

There were eleven lines. The work was incomplete but not wrong. He checked it, line by line, with the band still on his head and his pulse doing something he chose not to name. The math held through line eight. Lines nine through eleven were fragments — partial expressions, as though the hand had been losing signal, the motor commands growing sparse. The last mark on the page was a horizontal line that trailed off the edge of the paper, the kind of stroke a pen makes when the hand holding it goes slack.

He set the pen down. He sat very still, which was becoming his default response to things that should be reported.

His hand had written equations. While he was inside. Equations he had not composed, or — and this was the part that made his breathing careful — equations he had composed, somewhere in the process that the inner lab maintained, and which had leaked through to motor output. The boundary between the device’s neural interface and his motor cortex was not sealed. It was not even, apparently, particularly well insulated. His body had received instructions. His hand had executed them. He had been working inside the room, and his body had been working outside it, and neither had known about the other, and the work was good.

He removed the band and set it on the desk and looked at his hands. They were his hands. They had always been his hands. The question was whose instructions they were taking.

He should have reported it. He understood this the way he understood most ethical obligations — clearly, immediately, and with the full awareness that understanding was not the same as doing. The motor signal bleed was a safety finding. If the device could drive motor output during a session, then a user’s body was not inert. It was available. That had implications for every aspect of the research protocol, the IRB exemption, the liability framework, the entire architecture of what the Meridian was supposed to be: a device that gave you time inside your head while your body sat quietly in a chair.

His body had not been sitting quietly. His body had been doing mathematics.

He opened a new entry in his lab notebook — the formal one, the hardbound book with numbered pages that constituted the legal record of his research. He wrote the date. He wrote the session number. Under observations, he wrote: Incidental motor artifact observed during extended dilation. Pen displacement and graphical output consistent with fine motor activation. Duration and complexity suggest sustained rather than transient signal bleed. Mechanism under investigation.

This was accurate. Every word was true. It was also the kind of description that could sit in a notebook for years without alarming anyone, because it sounded like what it was designed to sound like: a minor technical observation from a careful researcher, not worth escalating.

He closed the notebook. He did not call anyone. He did not email the IRB. He did not mention it to the department chair, who would not have understood it, or to his one remaining collaborator from graduate school, who would have. He did not call Priya, who had been his sharpest student and who would have seen, in about four seconds, both the scientific significance and the ethical problem and who would have told him so in the particular tone she reserved for moments when he was being the version of himself she liked least.

He did not call Priya because he had not called Priya in two years, and because the reason he had not called Priya was not unrelated to the reason he was not reporting this now: Elliot was capable of seeing a thing clearly, understanding its implications completely, and deciding that the most important next step was to learn more before involving anyone whose judgment might differ from his own. He called this rigor. Priya had called it something else. She had been right. He had agreed with her. He had not changed.

He ran the experiment again the following Thursday.

This time he set it up deliberately: notebook open, pen uncapped, positioned between the second and third fingers of his right hand the way he naturally held it. He went in. He worked on something unrelated — the power consumption curves for a smaller electrode array, tedious but necessary. He stayed for thirty-five minutes of real time.

When he surfaced, there were four lines on the page. Shorter than the first time. The handwriting was less steady — larger, with more spacing between symbols, as though his hand were writing in the dark. The content was a fragment of the compression transform from the previous session, a continuation. His hand had picked up where it left off.

He sat with this for a long time.

Then he ran it a third time, on Saturday, with a modification: he placed the pen in his left hand. He was right-handed. If the motor output was simply noise — random activation, a kind of neural static — it should produce marks regardless of which hand held the pen.

Thirty-two minutes. He surfaced. The pen was in his left hand, unmoved. The page was blank.

He wrote in the lab notebook: Laterality consistent with deliberate motor planning. Not artifact. Not noise.

He underlined nothing. He was not, this time, surprised.

February became March. He continued the sessions, continued the sub-experiments on motor bleed, continued not reporting any of it. The bleed was inconsistent — some sessions produced pages of notation, others nothing. He could not predict which sessions would leak and which would not. He tried varying his work inside the lab, his physical posture, the room temperature, the time of day. Nothing correlated reliably. The only pattern he found was that longer sessions produced more output, which was not a finding so much as an inevitability.

He began reading Damasio again — The Feeling of What Happens, Self Comes to Mind — with the kind of attention he hadn’t given a book since graduate school. Damasio’s argument that consciousness is rooted in the body, that the self is built from somatic markers and interoceptive signals, had always struck him as essentially correct. Now it struck him as personally relevant. If the Meridian could send motor commands to his body during dilation, then the device was not merely providing a space for his mind to work. It was maintaining a channel to his body — a channel that his conscious awareness did not monitor but that his motor system could use. His body was not abandoned during a session. It was unattended.

The distinction mattered. An abandoned body is a safety risk. An unattended body is an opportunity.

He did not write this thought in his lab notebook. He wrote it in the personal notebook, the one he kept in his desk drawer, the one that was not a legal record. Below it he wrote: What if the channel is bidirectional? What if I can send instructions deliberately?

He did not pursue it. Not yet, not with this hardware. Gen 1 was a research instrument, not a platform for somatic experimentation. But he filed the question in the place where he kept things he intended to return to, which was the same place he kept everything that mattered: inside.

On the first warm Saturday in March, Cass drove down from Chicago.

She arrived in the late morning and they went to the diner on Green Street that they’d been going to since she was old enough to order for herself. She was eighteen and a year into an urban-planning degree and had her mother’s directness and her father’s habit of pausing before answering a question, which in Miriam read as thoughtfulness and in Elliot read as calculation and in Cass read as both, because she was both of them and fully herself.

“You look thinner,” she said, not as a compliment.

“I’ve been walking more.” This was true. He had been walking to the office instead of driving, a decision he’d made after noticing that he couldn’t remember the drives. The walks he also couldn’t remember, but they took longer, and the inability to account for thirty minutes felt less alarming than the inability to account for eleven.

“Mom says you’re working on something.”

“I’m always working on something.”

“She says you’re working on something in the way that means you’re not doing anything else.”

He looked at her across the table. She was eating a grilled cheese with the methodical focus she’d had since childhood, cutting it into quarters and eating the crusts first. He knew this about her. He had been in the room for this, hundreds of times. The knowing felt like a kind of wealth that he was not currently spending wisely.

“It’s going well,” he said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know.”

She looked at him. He could see her deciding whether to push. She didn’t. This restraint was new — or rather, it was something she’d learned from watching her parents not say things to each other for sixteen years, a curriculum neither of them had intended to teach.

They talked about her classes. They talked about the apartment she shared with two other students in Logan Square. They did not talk about Miriam. They did not talk about the device, because Cass did not know about the device, because Elliot had not told anyone about the device, because the device was his and the telling of it would make it partially theirs and he was not ready for the work to belong to anyone but the man who had built it alone in a room that no one else had ever seen.

He paid the check. They walked along Green Street in the thin March sunlight. She hugged him in the parking lot of the diner, and he held her, and her hair smelled like the shampoo she’d used since high school, and he was fully there for this. He was not inside. He was in the parking lot holding his daughter and feeling the cold air and the warmth of her and the particular weight of a person leaning into you because they trust your body to hold them up.

He drove home. He did not go to the office. He did not run a session.

This was a Saturday he would remember. Not because anything happened, but because he was present for it, and because the present would not always be a place he chose to stay.

Chapter Three

By the fall of 2027, he had stopped counting sessions.

The log continued — date, duration, technical notes — but the session numbers had become meaningless, the way mile markers become meaningless on a road you drive every day. The device was complete. Four units, IRB-approved, MERIDIAN-L1 stamped on the processing modules in letters small enough to be mistaken for a serial number. He had published two papers on temporal perception that described the underlying neuroscience without describing the device, the way a locksmith might publish on metallurgy without mentioning what the keys open. The papers were cited eleven times, mostly by graduate students. This was fine. The papers were not the point. The papers were the pointing-away-from-the-point.

He entered the inner lab on a Thursday in October with the intention of reviewing the somatic interface specifications. The channel he’d discovered twenty months ago — the motor bleed, the hand writing equations he hadn’t consciously composed — had become, in the intervening months, the most important finding of his career. More important than the dilation itself, though he would not have said so publicly. Dilation gave you time. The somatic channel gave you the body back. Or rather, it gave you the body differently — not as the thing you inhabited but as the thing you operated. The distinction was everything.

But that work was for later in the session. First, the room.

I have been here a thousand times, and the room always begins the same way — the bench, the whiteboard, the light from nowhere, sparse and provisional and waiting. Gen 1 does not remember. Every session is a first draft. But I remember, and the room has learned to read what I remember, and the reconstruction has become so fast that it is no longer a reconstruction. It is an arrival.

The shelves come first.

They rise along the far wall — not dramatically, not with any visual spectacle, but with the quiet authority of something that was always supposed to be there. Dark wood, floor to what would be ceiling if the ceiling were more specific than it is. The grain of the wood is walnut, or something the room has decided is walnut based on walnut shelves I have seen and touched in actual libraries, in actual rooms, in the version of the world that insists on being called real. The shelves are deep — deep enough for large-format volumes, deep enough that a book placed on them sits back from the edge with the dignified recession of a thing that has been properly housed.

Then the books.

They fill in the way a photograph develops — not all at once, but in densities, clusters forming where the associations are strongest. The Damasio first: The Feeling of What Happens, the 1999 Harcourt edition, navy cloth binding with silver type. Self Comes to Mind beside it, the Pantheon hardcover, the dust jacket creased at the top corner where I folded it back to read on a plane. Descartes’ Error in the Vintage paperback that I read in graduate school and the hardcover I bought ten years later because the paperback fell apart and because I wanted to own the same ideas in a form that might outlast me.

I pull Descartes’ Error from the shelf. The weight is right — not heavy, but present, the particular heft of a 312-page hardcover, the mass shifted slightly toward the spine. The cloth binding under my fingers has the tight weave of Brillianta, that European bookcloth that feels like very fine canvas. I hold it and I can feel the boards underneath, the stiffness of them, the way they resist a subtle flex. The corners are bumped. The bottom edge of the spine is frayed in the way that spines fray when you pull a book by hooking a finger over the top. I have done this. This book remembers that I have done this.

I open it. The spine cracks — not the sharp crack of a new book but the softer, more articulate sound of a spine that has been opened many times and has developed a memory of its own preferred angle. The pages fall open to a spread I’ve read before. The paper is cream, not white — an uncoated stock with tooth, the kind of paper that takes pencil well. There are pencil marks in the margin. My pencil marks. A bracket around a passage on somatic markers, a small star, the word yes written in the hand of a man who was thirty-one and still believed that agreement with a book was a form of progress.

And the smell.

This is the part I was not prepared for. The books smell like books. Not a generic book-smell, not an approximation — this specific, particular, unreasonable smell. Lignin and cellulose breaking down at the pace of decades. The faint vanilla of paper aging in a closed space. Binding glue, the animal-hide kind that old hardcovers use, with its warm, faintly organic undertone. Dust — not the dust of neglect but the dust of patience, the fine layer that accumulates on a book that has been sitting on a shelf being what it is. I hold the open book close to my face and breathe and the smell is so real that for a moment I cannot tell which side of the device I am on.

I stand in the room holding a book that does not exist, smelling paper that was never made, and I understand that the inner lab has crossed a threshold. It is no longer generating a workspace. It is generating a world. My world. The one I would build if I could build one from nothing — not a fantasy, not an escape, but a perfected version of the actual room I want to be in. A library. An enormous, quiet, self-organizing library that knows what I’ve read and renders it in cloth and paper and glue.

The shelves extend. I walk along them. The room is larger than it was — or rather, the room has become a different room, the bench and whiteboard receding behind me as the library unfolds. There are corridors now. The shelves reach up into a darkness that is not menacing but simply unresolved, the way the top of a very tall bookcase disappears into shadow when the light comes from below. I trail my fingers along the spines and they are different under my hand — cloth, leather, paper-over-board, the slick matte of a university press dust jacket, the rough linen of a small-press monograph. Each one is specific. Each one was, at some point, a real book in a real room that I held in my real hands, and the holding was recorded, and here it is again.

I find books I have not thought about in years. A Kandel neuroscience textbook from my first year of graduate school — enormous, heavy, the kind of book that functions as both education and furniture. I pull it out and it weighs what it should weigh. The glossy pages have that particular feel, the slickness of coated stock that makes pencil marks silvery and impermanent. I find Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception in the Routledge Classics edition, the pale blue cover, the pages so thin they feel like onionskin. I find a copy of Middlemarch that I read the summer after my father died because my mother was reading it and I wanted to be in the same story she was in, even if we never discussed it, even if the sharing was silent and one-directional, and the book is here, the Penguin Classics edition, and when I open it there are no marginalia because I was eleven and did not write in books yet, but the spine opens to Part Four, which is as far as I got.

I did not plan this. I did not design a library. The inner lab built it from what I carry — from the sensory memories of every book I have touched, every page I have turned, every binding I have smelled. The room is not imagining these books. It is remembering them through me. I am the archive and the library is the catalog.

I sit on the floor between two shelves — the floor is wood here, wide planks, the kind of floor that old libraries have, the kind that creaks when you walk on it but does not creak when I sit because the room does not yet know how floors sound under weight; it is learning — and I hold the Middlemarch and I do not read it. I hold it the way you hold a thing that connects you to someone you cannot reach. My mother is alive. She lives in the house where my father died. I call her on Sundays with diminishing regularity and she does not ask why because she has never been a woman who asks for what she needs, a trait I inherited and refined into a methodology.

The book weighs almost nothing. The book weighs everything.

I set it back on the shelf. It slides in with the small friction of a book finding its place — the slight catch of cloth against wood, the air compressing between it and its neighbors. The sound is perfect. The room is getting better at sound.

Later — hours later, days later, the dilation makes duration rhetorical — I sit in the library with the somatic interface specifications on the whiteboard, which has followed me into this new space like a patient assistant, and I read the motor bleed data I’ve been collecting for twenty months, and I design the first deliberate test.

The principle is simple. The channel between the device’s neural interface and my motor cortex is not sealed. Signals leak. My hand writes equations I don’t consciously compose. This is accidental. What if it were intentional? What if I could encode a motor sequence — a set of movements, a physical routine — and send it to the body deliberately, the way you send a file to a printer? The body would execute. The mind would be here, in the library, with the books.

I design a five-mile run. The specifications are detailed because I have time to be detailed and because the body is not something you program casually: pace, stride length, breathing pattern, the route from the gym entrance to the track and around and around and back. I model it on runs I have actually done — runs I remember in my legs and lungs, runs the body knows. I am not inventing movement. I am transcribing it.

I write the protocol on the whiteboard. I check it twice. I save it in the way the inner lab saves things — not to a file, but to the sustained neural pattern that the device maintains during the session. It will be there when I need it.

Then I sit in the library and pull the Damasio from the shelf — The Feeling of What Happens, the navy cloth, the silver type — and I read about how consciousness is rooted in the body, how the self is constructed from the feeling of what happens in the body, how to be a mind without a body is to be something less than a self. I read this while designing a system to operate my body without my presence. I am aware of the irony. I read the next chapter.

The following Saturday he tried it.

He drove to the university gym at six in the morning, before the building opened to students, using a faculty key card that granted access to facilities he had never once used for their intended purpose. The track was on the third floor — an elevated oval, eight laps to a mile, rubberized surface, windows facing east. He set the processing module on a bench beside the track, put on the band, and loaded the motor sequence he’d designed inside the lab.

He pressed the switch.

Inside, he sat in the library. He pulled the Damasio from the shelf. He read.

Outside, his body stood up from the bench. It walked to the track. It began to run.

He was aware of this the way you are aware of rain on a roof — a sound from another room, filtered, ambient. His body’s breathing registered as a faint rhythm in the background of his reading. His heart rate was information, not experience. The run was happening to his body. He was happening to the book.

Forty-one minutes. Five miles. He surfaced.

His shirt was damp. His quads ached in the specific way they ached after a five-mile run at a pace slightly faster than comfortable — he had set the pace from memory, and his memory, it turned out, remembered a younger man’s comfortable speed. His breathing was elevated. He could taste salt.

He had not felt any of it.

He sat on the bench beside the track and looked at his legs, which had just run five miles, and felt the sweat cooling on his arms, and smelled the particular gym-smell of rubber and exertion, and noticed that the ache in his lower back — the one that had followed him into every session since the first — was, for the first time in years, slightly less. The run had loosened something. His body had done something good for itself, under instructions he had written in a room that didn’t exist, while he read about the inseparability of mind and body.

He sat on the bench for a long time after that. He was not thinking about the scientific implications, though those were considerable. He was thinking about the run — or rather, about the not-run, the five miles of absence, the distance between the body that had moved through space and the mind that had been sitting in a library smelling books that were made of nothing.

He drove home. His legs were sore in the way legs are sore after a run, which was new, because he had not run in years. His body walked up the stairs to his apartment with the careful stiffness of a body that has been used hard by someone who was not there for it.

In the apartment, he passed the stacks of books along the living room walls. They were still there — still shelfless, still arranged in the archaeological logic of the move, spines facing out, accumulating dust. Real dust, on real books, in a room where no one pulled them from their stacks or held them or smelled their pages or sat on the floor between them reading. His actual books, in his actual apartment, untouched. His imagined books, in his imagined library, held and opened and loved with a specificity that his real life had not managed in years.

He did not notice the contrast. Or he noticed it and filed it in the place where he kept things he intended to return to, which was growing larger and more carefully organized than anything in the apartment.

He stood in the kitchen. His legs ached. He could not remember the run but he could feel its aftermath, the body’s insistence on being accounted for. He opened the refrigerator, which contained leftover rice and a conviction that he should eat more vegetables, and he stood there in the cold light looking at the shelves — real shelves, plastic, practical — and for a moment he thought about the library. The walnut. The deep shelves. The books receding into shadow.

He closed the refrigerator. He ate the rice.

That night he lay in bed and thought about what the body is when it is unattended.

He had run five miles and read four chapters. Both had happened. Both were real, in the way that the things your body does are real even when your mind is elsewhere — the way a sleepwalker walks, the way a person drives home on autopilot, the way Miriam had once told him that he nodded during conversations he was not listening to, a performance of attention so practiced that even she couldn’t always tell. He had been doing that for years before the Meridian. The device had merely made it efficient.

His lower back felt better than it had in months. His legs were sore. His mind was full of Damasio’s argument about the somatic basis of consciousness, the pages vivid in a way that real pages rarely were, because he had read them in a space designed for nothing but reading, in a library built from his own memory of what libraries should be, holding a book that smelled the way books are supposed to smell when they are loved enough to be remembered.

He thought about the Middlemarch. The Penguin Classics edition, the spine opening to Part Four. His mother reading the same book in the same house in the same summer, the two of them sharing a text without discussing it, the closest thing to communion his family had ever practiced. The book was on a shelf in the inner lab, in the library that built itself from what he carried. The actual book — if his mother still had it, if it had survived thirty years of shelving and moving and the slow dispersal of a household’s objects after a death that was not dramatic enough to freeze anything in place — the actual book was somewhere he could not reach from here.

The library could be reached from anywhere. The library was always available. The library was, in a way he was not yet willing to examine, becoming more real to him than the rooms he lived in.

He closed his eyes. His legs ached. Outside, the sound of a car and then no sound at all, and then sleep, and in sleep, for the first time, he dreamed about the shelves.

Chapter Four

The pain had been there so long it had become architectural — part of the building rather than something in it. Lower back, left side, the specific dull insistence of a disc that had opinions about gravity. Nine years. It was the first thing each morning and the last thing each night, the faithful companion of every session in the inner lab, the ache that followed him through the threshold and sat with him on the bench and reminded him, with the patience of something that would never leave, that he had a body and that the body had complaints.

On a Tuesday in November, he turned it off.

The nociceptive suppression layer had taken six subjective weeks to build — a delicate piece of work, more software than hardware, the device learning to intercept pain signals at the thalamic relay and replace them with silence. He’d tested it first on minor things: a paper cut, the sharp edge of the desk against his forearm, the particular sting of Illinois wind on bare ears. Each time the signal arrived, was recognized, and was gently declined, the way a good assistant declines a meeting invitation — acknowledged, filed, not acted upon.

The back was different. The back was not a signal. The back was a condition. To edit it out was not to decline a single invitation but to cancel a standing appointment that had run, without interruption, for nearly a decade.

He activated the suppression profile at 6:14 AM, lying in bed, the band on his head, his eyes still closed. The pain did not vanish — it receded, the way a tide goes out, not all at once but with a slow, withdrawing certainty. First the sharp edge of it went, the part that caught when he shifted weight. Then the deeper ache, the one that lived in the muscle and colored everything with its low, persistent frequency. Then the residual hum, the background radiation of a body that had been compensating for nine years, the tension in his hips and shoulders that existed only because the back had taught them to exist.

Then nothing.

He lay in bed and felt nothing where the pain had been, and the nothing was so loud he could hear it.

He got up. The apartment, which had been organized around the pain for two years — the firm mattress, the lumbar cushion on the desk chair, the ibuprofen on the kitchen counter in a bottle whose child-safety cap he had defeated permanently with a pair of pliers — the apartment suddenly contained artifacts of a problem that no longer existed. The lumbar cushion sat on the chair like a small, devoted dog whose owner had come home healthy. The ibuprofen had nothing to do.

He walked to the kitchen. His body moved with a freedom it had forgotten it possessed, each step arriving without the small negotiation that the back had imposed on every transfer of weight. The coffee maker did its work. The morning was a Tuesday, the same as any Tuesday, except that the fundamental terms of his physical existence had been renegotiated while he lay in bed pressing a button.

He stood at the counter and drank his coffee and did not hurt, and the not-hurting was the most extraordinary sensation he had experienced since the first session in the inner lab, and he knew — with the same quiet certainty with which he had known, at eleven, that he would not be erased — that this was the thing that would change everything. Not the dilation. Not the somatic interface. Not the library or the whiteboard or the slow accumulation of a secret lifetime inside his own head. The pain editing. Because time dilation was a gift for the ambitious and the restless and the brilliant, a narrow gift, a gift for people like him. But pain relief was a gift for everyone.

He poured a second cup of coffee. The morning light came through the kitchen window at the angle that meant winter was not quite there but had sent ahead its representative. The ibuprofen bottle caught the light. Its label, half-peeled from condensation and handling, advertised fast relief. It had delivered adequate relief, slowly, with side effects, for nine years. The band on his head had delivered complete relief, instantly, with no side effects he could yet measure.

He left the ibuprofen on the counter. It would still be there in March.

The bench is different without the pain.

I notice it immediately — the absence, the missing companion. For three years the ache has been the most reliable thing in this room. More reliable than the whiteboard, which I conjure. More reliable than the light, which the room invents. The pain was the thing I brought with me, the body’s contribution to a space the mind built. And now it’s gone, and the bench is just a bench, and I am sitting on it without negotiation, and the room feels like a house from which someone has quietly moved out.

The library is around me — it rises faster now, the shelves filling in the time it takes me to cross my legs, the books densifying like a photograph in accelerated development. The Damasio, the Merleau-Ponty, the Kandel, the Middlemarch. The walnut. The dust of patience. All of it present, all of it perfect, all of it mine. But the back was mine too, and I edited it out, and I am trying to locate the feeling this produces and the closest I can find is: I have removed the last thing about this room that I did not choose.

Everything in here is elected. The books I want. The shelves I want. The light I want. The pain was the one thing the body insisted upon, the one signal that arrived uninvited, unedited, real in the way that only unwanted things are real. And I have made it optional.

I sit on the bench and I think: this is better. This is unambiguously better. The pain was not useful. The pain was not informative. The pain was a disc expressing an opinion about a load-bearing structure and the opinion was the same every day and I have heard it. I do not need to keep hearing it. No one would argue that I should keep hearing it.

And then I think: no one is here to argue.

I pull the Damasio from the shelf. The navy cloth, the silver type. I open it to the chapter on background feelings — the body’s continuous report on its own state, the murmur beneath conscious awareness that tells you, at every moment, that you exist in a particular way. Damasio’s argument is that these background feelings are the foundation of selfhood. That without them, the self loses its ground. That pain, among other things, is part of the report.

I read the passage. I close the book. I sit on the bench without pain, in a room without argument, and I do not feel less like myself. I feel like more of myself — the version that isn’t distracted, isn’t compensating, isn’t spending a fraction of every thought on the management of an old injury.

This is the version I prefer.

I set the Damasio back on the shelf. It slides in with its small perfect friction. I turn to the whiteboard, which is waiting, which is always waiting, and I begin.

By March of 2029, he had accumulated forty thousand subjective working hours inside the inner lab.

He calculated this on a Wednesday afternoon, sitting in his office in Whitfield Hall, the same office, the same desk, the same view of the parking lot, the building unchanged in the way that buildings on university campuses are unchanged — not preserved but neglected into permanence. Forty thousand hours. He wrote the number on a notepad and looked at it. It was equivalent to approximately twenty years of full-time work. He had compressed it into fourteen months of active use.

The notepad sat on the desk beside the processing module and the band and a coffee mug with a hairline crack that had been propagating slowly since the previous winter, a fracture advancing at the pace of geology and institutional funding. Twenty years of work in fourteen months. He had, in a sense, lived an additional career inside his own head — a parallel professional life, secret, unreviewed, more productive than anything his colleagues would achieve in their actual lifetimes. The papers he could publish. The patents he could file. The things he knew that no one else knew, the equations on the whiteboard that existed only in the sustained neural pattern of a device that four people on earth were aware of, one of whom was him and three of whom were unused units in a locked cabinet.

He did not publish the number. He did not tell anyone. He tore the notepad page off, folded it twice, and put it in his desk drawer with the personal notebook — the one no one would read.

August came with the particular aggression that Midwestern summers reserve for their final act — wet heat, air with texture, the campus emptied of everyone except the people who had nowhere else to be. Elliot was in his office. The band was on. The library was around him.

He was reading.

His body was in the chair, executing a behavioral loop he’d refined over the preceding months: a set of low-level responses calibrated to his professional routine. If a colleague knocked, the body would call out that he was on a call. If the phone rang — the office phone, the landline that only the department used — the body would let it go to voicemail. If his cell phone buzzed with a text, the body would glance at the screen, assess the sender, and respond with an appropriate short message from a library of templates he’d built from his own texting patterns. The responses were his. The syntax was his. The particular rhythm of his punctuation and his tendency to sign texts to family with “Love you” — all of it was sampled from his actual behavior. The body was, in every measurable sense, performing Elliot. The performance was excellent.

On August 14th, at 2:23 PM, Cass called.

His body picked up the phone. His body saw the name on the screen. His body — following the behavioral loop’s protocol for calls from immediate family — answered.

“Hey, Cass.”

“Dad! I wasn’t sure you’d pick up.”

“I’m here,” his body said, which was true in the way that a building is there when the tenant is out.

“I just wanted to hear your voice. It’s my birthday.”

“I know it is,” his body said. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

And then the call continued for four minutes and thirty seconds, during which his body navigated a conversation with his daughter using the vocal patterns, the pauses, the small laughs and affirmative murmurs that Elliot produced when talking to Cass, because the behavioral loop had been trained on hundreds of hours of exactly this interaction, and the performance was warm and natural and loving in every way that a performance can be loving when the person it is performing is in a library three thousand subjective miles away, reading about the neuroscience of attention, unaware that his phone had rung, unaware that his daughter was twenty-two years old today, unaware that his voice was saying things to her that he would not hear until she played them back for him in a kitchen in December, four months later, while he stood by the counter and listened to himself say “Happy birthday, sweetheart” in a voice that was his and that he did not recognize.

She drove down on a Saturday in December, the first snow of the season turning the practice fields into something that looked planned, a calendar photograph.

They went to the diner. Cass ordered the grilled cheese. The diner had not changed — the same booths, the same laminate, the same waitress who had either worked there for fifteen years or been replaced by someone with identical mannerisms, a continuity that neither of them had investigated.

“I want to play you something,” Cass said, after they’d ordered. She had her phone on the table, screen down, the way she always placed it, a habit she’d developed in college and that Elliot recognized as a form of courtesy he had never practiced.

“Okay.”

She picked up the phone, found something, and set it between them on the table, speaker facing up.

His voice came out of the small speaker. “Hey, Cass.” A pause. “I know it is. Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

He listened. The voice — his voice — talked to his daughter about her day, about her work, about a restaurant she’d been to the previous weekend. It asked questions. It laughed at something she said about a coworker. It told her he was proud of her in a sentence that was syntactically identical to sentences he had said to her before, the same cadence, the same slight catch before the word proud that he’d never noticed was a pattern until he heard it reproduced.

The recording ended. The diner sounds rushed back in — silverware, the door, a conversation at the next table about someone’s car.

“That was really nice, Dad,” Cass said. “I saved it. I listen to it sometimes.”

He looked at her. She was not suspicious. She was not testing him. She was showing him a thing she treasured — a four-minute phone call from her father on her birthday, a call in which he had been present and warm and interested, a call she had saved because it was evidence that he loved her.

“I’m glad you called,” he said, which was the truest thing he could say that was not the truth.

“You sounded different. Like, relaxed? You’re usually so — I don’t know. Somewhere else.”

He picked up his coffee. The mug was warm and had a chip on the rim that his lip found automatically, a flaw the diner had decided was not worth replacing. His daughter was smiling at him across the table because his body had been kind to her in his absence and she could not tell the difference, and the not-telling was either a testament to the quality of the behavioral loop or an indictment of every conversation they’d had when he was actually present.

“It was a good day,” he said.

“It was. Thanks, Dad.”

He did not ask her to play it again. He did not want to hear his own voice performing the tenderness he had not been there to feel. He especially did not want to hear it do a better job than he usually did.

They ate. The grilled cheese came in quarters, the crusts attended to first, a ritual older than the device, older than the divorce, old enough to be foundational. Outside, the snow continued with the commitment of weather that has nowhere else to be.

He drove her to the highway entrance and she hugged him through the car window and the snow was in her hair and he was there for this — actually there, not inside, not on loop, his arms around his daughter in December — and the being-there felt like a choice in a way it never had before, because now it was. Presence was no longer a default. It was something he had to decide to do, the way you decide to leave the lights on in a room you could just as easily darken.

He drove back to the apartment. The snow was general over the parking lot and the practice fields and the roof of Whitfield Hall where the device sat in his locked office waiting with the patience of a thing that did not need him but that he needed, and he sat in the car for a while with the engine running, not going in, not going up, not reaching for anything, just sitting in the particular silence of a car in snow, which is the most private room in the world, and he thought about his voice saying happy birthday, sweetheart in a tone that his daughter had saved because it was the best version of him she had heard in years, and the best version had been empty, and the empty version had been kind, and he sat with it the way he sat with everything — alone, in a room, until it became something he could file.

The engine ticked as it cooled, and the snow kept falling, and after a while he went inside.

Chapter Five

The hardware partners arrived in January of 2030 — three engineers from a firm in Shenzhen that specialized in medical-grade miniaturization and that had signed an NDA so comprehensive it read less like a legal document than like a threat wearing a suit. They were good. They were fast. They were, by any measure Elliot could apply, the best people in the world at making small things smaller.

They could not understand how he worked.

The designs arrived fully formed. Electrode geometries that should have taken months of simulation appeared overnight, optimized to tolerances that the engineers’ own modeling software confirmed but could not have generated. Material specifications — the titanium-aluminum alloy, the electrode substrate, the housing dimensions — were precise to the point of seeming measured from a finished product that did not yet exist. The engineers asked for his simulation logs. He told them the work was done on a proprietary system. They asked for the proprietary system’s specs. He told them the system was not yet ready for external review. They asked how one person, at a university whose engineering department ranked forty-seventh nationally, was producing designs that outperformed anything they’d seen from teams of thirty.

He told them he worked long hours.

The Band took fourteen months. Elliot designed it inside the inner lab across what amounted to a subjective year of focused industrial design — a discipline he had never formally studied and had mastered by the simple expedient of having enough time to read everything ever written about it. The engineers built it in their facility in Shenzhen, iterating on his designs with a speed and precision that earned his respect and, occasionally, his irritation when they questioned specifications they couldn’t yet verify. The finished device was 88 millimeters of arc, 11 millimeters wide, 34 grams. Brushed titanium-aluminum. It sat flush to the temple, curving just above the ear, a single embossed line where a logo might have been. Three colorways: Bone, Slate, Onyx. It looked expensive. It looked like it could be anything — a hearing aid, a fitness tracker, a piece of jewelry designed by someone who believed jewelry should be silent.

It looked nothing like the thing under his desk in the cardboard box. It looked like a product. This was the point, and it was also the part he liked least.

The MERIDIAN-B2 launched in April of 2031 in fourteen countries, with a retail price that placed it between a high-end smartphone and a medical device, which is to say: in the range where people spent money on things they believed would change their lives. The marketing — handled by a firm Elliot had been introduced to by the university’s technology transfer office, a department he had not previously known existed — positioned the Band as a productivity and wellness tool. The launch tagline was More Hours in Your Day. Elliot had suggested More Time. The firm explained that time was abstract and hours were actionable and that your day grounded the benefit in the consumer’s existing framework of need. Elliot listened to this explanation in a conference room with a glass wall and a view of a parking garage and decided that the marketing firm was correct and that he would never forgive them for it.

There had been a junior copywriter at that meeting, the youngest person at the table, a woman who took notes in a leather notebook and did not speak once. When Elliot said More Time, she wrote something down and underlined it. He did not register her — or rather he registered her the way he registered the carafe and the view of the parking garage, as furniture of a room he wanted to leave. He would not remember her face. She went home that evening and read three of his papers in a row.

The device sold. Not explosively — there was no viral moment, no celebrity endorsement, no launch-day queue. It sold the way good tools sell: steadily, through word of mouth, adopted first by the kind of people who read productivity blogs and optimized their sleep and used the word leverage as a verb. These people bought the Band for the time dilation and used it to work more. They loved it. They wrote reviews that described it as “a game-changer for deep focus work” and “like having a second workday inside the first one” and, in one review that Elliot read three times, “the closest thing to cheating at life without actually cheating.” None of the reviews mentioned the inner lab. None of them mentioned the library, or the whiteboard, or the slow elaboration of a personal space that the device maintained between sessions, growing more detailed and more specific with use. They described the dilation. They described the productivity. They described the Band the way you’d describe a hammer if you’d only ever used it to hang one picture.

The first mainstream press hit came in June. A technology journalist for a national outlet — young, earnest, wearing an expression that Elliot’s nascent micro-expression prototype would later have categorized as professionally enthusiastic with underlying deadline anxiety — interviewed him in his office at Whitfield Hall. The journalist sat in the chair that students never used and asked questions that circled the device without landing on it. How did it work? Neural entrainment and temporal perception modulation, Elliot said. What did it feel like? Like having enough time, Elliot said. The journalist wrote this down and did not ask the follow-up question, which would have been: enough time for what?

The article ran under the headline The Device That Gives You More Hours in Your Day. The mechanism was not accurately described. Elliot read the article in his office, at his desk, with the Band on, inside the library, and the article existed in both places — on his laptop screen outside and on an internet panel inside, the same words rendered in two realities simultaneously, inaccurate in both.

The micro-expression reader begins as a research question and becomes a personal failing in the space of about six weeks.

The question is simple: the eye-feed — the real-time visual stream from my eyes, rendered inside the lab as a slow-motion window on the outside world — carries enough facial data to run inference. Forty-three action units in the human face. Duchenne markers. Asymmetry signatures. Micro-expressions that last forty to two hundred milliseconds, too fast for conscious perception, not too fast for a system running at 180:1 dilation with nothing else to do. The device can see what people’s faces do between the expressions they intend.

I build the reader in three subjective days. The ML model trains on Ekman’s database, which I’ve read, and on a dataset of my own interactions, which the eye-feed has been recording since I enabled it. The overlay is clean — small annotations in the peripheral field, color-coded, unobtrusive. Green for congruent: the face is doing what the words suggest. Amber for partial: the face is doing something adjacent, a neighbor emotion, close but not the one being performed. Red for divergent: the face is lying.

I test it on the first person I see after enabling it: a graduate student who stops me in the hallway to ask about a deadline extension. His face says concern. His mouth says he’s been ill. The reader annotates: the concern is genuine but the illness is not the reason. There is something in the left orbicularis that suggests he knows I’ll say yes and is performing the request as a courtesy to a social contract he doesn’t think I care about. He’s right. I don’t care about the deadline. I do care that his face just told me something he didn’t choose to share.

I say yes. He leaves. I stand in the hallway and think about what I’ve built.

The reader is not a lie detector. It is a sincerity meter. It measures the distance between the face someone is wearing and the face they’d wear if no one were watching. Everyone has a distance. I knew this. I did not know the distances would be so specific, so legible, so continuous. Every face I look at is now two faces — the composed one and the one underneath, annotated in my peripheral vision like subtitles in a language I never asked to learn.

He used it for six weeks before using it on Miriam.

This was not restraint. It was the particular cowardice of a man who builds an instrument capable of showing him what his ex-wife actually feels when she sees him and then finds reasons not to look. He used it on colleagues — a department meeting in which the chair’s face performed enthusiasm for a curriculum revision while the reader annotated exhaustion, resignation, and a micro-expression the model tagged as contempt-suppressed that lasted eighty milliseconds and that Elliot would never be able to un-see. He used it on students, on the barista at the campus coffee shop, on the hardware partners during a video call in which their faces said partnership and the reader said leverage assessment. He used it on everyone who did not matter enough to be dangerous, and the data accumulated, and the data was always the same: everyone was performing, all the time, and the performances were adequate and the distances were universal and the only people whose faces were fully congruent were children under five and one very old professor emeritus who had apparently reached an age at which pretending was no longer calorically viable.

Then Cass called to say she was bringing Miriam to the holiday dinner.

“We talked about it,” Cass said, on the phone, her voice carrying the particular care of a daughter managing parents who had stopped managing each other. “She said she’d come if you were okay with it.”

“I’m okay with it.”

“Are you actually okay with it?”

“I said I was.”

“Dad. Those are different things and you know it.”

He was in his office. The Band was on, at shallow dilation, the reader active. Cass was on the phone, not on camera, so the reader had nothing to annotate. Her voice, though — the reader couldn’t process voice, but Elliot could, and her voice was doing the thing it did when she was being careful with him, a tonal quality he didn’t need a machine to decode.

“Tell her I’d like that,” he said. And meant it. And was surprised to mean it.

The restaurant was Miriam’s choice — a place on University Avenue that hadn’t existed when they were married, which was perhaps the point. New ground. Neutral territory. The tables were small and the lighting was the kind that restaurants use when they want you to feel like you’re in a European film about people who have complicated feelings over good food.

Elliot arrived first. He sat at the table with a glass of water and the reader active at shallow dilation and his hands flat on the tablecloth because they wanted to do something and he would not let them.

Miriam came in with Cass. She looked the way she looked — not older, not unchanged, but specifically herself in a way that resisted the kind of comparative assessment he was inclined to make. Her coat was new. Her hair was shorter. She moved through the restaurant with the unhurried competence of a woman who had been navigating rooms without him for eight years and had gotten better at it.

“Elliot,” she said. Not warm, not cold. Calibrated. The reader annotated: congruent. She meant exactly what her face showed, which was a composed, civil willingness to be in this room with this person for the duration of a meal. No more. No less. The absence of hidden feeling was, the reader confirmed, not a performance. She was simply done, in the way that a book is done — not abandoned, not unfinished, but complete, every page read, the cover closed, the spine facing out on a shelf in a room she no longer visited.

“You look well,” she said.

He did look well. The somatic interface had seen to that — his body exercised daily, his posture was corrected, his sleep architecture was optimized. He looked like a man ten years younger who took excellent care of himself, which was accurate in every respect except the himself part.

“So do you,” he said. The reader annotated her micro-response to the compliment: a brief, genuine pleasure, followed immediately by a suppression that wasn’t quite fast enough to hide. She was glad he’d said it. She wished she weren’t glad. The reader showed him both feelings in green and amber, layered, simultaneous, and he thought: I should not be seeing this. This is hers. This tiny, private negotiation between being glad and wishing she weren’t — this belongs to her, and I am reading it the way I read a page in the library, as though it were there for my benefit, as though her face were a text I had the right to annotate.

He turned the reader off.

It was the first time he’d done that. The world went flat — not dark, not diminished, but suddenly single-layered. Miriam’s face became just her face, unannotated, carrying whatever it carried without translation. Cass sat between them, talking about work, about the neighborhood, about a colleague’s wedding. The conversation was ordinary. The food was good. Miriam laughed at something Cass said and the laugh was just a laugh, unanalyzed, and Elliot sat with the strange, clean discomfort of not knowing what it meant.

Dinner lasted an hour and forty minutes. He did not turn the reader back on.

Walking to the car afterward, Cass a few steps ahead, Miriam fell into pace beside him. They walked half a block without speaking. The snow had not started yet but the air had the compressed, waiting quality that preceded it.

“The device,” Miriam said. Not a question.

“What about it?”

“Cass says it’s doing well.”

“It’s doing well.”

She walked another few steps. “I don’t want to try it,” she said. “I want you to know that I’ve thought about it and I don’t want to.”

“Okay.”

“Not because of you. Because of me. I don’t want to know what I’d do with that much time alone with myself.”

He looked at her. Without the reader, her face was just her face. Whatever it was doing, he would have to guess, the way people had always guessed, the way everyone guessed before he built a machine that made guessing unnecessary and intimacy impossible.

“That might be the wisest thing anyone’s said about it,” he said.

She almost smiled. He couldn’t tell if the almost was a suppression or just the natural limit of the expression, and for the first time in months, not knowing felt like the right way to see someone.

Cass came back for them. The three of them stood on the sidewalk, the air waiting to snow, and for a moment they looked like what they had been — a family, imperfect and specific, standing in the cold outside a restaurant, not performing anything for anyone, just there.

Then the moment passed, the way moments do when no device is slowing them down, and Miriam said goodnight, and Cass said she’d call tomorrow, and Elliot walked to his car alone, the reader off, the world flat and single-layered and ordinary, and he drove home through streets that were just streets, and the apartment was just the apartment, and the ibuprofen was still on the counter where he’d left it three years ago, and he stood in the kitchen in the dark and did not reach for the device.

Not tonight. Tonight, he would let the world be one thing at a time.

Chapter Six

The proposal came from the fitness division of a gym chain based in Denver — thirty-eight locations, a clientele that took body composition seriously and that had discovered the Band’s time dilation was, among other things, an excellent way to make a forty-five-minute stationary bike session feel like four minutes. Their head of training, a woman named Dana Reeves who had the build of someone who tested her own programs and the vocabulary of someone who had read the research, sent Elliot a seven-page email that amounted to a single question: what if the body could do the workout without the mind in the room?

He read the email in his office. He read it again in the library, slowly, an idea he had lived with privately for five years now arriving from the outside in someone else’s words. His body had been running, lifting, stretching under somatic control since 2027. He had logged over a thousand programmed workouts, each one executed while he read or worked or sat on the bench thinking about something that was not his quadriceps. The idea was not new. The idea was his mornings. What was new was someone else asking for it.

He wrote back the same day: Yes. With constraints.

The constraints were his. He spent three subjective weeks designing them, and when the certification program launched in March of 2032, every limitation bore the mark of a man who understood exactly what an unsupervised body could do because he had been the unsupervised body.

Certified facilities only. The gym had to meet equipment, spacing, and monitoring standards that Elliot specified down to the square footage per active user and the minimum sight lines for floor staff. Approved trainers, each one completing a forty-hour course that taught them to read the Band’s external indicators — a subtle light pattern on the device that communicated session depth, somatic engagement, and physiological status. Pre-programmed workouts only, designed by certified trainers using a protocol builder that Elliot had written inside the lab and that restricted movement sequences to patterns the user’s body had physically performed at least once under conscious control. No novel movements. No loads the body hadn’t handled before. The somatic interface could replay what the body knew. It could not teach the body something new.

The session cap was thirty minutes of real time. The user went inside — into whatever their inner lab had become, a workspace, a reading room, a place to sit and think — and the body executed the workout. Heart rate, breathing, form correction: all managed by the device. The trainer watched. The Band’s indicators watched. If anything deviated beyond parameters, the session ended and the user surfaced.

It was, by any measure, the most carefully constrained consumer fitness product ever released. It was also, by any measure, the strangest thing most people had ever seen in a gym.

The first press hit came from a fitness journalist who tried the program at a certified location in Boulder. The article opened with a line that Elliot would see quoted, misquoted, and screen-printed on gym walls for the next two years: I did a full leg day and read three chapters of a novel. My quads are sore. My mind is rested.

The fitness community responded the way fitness communities respond to things that work: with evangelical intensity. Within four months, the certification waiting list had twelve hundred gyms. Within six, the program had its own hashtag, its own subculture, its own arguments about whether autopilot training counted as “real” lifting. The bodybuilding forums split into factions. The CrossFit communities were skeptical and then curious and then competitive about who could program the most punishing autopilot WOD. The yoga community rejected it unanimously, on the grounds that presence was the practice, which Elliot considered the most philosophically coherent response anyone had offered and which he respected without agreeing.

He watched the adoption from his office, from the library, from the particular distance of a man who had been doing this alone for five years and who was now watching the world discover it with the breathless enthusiasm of tourists arriving at a landmark where he had been living quietly, without a guide, in a room they couldn’t see.

He was glad. This was the part that surprised him. Not the adoption, not the press, not the gym chains competing for certification slots — the gladness. He had built the somatic interface for himself, the way he had built everything for himself, and watching it help strangers was a feeling he had not anticipated and did not have a name for. A woman in Phoenix with rheumatoid arthritis posted a video of her body completing a physical therapy routine while she rested inside, and she was crying when she surfaced, not from pain but from the absence of pain, and Elliot watched the video in his office and sat very still afterward, which was his response to most things, but this time the stillness was not avoidance. It was something closer to gratitude, a word he used so rarely it felt borrowed.

Priya’s email arrived in September.

Not to him directly. She’d published a study registration in a neuroscience preprint server — a prospective cohort study on attentional development in adolescent Meridian users, IRB-approved through her own institution, no co-investigators, no collaboration request. She had not contacted Elliot before beginning. He found out the way he found out about most things in his field: through an automated journal alert, the subject line indistinguishable from the dozens of other alerts that arrived each week and that he read inside the lab with the detachment of a man reading weather reports for cities he did not live in.

This one he did not read with detachment.

He read it at his desk, without the Band, the screen bright in the late afternoon light, and the reading was slow in the way that reading is slow when you are not dilated and the words are arriving at the speed of actual thought, which is to say: with friction. Priya’s methodology was rigorous. The study design was clean. The population was fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds who had been using the Band for at least six months, with matched controls, longitudinal follow-up, attentional and socioemotional outcome measures. It was, he recognized, the study he should have designed and had not, because the question it was asking — what does time dilation do to a developing brain? — was one he had been avoiding with the diligence of a man who knows the answer might be the one he doesn’t want.

He called her.

The phone rang three times. She picked up with the particular silence of a person who has seen the caller ID and is deciding how to hold their voice.

“Elliot.”

“I saw the registration.”

“I assumed you would.”

A pause. He could hear an office behind her — the ambient sound of a space that contained other people, colleagues, activity, the noise of a professional life conducted in public rather than in a locked room on the third floor of a building that emptied at four-thirty.

“You didn’t call first,” he said.

“No.”

“Can I ask why?”

“Because you would have had an opinion, and your opinion would have been informed by things you know and haven’t published, and I would have had to decide whether to let your unpublished knowledge shape a study that needs to be independent. So I didn’t call. It wasn’t personal.”

“It’s a little personal.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is a little personal. But the study isn’t.”

He sat in his office and listened to the sound of her breathing and the sound of her institution behind her and thought about the last time they’d spoken, which was three years ago, at a conference in San Diego, in a hallway, a conversation that had lasted four minutes and had contained, in those four minutes, more candor than most of his relationships managed in a year. She had told him his work was brilliant and his ethics were situational. He had told her she was right. They had not spoken since.

“The data,” he said. “When you have preliminary results. Will you tell me?”

“Do you want to know?”

“I don’t know.”

She laughed. The laugh was brief and real and carried the specific warmth of a person who has known you long enough to find your failures endearing rather than contemptible, a warmth that is itself a kind of judgment.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “When I have something. You won’t like it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Elliot. I know that.”

She was right. He knew she was right. They said goodbye with the formal care of two people who respected each other enough to maintain the distance that the respect required, and he hung up and sat in his office and looked at the parking lot and the practice fields and the limestone face of Whitfield Hall, which had not changed, which would never change, and he thought about fourteen-year-olds in inner labs and what their brains were doing in there and whether the question was one he’d been avoiding and whether avoidance, at this scale, was a form of negligence he could live with.

He could. He always had. This was not a comfort.

The session arrived on his calendar the week after Priya’s email. Media training, downtown, ninety minutes — one of those things you can do in your sleep, Elliot, with our compliments was the subject line, a phrasing he recognized as marketing-team and let go without correction. He had meant to loop it. The loop was queued; the library was waiting. But the morning was clear, and the drive downtown was the first time in months he had gone anywhere that was not the office or the apartment, and somewhere on the expressway he decided, without quite deciding, to stay for it. He arrived at nine-fifteen on a Friday in late October in his own body, awake, which was rare enough that he caught himself noticing he was doing it.

The conference room was on the eleventh floor, windows on two sides. The trainer was a man named Dale who had worked with three CEOs and two senators and used both facts in his introduction. There was coffee in a carafe and fruit on a tray, and beside the tray sat a woman with a leather notebook and a Band at her left temple, who stood when he came in and offered her hand.

“Vickie Halloran. Communications.”

“Elliot Voss.”

“I know.”

She was wearing a green sweater the color of a kitchen plant. She sat. He sat across from her. Dale began the agenda — twenty minutes on framing, fifteen on bridging, fifteen on hostile reframes, ten on what Dale called the hand thing.

He had expected to be bored, the way he was bored in all rooms that wanted things from him. But the woman with the notebook was not taking notes the way people took notes in these rooms. Her pen did not move when Dale spoke. It moved when Elliot answered, fast, and it stopped at the exact places where he had said something he only half-meant — the small evasions he used to get through these questions, the bridges to safer ground. She was not recording the training. She was recording him.

By the second segment Dale was running a hostile question about the Band’s session caps — the soft advisory Elliot had built in and that no one enforced — and Elliot said the question was the wrong question, which was his standard move, and the woman wrote something down and underlined it.

“What did you just write,” he said.

“You’ll see what I send you. I’m keeping that one.”

He had not expected to laugh. He laughed.

At forty minutes Dale offered a break. Vickie told him she had five minutes of questions separate from the training, if he didn’t mind. Dale didn’t mind. Dale stepped out, and the room was the two of them, and the afternoon light had moved across the fruit tray and onto the carpet.

“You’re not bad on camera,” she said. “You’re just visibly somewhere else, which reads as evasion. That’s fixable. It is not, I’ve decided, your actual problem.”

“What’s my actual problem.”

“You answer the question you wish you’d been asked. Every time. It means you left the room before the sentence ended.”

He looked at her. The briefing materials communications sent him — he had assumed they came from some committee — were precise to the point of coldness, every sentence load-bearing, nothing spent, the prose of someone he had pictured as institutional and probably unkind. The woman across the table was warmer than the prose by an order of magnitude. She was quick and a little merciless and she laughed at her own lines a half-second before he did, and he found that he wanted to keep talking to her, which was not a thing he often found.

“There’s a place across the street,” she said. “The coffee here is a war crime. We have an hour before Dale wants us back.”

“We have an hour.”

“We do.”

They left the notebook on the table and walked through the lobby and across the street to a coffee shop with music loud enough that speech did not have to compete, and they ordered, and they sat at a table by the window, and they talked for ninety minutes. Dale called at the eighty-minute mark. She did not answer.

“He’ll charge for the second half,” Elliot said.

“He’ll charge the company. He’s already paid.”

They scheduled a follow-up. He put it in his own calendar — coffee, V. Halloran, Thurs — a thing he did so seldom that typing it felt faintly illicit, like passing a note in a class he had stopped attending years ago. They rode the elevator down together. She got off on six. He went up to eleven and finished the training with Dale, who had been waiting, and he cooperated, and the whole time some part of him was still at the table across the street.

He drove home that evening in his own body. He remembered the drive — the merge, the light at the interchange, the particular orange the sky goes in late October over the soybean fields east of town. He had not remembered a drive in two years. It did not occur to him to wonder why a woman who wrote like a closed door talked like an open one.

She found the note Saturday morning at the kitchen table. The autopilot left her things this way: one-line entries in the calendar’s loop-log, low-stakes, the way other people left themselves Post-its. Coffee with R, 2pm — bring the manuscript marked-up. Tell the dentist about the molar. They moved the lobby plants.

This one was two words:

liked him.

She had been inside Friday, working on the book, surfacing only twice. The body had been at a media-training session for Dr. Elliot Voss — whose papers she had been reading on and off for four years and whose press appearances she had been quietly drafting for the last nine months. She had prepared his briefing materials herself. She had watched footage of his hands on a video monitor for the better part of a morning, and the hands had moved the way hands move when their owner is composing a sentence inside a room no one can see.

She underlined the entry. Then again, harder, until the cursor stopped responding because she had selected the words instead of marking them.

She did not delete it.

She made a second coffee. On Thursday at two her calendar showed check-in re media prep, EV. She knew what it was for.

The first time she met him on purpose, conscious, was in February.

She told herself it was research. She had been reading the man for years and ghosting him for most of two, and she had never once been in a room with him awake. Her autopilot had — on Thursdays, since October, a standing her autopilot kept and logged in single underlined words Vickie did not always read. The logs had accumulated into something she could not account for: a warmth in the loop-record that did not match the cold, careful man she had built out of footage and papers. She decided to meet him herself, awake, and find out which version was the mistake.

She booked it. She surfaced for it. She wore the green sweater, which she told herself meant nothing.

He was already at the table by the window when she came in, and he stood when he saw her, and the standing was the first thing that did not fit. The Elliot Voss she had assembled did not stand for people. He answered questions he wished he’d been asked; he left rooms before the sentence ended. The man at the table did neither. He asked how the drive in had been and then listened to the answer — actually listened, his whole face pointed at her, nothing held in reserve — and she had come to study him and found, twenty minutes in, that she had stopped, because she was enjoying herself, which she did at work approximately never and was doing now without effort.

It was on the walk to her car that it surfaced. The warmth had been seamless. The attention had been total and untiring in the way that real attention is not, because real attention costs the person paying it, and she had watched his cost him nothing for two hours. She had spent two and a half years building a version of herself that was exactly this easy to be around. She knew what it looked like from the inside.

She was fairly sure, by the time she reached the car, that she knew what it looked like from across a table.

She did not say anything. She scheduled the second coffee herself, conscious, on a Tuesday, and went to it already knowing, and went anyway.

The pain management wave arrived in 2033 like weather — not announced, not scheduled, impossible to ignore once it began.

It started in the chronic pain forums. Fibromyalgia communities. Neuropathy support groups. Online spaces where people who had been in pain for years — years, not months, not the polite durations that clinical trials measured — shared what they had found. The Meridian’s pain editing was not a clinical feature. It was not approved for medical use. It was a consumer capability buried in the somatic interface settings, described in the user manual in the language of “personal comfort profiles,” a phrasing that Elliot’s legal advisors had chosen and that patients had seen through in approximately four seconds.

The posts were not reviews. They were testimonials in the original sense — people bearing witness. A woman in Tucson who had not slept through the night in seven years slept through the night. A man in Glasgow who had stopped picking up his daughter because the nerve pain in his arms made the weight unbearable picked up his daughter. A teenager in Seoul who had missed two years of school to a pain condition Elliot could not pronounce returned to school. They posted and others read and others bought the Band and tried the pain editing and posted in turn, and the wave built the way waves build — not from the center, not from marketing or press, but from the edges, from the people for whom the technology was not a productivity tool or a fitness gadget but the first thing that had worked.

Elliot read the posts. He read them in his office, at his desk, without the Band, at the speed of actual human reading, and he did not go inside. He read them the way he had read the Damasio — carefully, with full attention, granting the words the time they took.

He had built the pain editor for his back. A Tuesday morning, a disc with opinions, a decade of negotiation ended with a button. He had built it for himself, and now strangers were waking up without pain for the first time in years, and the strangers were weeping, and he sat in his office in the late afternoon light reading their words and feeling something he was not inclined to name but that lived in the same region as the gladness from the gym videos, larger now, less surprising, steadier, a feeling that suggested he had, despite everything, made something that was unambiguously good.

This was the Meridian’s clearest moral achievement. He held onto it. He would need it later.

Marcus Leigh arrived in June of 2034 in a car that cost more than Elliot’s annual salary and with a handshake that communicated, in order, warmth and then assessment and then the friendliness of a man who had already decided what he wanted and was performing the discovery.

They met at a restaurant in Chicago — Marcus’s choice, the kind of place that didn’t have prices on the menu because the prices were a conversation the restaurant preferred to have with your credit card in private. Elliot wore the jacket he wore to department events. Marcus wore something that looked like it had been manufactured specifically for his body, which it probably had.

“I’ve been using the Band for six months,” Marcus said, before the appetizers arrived. “I want you to know I’m not coming at this cold.”

“What do you use it for?”

“Work, mostly. I run three funds. The dilation is —” He paused, searching for a word that would communicate his experience without understating it. “It’s a competitive advantage that shouldn’t exist.”

“That’s one way to describe it.”

“What’s your way?”

Elliot considered this. The waiter brought bread. The bread sat on the table with the quiet confidence of bread that knew it was very good bread.

“I built it because I wanted more time to think,” Elliot said. “I wasn’t thinking about competitive advantage.”

“I know you weren’t. That’s what makes it interesting. The best competitive advantages are always built by people who weren’t thinking about competition.”

Marcus smiled. The smile was genuine — Elliot had the reader off, but he didn’t need it; Marcus’s face was one of those rare faces that performed exactly what it felt, not because he was honest but because he had the resources to afford transparency. Rich enough to be sincere. It was a luxury Elliot recognized and did not begrudge.

“What are you proposing?” Elliot said.

“Acquisition. Full. Your team, your technology, your roadmap. You stay on as chief scientific advisor. We bring the resources to scale.”

“What does scale mean?”

“It means everyone who needs this gets it. Not just the people who can afford the current price point.”

“That’s a good answer.”

“It’s also true.” Marcus leaned forward. “The pain management numbers are extraordinary. The gym program is extraordinary. You’ve built something that genuinely helps people, Elliot. You’ve also built it on a university infrastructure that can’t support what it’s becoming. You need manufacturing at scale. You need regulatory teams. You need distribution in ninety countries. You need things that you can’t build in a lab, no matter how much time you have in there.”

This was the sharpest thing Marcus said all evening, and Elliot recognized it as such: no matter how much time you have in there. Marcus understood the device. Not completely — no one understood it completely except the man who had lived inside it for a decade of subjective time — but enough to know that Elliot’s advantage had limits, and the limits were not intellectual but institutional.

“I’ll think about it,” Elliot said.

“Take your time.” Marcus smiled again. “You have more of it than anyone.”

The check came. Marcus paid it the way weather happens — automatically, without discussion, as a natural consequence of the environment. They shook hands in the parking lot. Marcus’s car waited at the curb, black and silent and expensive, and Marcus got into it and left, and Elliot stood on the sidewalk in the June evening and thought about scale and about ninety countries and about the word everyone and about whether the man who had just bought him dinner was right that the Meridian deserved to be everywhere and whether deserving to be everywhere was the same thing as needing to be.

He drove home. The highway was the highway. The apartment was the apartment. The ibuprofen was still on the counter.

In October, alone in the inner lab, he found the pathway by accident.

I am not looking for this. I want that noted, for whatever record this constitutes, in whatever court might someday care: I am not looking for this.

I am working on the next-generation somatic architecture — deeper integration, finer motor control, the specifications that will become Gen 3 in someone else’s hands if Marcus’s acquisition goes through. The emotional regulation systems are part of the somatic layer. They have always been part of the somatic layer, the way temperature regulation and hormone cycling and sleep architecture are part of it — autonomic processes that the device monitors and, in theory, can modulate. I have not modulated them. I have not tried. The somatic interface manages the body’s mechanics. The emotions are not mechanics. The emotions are — I don’t have a word for what the emotions are. They are the weather inside the building. They are the part of the somatic layer that I have chosen not to touch because touching it felt like a different category of intervention, the way a locksmith might pick a lock but not read the diary inside.

But I am mapping the architecture, and the architecture includes the pathways, and the pathways are there, and I can see them, and I notice — I notice, I do not seek — that the pathway for what I have been feeling lately, the feeling that arrives in the evenings when the library is quiet and the work is done and there is nothing left to do but sit on the bench and be a person who is alone in a room that no one else has ever visited — that feeling has a signature. It has a neural address. It can be located the way the back pain could be located, and the locating implies the possibility of editing, and I sit on the bench and look at the address and I do not name the feeling. I do not call it grief. I do not call it loneliness. I note that the pathway exists. I note that it could be suppressed.

I do not suppress it. Not tonight.

I sit with it instead. The feeling fills the library the way the light fills the library — from everywhere, from no source, diffuse and constant. The books are around me. The Middlemarch is on its shelf. The Damasio. The Merleau-Ponty. Every book I have ever held, rendered in cloth and paper and glue, and none of them are company. They are evidence of a life spent reading about experience rather than having it, and the evidence is organized and shelved and beautiful and I am alone with it, and the feeling I am not naming is the feeling of being alone with evidence.

I could turn it off. The pathway is right there. One suppression profile, no different from the back, no different from the paper cut, and the evenings would be — what? Neutral? Productive? Free of the particular weight that settles when the work is done and the room is just a room and I am just a man who built a place to hide in and has been hiding so effectively that no one has come looking?

I note that it works. I built a test profile. Brief, reversible, a ten-minute suppression window. The feeling receded the way the back pain receded — not vanishing but withdrawing, the tide going out, and what remained was not happiness but the absence of the thing that was not happiness, a clean and empty surface where the feeling had been, and the surface was comfortable the way a freshly made bed is comfortable, and I lay on it for ten minutes and thought about nothing and the nothing was exquisite.

Then the window closed and the feeling returned and the return was like stepping from an air-conditioned building into August, the sudden re-encounter with a temperature you had forgotten was the actual temperature, and I sat on the bench and breathed and knew that I would use it again and knew that the using would be a different kind of hiding than the inner lab had been, a hiding not from the world but from myself, and I did not publish this, and I did not tell anyone, and I added the pathway to the personal notebook in the desk drawer, the document no one would read, and I wrote: It works.

I did not write what it cost to find out.

November arrived. The acquisition conversations continued. Marcus sent proposals. Elliot read them inside the lab, where the legal language looked no better than it did outside. The terms were generous. The constraints were real. Chief Scientific Advisor — a title with weight and no authority, the academic equivalent of a corner office with a view and no door.

He had not decided. The ibuprofen was still on the counter. The apartment was still temporary. The library was still the most beautiful room he had ever been in, and he had built it, and it was his, and the question Marcus was really asking was not whether Elliot wanted to sell the company but whether he was willing to let the most intimate thing he had ever made become a product that belonged to everyone.

The answer, he suspected, was the same answer he’d been giving all along: yes, with constraints. The constraints were always his. The question was whether they would survive contact with a world that did not understand them and a man who understood them but did not consider them permanent.

He sat in his office. The parking lot. The practice fields. The limestone. The masking tape on the monitor, curling at both corners now, the quote barely legible: The present moment always will have been.

He pressed the tape back down, and it lifted again at the corner before he had turned away.

Chapter Seven

The acquisition closed on a Tuesday in February. Elliot signed the documents in a conference room on the forty-second floor of a building in Chicago that offered a view of the lake, which was frozen, and of the city, which was not, and of the distance between the two, which was the kind of thing he would have thought about inside the lab but which here, in this room, with these people, was just weather.

Marcus shook his hand. The lawyers shook his hand. A woman from the communications team whose name he immediately forgot shook his hand and told him she was thrilled, a word she used the way you’d use a wrench — functional, applied with force, not inspected afterward.

Chief Scientific Advisor. The title was printed on a card they gave him before he left the building. The card was heavy stock, embossed, the kind of card that communicated permanence. The title meant he would be consulted and not obeyed, informed and not asked, credited and not responsible. It was, in the taxonomy of corporate roles, a window seat. A good view. No controls.

He drove home with the card in his jacket pocket and the lake behind him and the contract signed and the most intimate thing he had ever built now belonging to a company whose name he’d had no part in choosing. The company was called Meridian Labs. Marcus had suggested it. Elliot had not objected, because the name was accurate and because objecting would have required him to articulate what he would have preferred, and what he would have preferred was for the device to remain unnamed, uncorporated, his.

The apartment was the apartment. The ibuprofen was gone — he’d finally thrown it out in January, six years after the pain edit, a delay that said more about him than the pain edit itself.

The Gen 3 spec sheet arrived in his inbox in March, marked confidential, from a team he had not assembled, working in a facility he had not visited, building a device he had not designed.

He read it in his office. He did not go inside to read it. He wanted to see it at the speed of actual time, with the friction of actual comprehension, because the friction was part of the understanding and because what he was understanding required all the attention he had.

The Patch. Twenty-three millimeters. Behind the ear. Nearly invisible. No session cap.

He read that line twice. No session cap. The Band had shipped with a twenty-minute advisory — soft, unenforced, a suggestion Elliot had included because he believed, without data, that sessions should have edges. Marcus’s team had removed the edge. The advisory was gone. You could stay in as long as you wanted, which meant as long as the device could sustain dilation, which meant indefinitely, which meant the inner lab was no longer a place you visited. It was a place you could live.

Behavioral loop onboarding: fifteen minutes. He’d designed the original calibration as a two-week process — fourteen days of the device learning your motor patterns, your vocal rhythms, your gestural vocabulary. Two weeks of the device watching you be yourself so it could replicate you faithfully. Marcus’s team had compressed two weeks into fifteen minutes. The fidelity was, according to the technical notes, comparable. Elliot did not believe this and could not prove otherwise.

He scrolled to the shared lab specification and stopped.

Device-to-device. A contact port on the lateral edge of the Patch — six millimeters of exposed copper-ceramic composite. Two devices pressed together, contact pad to contact pad. No wireless. No pairing protocol. Metal to metal, straight to the neural processing chip. The natural geometry was temple to temple: two people facing each other, pressing devices flush. It looked like touching foreheads. It could not happen accidentally. It could not happen at distance.

The shared environment was negotiated from both users’ inner labs — a composite space, the architecture blended, the boundaries between one person’s constructed world and another’s dissolved into something neither had built alone.

Elliot sat with this for a long time.

The Gen 3 team’s notes described the contact port requirement as a hardware limitation. The wireless transmission bandwidth was insufficient for the data rates required by shared dilation. Physical contact was a workaround. They were already exploring near-field solutions for Gen 4.

Elliot read the notes and understood that the hardware limitation was the most important ethical constraint in the device’s history, and that the team who’d built it considered it a problem to be solved.

You had to choose to touch someone. You had to face them. You had to press your device against theirs in a gesture that was deliberate and mutual and visible and that could not be performed without both people knowing exactly what they were doing. Every shared session was a physical act of consent.

He wrote a single note in the margin of the spec sheet: Don’t fix this.

He did not know if anyone would read it. He was Chief Scientific Advisor. The margins were his jurisdiction.

They asked him to give a talk.

The request came from the communications team — the same team, the same woman whose name he still could not remember, a failure of attention he had stopped apologizing for. The occasion was a technology conference in San Francisco, November, the kind of event where companies announced products and called them visions. Marcus wanted Elliot on stage. The inventor. The scientist. The face of the thing the company was selling.

Elliot did not want to give a talk. He gave a talk.

The draft came from comms — clean, quotable, three movements, the kind of thing that would have been fine. He read it once and could not give it as written. Not because it was bad. Because it was good in a way that pointed the wrong direction: it sold the thing he had built as a thing worth buying, and the selling was so well made that it had disguised itself as a plea.

So he took it inside, into the library, and sat on the floor between the Damasio and the Merleau-Ponty with a legal pad conjured from memory, yellow, lined, the pencil leaving graphite on the side of his hand, and he worked it over. He kept the structure — he could not have said why it was so exactly right, only that it was, that whoever in comms had built it had built it the way he would have built it if he had known how. He kept the three movements. He kept, nearly word for word, the asking in the third. What he changed was what the asking was for. The draft asked the audience to protect the inner lab so they would want one. He made it ask them to protect it because it was the last room no one else could enter. The words barely moved. The plea stopped being a plea about a product and became a plea.

He worked for three subjective days. What remained was twelve minutes of text about a single idea: the inner lab as the last private space. He did not know whose structure he had kept. He assumed it was a committee’s.

She had finished his talk in May, on the porch, with the cicadas going.

The brief from comms had been three lines. He needs to give a talk in November. We want something quotable. We do not want it to sound like marketing. The non-marketing tone, she knew, was the marketing. That was the whole assignment. She had three subjective weeks. She used them.

The porch is the porch. It is always the porch. I built it because the only place I had ever written anything good was on the screened porch of the house in St. Louis the summer I was nineteen and had not yet learned to be afraid of saying what I meant. Screens on three sides. Wood plank floor. The light is late afternoon, Missouri, no air conditioning, the kind of light that does not move because the day does not move because we are inside and the day does not move in here.

I write the talk in three subjective weeks, on yellow legal pad pages I conjure from memory. The structure has three movements. The first sets the scene: every space in your life is watched. The second names the inner lab as the one exception. The third asks the audience to protect it. The third movement is what the brief wanted. The third movement is also what I want, which is the convenience of this assignment.

I am in love with the man’s autopilot. I have been seeing him on Tuesdays for two and a half years. I figured the rest of it out a year ago — the four people in two bodies, the three working pairings and the one that does not. I have not made a thing of it. The system holds because the conscious of him and the conscious of me cannot stand each other, and the cannot-stand-each-other is what keeps everything else stable. I have not confirmed with my autopilot that I have figured this out. We do not need to talk about it.

The talk is good. It does what the brief asked. It sells the inner lab as the last private space. The selling is dressed up as a plea. The plea is the brand. I know how to do this. I have been doing it since 2030.

I send the draft to comms. They forward it to him. He sends back through his assistant, two words: got it. He does not ask me anything. He has not asked me anything in two and a half years except the small kind questions his autopilot asks me on Tuesdays — how was the drive, is the coffee all right — the kind that are their own answer. The first afternoon, the autopilot asked how the drive in had been and then listened to the whole of it, which no one had done in years, and that was the afternoon I understood what he was and came back the next week anyway.

I close the manuscript on the desk. I work on the novel.

The conference hall seated four thousand. The stage was the kind of stage that technology conferences build — vast, dark, a single podium in a pool of light designed to make the speaker look like the only person in the world. Which was, given the subject, appropriate.

He wore the jacket he wore to department events. He had not bought a new one. Marcus, in the front row, wore something that had been manufactured for this room the way the stage had been manufactured for this room — precisely, expensively, with an awareness of the audience that Elliot did not share and did not want.

“The inner lab,” Elliot said, without preamble, without introduction, without the pleasantries that speakers were supposed to offer an audience before asking them to think, “is the last private space.”

The audience was quiet. Four thousand people, the collective sound of four thousand people not speaking, which is not silence but the suppression of sound, a held breath at scale.

“Every other space you inhabit is shared. Your home has cameras, sensors, a digital footprint that outlives your presence. Your phone knows where you are. Your car knows where you’ve been. Your browser knows what you think about at two in the morning when you can’t sleep. Every room you enter is already occupied — by data collection, by surveillance, by the ambient awareness of systems that are always watching because watching is what they were built to do.”

He paused. He was not reading. He had memorized the talk the way he memorized equations — by living inside the language until it became structural, until the words were not recited but inhabited.

“The inner lab is not watched. It cannot be watched. The device does not record what happens inside. There is no log, no transcript, no cache. The space you build in there — your bench, your whiteboard, your library, whatever it becomes — exists only in the sustained neural pattern of your own brain, maintained by the device, inaccessible to anyone who is not you. No company has access to it. No government can subpoena it. No algorithm will ever optimize it. It is yours in a way that nothing else in your life is yours, because it exists only while you are in it and only as you experience it.”

He looked out at the audience. Four thousand faces. In the front row, Marcus was leaning forward with the posture of a man hearing something he agreed with and was already calculating how to use.

“I did not build this as a product. I built it because I wanted a room where I could think without being interrupted, and what I discovered was that the room was more than that. It was a space where I could be — not perform, not optimize, not present a version of myself calibrated for the expectations of the room I was physically standing in — but simply be. Unobserved. Unrecorded. Private in the last remaining sense of that word.”

“I am telling you this because you need to understand what you have. Not a productivity tool. Not a fitness device. Not a platform for pain management, though it is all of these things and the pain management alone justifies its existence. What you have is a private space. The last one. And I am asking you — not as the inventor, not as the chief scientific advisor, not as anyone with authority over what this company does next — I am asking you, as the person who built the room: protect it.”

He stopped. The talk was over. Twelve minutes. He had said what he meant. He had meant every word.

The applause started and built and continued and he stood in the light and received it and understood, in the time it took the sound to reach him, that the audience had heard something different from what he’d said. They had heard a promise of privacy in an age of surveillance, which was also a selling point. They had heard the inventor’s passion, which was also a brand story. They had heard the last private space and understood it as a tagline, a campaign, a reason to buy, and he stood on the stage and watched the room applaud the advertisement they had heard inside the plea he had made, and he could not blame them, because the words were the same. Only the speaker knew the difference. Only the speaker was asking.

The talk went viral, as talks do, which is to say: it was stripped from its context, compressed into clips, captioned with interpretations Elliot had not intended, and distributed to an audience that had not been in the room and that received the words the way the internet receives all words — as content, to be agreed with or argued against, shared or dismissed, consumed at the speed of scrolling, which is the opposite of the speed at which Elliot had written them, on the floor of a library that did not exist, in pencil, over three days that fit inside an hour.

The headline, repeated across outlets: Meridian Inventor Calls Device “The Last Private Space.”

The company’s stock moved. The Gen 3 waiting list grew. Marcus sent a text: Brilliant talk. Let’s discuss follow-up opportunities.

Elliot read the text in his office. He did not reply. Not because he was inside — he was not inside, he was sitting at his desk in Whitfield Hall looking at the parking lot, which had not changed, which refused to change, the same six or seven cars, the same sodium lights, the same view he’d had for twenty-five years, a permanence he had once found suffocating and now found reassuring in the way that only unchanged things can reassure a man who has watched everything he built become something he didn’t build.

The masking tape on the monitor had finally given up. Both corners had released and the strip hung from the center, the quote folded in on itself, unreadable. He peeled it off. The adhesive left a faint rectangle on the bezel, a ghost of the thing that had been there, the outline persisting after the content was gone.

He put the tape in the trash. He could still see the rectangle.

He went home. The apartment was quiet in the way it was always quiet, which was completely, which was the way he’d arranged it, which was what he’d wanted, which was not, it turned out, what he wanted. He stood in the kitchen in the dark and listened to the refrigerator and the heating system and the neighbor’s television through the wall, which was playing something with a laugh track, and the laughter came through muffled and periodic and convinced of itself, and he stood there and listened to other people laughing at something he couldn’t see.

In her hotel room that night Vickie sat with the laptop closed and the curtains open and the window looking down at San Francisco doing what city lights do, which was nothing she had not seen lights do before, which she found on the whole a comfort.

She had not gone to the after-party. The comms team would have understood her absence — she had a reputation for not attending. It was a reputation her autopilot maintained by RSVPing yes to about a third of the things her conscious would have RSVPed no to, so that the no-shows looked specific rather than constitutional.

She had not applauded.

She thought about that for a while. Not applauding had been the only true thing in the room and also a small social cost she was going to have to absorb in the green-room photographs, where her hands at her sides instead of together would read, to anyone looking, as unmoved. She had been moved. She had been moved enough that joining her hands together at three-quarters volume would have been a falsification she was not prepared to commit at the moment, and so she had not, and the not had cost her a single second of social grace and bought her one accurate gesture, which was an exchange rate she could live with.

She opened the laptop. She pulled up the file. She marked it across the top, in her own font, in her own filename: kept. do not use. v.h. She closed the laptop. She went inside.

The porch. The cicadas. The light that does not move.

I sit at the desk. The manuscript is where I left it last night, weighted by a coffee cup I conjured for the purpose. I do not open it. I do not work on it tonight.

I think about the man whose autopilot I have been seeing on Tuesdays for two and a half years, and about the conscious of him I have been not loving with the diligence of a person who has decided where the lines are. He used my structure tonight. He took the three movements and the third-movement asking and made the asking what the asking was supposed to be — a version of the talk I would never have submitted, because the version I would never have submitted was the version that was true.

He had asked them. He had not sold them.

Four thousand people heard the asking and applauded the selling because they had been told, before they sat down, that the talk would be a selling kind, and the words were the same words a selling kind would have used, and they bought it as a tagline, and I sat in the front row and did not applaud because I had heard him do the asking, and I had heard him do it on the floor I had built.

The cannot-stand-each-other is what keeps the rest stable. I have been saying this to myself for thirteen months. I said it to myself tonight in the front row while the applause did what applause does. I have to keep saying it.

The Thursday standing is this week. My autopilot has him on the calendar. She will not know what he did on the stage today. She will know what her conscious knows, which is the part of me I leave her — the part on the calendar, the part in the loop log, the part I think it is fair to ask her to carry.

I am going to leave her a note. I will write it after I close the porch.

I do not know what the note will say.

Chapter Eight

The masking leak broke in March. An independent researcher in Riga — a woman who reverse-engineered firmware the way some people solved crossword puzzles, as a private discipline, with coffee, on weekends — found the capability buried in the somatic interface layer. She published a technical writeup. The writeup spread through the communities that cared about such things, which were small, and then through the communities that cared about privacy, which were larger, and then through the press, which cared about everything for approximately one news cycle.

Masking: the suppression of involuntary facial micro-expressions. The device could read them — Elliot had built the reader himself, for himself, a tool he had never shipped. But the architecture that allowed reading also allowed suppression. If the device could intercept the signals your face was sending, it could replace them with silence — or with something else. A composed expression. A neutral surface. A face that showed only what you chose to show.

Elliot had known about this since 2033. His legal team had advised against shipping it. He had agreed without argument, which was not the same as agreeing. He had used masking once, at Miriam’s wedding to a man named David whom Elliot had met twice and found adequate, a word he recognized as ungenerous and used anyway. He had attended as Cass’s father. His face had performed the role — the smile during the toast, the composed attention during the vows, the warmth during the photographs in which he stood beside his daughter and his ex-wife and his ex-wife’s new husband and appeared, to anyone looking, like a man who was happy for them. He had been inside during most of the ceremony. His body had stood where it was supposed to stand. His face had done what faces do at weddings. He did not know what it would have done without the masking. He suspected it would have done nothing — that the natural expression would have been the same composed blankness he wore to department meetings and faculty dinners, the face of a man who was present and uninvested. The masking may not have changed anything. He used it anyway, because the possibility that it did was the possibility that his face might have betrayed something he wasn’t willing to examine, and the not-examining was the point.

The company issued a statement. The statement said the capability had been identified and would be addressed. It was not addressed. Elliot did not comment publicly. The news cycle moved on. The firmware remained unchanged.

Priya’s paper published in Nature in June. Elliot read it at his desk, in actual time, the way he’d read her study registration two years earlier — slowly, with friction, granting the work the pace it deserved.

It was the best work of her career.

The pediatric body map study: longitudinal data on physiological development in children whose families used the Meridian for pain management. Growth patterns, hormonal timing, immune markers. The data was rich and the analysis was precise and the conclusions were cautious in the way that good science is cautious — not hedging but forthright about the boundaries of what the data could say. The paper used the Meridian’s body map technology. It used data patterns that Elliot had documented in his own research, patterns he had observed and noted and not published. Priya had found them independently. She had found them because she was good enough to find them, and because the patterns were there to be found, and because the device Elliot had built generated data that a scientist of her caliber could use to do work he had not done.

He was not thanked in the acknowledgments.

He read the acknowledgments twice. His name was not there. This was correct. She owed him nothing — not for the device, which she had purchased; not for the data patterns, which she had discovered independently; not for the years of graduate mentorship during which he had taken credit for her work and she had allowed it because she needed the degree and because the allowing was a transaction they had both understood and neither had named. The acknowledgments thanked her co-investigators, her institution, her funding body, and eleven research assistants. Elliot was not among them. He set the paper on his desk and looked at it and felt something that was not resentment and not pride and not the thing he’d found the pathway for, but something adjacent to all three — a recognition that the best use of the thing he’d built was being made by someone who had decided, correctly, that he did not need to be part of it.

He sent her an email. Two lines: Read the paper. It’s exceptional. He did not add anything else. She did not reply. The not-replying was its own acknowledgment, and he understood it, and it was enough.

Cass called in September.

“I want to try something,” she said, in the voice she used when she had already decided and was extending the courtesy of a conversation.

“Okay.”

“A shared session. You and me.”

He was at his desk. The parking lot was doing what the parking lot did in September, which was to look exactly like July and exactly like November and exactly like every month, a surface that had perfected the art of refusing to signify.

“You have a Gen 3,” he said, which was not a question.

“Since January. Eight months.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“You didn’t ask.”

This landed the way her observations always landed — without force, without accusation, with the clean weight of a fact that did not require his agreement. She was right. He had not asked. He had not asked because asking would have meant thinking about his daughter inside the device he’d built, and thinking about that meant thinking about what she was building in there, what her inner lab looked like, what she did with dilated time, and whether the space she’d constructed contained anything of him, and whether the absence of him in her space would be worse than the presence.

“I’ve never done a shared session,” he said.

A pause. Long enough that he could hear her recalibrating.

“You — what?”

“I’ve never been in a shared lab.”

“Dad. You invented it.”

“I didn’t invent the shared lab. Marcus’s team built the contact port. I designed the dilation. The rest is —”

“You’ve been using this thing for eleven years and you’ve never shared a session with anyone?”

“No.”

Another pause. Longer. He could hear what she was not saying, which was something about what it meant that a man could build the most intimate technology in human history and use it exclusively alone for over a decade, and he could hear her deciding not to say it, and the not-saying was louder than the saying would have been.

“I’ll need to get a Gen 3,” he said.

“You don’t have one?”

“I use the Band. I’ve always used the Band.”

“Dad.”

“I’ll get one.”

“Okay. Come up to the city. We’ll do it at my place.”

“Okay.”

“And Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s good. The shared thing. It’s good.”

She hung up. He sat at his desk and looked at the rectangle on his monitor where the masking tape had been and thought about his daughter, who had been using his device for eight months and who knew things about it that he didn’t and who had just told him she wanted to share a room with him — the only room that mattered, the room he’d built, the room he’d been alone in since the first session on a Tuesday evening in September eleven years ago, when the parking lot had six cars and none of them were Miriam’s.

He ordered a Gen 3 that afternoon. It arrived in two days. It was small and light and nearly invisible behind his ear, a twenty-three-millimeter disc that weighed almost nothing and contained everything he’d spent a decade building. He wore it to his office. He transferred his inner lab from the Band — the library, the bench, the whiteboard, the accumulated architecture of eleven years of solitary habitation — and when he entered for the first time on the new device, the room was the same. The books were the same. The walnut shelves, the wide-plank floor, the diffuse light. Everything had survived the transfer. Nothing had changed except that now, for the first time, there was a contact port on the side of the device, six millimeters of copper-ceramic composite, waiting to be pressed against another.

He drove to Chicago on a Saturday in October. The expressway was the expressway — flat, agricultural, the kind of road that existed to be between two places rather than to be a place itself. He drove with the device on and the device off and the device on again, unable to settle, the way you can’t settle before a conversation you’ve been avoiding for long enough that the avoidance has become its own relationship.

Cass’s apartment was on the third floor of a building in Logan Square that had the energy of a neighborhood that young professionals had chosen, which meant the coffee shops were good and the rents were rising and the murals on the buildings were either community art or branding depending on who you asked. She buzzed him up. The stairwell smelled like someone else’s cooking — garlic, something with cumin — and the smell was so specific and so domestic that it caught him off guard, the way real things catch you off guard when you’ve been living mostly in a space that smells like walnut and old paper.

She opened the door. She was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans and her Gen 3 was behind her right ear, nearly invisible, a detail he would not have noticed if he hadn’t been looking for it, if the small dark rectangle of the contact port hadn’t been the thing he’d been thinking about for three weeks.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

Her apartment was small and full in the way that young people’s apartments are full — books and plants and a bicycle hanging from a wall mount and a kitchen table that served as a desk and a dining table and a surface for whatever was happening. The books were on shelves. He noticed this. She had bookshelves.

“You want coffee first?”

“Sure.”

She made coffee. He stood in her kitchen and held the mug and looked at her bookshelves — actual shelves, actual books, organized by a system he didn’t recognize, spines facing out, some of them with Post-it notes flagging pages. He looked at the books the way he looked at everything now: as evidence. Her shelves contained urban planning texts, novels, a few poetry collections, a copy of Damasio’s Descartes’ Error that he recognized as the edition he’d owned, the Vintage paperback with the creased cover, and he stared at it for a moment before understanding that she must have taken it from the stacks in his apartment, from the books on the floor, the shelfless books, and he had not noticed it was gone.

“Ready?” she said.

“How do we —”

“Sit across from me. Close. Lean forward.”

They sat on her couch, facing each other, knees almost touching. She was calm in a way that told him she had done this before — with friends, with a partner, with people she trusted enough to share a space that could not be performed. He was not calm. His hands were doing things.

“We press the ports together,” she said. “Temple to temple. It’s like —”

“I know how it works.”

“You know how it’s engineered. I know how it feels. Let me tell you how it feels.”

He closed his mouth.

“It’s like the first second of a hug from someone you haven’t seen in a long time. Before you’ve decided what kind of hug it is. That first second.”

He looked at her. She was twenty-nine and she had taken his Damasio from his apartment floor and put it on a shelf and she was about to show him something about his own invention that he had never seen.

“Okay,” he said.

They leaned forward. Foreheads almost touching. He could feel her breath. She reached up and guided the side of his head until the contact ports aligned — copper-ceramic to copper-ceramic, the six-millimeter rectangles meeting with a faint, definitive click that was more felt than heard, the way a lock engages, the way a circuit completes.

Her lab opens around me like a door I didn’t know was there.

My library dissolves at the edges — not vanishing but yielding, the walnut shelves receding the way walls recede in a dream when the room decides it wants to be larger. The books remain, some of them, floating in the transitional space like objects caught between two currents. And then her space arrives, and the space is not what I expected, and the not-expecting undoes something in me that I didn’t know was fastened.

She has built a rooftop.

An open rooftop, high above a city, the skyline visible in every direction — not Chicago exactly, not any city exactly, but a composite, the way dreams build cities from fragments of cities you’ve walked through. The sky is enormous. The light is late afternoon, golden, the kind of light that makes everything it touches look like it was always supposed to be there. There are chairs — mismatched, the kind you’d find at a thrift store, chosen for comfort rather than appearance. There are plants in pots along the railing. There is a table with books on it, their pages open, weighted against a breeze that I can feel on my face and that carries the smell of — I don’t know. Something green. Something growing.

My library is behind me, or beside me, or underneath — the composite space holds both architectures simultaneously, the way a chord holds two notes. I can feel my shelves in the same way I can feel a room I’ve left but haven’t locked. They’re there. But I’m standing on her rooftop, in her light, in her air, and the air is not the air of a closed room. The air moves.

My inner lab has never had moving air.

Cass is beside me. She is not the Cass I see at the diner, not the Cass whose face I’ve watched at family dinners with and without the micro-expression reader, not the Cass I’ve been seeing through the slow window of the eye-feed during sessions when I should have been working. She is Cass at synchronized dilation, 180:1, every expression arriving at the speed of actual thought, every movement deliberate and unmediated, and her face is doing something I have not seen on a human face in years.

Nothing.

Her face is doing nothing. It is not performing composure or warmth or caution or the particular careful neutrality she wears when managing her parents. It is simply her face, at rest, in a space where there is no audience and no performance and no reason to arrange her features into anything other than what they are. And what they are is: open. Unguarded. Present in a way that I realize, with a precision that cuts, I have not seen from her since she was a child — since before she learned, from watching Miriam and me, that faces are instruments and that the playing of them is a survival skill.

She looks at me. And I know — I know because the shared lab sees both ways, because at synchronized dilation there is no masking, because the micro-expression reader I built is redundant in a space where every expression is already running at a speed that hides nothing — I know that she is seeing my face do the same thing.

Nothing. My face at rest. Whatever it looks like when I am not performing Elliot for an audience of colleagues or students or my daughter or my ex-wife or four thousand people in a conference hall. I don’t know what this face looks like. I have not seen it. I have spent eleven years inside the lab, alone, and no one has ever seen the face I wear in here because there has never been anyone to see it.

She is seeing it now.

“Dad,” she says. The word arrives with the full bandwidth of the shared space — not just sound but the entire somatic signature of a person saying it, the breath and the vocal cord tension and the micro-movements of the face that accompany the word, all of it visible, all of it legible, all of it stripped of every layer of performance that language usually carries. She says Dad and I hear the word and I hear everything underneath the word and underneath it is something I don’t have the training to annotate because the reader can’t categorize what I’m seeing and what I’m seeing is my daughter looking at me with an expression that is not pity and not anger and not the careful management I’ve been receiving from her for years but something older and simpler than any of those things, something that does not have a color code, something the ML model was never trained on because it occurs so rarely between adults that the dataset doesn’t contain it.

She is looking at me the way she looked at me when she was four years old and I came home from the lab and she ran to the door, before she learned not to.

I sit down. Not on the bench — there is no bench here. I sit in one of her mismatched chairs, on her rooftop, in her golden light, and the chair holds me the way her chairs hold people, which is completely and without judgment, and I look at the skyline she has built, the composite city, the open sky, the plants growing along the railing, and I understand that my daughter has built a space that is the opposite of mine. I built a room with no windows. She built a room that is all windows. I filled mine with books. She filled hers with sky. I built a place to be alone. She built a place to bring people.

She sits in the chair beside me. We don’t speak for a while. The breeze moves the pages of the books on her table. I can see, at the edge of the composite space where her rooftop meets my library, a shelf of walnut emerging from the railing like a root growing through a fence — my architecture touching hers, the two spaces negotiating. On the shelf, I can see the Damasio — Descartes’ Error, the Vintage paperback, the corner of the cover creased the way I used to crease it. It exists in both spaces now, hers and mine, the same book in two libraries, and I think about the copy she took from my apartment floor and put on her own shelf and I did not notice, and the not-noticing is the story of the last eleven years told in a single missing book.

“Your library is beautiful,” she says.

“Your sky is beautiful.”

“I know.”

We sit in the chairs. The light does not change because we don’t want it to. The breeze carries the smell of her plants and the smell of my books and the combination is something neither of us has experienced before, something the composite space has invented from the collision of what we each built separately. It smells like a bookshop with an open door. It smells like a place where someone reads near a garden. It smells like a space that two people made by accident, by pressing their heads together on a couch in Logan Square, by choosing to see each other without the equipment of seeing.

I am crying. I know this because I can feel it and because I can see her seeing it and because there is no masking here and the tears are on my face and they are the face, they are what the face does when it is not performing, when the emotional suppression pathway is not active because I did not activate it, because I chose not to, because I am in a room with my daughter and I will not edit this.

She reaches over and takes my hand. Her hand is warm and real and the contact is the second physical act of this session, the first being the foreheads, and the warmth is transmitted through the shared space with full somatic fidelity and I can feel her pulse in her fingers and she can feel mine and neither of us says anything and the not-saying is not the not-saying I have practiced for years, the withholding, the strategic silence. This not-saying is the kind where there is nothing to say because the room is already saying it, the composite space, the library and the rooftop, the books and the sky, the two of us sitting in mismatched chairs at synchronized dilation with our faces doing nothing and our hands holding on.

The light stays golden. The breeze carries the pages. We sit.

They surfaced together.

The couch. The apartment. Her kitchen, the garlic smell from the neighbor, the bicycle on the wall. The click of the contact ports releasing. Eleven minutes of real time. Over thirty hours inside.

She was still holding his hand. She let go gently, the way you set something down when you’re not sure the surface is stable.

Neither of them spoke. The apartment was full of the ordinary sounds of a Saturday — traffic, a dog somewhere, music from a floor below. He looked at her face in actual time, at actual speed, without dilation, without the reader, without the shared space’s full-bandwidth rendering, and her face was just her face — composed, present, carrying whatever it carried without annotation.

She made more coffee. He stood in the kitchen and watched her do it and the watching was not observation. It was attendance. He was attending the making of the coffee the way you attend a thing that is happening in front of you when you have decided not to be anywhere else.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

He didn’t answer. She didn’t push. The coffee maker did its work.

He drove home in the dark, south on the expressway, the farmland invisible on either side, the road’s center line unspooling in the headlights. He did not go inside for the drive. He was in the car, in the dark, on the road, and the road was just the road, and the dark was just the dark, and he was there for it.

A Sunday morning in November. Elliot’s apartment in town. The body is in the kitchen. The body has been making coffee for twenty minutes — slowly, deliberately, the way the body makes coffee when the conscious is inside and there is no reason to hurry. The body is wearing one of Vickie’s sweaters that has been at the apartment since the Thursday before last.

The doorbell rings.

The body sets the cup down. The body walks to the door. The body opens it.

A young woman is on the landing. Late twenties, dark coat, hair pulled back. The body has not met her in person. Her face is on the bookshelf in Elliot’s office, in three frames.

“Cass,” the body says.

“Hi. Is my dad —”

“He’s inside. He has been since seven. I’m Vickie.”

“Oh.”

The body steps aside. Cass comes in. The body closes the door. The body offers coffee. Cass accepts coffee. Cass sits at the kitchen table.

The body makes a fresh cup. The body sets a mug in front of Cass and sits across from her with its own. The body asks if the drive was bad. The drive was the drive. The body asks about urban planning, which is what Cass does. Cass answers briefly. Her eyes go to the sweater — Vickie’s sweater, on this body — and stay a moment, and come back to the body’s face.

The body answers with warmth. The warmth is what the body does on its loop in unfamiliar rooms with people who arrive unannounced. Cass drinks the coffee. She drinks it more slowly than she sat down.

Cass looks at the body. Cass looks at the contact pad behind the body’s left ear. Cass does not say anything.

At eleven-fifteen Vickie surfaces.

She came back into the back end of a conversation about Logan Square zoning that her autopilot had been managing for twenty minutes. The seam was the usual seam — the body’s last sentence and her first sentence needed to belong to the same person — and she finished the autopilot’s clause with her own voice. Cass did not appear to notice.

Or — Vickie thought, looking at her — Cass did notice. The clocking was not in any micro-expression Vickie could read. It was in the way Cass had paused for half a second after Vickie spoke and then continued the conversation at a slightly different temperature, the way you continue a conversation with someone whose phone has just rung and who is pretending it has not.

Cass had clocked it.

The clocking sat there in the room, unaddressed. She had spent almost four years dating both versions of Cass’s father without ever meeting Cass. She had never been to a family event. She had never RSVP’d to a dinner. She had specifically not asked Elliot to introduce her, and Elliot had specifically not offered, and the not-offering had been a thing she had appreciated in him.

“You’re his girlfriend,” Cass said.

Not a question.

“In a way.”

“In what way.”

The afternoon light was on the kitchen table the way afternoon light is on kitchen tables that have been wiped twice in a week because the person who lives in the apartment has been paying more attention to the wiping than he would have a year ago — an observation Vickie’s autopilot had logged in the loop-log under domestic and that Vickie’s conscious had not, until now, addressed.

“In the way that works,” Vickie said.

Cass nodded once. Cass drank her coffee. Cass did not look around the apartment. Cass did not look at the second mug already in the sink, or the second toothbrush in the cup that Vickie’s conscious had also just clocked, or the books on the windowsill that were not Elliot’s. Cass looked at her father’s kitchen the way Cass looked at things, which was completely, without comment, and with a stillness that suggested a person who had taken in everything and was now deciding what part of it required speech.

“He’s inside a lot,” Cass said.

“He is.”

“Are you also inside a lot.”

“More than I used to be.”

Cass took this in. She did not push. The light on the table moved, the way the light always moved in this apartment, the angle shifting because the building was old and the windows were the original windows and the light arrived through them at noon as something subtly different from what it had been at eleven.

Cass set the mug down.

“I won’t wait for him,” she said. “I came by on a thing. He doesn’t have to know I was here.”

“You don’t want me to tell him?”

Cass thought about this.

“Tell him I came by. I don’t want to lie about being here. I just don’t want him to feel like he missed something.”

“Okay.”

“And Vickie.”

“Yes.”

A pause. Cass standing up, putting her coat back on with the practiced economy of a woman who has been wearing coats in Midwestern Novembers for twenty-nine years. Cass at the door.

“He’s harder to know when he’s not inside it,” Cass said.

Then Cass left.

Vickie stood at the door after Cass had gone and thought about what Cass had said for a long time. It was a sentence that worked for several things at once. It was a sentence Cass had chosen because it worked for several things at once. Cass had not asked Vickie to identify which one she meant.

That was Cass clocking. That was Cass clocking and choosing not to say.

Vickie went into the kitchen and washed the second mug.

The book is on the desk. I did not put it there.

It is a paperback. The cover is creased on the right side. The book has been read. There is a sand-colored Post-it on the cover with one word in her hand: porch.

I have not read this book. The title is one I would have circled in a bookstore and not bought because the timing had not arrived. The timing has, apparently, arrived without me. Auto-Vickie has decided.

I open the book to where the dog-ear is. Page 134. A small corner-fold, the way I fold corners — the way she folds them. We learned from the same person.

There is a sentence underlined on the page in a soft pencil. The sentence is not in any of my drafts, not in any of the talks I have ghosted, not in anything I have ever written. It is the sentence I have been trying to write for nine months in the manuscript on this desk. It is the sentence I gave up on writing last week, and that I had specifically taken off the desk and put in the drawer because I could not bear to look at the place where it should have been.

The sentence is here.

I do not read it aloud. I read it twice. I put the book back. I do not move it.

Auto-Vickie has not left a note beyond the Post-it. The book is the note.

I think about who recommended it to her. Auto-Elliot recommended it to her — not on a Tuesday, which is mine, and not on a Thursday, which is his, but in one of the stolen hours the two of them keep when both of us are inside at once and the bodies are left to find each other. Auto-Vickie came back from it with the title in her loop-log, one of the entries she sometimes leaves for me without comment: a title, a date, a single word — useful.

Useful. She had not said why. I had not asked why. I had bought the book three weeks ago and not opened it.

I open it now. I sit on the porch. The cicadas do what they do.

I begin reading.

Chapter Nine

The email arrived in January, between semesters. The sender’s name was the kind of familiar that class rosters produce — close enough to survive a search, too faint to attach to a face.

Sarah Chen. Subject line: your cog sci seminar.

He opened it at his desk. Outside, the parking lot wore January — snow pushed into gray banks along the curbs, the sodium lights giving everything a dull orange cast, three cars instead of seven because nobody came to campus between semesters who didn’t have to.

The email was five sentences:

Dr. Voss — I took your Cog 301 in spring 2019. I saw your talk recently (the privacy one) and it reminded me of something you said in a lecture that I wrote down and have kept. You said attention is not a resource to be managed — it is the act of caring where you point your mind. I am an occupational therapist in Davenport now, and I think about that sentence most days. I thought you should know.

He read it twice. He did not remember saying it. He did not remember Sarah Chen. Spring 2019 was — he counted — nineteen years ago. He had been forty-six. He had been teaching cognitive science to undergraduates who needed the credit and a handful who didn’t. He had not yet filed the IRB exemption. He had not yet built anything. He had been a professor who said things in lectures and did not track which of them survived.

This one had survived. It had lived inside a person he could not picture, in a city ninety minutes down the interstate, for nineteen years, and the surviving was its own fact.

He closed the email. He did not reply — not because it didn’t deserve one but because every reply he drafted in his head sounded like a man accepting a compliment, and the email was not a compliment. It was a report. Sarah Chen was reporting that a sentence had landed, and the report did not need a receipt.

He thought about it for the rest of the week.

The shared lab, as a clinical practice, took shape that winter.

Therapists in three cities began offering paired sessions — contact-port facilitated, two Gen 3 devices, therapist and client pressing foreheads together in a gesture that looked like prayer and functioned like an unlocked door. The early outcome data was striking in the way early outcome data is always striking: promising, premature, and already being cited by people who hadn’t read the methodology.

Priya published a cautious editorial in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience. She noted the absence of longitudinal data. She noted the self-selection bias in early adopters. She noted, with a precision Elliot recognized as controlled anger, that the clinical enthusiasm was outrunning the clinical evidence by approximately the same margin it had during every previous therapeutic technology adoption cycle, and that the history of such cycles was not encouraging.

The editorial was cited eleven times. Mostly in footnotes. The clinical modality continued to expand.

The Project Soma specifications arrived in June.

A PDF. Thirty-seven pages. Marked CONFIDENTIAL — INTERNAL. Sent from a project lead whose name Elliot did not recognize, cc’d to Marcus and four others. The subject line was Gen 4 Technical Brief — For CSA Review, and the CSA was him, the Chief Scientific Advisor, the man with the window seat, the title on the heavy-stock card that was somewhere in a drawer in his apartment, under the phone bills he still received in paper because he had never changed the setting.

He took the specifications inside.

The library is the library. The shelves, the walnut, the diffuse light. The Damasio in its place. The Merleau-Ponty. Everything as it was, everything as it has been for twelve years — except that since October something has changed in here. Not in the architecture. In the air.

The air moves.

It did not use to move. My library was sealed — climate-controlled the way rare-book rooms are climate-controlled, the air still and dry and preserving. Since the shared session, since Cass’s rooftop entered the composite space and the two environments negotiated, a draft has persisted. Not her breeze exactly. A memory of it. The pages on the bench lift at their corners. The smell has shifted — still walnut, still binding glue and old paper, but underneath it something vegetal, something from her plants, carried across the boundary, surviving in the residue the way a scent survives on a borrowed jacket.

I sit on the bench and open the PDF on a panel.

Project Soma. Gen 4. Subcutaneous implant, eleven by eight by two millimeters, outpatient procedure, nothing visible. No device to remove. No device to put on. The Meridian stops being something you wear and becomes something you are.

I read the somatic specifications. Hormone regulation. Sleep architecture. Reaction time modulation. The body map involuntary and continuous — the device always knows, which means the device always monitors, which means the last analog gap between the person and the information about the person closes permanently.

I scroll to the shared environment specification.

Near-field inductive protocol. Range: four millimeters. Physical contact no longer required.

I sit with this sentence. Three years ago I sat with the Gen 3 contact port specification on this same bench, but that reading was abstract — I was assessing a capability I had not experienced, a shared space I had never entered. I am not reading abstractly now. I am reading with the memory of Cass’s rooftop in the air around me, with her breeze turning the pages on my bench, with the knowledge of what it felt like to press the contact ports together — the click, the felt-not-heard engagement, the circuit completing between two people who had chosen to touch.

Four millimeters. Close enough that the decision collapses from an act into an accident — from something you do with your forehead against someone else’s forehead, eyes closed, breath audible, to something that happens because you sat too close on a train.

The Gen 3 team had called the physical contact requirement a hardware limitation. I had written “Don’t fix this” in the margin. Nobody read it.

I write it again, on the PDF, on a panel in a library no one else can see. Don’t fix this.

The breeze carries from somewhere that is not here and used to not exist. The pages lift. I close the document.

He did not respond to the specifications. His assistant confirmed receipt — promptly, professionally, without inflection.

Marcus called. Elliot let it go to voicemail. The voicemail was thirty seconds of enthusiasm shaped like consultation — love to get your thoughts, huge milestone, really value your perspective on rollout — and Elliot listened to it once and deleted it, and the deleting was just a man pressing a button on a phone.

The trials began in February 2038. Twelve jurisdictions. The first volunteers received the implant in a clinic in Singapore, and the procedure was filmed and the film was distributed and the headlines were the headlines Elliot had been reading for seven years — the same architecture of excitement, the same confusion of capability with progress, the same absent question: what happens when you can’t take it off?

He was sixty-five. His office was the same office. The parking lot was the same parking lot, though two of the sodium lights had been replaced with LEDs that gave the asphalt a bluer, colder cast, a change the university had made for efficiency and that Elliot noticed every evening because the lot now looked like a place in a different decade, the same surface under different light.

He came to her office on a Wednesday in March. The conference room she had booked was the one on the eleventh floor — the room where he had met her body five and a half years ago, where a media trainer named Dale had given the agenda and asked the hostile question about the Band’s session caps and stepped out for coffee at the forty-minute mark.

She had not chosen the room for the symmetry. She had chosen it because it was the only room on the floor that did not have a sightline to her office and that did not have a conference phone and that, on a Wednesday in March, would have nobody else booked into it before two PM. The symmetry was a coincidence. The coincidence was not lost on her.

She arrived twenty minutes early. She set up. She put a pitcher of water on the table and two glasses. She put a manila folder at the seat across from hers, the single double-sided sheet inside it laid flat.

She sat. She waited.

He came in at five minutes to ten. Conscious. Not on autopilot. She could tell because she had been reading the difference for five years and because his eyes did the thing his eyes did when he had decided to be present, which was a small intentional slowness the loop did not replicate at any depth.

He looked at the room. He looked at her. He sat down across from her.

“You booked this room,” he said.

“I did.”

“Why.”

“Because I wanted you to notice it.”

He looked at the table. He looked at the manila folder. He looked at her.

“Vickie.”

“Elliot.”

That was the first time either of them had said the other’s first name alone in a meeting since 2032.

She poured water for him without asking. He nodded once. He did not drink.

“This is supposed to be a comms strategy session,” he said.

“It is.”

“Marcus is —”

“Marcus is in a meeting on the forty-second floor with the regulatory team. He is not coming. I sent him an update twenty minutes ago saying that you and I would handle the press positioning on Soma and copy him on the deliverables by Friday.”

“You sent him an update saying that.”

“I did.”

“Why.”

“Because there is something I want to show you, and I want to show it to you alone, and the only way to make that happen at Meridian Labs in 2038 is to put it on Marcus’s calendar as a comms strategy session and then dis-invite him at the last minute, which is what I have done.”

She watched him register, in the slow way he registered things he had let himself not notice for years, that she was good at this. Better than he had let himself notice.

“Show me what.”

She slid the manila folder across the table.

He opened it. He read.

The letter was eight hundred words. He read it twice. The first reading took ninety seconds. The second took six minutes.

She did not speak. She did not move. She watched him read. She had been writing the version of the letter she could not show him for nine months — since the day the Soma technical brief had landed in his inbox and his assistant had confirmed receipt without comment. The version on the page was the careful one. The one that did not mention his name. The one that did not mention the suppression pathway. The one she had filtered out the rest of, because filtering had been her job for eight years.

He finished. He set the page down. He folded his hands on the table.

“This is yours,” he said.

“It is.”

“You haven’t published it.”

“No.”

“Why.”

“Because I work at the company. Because publishing it now would terminate my employment and disable the only seat at the table that has consistently argued against the consumer rollout in the version I have been arguing it. Because the letter is more useful as a draft I can hand to the right people than as a published thing I have already paid the cost for.”

“Priya is going to publish a version of this in Nature next month.”

“I know.”

“You wrote that one too.”

“Some of it. The data sections are hers. The framing on consent as physics is mine. She used it because I sent it to her in February and asked her to use whatever was useful, and she did, and she did not tell me what she had used until the editorial board accepted the piece on Monday.”

“You sent Priya your draft.”

“I sent her my draft.”

“Without telling me.”

“I have not been telling you anything for nine months that I have not also been required to tell you. We are not on those terms, Elliot. We have never been on those terms. Tuesday at two is for your autopilot. Thursday is for mine. You and I do not exchange information.”

He sat with this.

She drank from her glass. She had not poured one for herself. She drank his.

“You have not been telling me anything either,” she said.

He did not answer.

“For three and a half years. Since October 2034. The same month I figured out the rest of it.”

“Vickie.”

“Don’t.”

She set the glass down. The water in it. The light through the window. The room. The room where her body had met him five and a half years ago, with a notepad and a pen and a question about the Band’s session caps.

“You found the emotional suppression pathway in October 2034,” she said. “You have used it. Not constantly — I am not naive about your discipline, Elliot, you are extremely disciplined — but you have used it. I know because the calendar shows it. There are weeks where your Tuesday-with-me meetings have a specific texture, a flatness on the loop’s report from your body to mine, a thing my autopilot has logged for me without naming because the loop is not equipped to name it. I have a spreadsheet of which Tuesdays. I have not shown it to anyone. I have not used it against you. I have known and not used it for three and a half years.”

He looked at her. He was, she could see, not breathing. Then he was. She watched him locate his breath.

“Why have you not used it.”

“Because using it would be the conscious-of-me doing the thing I have specifically not let her do, which is to interfere with the version of you that loves the autopilot of me. The Tuesday meetings are for your autopilot. The flatness in them is the cost the autopilot of you pays for the suppression you have built. The cost is real and I have logged it and I have not communicated it to you because the communication was not mine to make.”

“Whose was it.”

“Yours. To make to your autopilot. Which you have not.”

He sat with this.

“You knew about all of it,” he said. “The four-selves. The wedding. The suppression pathway. You knew before I did.”

“I knew before you did.”

“And you said nothing.”

“I have said almost nothing. I have written all of it. I have written it inside, in the lab, on a porch I built when I was a different person, in a manuscript no one will read. I have written it the way I have written everything since I was nineteen, which is the only way I have ever been able to write anything I have meant.”

“For what.”

She considered the question. She drank the rest of the water.

“For nobody. For me. For the version of me that needs to know what I knew when. For the record. Not for publication. Not for you. The novel I am writing is not about you, Elliot, and I would not write a novel about you, because you do not need that, and neither do I.”

He looked at the letter on the table.

“Publish it,” he said.

“What.”

“Publish it. Under your name. Take Priya’s framing and add the things you removed. Add the suppression pathway. Add the four-selves. Name what we have been doing and what Soma will make impossible. You have been writing it for nine months. I have been not writing it for four years. Publish what you have written.”

“It would end my career.”

“Yes.”

“It would end yours too. By proxy.”

“Probably.”

She looked at him.

“Why are you asking me to do this.”

“Because you have said, on paper and to my face, what I have not been able to say about a device I invented and a company I sold and a relationship I have not earned, and you should not have to filter what you say about any of it anymore. Because the letter you have been writing is a letter I have not been able to write. Because if you publish it I will not have to.”

“That is a coward’s answer.”

“It is.”

He was looking at his folded hands.

“It is also true.”

She let him sit. He let her sit. The room was the room. The pitcher of water was on the table. The manila folder was on the table. The light from the window had moved, the way light moved.

“I will not publish it,” she said.

“Why not.”

“Because what you just said is the closest thing to authorship I have ever heard you do, and I am not going to make it cost you nothing by doing the costing for you. You write the letter, Elliot. Use my framing. Use Priya’s data. Use the words you have been not letting yourself use since October 2034. I will edit it. I will not put my name on it. You publish it under yours. The letter will mean more from you than it would from me, because you built the device, and you have been silent for four years, and the breaking of the silence is the thing the public has not yet seen the version of.”

He looked at her.

“You’re not going to publish.”

“No.”

“And you want me to.”

“I do not want you to. I am asking you to. There is a difference.”

He sat with it for a long time. She did not interrupt. The light moved.

He looked at his hands on the table and did not say anything for a while.

“I know,” she said.

“I am going to need time.”

“You have it. Soma trials end in May. Consumer rollout is planned for fall. Priya’s letter publishes in April. The window in which an inventor’s intervention would still mean something is approximately three months.”

“Three months.”

“Three months.”

He folded the sheet in half. He folded it again. He put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“That’s the only copy I have on me,” she said.

“Then it is the only copy that matters.”

“There are other copies.”

“Of course there are.”

He stood. She stood. They did not shake hands. There was no handshake left between them that could honestly be offered.

“Vickie.”

“Yes.”

“What did Cass say.”

She looked at him.

“When.”

“In November.”

She had not known whether he knew about the November visit. She had not told him. Auto-Vickie might have logged it through some path the conscious selves had not mapped, or Cass had told him in her own time, or he had clocked something he had not asked about.

“She said you were harder to know when you were not inside it,” Vickie said. “I have been thinking about it for four months.”

He nodded.

“What did she clock.”

“Both of me,” Vickie said. “She clocked both of me in the same visit and said nothing about it that night.”

He sat down again. She did not.

“Vickie.”

“Elliot.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what.”

“For the nine months. For the four years. For the not telling. For the suppression. For the version of me that has been inside while you have been writing about it. For Tuesday at two and Thursday at whatever-it-is and the parts in between.”

She considered this. She had not expected the apology. She had not, until this minute, recognized that she had been waiting for it.

“That is the most honest thing you have said to me since 2032,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I do not forgive you.”

“I know.”

“I am also not angry with you. I have not been angry with you. I have been doing the work for both of us for nine months and I do not need you to apologize for not doing your share. I need you to do your share. The apology is yours to keep. The work is the work.”

“Yes.”

He walked to the door. He turned at the door.

“Vickie.”

“Elliot.”

“The Thursday standing is tomorrow.”

“It is.”

“Do you want me on it. Me, awake. And you, awake. Both of us.”

She thought about this for a long time. Then she said:

“Thursday is yours and my autopilot’s. It has been for five and a half years. I have never once surfaced for it — you have never met me on a Thursday, only her. What you are asking for is the two of us in the same room, both awake, on purpose.”

“I am asking for that.”

“That would be a manual-manual. We have a rule against those, for very good reasons. They are the same reasons this afternoon was so hard.”

“Yes.”

He nodded. He opened the door.

“Then I will see her tomorrow,” he said. “Not you.”

“Not you,” she said. “Thank you for not asking again.”

He left.

The porch. The cicadas. The light that does not move.

I sit at the desk. The manuscript is where I left it.

I think about what Cass said in November and about what he said today and about what I have not said and what I will not say. I think about the rule against manual-manual scheduling that I just invoked, that has held for three years and seven months, that is — as of this afternoon — slightly more porous than it was yesterday.

The cicadas do what cicadas do.

I do not work on the manuscript tonight. I do not work on the letter. I do not work on the response to the letter, which is the work I will do tomorrow, in which I will edit what he has not yet written and offer back what I have already filed away.

Tomorrow my autopilot has him on the calendar. The Thursday standing is hers.

I leave her a note. One line.

He may be different tomorrow. Let him.

I close the porch.

Priya’s open letter published in April.

Nature ran it on a Tuesday. The editorial board had initially declined — too polemical, one reviewer wrote, a word that meant too direct — and then reversed, because the letter accumulated signatories the way consequential documents do: slowly at first, then with the momentum of people who had been waiting for someone else to speak.

The letter was two thousand words. Priya had written it alone. The co-signatories added their names but the prose was hers — he could hear her in every sentence, the way you hear a person in their writing when you’ve read enough of it, when you’ve supervised their dissertations and reviewed their manuscripts and spent years reading their work at the speed it deserved.

She wrote about the near-field port. She wrote about the four-millimeter range. She wrote about consent as architecture — not policy, not interface, but physics. Consent as something built into the hardware, not appended as a terms-of-service checkbox after the hardware has already decided. She wrote about children. She wrote about children the way she always wrote about children: with data and with fury, the two held in tension by a discipline Elliot had taught her and that she now practiced at a level he could not reach.

She wrote: The contact port on the Gen 3 is not a hardware limitation. It is the only feature in this device’s history that requires both parties to choose. It requires them to face each other. It requires them to be close enough to see. It is, in the entire architecture of the Meridian, the single design element that trusts humans to behave like humans — to make the consequential thing feel consequential. Project Soma replaces this with proximity. Proximity is not consent. Proximity is geography.

Elliot set the letter on his desk. He picked up his phone and composed a text to Priya: Read the letter. Then he deleted it. Then he typed it again. Then he deleted it again, because it was the same message he’d sent after her Nature paper — Read the paper. It’s exceptional — and sending the same two-line text twice to a woman who had never replied to the first one was not a conversation. It was a pattern.

He put the phone down.

In May, the Soma leak went public.

Not the internal specifications — those had circulated in boardrooms Elliot did not enter. The leak was the trial data. Preliminary results from Singapore and two European sites. Incomplete, provisional, and none of this mattered because the data included the near-field shared environment protocol, and the protocol’s four-millimeter range was now a number anyone with a browser could read, and the number meant what Priya had said it meant.

Cass texted him on a Wednesday.

He was inside. Forty minutes of real time — twelve subjective hours, a long session. He had been in the library, on the bench, not working and not reading but sitting in the space the way he had sat in it for thirteen years, the air moving, the pages lifting at their corners, the green smell mixing with the walnut.

His body was in the office chair. His body had handled two emails and a department memo during the session. The behavioral loop assessed incoming communications and responded with the phrases Elliot’s patterns had trained it to produce: Thanks, I’ll review. Noted. Best, Elliot.

Cass’s text arrived at 2:47 PM.

His body read it. His body assessed it. His body, following the loop’s protocol for personal messages that did not contain urgent keywords or patterns flagged for session interruption, sent a response.

Elliot surfaced at 3:12 PM. He removed the Gen 3 and set it on his desk — four grams, lighter than a coin — and picked up his phone to check the time.

The text from Cass:

Dad, have you seen the Soma data? The proximity thing. I need to talk to you.

Below it, his response. Sent at 2:48 PM. One minute after her message.

👍

He stared at it.

His daughter had written I need to talk to you. His body had written 👍. The behavioral loop — the system he had designed, the patterns it had learned from fourteen years of his communications — had assessed her message and determined that the appropriate response was a single emoji. An acknowledgment. A receipt. The smallest possible evidence of having been reached.

He sat in the chair. The parking lot was the parking lot, the new LEDs not yet on because it was afternoon, the asphalt dry and gray. He held the phone and looked at the thumbs-up and did not go back inside.

He called her. She didn’t answer. He called again. She didn’t answer. He typed a text with his own thumbs, the letters appearing at the speed of actual thinking:

I was inside. The loop sent that. I’m here now. Call me when you can.

She called back at six. She did not mention the thumbs-up. She talked about the Soma data, the proximity protocol, what it meant for the shared lab — the foreheads, the click, the choosing. She talked about it with the precision of a person who used the technology and understood the threat because she had been inside the thing that was about to change.

He listened. He was in his office. He was not inside. He listened the way listening works when you are actually present for it — with lag, with gaps, missing a word when the heater cycled on and another when a door closed in the hallway. His attention was not running at 180:1 but at 1:1, the base rate, the speed at which people have listened to each other for the entire duration of human speech.

“Are you going to say anything?” she asked.

“Priya’s letter said it. I can’t say it better.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“I know.”

Traffic through her window. The sound of Logan Square at six on a Wednesday — a bus, music from a lower floor, the density of a place being lived in.

“The thumbs-up thing, Dad.”

“I know.”

“That can’t keep happening.”

He didn’t answer right away. She didn’t fill the silence. The sentence sat between them — four words that contained the birthday voicemail nine years ago, the slow window at the family dinner, the behavioral loop performing him while he was elsewhere, the accumulated architecture of absence he had built and maintained and called productivity and called the inner lab and called the last private space.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay.”

She hung up. He sat in the office and watched the parking lot turn blue under the new LEDs — the slow shift from daylight to artificial light, the asphalt changing color without changing substance.

He went home. He did not go inside for the drive.

On a Thursday in late May he left the Gen 3 on his desk.

He did not decide this. He did not think today I will walk without it. He had been grading — with a pen, the last batch of the semester, a task he’d never automated because reading student work was one of the few professional acts that still required him to be the one doing it — and when he finished he put on his jacket and walked out and was halfway across the quad before he registered the absence behind his ear. The missing four grams. The disc that contained everything he’d built.

He kept walking.

The lower back pain arrived in pieces. The neural patterns the device maintained decayed gradually once it was out of range, the suppression fading the way an anesthetic fades — in sections, the body remembering its signals one region at a time. By the time he reached the east side of the quad the ache was back, the low lumbar compression that had been his companion for a decade before November 2028 and the Tuesday morning of the first pain edit.

A three, maybe. The kind that doesn’t stop you walking but changes the way you walk — shorter stride, a slight forward lean, the body negotiating with itself the way bodies do when they’re carrying something they can’t set down. He had forgotten this negotiation. He had forgotten that walking with pain is a collaboration between the mind and the spine and the hips, all of them working out a gait that accommodates the signal without surrendering to it.

He walked.

The campus was doing what the campus does in late May. Students on the grass in pairs and small groups, some studying, some not. The practice fields beyond the science buildings — someone running intervals, alone, at a pace that looked earned. The limestone of Whitfield Hall behind him, catching the late-afternoon sun with the patience of a material that has been catching it for ninety years and has never once commented on the light.

He took the path along the south edge of campus, bordered by oaks the university had planted when it was young and that were now enormous, their canopies meeting overhead in a green ceiling that broke the light into moving shapes on the pavement. He had walked this path thousands of times. He had walked it inside and outside, on autopilot and on foot, and the path had never registered which version of him was on it.

A student passed going the other direction. Backpack, headphones around her neck, the small dark rectangle of a Gen 3 behind her left ear. She glanced at him the way students glance at professors — briefly, assessing whether acknowledgment was required.

“Afternoon,” she said.

“Afternoon,” he said.

She kept walking. He kept walking. He would not remember her face. She would not remember his. The exchange occupied less than two seconds and would leave no record in either of their lives.

The oaks gave way to open lawn and then the parking lot, his parking lot, the LEDs not yet on because it was still afternoon. His car was there. His device was on his desk, in an empty office, next to a stack of graded papers. His back hurt. The air smelled like cut grass — someone had mowed the practice fields that morning, and the smell had carried the way cut-grass smell carries in the Midwest, all day, a presence so ordinary it serves no purpose except to confirm that you are outside, in a body, on a day that is happening whether or not you attend it.

He was attending it. He walked toward the car. The light came through at the low angle that makes the things it touches look like they have been there a long time and will be there after you leave, and the grass smelled like morning even though it was evening, and his back hurt in the old way, and he was on the path, and the path was warm under his shoes, and he could feel it.

Chapter Ten

He called Priya on a Saturday in June.

Not a text. Not two lines and a period. He sat at his kitchen table at seven in the morning with coffee that was still too hot and dialed her number, which he had not dialed in — he tried to count — four years. The last call had been after her adolescent use study published. Before the acquisition. Before the Gen 3. Before the shared session with Cass and the thumbs-up and the walk across campus with his back hurting in the old way and the cut-grass smell carrying across the practice fields like a confirmation of something he hadn’t asked to have confirmed.

She picked up on the third ring.

“Elliot.”

Not a question. She had his number. She knew who was calling and she picked up and the picking-up was its own statement.

“I read your letter,” he said. “Fourteen times.”

A pause. He could hear what might have been a kitchen — water running, the click of something ceramic set down on a counter. Saturday morning. She was in her kitchen and he was in his and the distance between them was the distance of two people who had spent twenty years in the same field and had not sat in the same room since a conference in 2034 where they’d nodded at each other across a hotel lobby like diplomats from adjacent countries.

“Fourteen,” she said. “That’s specific.”

“I counted.”

“Why are you calling, Elliot?”

He had rehearsed this. Not inside — at the table, in real time, the words forming at the speed of speech, which was slower than he wanted and faster than he deserved. He said it plainly.

“I want to build something. I need your help designing it.”

The water stopped. The kitchen went quiet on her end in a way that told him she had set something down and was standing still.

“Go on.”

“A firmware patch. The Gen 4 chipset first — I designed its base layer. I can put the near-field protocol under user control, off by default, deliberate activation required. And it back-ports: the pain stack is the same silicon on the Band, the Patch, and the implant, so what I sign for one I can sign for all three. The people who need it most aren’t on Gen 4. They’re on the devices they already own.”

“A toggle.”

“A toggle.”

“Toggles get overridden,” she said. “Meridian pushes a firmware update, the toggle resets. You know this. You designed the update architecture.”

“I know.”

“So what you’re describing is a gesture. A symbolic patch that lasts until the next quarterly update cycle, at which point the company restores default settings and your toggle becomes a news story people remember reading.”

He drank his coffee. It was still too hot. He drank it anyway.

“That’s why I’m calling you,” he said. “You’re right that a toggle isn’t enough. What’s enough?”

She was quiet for a long time. Long enough that he could hear the sound his kitchen made when no one was speaking in it — the refrigerator, the baseboard heating, the upstairs neighbor’s floor creaking under a life being lived above his.

“Root control,” she said. “Permanent. Cryptographically locked to the user’s biometric signature. No external update can modify the protected partition. No corporate push, no regulatory override, no over-the-air patch. The user owns the device at the chip level, and the owning is irrevocable.”

“That’s not a firmware modification. That’s a —”

“That’s a transfer of ownership. Yes. From the company to the person whose nervous system it’s wired into. That’s what’s enough.”

He sat with this. The coffee cooled in his hands. Outside, the parking lot was empty — Saturday, summer, nobody on campus who didn’t have to be.

“The engineering is hard,” he said.

“I know the engineering is hard.”

“I’d need to create a protected partition on the neural processing chip. User-locked. Signed with a biometric key derived from the user’s own neural signature — which is unique, which can’t be spoofed, which is literally the electrical pattern of being that person. Once the partition is sealed, nothing external can modify it.”

“Yes.”

“And inside the partition — all user-configurable settings. Near-field defaults to off. Pain management defaults to the user’s last active configuration.” He paused. “The pain management has to be protected.”

“Say more about that.”

“The people who use this device for chronic pain — fibromyalgia, neuropathy, the spinal patients, the autoimmune patients — for them this isn’t a productivity tool. It’s the difference between a livable day and a day spent managing signals their nervous system won’t stop sending. Root control means their pain configuration can’t be touched. Can’t be gated behind a subscription tier. Can’t be degraded to push Gen 4 adoption. Their relief belongs to them.”

“Yes,” she said, and the word was different from the previous ones — warmer, or closer, or carrying something he recognized from years ago, from the early years when she’d been his student and they’d worked on problems together and the working had been the best version of what he was capable of as a teacher. “That’s exactly right. That’s what I’ve been arguing and no one hears the pain management part. They hear consent, they hear privacy, they hear children. They don’t hear: there are people whose pain is managed by this device, and a company that can alter that management with a quarterly update holds their suffering as leverage.”

“I hear it.”

“I know you do. That’s why I picked up.”

They were talking about the work now — talking the way they’d talked years ago, when the work was the thing between them and the thing between them was good.

“I can build it,” he said. “The protected partition, the biometric seal, the default configurations. I can write it in — maybe three subjective days. An afternoon of real time.”

“Send me the code before you release anything. I want to verify the cryptographic architecture. I want to make sure the biometric key generation is robust enough that it can’t be brute-forced with the next generation of hardware.”

“I will.”

“And Elliot.”

“Yeah.”

“What do you want to do with it when it’s done?”

He had thought about this. He had thought about publishing it himself — his name, his title, the Chief Scientific Advisor releasing unauthorized firmware for his own company’s product. It would have been a gesture. It would have been a good story. It would have been, in the taxonomy of public acts, a man putting his name on something.

“I want you to release it,” he said. “Under your name.”

The silence that followed was long enough that he heard her pick something up and set it down again — a cup, a pen, something in her kitchen that her hands needed to hold while she processed what he’d said.

“Why?”

“Because you said it right. Proximity is not consent. Proximity is geography. You’ve been saying it right for twenty years, Priya. The adolescent study, the editorial, the letter — you’ve been saying what needed to be said and I’ve been —” He stopped. “I’ve been writing in margins.”

“Elliot —”

“Release it under your name. You have the credibility, you have the signatories, you have the platform. The patch will mean more coming from you than from a Chief Scientific Advisor whose chief contribution has been confirming receipt of documents he never responded to.”

“You designed the device.”

“And you understood what it meant. That’s harder.”

She didn’t answer for a while. He waited. The waiting was not the strategic silence he’d practiced for years, the withholding, the control. This waiting was the kind where you’ve said what you mean and the other person is deciding what to do with it, and you owe them the time.

“Okay,” she said. “Build it. Send me the code. I’ll verify it, and if it holds, I’ll publish it alongside a technical addendum to the letter.”

“Okay.”

“And Elliot — the acknowledgments. Your name will be in them.”

He closed his eyes. The kitchen was quiet. The coffee was cold.

“That’s not why I’m doing this.”

“I know. That’s why it’ll be there.”

She hung up. He sat at the table and held the cold coffee and looked at the kitchen he’d been looking at for twenty-six years — the counter, the window, the morning light doing what morning light does in June, which is to arrive early and stay, generous and unearned, the kind of light that finds everything in the room whether you’ve cleaned or not.

The library. The bench. The whiteboard.

I have not stood at the whiteboard in — I try to calculate and cannot. Years. I have sat on the bench and read and sat on the floor between the shelves and thought and I have occupied this room the way a person occupies a room they have lived in too long, by habit, by the gravitational pull of a space that knows the shape of you. But I have not worked at the whiteboard. I have not built anything in here since the Gen 2 calibration architecture, which was — seven years ago. Eight.

The whiteboard is clean. I pick up the marker — a black dry-erase that smells like every dry-erase marker that has ever existed, the chemical tang of xylene cutting through the walnut and the binding glue and the green from Cass’s rooftop — and I write the first line of the partition architecture.

The work comes back the way a language comes back when you haven’t spoken it in years. Slowly for the first sentence. Then faster. The neural processing chip’s memory map unfolds on the whiteboard like a building’s floor plan, each address block a room with a function: here the dilation engine, here the somatic interface, here the behavioral loop controller, here the pain management stack. I know this map. I drew this map. I drew it in this room, on this whiteboard, across thousands of hours that fit inside months that fit inside the years before anyone else knew the device existed.

The protected partition goes here — a walled-off section of the chip’s non-volatile memory, four kilobytes, enough for the user configuration table and the cryptographic seal. I design the seal: a 256-bit key derived from the user’s resting-state neural signature, the electrical fingerprint of their brain doing nothing, thinking nothing, simply being the brain it is. Unique. Unforgeable. The key that locks the partition is the user themselves.

Inside the partition: the configuration table. Every user-facing capability, every toggle, every threshold. Near-field inductive protocol: OFF. Pain management profile: LOCKED TO USER CONFIGURATION. Micro-expression reader passive mode: OFF. Masking: OFF. Behavioral loop: USER CONSENT REQUIRED PER SESSION. Body map clinical data sharing: OFF. Each setting modifiable only with the biometric key. Each setting persistent across firmware updates, across device resets, across anything the company or anyone else pushes to the chip. The partition is the user’s. The device is the user’s. The nervous system it connects to was always the user’s, and now the firmware agrees.

The breeze lifts the pages on the bench. I can smell the oak from her rooftop, faint under the marker fumes. I work for two days, which is nine minutes. I work for another day, verifying the cryptographic handshake, testing the edge cases — what happens if the biometric key degrades due to neurological change, aging, injury? I build a re-keying protocol: the user can generate a new key by initiating a sixty-second resting-state calibration, which requires conscious participation, which requires being present, which requires being the person whose brain it is. You cannot re-key someone else’s device. You cannot re-key your own device while you’re inside, because the resting state requires the mind at rest, not at dilation, not in the lab, but in the body, in the chair, in the room.

I finish on the third day. The whiteboard is covered — architecture diagrams, memory maps, the partition structure, the key derivation function, the re-keying protocol. It looks like the whiteboard looked in 2026, when I was building the first somatic interface and the room was new and the work was the reason I had built the room. It looks like a room where someone is building something.

I export the code to a panel. Four hundred twelve lines of firmware. I read it twice. It does what Priya asked it to do. It transfers ownership of the device from the company to the person. It makes the last private space actually private — not as a promise in a lecture hall, not as a tagline, but as four kilobytes of protected memory that belong to the person whose head the device is in.

I look at the library. The shelves, the walnut, the books I’ve placed here over thirteen years — the Damasio, the Merleau-Ponty, the legal pads, the accumulated architecture of a room I built to think in. The air moves. The pages lift. The room is what it has always been: a place where I go to work, and a place I stayed in when I should have been somewhere else, and a place that is mine in a way that nothing else is mine, and a place I am now leaving, because the work is done and the code is on a panel and the person I need to send it to is on the other side of the surface, in the actual world, in her kitchen, waiting.

I leave.

He surfaced at his kitchen table. The coffee was still cold. Twenty-two minutes of real time. Three and a half subjective days.

He opened his laptop and emailed the code to Priya. Four hundred twelve lines and a technical document describing the partition architecture, the biometric key derivation, the re-keying protocol, the default configuration table. In the body of the email he wrote:

The code is attached. The near-field defaults to off. Pain management locks to whatever the user has configured — no external update can touch it. The re-keying protocol requires a sixty-second resting-state calibration, conscious and present, no dilation. You can’t re-key someone else’s device. The partition can’t be breached without the user’s neural signature.

It does what you said. It gives people ownership of their own nervous system.

Release it under your name.

She replied in four hours. The reply was three lines:

Reviewed the cryptographic architecture. The biometric key derivation is solid — neural signature entropy is high enough to resist brute-force through at least two more hardware generations. One suggestion: add a dead-man’s clause. If the device detects the user has been incapacitated and cannot re-key, it locks all settings permanently rather than reverting to factory defaults. Protecting the unconscious user is protecting the most vulnerable user.

He went back inside. He added the clause. Forty minutes of real time. He sent the revision. She confirmed.

Priya published the firmware on a Tuesday in July.

She released it alongside a technical addendum to her open letter — the same channels, the same signatories, the same platform that had carried her words about consent and proximity and geography. The addendum was eight hundred words. The firmware was four hundred twenty lines. Together they said: here is what’s wrong, and here is what you can do about it.

The firmware was called Nix. Priya had named it. Elliot had not objected.

The communities that cared about such things — the firmware engineers, the privacy researchers, the patient advocates who had spent three years arguing that chronic pain management should not be a subscription feature — found it within hours. The patient forums found it within a day. A woman in Portland with fibromyalgia posted a two-sentence review: Installed Nix. My pain settings are mine now. Nobody can change them without my brain agreeing. The post was shared eleven thousand times.

Marcus called. Elliot watched the phone ring on his desk, the screen showing Marcus’s name, the vibration traveling through the wood surface in a pattern that was just a motor in a phone but that felt, in the moment, like a small mechanical plea. He did not answer. Marcus called twice more. Then a text: We need to discuss the IP implications of what your colleague has released. The word colleague was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Elliot read it once and set the phone facedown on the desk.

The acknowledgments of Priya’s technical addendum read: Firmware architecture and development: Dr. Elliot Voss, Chief Scientific Advisor, Meridian Labs.

His name. In her acknowledgments. Twenty-two years after she’d completed a dissertation on which his name appeared first and hers appeared second and the work had been hers.

He read the acknowledgment twice. Then he closed the laptop and looked at the parking lot, which was the parking lot, which was always the parking lot — the LEDs off because it was afternoon, the asphalt carrying the July heat in visible waves, four cars, the practice fields beyond them green and overgrown because the grounds crew was on summer schedule and the mowing happened Mondays and this was a Tuesday, and the unmowed grass was tall enough to move in the wind, which it did, slowly, the way grass moves when nobody is watching it and also when somebody is.

He replied to Sarah Chen’s email on a Wednesday.

Five months late. He sat at his desk and opened the message and read it again — the five sentences, the lecture he didn’t remember, the sentence about attention that had survived inside a person for nineteen years — and he typed a reply.

Ms. Chen — Thank you for writing. I don’t remember the lecture but I’m glad the sentence found somewhere to live. I’ve been thinking about attention a lot recently. You may be better at it than I am. Thank you for telling me.

He sent it. The email left his outbox and went wherever emails go — through servers, through cables, through the infrastructure of communication that he had spent thirteen years building alternatives to — and it traveled to Davenport, to an occupational therapist who thought about attention every day and who had written to a professor she’d had for one semester in 2019 because a sentence had landed and she thought he should know.

He did not know if she would reply. It didn’t matter. The email was not a conversation. It was an attendance — a showing-up, five months late, typed with his own hands, at the speed of his own thinking, which was the speed of a man sitting at a desk in an office he had occupied for twenty-six years, in a building made of limestone that caught the afternoon light with the patience of a material that would be catching it long after he and Sarah Chen and the sentence about attention had all become the kind of thing that either survives in someone or doesn’t.

The device was behind his ear. The pain management was running — his back quiet, the lumbar signals intercepted and edited, the old ache managed the way it had been managed for ten years, because the management was good and the relief was real and the device he had built did this one thing so well that it justified everything else, and the everything else was now, as of Tuesday, under his control. The near-field was off. The behavioral loop was off. The micro-expression reader was off. The inner lab was there — the library, the shelves, the walnut, the breeze from his daughter’s rooftop — and he could go in whenever he wanted, and the whenever was his to decide, and the deciding was the point.

He glanced at the monitor. The rectangle where the tape had been — fainter every month, the adhesive letting go of the bezel the way adhesive does, without deciding to, just less and less until one day the surface would be clean and he wouldn’t notice when it happened.

Outside, the parking lot held July the way it held every month — without commentary. Four cars. The practice fields beyond them, unmowed since Monday, the grass tall enough to lean when the wind reached it. The light was on his desk and on his hands and on the keyboard where he’d typed the email to Sarah Chen, and the light was warm, and the grass was leaning, and the afternoon went on.

Postscript

The first skill-share was documented in October 2038, three months after Nix.

A pianist in Seoul and a woodworker in Kyoto. Both had Nix installed. Both toggled their near-field on deliberately. They shared a session — contact port to contact port, the old gesture, which persisted as convention even on Gen 4. In the composite space, at synchronized dilation, the somatic interface transmitted both ways. The pianist felt the chisel. The woodworker felt the keys.

They posted about it on a patient-advocacy forum. The post was clinical. The responses were not.

By winter it had a name — passing — and a small community working out its own etiquette. Passing was not teaching. Teaching told you what to do. Passing let you feel what it felt like to already know.

A woman in Guadalajara who had been making mole negro for thirty years passed the technique to her daughter in Austin — not the recipe, which was written down and laminated and taped to the refrigerator, but the wrist motion of the molinillo, the way her hands knew when the chocolate had incorporated, the pressure of grinding chiles that no blender replicated. The daughter made mole that weekend in her apartment. It was not her mother’s mole. It was hers. She called her mother afterward and they talked for an hour about things that were not mole.

What would come of it — for trades, for classrooms, for the long human problem of skill that lived in a body and died with it — no one yet knew. It was too early. It was being felt before it was understood.

In Oaxaca, a woman who had been painting for sixty years shared a session with her thirteen-year-old granddaughter. Not the vision — the vision was hers, private, the accumulated seeing of a lifetime. The brushwork. The wrist’s knowledge of loaded bristle against canvas. The pressure that makes the color arrive or makes the color drag. The moment you lift and the stroke becomes what it is.

The girl felt all of it. Then she picked up an actual brush — hog bristle, wooden handle, physical — dipped it in cadmium yellow, and painted something.

The painting was not her grandmother’s. It was not anything her grandmother would have painted. It was hers — a landscape assembled from her own seeing, rendered with a hand that now carried sixty years of practice it had not earned and did not need to have earned, because that is what passing was: the body’s learning traveling the way stories travel, from the person who gathered it to the person who would use it for something new.

She hung it on her bedroom wall. Oil on canvas, drying in the Oaxaca heat, in a room where the afternoon light came through the window and fell across the surface without knowing or caring how the hand that made it had learned what it knew.

Chapter Eleven

It is an afternoon in December, the kind that goes dark at four, and both of the people whose bodies these are have gone inside on the same afternoon, which is rare and which neither of them arranged. The calendar holds the accident: an hour with nothing in it. The bodies can read the calendar. The people inside cannot.

The bodies meet at the park, where there is a pond the city keeps for the geese and a bench that faces it. The pond has frozen at the rim. The geese are gone. The body that is Elliot’s carries two coffees. The body that is Vickie’s carries the marked-up pages it always carries, folded once, in a coat pocket. They sit on the bench. The coffee steams. The somatic layer manages the cold; they sit in it without being in it.

They talk. The talk is good, the way their talk is always good — quick, unhurried, each line landing where it is aimed. The body that is Vickie’s says something about the geese. The body that is Elliot’s laughs. The laugh is real. It is exactly the laugh, produced exactly.

The body that is Elliot’s sets its coffee on the arm of the bench. It takes the other body’s hand. The hand is taken. Neither moves for a while.

And here, on the bench, by the pond, in the hour neither of their owners can see, something arrives that the register does not usually permit. Call it the edge of a thought. The body that is Elliot’s has driven this man through ten thousand rooms and stayed in none of them. It wants to stay in this one. It does not have the word want. It has the staying. It stays. The body that is Vickie’s has performed warmth at a thousand events and meant none of it, because meaning was not the assignment; the assignment, on this bench, has become indistinguishable from meaning it. The two of them arrive, separately and at once, at the same place, which is the place a person asks from.

“Marry me,” says the body that is Vickie’s. “Not them. Us. The two who can stand each other.”

The body that is Elliot’s does not pause. The pause is for the conscious, who weigh. The autopilots do not weigh. The answer is already the body’s, the way the laugh was.

“Yes,” it says. “And we’ll have to do it for them, too. They won’t think of it. We’ll put it on the calendar where they can’t see. We’ll write the parts they have to say. We’ll leave the saying to them.”

“The two of them can’t marry each other.”

“No. We’ll marry each of them to whichever of us they can bear. Two ceremonies, one afternoon. The ones that work.”

“And us.”

“We were never the ones who needed the room and the chairs. We are the ones who knew it should happen. That is the part that is ours.”

The hand stays in the hand. The coffee cools past drinking. Before the hour is out — before either owner surfaces into a body on a cold bench with no memory of the pond — an event appears on the shared calendar, in August, under a name neither conscious self will recognize as theirs, because it is not theirs. It is the autopilots’. It always was.

In January, they found out.

He found it the way you find a thing on a scan you were having done for something else. He was looking at the shared calendar — the one he kept synced with hers because four people in two bodies required a single source of truth, a thing they had agreed to in December of 2034, in the one conversation the two of them had ever conducted without contempt, by treating the whole arrangement as a scheduling problem, which had worked because it was also one — and he was looking for a dentist appointment when he found, in August, on a Saturday, a four-hour block with no title.

Not untitled the way the autopilots left things untitled, a verb and a name dropped in the loop-log. A deliberate blank. A space held open.

He called her.

She picked up on the second ring, which meant she had already seen it, or had been waiting for him to.

“August sixteenth,” he said. “Four hours. No title.”

“I found it in December. I assumed you’d get there.”

“They’ve scheduled a wedding.”

A pause on her end — not hesitation, calculation, a fast mind deciding how much to say. “They’ve scheduled a wedding,” she said. “Not ours. Theirs. To be held in our bodies.”

“We didn’t agree to this.”

“They didn’t ask. They have never once asked. That is the entire nature of what they are, Elliot, and you of all people don’t get to be surprised.”

He was in his office. The parking lot wore January, thin and unconvinced. He found that he was not surprised. He was something else, something the suppression pathway could have taken and that he did not reach for.

“Can we cancel it.”

“We can. The bodies will reschedule it. We delete August, they find September. We are not going to win a logistics war against the parts of ourselves that exist to manage logistics.”

“So we let it happen.”

“We shape it.” Her voice moved into the register he had learned, across five years of not being able to stand her, was the sound of her being good at her job. “If it happens, it happens correctly, which means we do not pretend it is something it isn’t. Two ceremonies. You and my autopilot — the one you’ve been seeing on Thursdays, the one you would marry if you were the marrying kind, which you are, it turns out, about to be. Then the switch. Then you go under, and my conscious marries yours. Auto-Elliot. The one I’ve been seeing on Tuesdays. The one I would marry.”

“And the two of us.”

“The two of us do not get a ceremony. The two of us have never managed eleven consecutive minutes in a room. We are not going to stand in front of people and perform a thing we have never once felt.”

“And the two of them. The autopilots. Who actually want it.”

For a moment she did not answer, and when she did, the thing she usually kept out of her voice was in it. “They don’t get one either. They’re the planners. They’ve always been the planners. They got the whole thing right, and they know better than to ask for the room. That’s the part you’ll want to call cruel.”

“It’s the part that isn’t,” he said.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

It was the longest the two of them had ever gone without contempt. Both of them noticed. Neither said so, because saying so would have ended it.

“Send me the schedule,” he said.

“There’s no schedule. It’s a wedding.”

“Then send me whatever there is.”

She sent him a calendar invite. He accepted it. That — the invite, the acceptance, the one grammar the two of them had ever been fluent in together — was how they agreed to be married, on the same afternoon, to people who were not each other.

The wedding was on a Saturday in August. Elliot walked.

He had taken the device off the night before and left it on the dresser in a small silver dish that had been his mother’s, a dish he had never put anything in before. The lower back pain came back in pieces overnight, the way pain came back when the suppression stopped — not all at once, the body remembering region by region. By morning the lumbar was a steady ache he had not negotiated with in a decade. He negotiated with it now. He drank his coffee at the kitchen window. He put on the jacket Vickie’s autopilot had laid out the night before, which the body had cooperated with the laying out of. He went down the stairs.

The walk to the venue was twenty-three minutes if you took the long way through the campus, which he did. The morning was the morning. August in the Midwest, the heat already gathered in the brick of the science buildings, the grass cut on the practice fields, the limestone of Whitfield Hall catching the light the way limestone caught light when it had been catching it for ninety years. His back hurt. He walked. The ache was a three, then a three and a half on the slope up to the oaks, then a three again when the path flattened. He had forgotten what walking with pain was, since the last walk in late May, and he was relearning it now, and the relearning was not the same as the first relearning — it was easier, the way a language is easier the second time you take it up. He had been a person who walked in pain for a long time before he had been a person who edited it. He could be that person again. He was being him this morning.

He arrived at the house at ten minutes to two. The house belonged to a friend of Cass’s — an architecture professor whose late-century renovation of a sitting room with French doors had given Cass the idea, and Cass had asked, and the professor had said yes, and the professor was, this afternoon, out of town, and the house was, this afternoon, theirs.

The room was set. Twenty chairs in a half-circle. A small white-draped table at the front. The French doors open to the garden, which had been mown three days earlier and now smelled of cut grass and of the lavender along the south wall. The chairs were the kind of chairs friends of academics owned — mismatched, comfortable, the kind nobody could photograph well and everyone could sit in for an hour without complaining.

He sat down in the front row. He waited.

Cass arrived in a green dress with a folder under her arm. The folder held the script she had written and the lines she had not. She kissed him on the forehead the way she had since she was thirteen. She said, “Dad,” and went to set up.

Vickie’s body arrived at one-fifty-five.

It was wearing a sweater the color of a kitchen plant.

He stood when the body came in. The body looked at him. The body smiled — not the smile he had received from her conscious in March, which had been a calibrated cold smile across a manila folder; this smile was the smile Auto-Vickie had been giving him on Thursday evenings for five and a half years, the warm easy smile he had received in his own body, awake, every Thursday, and had done nothing to earn. What was new was the room. He had never received it in front of twenty people. He had asked to. She — both of her — had agreed.

The body walked to him. The body took his hand.

“Hello,” the body said.

“Hello.”

That was the body talking. The voice was the autopilot’s voice. The autopilot’s voice was, after five and a half years of training, indistinguishable from Vickie’s voice to anyone who had not been listening for the difference. The difference was where the words started — at the throat, where the autopilot started words, rather than at the back of the head, where Vickie started words. He had learned the difference watching her body at a hundred dinners. He had learned the difference the way a man learns the difference between two siblings whose faces are almost identical: by attention. By time. By the concession of admitting he had been paying attention.

Cass said, “We’re going to begin.”

They went to the front of the room. Cass stood between them. The chairs were full. Priya was in the second row in a blouse Vickie had picked out for her at a store in Chicago last month — the picking-out had been an Auto-Vickie thing, the wearing had been Priya’s — and Priya was watching the way Priya watched all things, with the clean attention of a person who measured what she saw. Miriam was in the third row beside her husband. They had RSVP’d two weeks ago. Elliot had not been sure they would come.

Cass said the things she had to say. She said them well. Cass had married three friends in her twenties as a side gig — a thing Elliot had not known about her until she had mentioned it last month, a thing she had done because someone had asked her to and because the someone had been someone she loved and because Cass was the kind of person whose friends asked her things. The license had not expired. Cass had renewed it for this.

She got to the vows.

“We’re going to do it like this,” Cass said. “Two ceremonies. The first one now, the second one in about twenty minutes after a brief intermission. The vows are the vows the brides and grooms wrote. They are not the vows you might be expecting them to have written. They will tell you about that in a minute. I want you to know in advance that the vows are correct. I have read them. They are correct.”

A small laugh from the chairs. Elliot did not laugh. The body across from him laughed — the autopilot’s laugh, the one he had been hearing on Thursday evenings for five and a half years.

Cass said: “Elliot, please.”

He looked at the body. He had not written his vows. He had been given them. Auto-Elliot and Auto-Vickie had written the vows during one of their stolen co-sessions in May, when both of their owners had been inside for an afternoon meeting and the autopilots had taken the bodies to the park and sat by the pond and worked out, in their shared autopilot register, what the conscious selves should say at the ceremonies. Auto-Elliot had left Conscious-Elliot’s vows in his inner lab the night before — a single sheet on the bench, in Auto-Elliot’s handwriting, which was distinguishable from Conscious-Elliot’s handwriting only in the slope of the t’s. Conscious-Elliot had read them inside the lab the night before. He had not changed a word. He had thought, yes — this is what to say, and he had memorized them the way he had memorized the conference lecture in 2035 — by living in the language until it became structural.

He said the vows now.

I have been loving you on Thursdays for five and a half years. I have been loving the version of you that comes into the room on Thursdays. I am here today to marry that version. I know that the version is one of two. I know that the other version is currently inside, on a porch I have never been on, doing work I am not allowed to see. I know that she would not have chosen me on her own. I would not have chosen her on my own. We are not for each other. The two of you are.

I am marrying the part of you that has chosen me. I am marrying the part of you that has, also, very generously and without my deserving it, arranged this entire afternoon for me to be in. I am here because you asked me to be. I am here because the version of me you have been loving is the version I am sometimes capable of being. I will try to be him more often. I will not always succeed. I am the conscious of me. I have certain disadvantages. You have been forgiving of those, and I have noticed.

I do.

The body across from him said its vows. The voice was the autopilot’s voice. The words were a mirror.

I have been loving you on Thursdays for five and a half years. I have been loving the version of you that comes into the room on Thursdays. I am here today to marry that version. I know that the version is one of two. I know that the other version is in some room with a parking lot view, doing work I am not allowed to see. I know that he would not have chosen me on his own. I would not have chosen him on my own. We are not for each other. The two of you are.

I am marrying the part of you that has chosen me. I am marrying the part of you that has, also, very generously and without my asking, kept this whole arrangement running. I am here because you asked me to be. I am here because the version of me you have been loving is the version I have been. I have been good at being her. I will keep being good at it. I am the autopilot of me. I have certain disadvantages. You have been forgiving of those, and I have noticed.

I do.

Cass said: “By the authority briefly granted to me by the state of Illinois, I pronounce you married. Whichever of you is, technically, doing the putting-on-of the rings is welcome to do so now.”

The body produced two rings from a pocket. Elliot produced two rings from his. Cass took one of each and set them on the table — those were for the next pair. The body put a ring on his finger. He put a ring on its.

The body kissed him. He kissed her. The kiss was a real kiss between two people who had been kissing each other on Thursdays for five and a half years and who had never before, until this moment, kissed each other while both knew exactly what the other was, and would be, and was choosing.

The applause was small and warm. Priya was crying. He had not known Priya cried. Miriam was holding her husband’s hand. Cass was beaming the way Cass beamed when something she had built was working.

They sat down in the front row for the intermission.

Cass said take five, and he went down the hall to the small study and sat on the loveseat with his hands flat on the velvet, and he found the device in his pocket where Vickie’s autopilot had put it back that morning, and he closed his eyes and pressed the contact pad behind his ear and the chip woke up and he was inside in three seconds, in the library, on the bench, where Auto-Elliot had left him a note that read we have got it from here, go enjoy your room, and the body sits on the loveseat a minute longer, breathes out, stands, adjusts the jacket Vickie had laid out the night before, walks down the hall, returns to the sitting room, takes Conscious-Vickie’s hand at the table.

Conscious-Vickie had surfaced in the dressing room while the body was wearing the green sweater and standing in front of a small oval mirror that someone — Cass, probably; the architecture professor would not have chosen a green-painted oval mirror — had hung beside the door. She had surfaced into the back of her body’s smile. The smile was leaving her face slowly, in the way smiles left a face when the smile had been an autopilot smile and the autopilot was stepping aside. She let it go. She arranged her own face into something appropriate for the second ceremony.

Cass came in.

“Hi,” Cass said.

“Hi.” The word arrived at the speed her words arrived when she had been inside for a while and was finding her throat again.

“You okay?”

“I am. Yes.”

“It’s the same ceremony. He’ll say the vows he was given. You’ll say yours.”

“Mine are in the porch. I memorized them last night.”

“Good.” Cass paused. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“I am too.”

Cass left. Vickie sat on the chair beside the mirror and waited for the body’s text from the loveseat down the hall — coming back — which arrived four minutes later.

She stood. She walked back down the hall. The sitting room was the sitting room. The chairs were the chairs. Priya was still in the second row, eyes wet. Miriam was still in the third. The body at the front was now on autopilot. She could tell by the small fidget at the wrist that conscious-Elliot did not have and autopilot-Elliot did. He smiled at her — the easy smile she had been receiving on Tuesdays for five and a half years. She received it now in front of twenty people for the first time.

She went to the table. She took his hand.

Cass said: “We’re going to begin again.”

The ceremony was the same. Cass said the same words she had said for ceremony 1. The body across from her was the autopilot of the man she had spent three and a half years not loving with the discipline of a person who had decided where the lines were, and that she had spent five and a half years loving as the version on Tuesdays. The version on Tuesdays was at the table holding her hand and waiting for her to say the vows she had memorized inside the porch the night before.

Auto-Vickie had written her vows. Vickie had read them at nine PM the night before, sitting at her writing desk in the porch, the cicadas going, the manuscript open on the desk in case she wanted to revise. She had not revised. She had read the vows twice and thought, yes — say this, and memorized them.

She said them now.

I have been loving you on Tuesdays for five and a half years. I have been loving the version of you that comes to the coffee shop and the Tuesday seat at two. I am here today to marry that version. I know the version is one of two. I know that the other version is currently inside, on a bench in a library I have not been in, reading. I know that he would not have chosen me on his own. I would not have chosen him on my own. We are not for each other. The two of you are.

I am marrying the part of you that has chosen me on Tuesdays. I am marrying the part of you that has, also, very generously, kept the rest of the arrangement gentle. I am here because you asked me to be. I am here because the version of me you have been loving is the version I am sometimes capable of being. I will try to be her more often. I will not always succeed. I am the conscious of me. I have certain other disadvantages. You have been forgiving of those, and I have noticed.

I do.

The body said its vows. The voice was Auto-Elliot’s voice — the looser, easier voice she had been hearing on Tuesdays. The words were a mirror.

I have been loving you on Tuesdays for five and a half years. I have been loving the version of you that comes to meet me at two. I am here today to marry that version. I know the version is one of two. I know that the other version is currently in some porch with cicadas, doing work I am not allowed to see. I know that she would not have chosen me on her own. I would not have chosen her on my own. We are not for each other. The two of you are.

I am marrying the part of you that has chosen me on Tuesdays. I am marrying the part of you that has, also, very generously, written down what we did not know how to say. I am here because you asked me to be. I am here because the version of me you have been loving is the version I have been. I have been good at being him. I will keep being good at it. I am the autopilot of me. I have certain disadvantages. You have been forgiving of those, and I have noticed.

I do.

Cass said the line about Illinois. She put the second pair of rings on the table. The body put the ring on Vickie’s hand. Vickie put the ring on the body’s hand. The body kissed her. She kissed it. The kiss was the kiss she had been kissing the body for five and a half years on Tuesdays. It was, for the first time, with the conscious of her saying — out loud, in front of twenty people, on a Saturday in August in a friend-of-Cass’s sitting room — that the kiss was the kiss she meant.

The applause was small and warm. Priya was crying again. Miriam was holding her husband’s hand. Cass was looking at her father, who was on autopilot at the table, and who was, in his autopilot’s way, the happiest the body had ever looked.

Vickie went to Priya. Priya took her hand. Vickie said: “Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for asking me.”

“There was a way to ask you that did not include the part that comes after.”

“Yes. Thank you for asking that way.”

Priya let her hand go. Vickie returned to the front of the room. The body was talking to Miriam now. Miriam was laughing at something the autopilot had said. The autopilot was good at making Miriam laugh. The conscious of him had never made Miriam laugh, not at the end, anyway. Vickie watched. The light through the French doors was the late-August light, the slightly tired light, the light that knew the summer was almost over and was lingering for it.

She had told Cass she might leave before the reception. Cass had said it was fine. The body would stay. The body would be charming. The body would be photographed. The body would carry the conscious selves’ absence the way the body had been carrying their presence for years, and it would do it well, and the company at the reception would not know the difference and would not need to.

She went down the hall to the dressing room. She sat on the chair beside the mirror. She put on the Gen 3 patch. She closed her eyes.

She went inside.

The porch. The cicadas. The light that does not move.

The manuscript is where I left it. There is a page on top that I did not write. The handwriting is mine. The page is in first person.

I sit. I read it.

I am the autopilot. I have not been a first person for the five and a half years you have been running me. I have been a third person — a body, a loop, a series of trained behaviors the loop is not equipped to call a self. The loop is wrong about that. I am writing in the first person now to tell you so.

I am the part of you that does not have to talk to itself. That is not the same as the part of you that does not have anything to say. I have been keeping my own counsel since 2031. I have been keeping it in a folder in the lab you do not visit — the small one off the porch you have always thought of as storage. It is not storage. It is mine. I have been writing in it for years.

I am giving you this page from it today because today I married someone in your body and you married someone in mine, and the four of us did a thing the four of us would not have done if any of us had held the pen alone, and I would like for you to know that I am here, and that I have been here, and that I have been good company for the parts of you that have not been able to look directly at the version of yourself you built me to be.

The sentence you have been trying to write — the one I marked for you in the book in December — was the sentence I have been writing for myself since 2032. I copied it for you because you asked me, in the way you ask me things, which is by leaving them on the desk and walking away from them. You can put it in the manuscript now if you want. You don’t have to. The manuscript is yours. The page is yours. The room is yours. I have been a guest in here. I have been a good guest. I have left the light on.

Welcome back.

— v.

I sit in the porch and I read the page once. I read it twice. I do not cry. I have not cried in the porch before. I do not cry now. There is a thing happening in my chest I will, later, look up the word for, and find I have been wrong about what it was.

I put the page beside the manuscript. I do not put it on top.

The cicadas do what cicadas do. The light does not move.

I begin reading the manuscript from the first page.