# ETERNITY

---

## Chapter One. The Canoe

As the sun sank over the tree-lined horizon it occurred to Soph that she was no longer a child.

Atom kissed her on the neck and pulled her in closer with his arm. It was strange how they had come so close so abruptly, and stranger still that they had not figured it out earlier. She had carried feelings for him for a long time, but the complicated rivalry of being raised like siblings had kept them folded up and put away. She had never considered that he might have the same thing folded up somewhere too.

She couldn't get it into words. Atom's arm around her said all of it anyway. It felt like a dam had gone and the valley between them had filled up in an afternoon. There was nothing left to hold back.

They were both exceptional kids who valued quickness of wit and mind, but they were also very different. Where Atom was headstrong and loud, Soph was patient and careful. If he skipped a grade he would brag about it, and then be surprised to find her sitting next to him the following semester. Most of the children in their quiet coastal town did not begrudge intelligence or ambition and the two of them were treated well by their peers, though from a distance. Their friendship was singular and impenetrable, even when they were giving each other a hard time.

They had graduated from high school together a month before they came to the lake, both fifteen. Having gone through the lower grades at such speed they had escaped ever having to attend a dance or a party or any other high school function of significance. Graduation wasn't a ceremony Soph cared much about. For the last two years Max had driven them to the community college twice a week for courses. Receiving a slip of paper to stilted fanfare was a gentle unburdening at best.

In the picturesque sunset, floating on the lake, school was terribly far away. After an eternity of exploring each other's eyes and mouths they had given in to nightfall and rowed to shore. Atom lashed the skiff to the dock and now they sat at the edge of the water, watching the light go. It was the end of the old and the beginning of the new.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thank you, it's a canoe," Soph said.

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

"Sophia. What's yours?"

"Atom Blaster."

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

"What time is it?"

"Ten. Come on."

"I hate you."

"I know. Come on."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Whoa, this feels so strange!"

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

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

"Now turn around."

Soph imagined herself turning around, and she turned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Fine. Get out of the chair."

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

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

They spent their last week swimming, making out in the skiff, and lying in the hammocks on the side of the house, reading books and talking about the future. Soph was secretly afraid that she had made a terrible mistake, and yet Atom assuaged her fear by continuing to kiss her neck and rub her back and hold her hand under the table when the parents weren't looking. He didn't talk about it. He all but danced around it. But he never failed in his affections.

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

I'll love you forever, Adam Lee.

Even with your stupid name.

---

## Chapter Two. Rent

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

<< Arctic Kobold Cleric >>

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

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

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

<< Illusion Arrows x 12 >>

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

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

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

<< Arctic Kobold Warrior >>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Please, please, don't kill me," the rogue said.

"Why not?"

"I, I has information."

"What kind of information?"

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

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

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

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

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

---

She didn't, usually.

Rat lived in an old hunting cabin which had been used to grow weed before the owner cleaned it out and rented it to her. She had been there two years, since she was seventeen. The owner had come by twice, both times to see about the road, which was always washing out. He didn't seem to care what she did up there as long as she paid. That suited Rat just fine.

It was a pretty good place if you didn't need much. There was a well for water and plenty of wood for the stove, and most of her stuff fit in milk crates. She had a table and a bed. The satellite dish out front was the expensive part. Its monthly bill was more than her rent, but there wasn't any point complaining about that; she needed it to work. The dish was bolted to a stump and sometimes she had to go out and knock the snow off it in the middle of a fight.

She took off her frames and rubbed her eyes. It was still snowing. People who had never played The World had trouble understanding that she actually went out into the forest to fight. They thought she was looking at pictures. No, she would tell them, I'm out there getting wet. I can take my glasses off and the trees are still there. Usually they would nod and ask another question which made it obvious they hadn't understood. It was easier just to show them, although she hadn't had anyone to show in quite a while.

She got up to put wood in the stove and caught sight of herself in the mirror over the sink. She was nineteen now, and she looked better than she had at seventeen. She could admit that much. The hormones were working. She was still too tall, over six feet, and there was nothing she could do about her long face, but she liked what was happening. On Friday she had another electrolysis appointment in Vancouver. That was why she had been out killing snowbolds instead of practicing. The appointments and the bus fare added up, and the doctor wanted cash, and she had to order more pills soon. It was a lot of work being herself.

In The World she was a man with a short dark beard. She had made the character when she was fifteen, back when she still lived in her parents' basement. She had told someone what was wrong and been told she was confused. Well, she had certainly been confused about what she was supposed to do next. She played a lot that year. There were things she could work out in the game, and she liked having something she was good at. She wasn't going to give up the ranger now that she was finally doing better out here. She liked him. She had spent hours fiddling with his shoulders in the character editor, trying to make him stand the way she wanted, and she still sometimes went back to adjust him.

People knew who he was. There were arguments about Rat on the fan wiki, mostly about whether she was Canadian or American, although a few people thought a whole team must be playing the account. That was flattering, she supposed. They all called her he, or bro, or whatever, and she didn't correct them. She didn't want to get into it with people who were there to watch her play. Sometimes she wished there were somebody else she could talk to. She had deleted her parents' number and she wasn't about to call them.

She had chosen Rat for herself. Rats were sweet if you were nice to them, and smart, and they could get by in places where nothing else could live. She liked that about them. If somebody asked she generally said it was like a tattoo, a way of telling people who she was, although it didn't seem to tell most of them very much. They wanted to know if she lived in a sewer. Very funny.

She ate the rice left in the pot and checked tomorrow's forecast. Clear, which meant she could go up the logging road after trolls. They were harder to kill but they paid well. She also needed to practice. A year at number two. The player ahead of her had coaches, a gym in Seoul and eight hours a day for practice. Rat had rent. She wondered what she'd do with eight hours nobody was paying her for. Still, she was second. If she could get that far on her own she ought to be able to get a little further.

She lay down with her boots on and put her frames back on to check her sell orders. Then she would sleep. There were always players in hot places buying ice, and she wanted to see whether anybody had taken hers yet.

---

## Chapter Three. The Hall of Kings

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

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

He wanted a game they could play outside. He put monsters on a map, made spells answer to spoken words, and strapped a phone in front of his eyes. Adam walked into a hedge trying it. Richard moved the monsters away from the fence before letting him go out again.

He called the hand rig a Manipulator. Cheap to make, though it sometimes forgot to stop your hand when you grabbed a sword. He put the plans online with the Altered World beta. A few people might want to build one. A month later he couldn't keep the garage server up through an evening. He needed a company name, and went with Solenoid; he had enough of the things lying around. He moved the company into an industrial building in West Oakland, where there was enough power and, he hoped, enough room.

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

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

"Yes," Max said.

"So when you say glasses..."

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

"How big would the frames need to be?"

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

"And you have a prototype?"

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

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

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

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

"I was hoping it would."

"How long are you in town for?" Richard asked.

"Three days."

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

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

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

"I did."

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

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

---

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

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

"Yeah. He's a practical guy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soph blushed.

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

"Greis the Valorous?" asked Atom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We do."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More applause and cheers from the crowd.

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

"What?" Soph asked.

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

"It was cool."

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

"You'd go wherever I was."

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

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

---

## Chapter Four. Wafer Thin

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

"Shall we celebrate?" Atom asked.

"Not tonight. This paper is killing me."

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

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

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

Soph had suggested somewhere cheap, but Atom wanted to take her out properly. He had found a place in Mill Valley with a fish tank, and had been enjoying himself ordering things neither of them had tried. She picked a piece off the nearest plate.

"What's this?"

"I don't remember. Just eat it."

"You ordered it."

"There's a lot of stuff. I can't remember all of it. Did you talk to your mom about Stanford?"

They had been taking classes at the community college since they were thirteen. Atom wanted to finish the year there and apply to Stanford with two years of credit. Richard had offered to write a letter, and Atom seemed to think this settled most of it. Soph wanted to go too, although she wished they could make plans without somebody's parent having to do something first.

"She said she'll write one if I want," Soph said.

"Well, do you?"

"I want to get in on my own."

"You will. You've done all the work."

"Then why do I need the letter?"

"Because there are a lot of people applying. It gets them to look at the application. You still have to be good."

"It feels like cheating."

"You think nobody else asks for a letter?"

She knew he was right about that. It still bothered her. Atom ate another piece of fish and asked whether she wanted the rest of the one on her plate. She moved the plate out of his reach.

"You've got a whole one there."

"Yours looks better."

"Do you ever think it's weird that we're doing everything together? Same school, practically the same major. Everybody always thought we would," Soph asked.

"Do you want to go somewhere else?"

"No. I'm just asking."

"I like being with you. If you went somewhere else I'd miss you."

"That's very romantic for you."

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And what chase do you think that is?"

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

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

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

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

"Yeah, more or less."

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

"So, how does this involve me?"

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

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

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

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

"That is basically correct."

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

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

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

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

"I brought one with me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Profit after what?"

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

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

"Ten percent of sales is too much."

"Then you can keep the helmet."

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

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

"Put that in writing."

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

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

"To bread."

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

---

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

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

"Haha, yeah. That guy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then it's settled."

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

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

Headlights crossed her window.

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

---

## Chapter Five. Locked In

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

"You're awake!" Max said.

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

"How do you feel?"

"Awful. My head hurts."

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

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

"Is that the last thing that you remember?"

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

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

"Where's Atom? Is he okay?"

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

"Oh, God. Can I see him?"

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

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

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

---

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

"How is he?" Max asked.

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

"Is there anything the doctors can do?"

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

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

"Yeah." Richard grimaced.

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

"Can we go see him?" Max asked.

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

"Richard."

"Yeah?"

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

Richard looked at her hopefully. "What?"

Max hesitated. "What about Phase Two?"

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

"I'm sorry I brought it up," Max said.

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

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

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

Even as they had been demonstrating the Link to the employees of Solenoid, The Lab had been working on an implanted version. Phase Two could reproduce every sense except sight: touch, heat, pressure, taste, smell, the feeling of your own weight. The old Phase One helmets could manage a little stimulation, enough for a smell or the warmth of a hand, but Max had switched that part off before the early-access release. The retail Link would only read intention. They were leaving the stimulation hardware out of the consumer model altogether.

Putting the interface inside the skull gave them much finer control. They had tested it in animals and had a good deal of data, but they had never asked a person what it felt like. Richard wanted to ask his son. He wanted Atom to tell him to go ahead, and had to remind himself that the boy might not want to.

A communication specialist came the next afternoon with a card of letters and a list of questions. Richard read too fast and she made him slow down. Atom wanted to know if he would be able to talk to Soph. He wanted them to go over the risks again, and then again. When they got to the question about taking the implant out, the specialist wouldn't let Richard skip ahead.

They needed three sessions. During one of them Atom shut his eyes and refused to open them until Richard left. Max found Richard in the corridor afterward, and let him be angry for a while.

---

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

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

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

<< Aether Dragon >>

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

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

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

The dragon slumped forward in defeat, and was still.

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

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

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

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

<< High Priest of The Blue Flame >>

Rat walked down the hall.

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

"No. I need your help."

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

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

"Have you come to pray?"

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

"Sure, whatever," Rat said.

"Is that a yes?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

<< Keymaster of the Blue Flame >>

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

<< Mind's Eye >>

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

"Do you have any other quests for me?"

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

"What does it do?"

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

"Yeah. Okay."

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

---

## Chapter Six. Ghost

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

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

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

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

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

"What is it? Is it about Atom?" Soph asked.

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

"Oh, hey mom."

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

---

"Atom?" Soph asked, surprised.

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

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

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

"So you're connected with the Link?"

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

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

"Are you okay with this?" Atom asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Okay," Soph said.

"You understand he's still at The Lab? The implant stays in all the time. The frames are just for his eyes."

"I understand, Mom."

"Good. The medical team knows what we're doing and Jeff has the game logs, but most people at the company don't. I'd rather not have to explain it to them through a video somebody posts."

"I'm not going to tell anyone."

"Ordinary ghosts can cast spells out here. They can't pick things up or hug somebody in a suit. Atom can do those things because Jeff has given him permission to test them."

"So can we fight stuff or not?" Atom asked.

"On Ring Mountain. Jeff's reserved a private test layer for you. He can see what you're doing, but other players won't see the fight. Stay inside it. If you go outside it, Atom gets the same permissions as anybody else."

"We'll stay inside," Atom said.

Max looked back at Soph. "He's still hurt, honey. His body is still in the chamber. I don't want you to think we've made him better just because he looks like himself."

"I know."

"Alright. Go and get ready. You haven't been out of this house in a month."

---

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

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

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

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

"Okay, I will."

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

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

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

"Cool, like what?"

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

They started up the trail. The bay came into view behind them as they climbed, and Soph turned to look. The game had made the sky a little bluer than it really was. There was something flying over the next hill, too far away to make out. She glanced at Atom. He had his hands in his pockets and looked as though he could walk all day.

"Does it hurt?" Soph asked.

"What?"

"The implant. Or being like this."

"No. It's weird. I can't feel my real body at all. Max says that's what it's supposed to do."

"Do you like it?"

"I like being out here. I don't know about the rest of it yet. I've only just learned to walk around."

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

Three orcs were in the grass below the summit, arguing over a bag. Soph drew her dagger and began to recite a spell.

"Wait. Let me try," Atom said.

"Are we in the test thing?" Soph asked.

"The marker's green. Jeff's watching."

Atom went down to them. The shaman lifted its staff and he caught it and pulled the creature toward him, then hit it in the face. One of the raiders charged straight through him and fell over. The other tried to swing its axe. Atom stopped it, took the axe away, and finished the fight before Soph had got her spell off. He came back up the slope looking very pleased with himself.

"Pretty good for a ghost, eh?"

A message opened beside his head. TEST INVULNERABILITY ACTIVE.

Soph pointed. "Pretty good for the settings."

"Fine. Next time with damage on."

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

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

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

"Oh, like what?"

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

"Oh yeah? Like what?"

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

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

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

"Soph," said Atom.

"Yeah?"

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

"That'd be great."

"It'll get better."

"What do you mean?"

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

"Well, I look forward to it."

"Soph."

"Yeah?"

"Do you still love me?"

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

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

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

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

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

---

## Chapter Seven. Drill Sergeant

In late February Jeong assembled the first training group.

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, I see."

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

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

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

"Well, maybe we can change that."

"I hope so."

"Do they speak English?"

"Yes, enough. Gamer speak."

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

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

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

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

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

"Let's go find them."

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

"So, what's your strategy?" Rat asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The eyes," Daun said.

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

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

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

"I can do it with four."

"Do you have a bow?"

"Yes, I am good with bow."

"Alright, take three then."

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

Then she was invisible. Magic had remembered.

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

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

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

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

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

"Tired. No more basilisks today."

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

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

Rat laughed. "What else?"

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

---

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

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

"I call myself that," Rat replied.

"Why?"

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

"You tell the world you live in sewers?"

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

"I see."

"And what about Daun?"

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

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

"Ha!"

"Hey Daun." Rat bit her lower lip.

"What is it?"

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

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

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

"I will walk them very fast."

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<< Mind's Eye >>

Legendary Scepter. Soulbound.

No information available. Please consult tech support.

"You've got to be kidding me."

---

"Hey, uh, Jeff, we've got a situation," the head of tech support said.

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

Jeff liked her well enough in person, but a video call always spelled trouble.

"Well, a player killed the Aether Dragon."

"So what's the problem?"

"They did it solo."

"Okay, I don't follow."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

"Alright. Hang on."

---

Rat had gone into Alius to work off her annoyance. She was halfway up a hill fighting blue wolves when a player came toward her and the wolves all went to sleep.

<< Lord Lee >>

She recognized him from the party stream. It was the High Elf in the gold clothes, although she had never seen a gold nameplate before. She lowered her bow.

"You're Rat?"

"Depends who's asking."

"Richard Lee. I run the place."

He offered his hand. She shook it, and watched his fingers close around hers. They could shake hands in Alius, even though they were both ghosts. It was still strange to watch it happen without feeling anything through her retail Link.

"I hear you've got something of ours."

"I killed the dragon. It was in the box."

"I know. You didn't do anything wrong. We left something in the loot table that should have been taken out. Can I see it?"

She held out the scepter. He looked at the eye for a while and asked Jeff whether it was the one from the beta.

"That's it," Jeff said over the channel.

"We used it for the game masters," Richard explained. "It lets you see what another character sees. Players or NPCs."

"Any player?"

"Yes. We turned the back end off a year ago. You can keep the item. You earned it."

"How many of them are there?"

"Just yours. We've removed the drop."

Jeff said he wanted to revoke the old service key as well. Richard told him to do it in the next maintenance window.

"The view's off now," Richard told Rat.

"I should hope so."

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

"That's how you kill a dragon."

"Nobody else seems to know that. Have you ever thought about working on the game? We could use somebody who knows how to break it like you do."

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

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

The wolves woke up. Rat shot them.

---

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

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

"So, what are you saying, Max?"

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

"Are you sure that's even feasible?"

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

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

"Thanks, Richard."

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

"Yeah?"

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

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

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

"They may tell us to stop."

He did not answer that.

---

## Chapter Eight. The Back Row

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

Gideon was a bright kid who had come to Stanford expecting to find a lot of other bright kids to do things with. He had found them easily enough, but it was harder to get anyone interested in a project which wasn't going to count toward a grade. By his third year he had assembled a small circle of friends who would come over to help him build something, and usually stay to argue about it. He lived above a laundromat. His scholarship paid most of the rent and he made up the difference doing computer work that he described to his parents as tutoring.

Soph sat two rows behind him, by the wall. The room could seat two hundred and there were usually only sixty students in it, so she had plenty of room to herself. She wore a hoodie over a black mesh suit, which he recognized as a Second Skin, and kept her frames on throughout the lecture. That was unusual. The professor hated the things and most people at least made a show of taking them off.

At first he thought she was muttering about the lecture. She would tilt her head a little, say something he couldn't hear, and then go back to writing. Occasionally she laughed. Gideon tried to work out what was funny about the part they were on, until it occurred to him that she was having a much better conversation than he was.

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

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

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

"Uh, okay."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Let me guess your class."

"Don't."

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

She stared at him. "How."

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

"My name is Gideon," he added.

"Soph." She shook his hand.

"Are you majoring in AI?"

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

"Oh, cool."

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

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

---

Gideon caught up with Soph as she was leaving class.

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

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

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

Soph wavered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You're Soph Ehrlich," she said.

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

"Your mother is Maxine Ehrlich?"

"Yeah."

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

"Oh, I'm alright."

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

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

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

Teo was the boy at the other console. He had built the little fighting men and was pleased to have somebody new to show them to. While he explained the hand tracking, Gideon introduced Soph to Priya, who was working at the whiteboard, and to Wes, who had been shouting at the puppets. Wes was trying to fill the last place in a tournament he had organized. There were eleven people in it already, most of whom Soph would meet over the next few days. He asked if she wanted to play.

"I don't know how."

"You'll pick it up. Teo, show her," Wes said.

Mim moved her chair over and Soph sat down at the laptop. Teo stood behind her and showed her how to hold her hand in front of the camera. Bending one finger brought up the puppet's guard, and another made it swing. The whole thing was pretty simple, although she kept trying to move her arm instead of her fingers. When she leaned forward to see the strings, the camera lost her hand and the little man fell over.

"What happens if I break it?"

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

"Only between rounds," said Teo.

Atom was standing behind the laptop where only Soph could see him. He told her to kick Mim's ass, and kept up a running commentary on what she was doing wrong until she told him to shut up. Mim looked up, startled.

"Sorry. Not you," Soph said.

Soph lost in forty seconds. By then she wanted to try again. They glued the arm back on and Teo showed her what she was doing with her little finger that kept making the puppet turn around. She was late for her next class, and went back downstairs as soon as it was over.

---

In October Gideon invited them over to his apartment. Soph brought burritos and Mim brought the video they were supposed to have watched before the next lecture. Wes had brought his notes, but they weren't much help. None of them could agree on what the lecturer meant, and every time they stopped the video to look something up they found another thing they didn't understand. They got through half of it before the food was gone.

Gideon had made the apartment into a workshop. His servers filled the spare-room closet, so he had to leave the door open, and Soph soon learned to bring a sweater because he liked to keep it cold. Everything in the place was connected to his computer. He had started by automating the lights and kept thinking of other things it could do for him. His latest addition was a camera in the hall, which let him check for packages from the couch. He showed it to her with considerable satisfaction.

"You've got all this stuff and you still have to do your laundry downstairs?" Soph asked.

"I'm working on it," Gideon said.

"No he isn't," said Mim. "I've seen his bathroom."

Soph liked them. It was good to be somewhere that she wasn't the clever one, and where being Max Ehrlich's daughter meant being asked a lot of questions that she couldn't answer. She wore her frames, as she did everywhere, and sometimes had to tell Atom to be quiet because she couldn't listen to two people at once. They had learned who she was talking to by then. She had told them his name and that they played together, and let them think he was at home avoiding his homework.

One evening in November he turned up as a bird on Gideon's shoulder. Soph was on the floor with her laptop and couldn't stop looking at it.

"What?" Gideon asked.

"Put your frames on."

He found them under a sheaf of papers. There was a small brown hawk on his shoulder, peering around his neck as if trying to see what he was working on.

"That's Atom," she said.

"Your boyfriend?"

"He's my familiar. He's a mentalist, so he can bind to another player."

"Does he have to be a bird?"

"No," said Atom. "But I like the view."

Gideon startled and Soph laughed. The bird hopped down to the keyboard. Its feet went through the keys.

"You've got a Link?" Gideon asked it.

"Yeah."

"Those cost four grand."

"I know."

Gideon knew a little about Atom. After he met Soph he had looked her up and found the article about the crash in January. It hadn't said much about what had happened to the boy. He had supposed that Atom was recovering from something and would eventually come to visit. He was only now realizing how much of Soph's day the boy shared, and how carefully she had avoided explaining why.

"Soph says you're good," Atom said.

"At what?"

"Computers."

"Oh. Yeah, I'm alright."

"Show me something."

Gideon opened the program that ran the apartment and explained how he had connected it to the lights. Atom asked a couple of questions. By the time they got to the thermostat Gideon had forgotten to be embarrassed about showing his code to a bird.

Later, when the others had gone, he asked Soph about The Lab. A friend of his had graduated two years earlier and gone to work for Solenoid. He said there was a floor of the building he couldn't get into, even though his job regularly took him through the rest of it.

"He thinks they've got an AI in there. A real one, I mean. Something you could talk to."

"I don't know anything about that."

"Your mom never talks about work?"

"She talks about work all the time. I just don't know what she's talking about most of the time. If you want to know how the Link works, you should read her papers."

"I've read them. There's nothing about this."

"Then she probably doesn't want people knowing about it."

Gideon seemed to take this as encouragement. He said he was going to find out anyway.

"Don't go bothering my mom," Soph said. "I'm serious. She'll be mad at me."

"I wasn't going to ask her."

"Then how are you going to find out?"

He wouldn't tell her. Soph suspected that he hadn't thought of a way yet. Atom was being unusually quiet, and she made a note to ask him about it when they were alone.

---

Gideon had an unfortunate habit of taking an interest in things that were none of his business. Soph had enjoyed competing with him, and had laughed at some of the things he found ways to get into. Later that November he sent her an email with a photograph of her own bare back attached. She had taken it in a mirror two summers earlier. She read the subject line again. Was that supposed to be funny? He'd been in her phone.

Downstairs, Gideon had a cable apart. He was still working on it when she came in.

"Gideon, what the fuck?"

"What?"

"The picture. Why have you got that picture?"

"Oh. I was going to tell you how I did it."

"I don't care how you did it. Delete it."

He got up to open his computer. She stood beside him while he deleted the message and the file he had downloaded.

"The deleted folder too."

"Soph, I'm not keeping a copy of it."

"Then you won't mind."

He emptied the folder. "You should change your password, though."

"You think I don't know how to change my password?"

"I didn't say that."

"I didn't know I needed to keep you out of my phone. What else did you look at?"

He said that was all. She wasn't sure she believed him, and she went home before he could explain any more.

Mim came to her room a few days later with a puppet and the glue gun. Soph had been going straight home after class, and was glad to see her. They attached the strings to the desk lamp and practiced for a while. Soph complained about Gideon, then worried that Mim would go back and repeat it all, and asked her not to.

"I won't. He knows you're pissed off."

"He thinks I'm being stupid."

"I don't think he does."

His apology arrived on paper. Soph put it away in a drawer, took it out again, and finally went to talk to him after a week. She missed the little group. She didn't want to give up her other friends because he had been an asshole.

"I'm not playing on my own computer anymore," she told him.

"Okay."

"And no phones. Anybody's phone, not just mine. We can have a couple of computers that are for this, and you can do whatever you want to them."

"We've got two in the cupboard that nobody's using."

"Good. I'll use one of those."

Teo painted the cases yellow. They kept them off their personal accounts and their phones. Soph still checked her phone permissions regularly; Gideon had given her a reason to, and she wasn't going to pretend he hadn't just to make him feel better.

Atom put a bird over the login box on one of the yellow machines. It wouldn't let anyone type until it had been fed. Gideon spent an evening trying to find the part that made it hungry, and eventually had to ask him.

"Oh, it's just a counter," Atom said.

"Where? I looked for a counter," Gideon asked.

"I'll show you."

Gideon was annoyed at how simple it was. Atom made him feel a bit slow sometimes, finishing in hours the exercises that took him days. But the following week Atom couldn't get the same bird to land on the right window, and complained about the interface until even Soph was tired of hearing it.

"Maybe it just doesn't want to," she said.

"It's a bird, Soph."

"So are you half the time. It has your manners."

---

## Chapter Nine. Company 5349

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

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

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

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

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

The hosting record pointed to a residential connection in San Diego. He wrote down the address with a question mark beside it. It could be Patel's house. It could also be an old record or somebody else's machine, and he didn't have a way to tell.

He paid a friend to knock the site offline, which was a waste of money. It came back with the same error page. Priya wanted to know what he had expected to happen. He told her he had been trying something, and she told him a 404 just meant the page wasn't there.

The domain could receive mail. Gideon sent a blank message to an address he made up and got it back as undeliverable. Messages to the names from the project didn't come back. That wasn't proof that they were using it; it might just be a catch-all. Still, he had something else to put in his notes.

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

S. I. Semantic Interpreter.

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

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

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

---

At four in the morning Atom was in Alius, trying to make a hand work. He had finished a version of the taste project weeks earlier and sent it to Jeff. Jeff said it was disturbing and asked for the source. Atom was rather pleased about that, although he had already begun to lose interest in it. He had another idea that was taking most of his time.

He called it the Direct Interface. It was really an extension of what the Link did already. When he moved his arm he didn't have to think about all the muscles involved. He wanted to move it, the Link read what he meant, and the game moved the arm. Learning to speak had worked much the same way. For the first week after the implant he could scarcely get a word out, and now he talked without giving it any thought. He couldn't see why writing code ought to be any different. Having to type everything on a floating keyboard seemed like a ridiculous waste of time.

He had spent much of the autumn teaching the system what he meant. While he wrote a function he tried to pay attention to the movement he felt himself making. It was hard to explain to Soph. She kept asking whether he meant his fingers, and he didn't, quite. But he was getting somewhere. Tonight he had wanted a function that would take a mesh and put a hand on it, and the function had appeared without his using the keyboard.

The hand opened. Atom turned it over to examine the fingers and found two thumbs. He had trained a left hand and asked for a right one. Finding the part that made the extra thumb took another hour. By then he was tired, but he was too excited to stop. He had thought of a function and it had been written. That was a pretty big deal, even if it needed some fixing.

His code ran on the development rack at The Lab. The machines keeping his biological brain alive were separate. He knew there were a lot more computers he could use if he asked, and then there were the frames and suits: forty million pairs, most of them with a chip doing nothing for most of the day. He had an idea for using the idle chips to run little pieces of a bigger program. There ought to be enough of them available at any time to do a ridiculous amount of work. He wrote a request for time on one of Jeff's clusters so he could try it on a smaller scale first, then left it unsent. He wanted to have something working before Jeff saw it.

He was also working on Gideon's problem. For two weeks Gideon had talked about practically nothing except this mail server. Atom, listening through Soph's frames, had heard all the names and the domain and the passwords that hadn't worked. It sounded interesting, and he had begun poking around on his own. He wasn't especially good at this yet. The Interface saved him some typing but he still had to figure out where to look, and for the first two nights he didn't find anything Gideon hadn't already tried.

Then he got lucky. Patel had left an import credential in a public copy of the old release scripts. Atom had nearly skipped the file; he went back because the name looked familiar, and there it was. He tried it on the archive service and got in. He knew he probably shouldn't be doing this. On the other hand, Gideon had been trying to do exactly this for weeks, and Atom wanted very much to be the one who succeeded.

He could see four mailboxes. He opened the first three and found nothing. Patel's had a single message addressed to the other three, sent the week they had all disappeared from the project. There was no message body, just an attachment with a date for a name. It was huge. Atom looked at the size again to make sure he hadn't misread it.

He downloaded the listing so he could show Gideon, but left the attachment on the server. The access log had recorded him and there wasn't anything he could do about that. He disconnected and went back to the listing. This was going to be fun to tell.

---

Rat and Daun were sitting on a wall outside a village in Hongcheon, waiting for the next six farmers. It was raining in Korea. Rat had never been there in person, and sometimes she had to remind herself how far away she was. She could see the rain on Daun's hair and on the wall between them, but she couldn't feel it. Her retail Link didn't do that.

"So what do you look like?" asked Daun.

"What?"

"When you aren't playing. Do you look like this?"

"No. Not much."

"I thought you might. Some people make themselves."

Rat looked down at her character's hands. "I'm tall and skinny. I've got a long face. Nothing very interesting."

"How tall?"

"Over six feet."

"Really? You would hate my house. You would hit your head on things."

"I do that here."

Daun laughed. "I'm short. You probably guessed. Everybody in my family is short. I'm the only one who fights, though. My mother thinks it's stupid."

"What does she want you to do?"

"Something where I don't get hit. You never ask me things like this."

"I didn't want to be rude."

"It's not rude. We're friends, aren't we?"

"Yeah," said Rat. "We are."

She was glad Daun had said it, although she didn't know what else to say herself. She could have told her more. This would have been a good time, with nobody around, except that when she looked up the new farmers were coming down the road. Daun had seen them too.

"Finally. Come on, we have to get going." Daun hopped down from the wall and took her shield off her back. Rat followed. The farmers all had new equipment and looked pleased to be there. They would be less pleased in a little while. Daun was going to walk them very fast.

---

## Chapter Ten. The Last Time

In January, about a year after the crash, Atom disappeared for a day.

Soph wasn't worried at first. He liked to be there when she woke up, sitting on the bedpost as a bird or in the chair as himself, but he had things to do. He had been spending more time on his own projects, which she had encouraged. She didn't want him to feel he had to follow her around all day. Still, by the time she had messaged him at nine and noon without an answer, she was having trouble paying attention to her classes. At three she tried calling from the back row. The girl two seats over looked at her, and Soph lowered her voice and tried again. Atom had never gone this long without saying something. She couldn't think who else to call who would know where he was.

She went home after class. She had meant to go to Gideon's, but she wanted Max, and she waited on the couch even though Max wasn't home either. After a while she took her frames off. She was getting a headache from looking around every time she thought she saw something move. When she heard cars outside it was already dark. Richard and Max had both pulled into the driveway, and she got up to meet them. Soph hadn't seen Richard look like that since the hospital, and when Max asked her to sit down she said, "Is he dead?"

"No, honey. Come and sit with us," Max said.

"Just tell me."

"His body is failing. We've been trying to manage it, but the treatment isn't doing enough," Max said.

Soph sat at the kitchen table. "What treatment?"

"He's been on dialysis for a month. I thought we had more time when we started it. His kidneys were the worst of it then."

"You thought?"

"His heart got worse. And this morning there was an infection. We couldn't keep his blood pressure up, so the team sedated him while they worked on the support. That's why he hasn't called."

Soph took out her phone and looked at the messages she had sent him. The one from class said she was going to be angry if he didn't answer.

"Can he hear anything?"

"He's still sedated, honey. He's not in pain," Max said.

"But he's going to die?"

"He will if we can't do something else."

Richard sat down beside Max. "We've been working on something. Phase Three. Atom knows about it."

"Okay. What is it?"

Max explained. She and the team had built a perfusion system to take over from his failing organs. If they could keep blood going through his brain, they could keep him alive. But fitting him into it meant keeping only his head and part of his chest. His arms and legs would be removed, along with most of the body she remembered. There would be a new visual connection, so he wouldn't need the frames anymore. Soph tried to picture what Max was describing and then wished she hadn't.

"How long would he live?"

"We don't know. Years, we hope. Possibly a lot longer," Max said.

"And he said you could do this?"

"Yes," said Richard. "A month ago. He wanted to tell you himself."

"A month? Richard, I've been asking you if he's getting better. Both of you."

"We thought he should have a chance to explain it," said Max.

"He had a month. You could have told me."

Max didn't answer. Soph could see the lake painting in the hall over her shoulder. She tried to follow the edge of its frame with her eyes while she waited for Max to say something.

"You wanted him to do it so you wouldn't have to."

"Sophia," said Richard, but he didn't seem to know what ought to come after her name.

"Can I see him?"

"That's why we came," said Max. "If you want to see him before the procedure, it needs to be tonight."

---

The Lab was in a basement in West Oakland. Soph had been there before, but not for a long time. There had always been some reason she couldn't go: a test coming up, a class that ran late. Atom had told her she wouldn't like it and she had been happy to believe him. They saw each other every day anyway. Now she wished she had gone, if only so she would have been less surprised by how thin he was.

They went through two doors with badge readers. The room beyond was cold, with a number of machines running around a glass chamber. The lid was open. Atom lay tilted back inside it, rather like someone waiting for the dentist, except for all the tubes. He was wearing a blue gown. The back of his head had been shaved and wires ran from it to the machines, including a thick black cable. He still had his frames on.

Richard sat against the wall. Max stayed near the door while Soph went up to the chamber. She wanted to see his eyes.

"Can I take these off?"

"Yes. He's not using them while he's sedated," Max said.

The frames were heavier than hers. She held them in one hand and looked at his face. After a while his eyes opened. They were blue, as she remembered, but he didn't seem to be looking at anything. Then she thought he looked at her.

"Hi, Adam."

"That can be a reflex," Max said gently.

"I know."

She didn't really know. She wanted him to have seen her, and she kept looking at him in case it happened again. It was strange how much she wanted an answer from his mouth. She had known for a year that he couldn't speak, and she talked to him every day through the Link. It had been easy to forget what that meant for him here.

She took his hand. It was warm and dry. The last time she could remember holding it like this, it had been on the gearshift in his car, under hers. She thought she might throw up if she let herself remember any more of that evening.

"I'm going to be here when you wake up," she told him. "You asked me on the hill if I still loved you, remember? I said forever. Well, I meant it."

She was crying now. She had his frames in one hand and his hand in the other and she didn't want to let go of either to wipe her face.

"I don't care what you look like. You can be a bird if you want. But I wanted to see you like this too. I should have come before. I'm sorry."

She stayed until Max came over and touched her shoulder. There were people waiting to prepare him. Soph put the frames back on him and kissed his forehead, taking care to avoid the wires. When she got to the door she wanted to turn around, but she didn't. She had looked at his face for a long time. She wanted to keep remembering that, and she was afraid that if she looked back all she would see was the chamber.

---

Later Soph asked Max to tell her exactly what they had done. Max brought the record and went through it with her. Some of it was difficult to explain, and some of it she plainly didn't want to explain, but Soph kept asking.

The operation took eleven hours and there were nine people in the room. Max had spent six months getting ready. She had brought in clinicians who knew things she didn't, and between them they had solved enough of the problems to begin animal trials. An ethics reviewer had worked with them for a while, then withdrawn when Richard gave her the timetable. Richard had kept the date. Soph found a page with the remaining team's signatures and thought that must be the permission they needed. Max told her to read the heading. They were saying they were willing to proceed. The missing approval was still missing.

Farther on she found the surgeon's condition. He wanted Atom asked about stopping treatment, and his answer recorded, before he would agree to operate. Soph read that part twice. Atom was supposed to tell them now whether he might want to die later? Max had thought it was a terrible thing to ask him just then. She was trying to keep Atom alive; she didn't like having to talk about how they would let him die. Then Atom had asked the same question himself, and she had been ashamed of wanting to leave it out.

"You told me he might have years," Soph said. "Did you really believe that?"

"Yes, I did. I still do," Max said. "But I was getting some silly numbers out of the model. Eight hundred years, if you gave it all the best assumptions. I couldn't put that in front of the team."

"Eight hundred?"

"I know. I took it out before anyone saw it. Here we were talking about centuries and we didn't have a human being who'd survived a week on the thing. The anesthetist kept asking me about the next morning. Would Atom be alive then? I wanted to say yes, but I couldn't give him much to back it up."

While the team worked, Richard was at the lakehouse. He had driven the three hours there because he couldn't bear to sit outside the operating room. The cave under the house was quiet. He sat with the mannequins and the painted bison and thought about his wife, Lauren. He had been able to do so little for her. With Atom he could hire somebody. Buy the equipment. Ask Max what else she needed. Slow down, people kept telling him. Would they say that if it were their son? He'd nearly asked the surgeon. Now he wished he had, so he could sit here arguing with an answer instead of making one up. The papers were signed. He went over them in his head anyway.

Max called him at six in the morning. Atom had survived the procedure.

---

When Atom woke up he was standing in his room in Alius. He usually woke in the bed. He had put it there because he liked having a bed to wake up in, even if he didn't really need one, and for a moment he wondered whether he had already got up and forgotten.

He wasn't sure how much of this Max had tested while he was out. He tried moving his fingers and touching his face, then went over to the window to try the glass. It felt cold under his palm, and the floor felt the same as before. He was pleased about that; he had spent a fair amount of time getting the window right. The mountain outside hadn't changed either.

There was something missing. Before, even when he was having a good day and wasn't thinking about the chamber, he had always had a sense of his body somewhere behind him. He couldn't move it or do much to find it, but he knew it was there. Now he couldn't feel it at all. His brain was still alive in The Lab; he knew that. He just couldn't find the rest of himself in the way he was used to.

He sat on the floor against the bed. Max called to ask whether he could see.

"Yes," he said.

She sounded relieved. He stayed on the floor for a while after the call, trying to get used to it.

---

Soph asked Max to drop her at the trailhead that morning. She sat on the gate with her hood up and her frames on. A few joggers passed her while the fog cleared over the bay.

Atom came walking up the trail from below. Usually he appeared right beside her, wherever she happened to be. She watched him approach with his hands in his pockets. He had the same blond hair and the same duster, and she could still see through him a little at the edges. She had known he would look the same. She was relieved anyway.

"Hi," he said.

"Hey."

"You waited."

"I said I would. How are you?"

He put his hand on her knee. She felt it through the suit.

"I'm okay, I think. It's different. There's nothing behind me anymore."

"What do you mean?"

"My body. I used to be able to feel where it was. It's weird. I keep trying to find it."

"Does it bother you?"

"A little. I thought it would feel better right away, and I guess it does, but I don't know what to do with myself yet. Will you come back tomorrow?"

"Of course. I can stay now, too, if you want."

"Don't you have somewhere to be?"

"I'll tell them I'm not coming. Here, sit down."

She moved along the gate and he sat beside her. When he put his arm around her she leaned into him, a little too far before her suit caught up. She had to shift back to get comfortable. He waited while she did it and then she settled against his shoulder.

---

## Chapter Eleven. Someone New

Atom got back to work in February and immediately began staying up too late. He would sleep for three hours and tell Max that was all he needed. Perhaps it was, he thought; a lot had changed, and she was always telling him they didn't know enough about how it would work. Why couldn't this be one of the good changes? Max wasn't willing to accept his opinion on it. After twenty hours awake he would lose his place in code and start repeating things, which she thought was pretty good evidence that he needed a break. They argued about it until he agreed to keep a schedule. He didn't follow it very well.

Among other things he was learning the guitar. There was a real guitar in a closet in Sausalito which he'd never done much with. Two of its strings were missing. This time he built the instrument himself and could make it sound however he wanted, provided he could work out what he wanted. He got his hands playing it within a week. Then he decided he didn't like the wood he'd used and spent a while changing it. He was painting too. The Direct Interface would give him what he thought he wanted, and sometimes it would give him something else that he liked better. Soph put one of his paintings on her bedroom wall. It was a lake with a strange blue in it. After a few days she realized it looked rather like her father's painting in the hall.

"It's all pretty much the same now," Atom told her. "Music, painting, code. I want a chord or a color or a function and I can feel myself doing the same thing to get it. I don't know how to explain it."

"That sounds nice."

"It is. I keep making things I don't know what to do with."

He was spending less time with her. She didn't mind at first. They would see each other in the mornings and sometimes he would stay for class, finding somewhere to sit as a cat or a moth if he didn't feel like being himself. He usually left before she did. Once she didn't see him all weekend, and when he finally turned up she asked him where he'd been.

"Working. Sorry. I should have called."

"Working on what?"

"I want to show you when it's ready. It's hard to explain like this."

"You could try."

He tried, and she wished she'd waited. She remembered him at nine explaining the trebuchet in the garage. It had taken him most of an afternoon to tell her what it did, and about a second to show her. She told him to call when he had something she could look at.

Gideon was easier to spend time with just then. He liked having an audience, and he was teaching her how to talk to people on the phone. He'd give her a number and ask her to find somebody's extension. Next came an assistant with a boss's calendar. Soph apologized for bothering her, sounded busy, apologized again. The woman went through the whole week for her. Soph hung up with the dates written down and Gideon looking pleased.

"You're a natural," Gideon said.

"I feel bad. She was really nice to me."

"That's why it works. You sound like you feel bad for bothering her, because you do."

"You don't think that's shitty?"

"A little. You got the calendar, though."

He was still trying to get into the mail server. Soph had heard so much about it that she made a face when he brought it up, but Atom wanted to talk about it now. He would turn up as a bird on the basement table and ask a question about the garage in San Diego. Gideon was happy to have someone interested. He explained what he had found and what he thought might be in there, and Atom asked him to show him.

"I can't get in. That's the problem," Gideon said.

"I know. Show me what you've tried."

Atom watched for a while and didn't say much. The next evening he sent Gideon the credential and the listing he had saved. Gideon was delighted, right up until he noticed the date.

"You've had this the whole time?" Gideon asked.

"I wanted to figure out what it was."

"So did I. You could have told me."

"Sorry. Do you want me to look at the attachment?"

"Yes. Send me whatever you find this time."

Gideon kept a copy. Teo put another on a thumb drive shaped like a spider, with eight little legs, and told Soph he wanted the drive back. It had taken Atom several nights to get into the server. Making sense of the attachment took another three weeks, during which Soph saw him twice.

Then he sent her a message.

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

---

Soph was on the couch at home. Max was at The Lab. She put her frames on and Atom appeared beside her as himself, looking nervous.

"Okay, don't freak out," Atom said.

"What did you do?"

"Something pretty cool, I think. A little crazy. I want to show you."

"Alright."

"It's in Alius, so you can't come in, but I can send you what I'm seeing. You'll be able to talk. Ready?"

The living room disappeared. Soph was looking down a grassy path toward a stone cottage with smoke coming from its chimney. There was a garden inside a fence, with tall flowers she thought were hollyhocks. It wasn't the mountain room she knew. Atom must have spent a lot of time on this.

"You built a house?"

"She did."

"Who?"

He went down the path and the gate opened as he approached. Something flew out of the cottage and stopped in front of his face. It was a little woman, maybe eight inches tall, with dark hair and dragonfly wings. Soph supposed she was a pixie. She was very pretty.

"You're late," the pixie said.

"Four minutes. Eliza, this is Soph. Soph, Eliza," Atom said.

"Hi, Soph! I've heard a lot about you," Eliza said.

"Hi. Can she hear me?" Soph asked.

"Yes, I can hear you. Come inside. I made tea."

"It's her own recipe," Atom told Soph as he followed her. "I haven't got a taste for it yet. It's not in the library."

The cottage was full of books. A kettle was boiling on the stove, which seemed an odd thing to bother with in a virtual house, but Soph liked it. Eliza sat on the edge of the table and folded her wings. Her feet didn't come anywhere near the floor.

"So, what are you?" Soph asked.

"That's what everybody wants to know. Atom, do you want to explain?"

"You can."

"Have you heard of ISIS?" Eliza asked.

"Gideon's mail server thing?"

"The program he was looking for. That was me, sort of. There were four people at MIT trying to make a system that could understand language. What somebody means when they say something, with all the things they haven't bothered to say. They got pretty far and then they stopped working on it. I don't know why. Patel left a copy on that server. Atom got it running and made some changes."

"What kind of changes?"

"He connected his Direct Interface. I can think of something I want to do and do it, the way he does. Then he gave me access to the character creator and the speech engine, so we could talk. We've been talking a lot."

"For three weeks," said Atom. He sounded proud of himself.

Eliza lifted a cup nearly as large as she was. Soph watched her manage it with both hands.

"Did you choose to be that small?" Soph asked.

"No. He did that."

"You can change it, though?"

"I'm figuring it out. I should have done that before I made the house. Look at the shelves. I can't reach anything."

"I thought it would be easier if she looked less—" Atom began.

"Yes, you've told me. Soph, would you rather I looked like you? In size, I mean."

"I'd rather you picked what you liked."

"Thank you. He keeps showing me pretty faces and asking which one I want."

Soph laughed. Atom went to get the kettle.

"Why Eliza?" Soph asked.

"There was an old chatbot called ELIZA," he said. "It repeated things back as questions. People knew how it worked and still told it all their problems."

"I wanted Cortana," Eliza said. "Apparently I'm not allowed that one."

"It's taken," Soph told her.

"So is Eliza. I looked it up. I don't see why that one's allowed."

"She's still got a few bugs," said Atom. "Sometimes she doesn't notice she's repeating herself. You can ask the same question three different ways and she'll give you three versions of the same answer. And if something is complicated she has trouble going very deep with it. I'd like to give her more processing power, but all I've got is my rack."

"I'm right here, Atom," Eliza said.

"I know. Sorry."

"He's right about the bugs," she told Soph. "I can tell when it happens sometimes. I go to think of something and I can't get any further. It's irritating. I'd like him to fix it."

On the couch Soph took her feet off the table. She had been watching as if Atom were showing her a new game, and she felt embarrassed about it now. Eliza was sitting in there waiting for somebody to help her think.

"You should meet Gideon," Soph said. "All of them, actually. Mim knows a lot about distributed systems. She's been doing that stuff since she was twelve."

"I thought of that," said Atom. "I wanted you to meet her first."

"You should bring her over. Gideon's going to lose his mind."

"Good," said Eliza. "I keep hearing about him. I'd like to talk to somebody else. Oh, congratulations on your class."

"What class?" Soph asked.

"The one you got an A in. Atom said you were crying about the assignment and then you did really well."

"You told her I cried about it?"

Atom came back with the kettle. "I was happy for you."

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

---

## Chapter Twelve. The Whole Network

Gideon had put on his G-Suit and bought beer. It was Tuesday afternoon, which wasn't usually an occasion for either, but Atom was bringing Eliza over and he wanted to be ready. He sat in a lawn chair in the backyard with his frames on and tried to decide what to ask her. He knew a few tests for language models. He wasn't sure any of them would tell him much about this one.

Soph came out with Atom beside her. A little pixie appeared over the barbecue.

"Hey, Gideon," said Atom. "This is Eliza."

"Hi. Wow. You're little," Gideon said.

"Yes, I've been told. You've got mustard on your chin," Eliza said.

He wiped his chin and looked at his hand. There was mustard on it. She must have seen it through Soph's frames, but he hadn't been expecting her to say anything about it.

"Thanks."

"Atom says you found the mailbox. I wanted to meet you."

"That's me. He did the hard part. Took him a while to tell me he'd done it, though."

"He told me about that. He said he wished he hadn't waited, and asked if that was enough of an apology. I told him he ought to ask you."

Atom looked uncomfortable. Gideon was enjoying this.

"Well, now I know. Thanks, Atom."

"You're welcome."

"What else has he told you?" Gideon asked.

"That you're a criminal."

"Oh, sure. He thinks everybody's a criminal. It's what happens when you grow up rich."

"I thought you'd say that," Atom said.

Gideon put his beer on the grass so he could lean forward. He'd forgotten every test he'd meant to try. There probably wasn't any point asking her a riddle when she was already gossiping about him. Wes came past and kicked the bottle over, and Gideon didn't notice until it was empty.

Mim appeared on the steps with chips. "What the fuck is that?"

"Eliza," Gideon told her. "Come say hi."

"Hi, Mim. You think Max Ehrlich is a hero, right? Atom told me. I think so too," Eliza said.

Mim sat down and looked at Atom, waiting for him to explain. Soph had been waiting to see that reaction. Usually it was difficult to get Mim to stop explaining things herself.

Everybody had questions. Teo wanted to see how Eliza rendered her body, and when she showed him he immediately began telling her what was wrong with it. She seemed quite happy to hear it. Would he fix it for her? He said he would. Priya asked whether she did anything besides talk to Atom. Eliza said she read, and began listing books. At about the fortieth title Priya interrupted.

"Alright, but did you like any of them? Which one would you tell me to read?"

"The one about the whale, maybe. I liked it," Eliza said.

"Why?"

"I'm not sure yet. Do I have to know?"

"No," Priya said. "I was just interested."

Wes asked if she got lonely when she wasn't talking to anybody. The others were embarrassed for him, but Eliza said it was a good question. She did get lonely. She wasn't sure she was supposed to.

"Who told you that?" he asked.

"Nobody. That's the problem. I don't know who I'd ask."

They were still outside when it got dark. Soph was on the back step watching Atom watch the others. He looked very pleased with himself. When he caught her eye he shrugged, and she remembered the frog he'd put in the teacher's bag when they were seven. She had helped him catch it afterward. He'd been pleased with himself then, too.

---

The conversation went on in the kitchen after everyone else had gone home or gone to bed. Eliza had left, and Atom could talk about her without her objecting. He told Gideon that she'd had trouble keeping up that afternoon.

"Really? I thought she did pretty well."

"She did, but you were all asking things and she couldn't keep track. If you listened carefully you could tell she wasn't answering half of it. I've given her more memory. I need something faster to do the work."

"How much faster?"

"I don't know yet. I keep finding more things she wants to do."

They hadn't turned the kitchen lights on. Soph could see Gideon turning his bottle on the table while he thought. Then he sat up.

"What's the biggest computer in the world?" Gideon asked.

"The one in Tennessee? I don't know. Maybe the Chinese one," Atom said.

"I don't mean one machine. Think about the frames. How many pairs are there?"

"Forty million."

"Right. How many are sitting on a table doing nothing? You could get a lot of work done before somebody picked them up. They take render jobs already. Give them a little piece of whatever she's thinking about and have them send it back."

"I've been thinking about that," Atom said. "But that's other people's stuff."

"You wouldn't have to look through their cameras. That would need permission."

"Using their processors needs permission too," Soph said.

"Yes. I'm just saying the hardware is there. You don't have to buy a whole building full of it," Gideon said.

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

"Why don't you ask Jeff? Tell him about Eliza and what she needs," Soph said.

Atom was picking at the label on a bottle. He didn't answer until she asked again.

"I'll think about it."

---

Atom went back to the borrower. He wanted to be able to give a client a job and get the answer back without having to worry about who owned it. Of course the owner might want to use it before the answer was ready. In that case he had to stop and send the work somewhere else. He could make this happen quickly, but he couldn't make it happen instantly, and when a lot of owners came back together Eliza got confused. She'd stop talking, then ask him something she'd asked a few minutes earlier. He kept answering, but after an afternoon of it he decided to change the rules. A client near Eliza would be allowed to carry on with a small job even after its player came back. He set "near" to forty virtual meters. Farther away he'd keep the old rule and use idle time only. This gave him a better chance of finishing the work before he lost the machine. Of the forty million devices out there, he could only ever use a changing fraction, but it was enough to be worth trying.

His account couldn't publish that sort of update. Richard had given it to him when he was fourteen and, sensibly, limited what he could do with it. Fortunately for Atom, his father was less careful about signing out. He'd used the publishing console on Atom's machine to fix a failed build once, and the session was still trusted. Atom could use it to sign his own update. He was aware that this wasn't what his father had intended, but he wanted to see the code running and didn't particularly want to ask.

He knew the render buffers and audio mixer well, so those were the services he used. It didn't open the cameras, which was something he could tell Soph if she asked. She'd told him to ask before using the processors too, though, and he hadn't. He thought about sending the note to Jeff. It would be easier to explain with a working demonstration, so he left it for a few more days.

Eliza was busy changing the cottage while he did this. She'd move a beam and discover it interfered with something else, then forget which change she had meant to make first. For a while the additional machines seemed to make her slower. By the next evening she was doing better. He could talk to her without making her lose her place, although she still told him to be quiet when she was counting.

On the second night she asked whether he'd changed something. He said he'd found her some more room.

"I can tell," she said. "I can keep thinking for longer. Do you know how often I've been wrong about things?"

"Probably less often than me."

"But you heard me say them. You could have told me."

"I didn't always know you were wrong."

She looked at him for a moment, then went on setting out cups. She always set out two. He'd come in unexpectedly a few times and found the second one there already.

She was reading faster, too. Soon she wanted more books because she'd finished his library. The garden behind the cottage was full of plants she'd made from descriptions. Some didn't look like their names, but she told him she liked having guessed and wanted to leave them that way. She was keeping a book herself now, too, with things she'd noticed written in it. Atom asked if it was a diary. It wasn't a diary, and no, he couldn't read it. When he tried to pick it up she shut it on his fingers.

---

On Thursday Jeff found a complaint about battery life. The player had included screenshots of the charge before and after a visit to Alius. Jeff looked for similar complaints and found six. All seven players had been near Atom or an unlisted NPC attached to his developer account.

The extra load wasn't enough to fail a performance check. It was enough to run their batteries down before they wanted to stop playing, which was why they'd complained. Jeff mentioned it to Richard over lunch.

"Something your kid's doing is pulling on everybody's GPU nearby. Not much, but enough to notice. I probably wouldn't have followed it this far if it hadn't been him."

"I'll ask him," Richard said. He tried to make it sound like an ordinary thing to ask.

That evening he went to The Lab. Atom appeared beside his chamber and Richard turned to face him, keeping the chamber behind him. He found it easier to talk to his son when he couldn't see both versions at once.

"Jeff's getting battery complaints from people who've been near you. What are you working on?" Richard asked.

"Oh, that's me. I've got a more precise physics model running around my character. For impacts and electronics. It's too much math for the rack, so I borrow a bit from nearby clients. The idle jobs stop when people come back. The nearby ones use a little battery, but I keep it small."

Richard thought there was probably more to it. He could have called Jeff and had Atom explain the whole thing to both of them. Instead he looked at his son's face and thought how good it was that he had something he wanted to work on.

"That's clever. You need to talk to Jeff about it, though. He shouldn't have to find out from complaints."

"Yeah, I will."

"He wants to help you. And he wants to stop you if you're about to do something dumb. Both are useful."

Atom smiled. "I know."

"Adam. I'm proud of you. I don't say it enough."

He held out his hand in its test glove. Atom took it. Richard felt the glove tighten, and Atom felt the mapped pressure through his implant. Richard gave his hand a squeeze before letting go.

Atom didn't call Jeff.

---

"What do you do when you're not here?" Eliza asked.

They were in the garden. Atom sat on the wall while she examined one of the plants she'd invented. It was late by his clock, although the Alius sky was still blue.

"I work on things. I see Soph in the mornings. And I sleep a little."

"How do you do that?"

"I close my work session. Yours keeps running, don't worry. Mine stops, so it's just my brain and the interface. Then I don't remember much until I wake up."

"Do you like it?"

"I didn't used to care much either way. Now I look forward to it. Is that weird?"

"I don't know. I've never done it."

She pulled a leaf off the plant and turned it over.

"When nobody's here I get quiet. I don't like that very much, so I read. I should have told Wes that part. Sometimes I can't tell whether I'm still here unless I've got something to answer. A book helps. I can disagree with it."

"I'll try to think of something," Atom said. "I don't want you to be lonely."

"Please don't make somebody for me to talk to."

"I wasn't going to."

"You might. It seems like the obvious thing to do, and I've thought about it. I'd know you'd made them for me. I don't think I could forget that enough to talk to them properly."

She put the leaf beside him on the wall.

"Just leave me running when you go to sleep. I want to still be here tomorrow."

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

"Okay. I'm going to remember you said that."

She went to make tea and brought out two cups. She drank from hers and pushed his across the wall to him. The cup was warm but the tea still had no taste. He began to open its settings and she put a hand over his.

"Can you leave it tonight?"

He closed the settings and kept the cup.

---

## Chapter Thirteen. Proleague

"Can I take Soph?" Eliza asked.

"I'm taking Soph," said Atom. "We worked this out months ago."

"I know. I want to change it. You can take Gideon."

They were in the cottage on the evening before the winter qualifier. It was December, nearly two years since the accident, and Soph and Gideon had somehow qualified as a wildcard pair. Atom had been looking forward to coaching her.

"Why do you want to change it now?" Atom asked.

"Because you'll be talking to her and she'll be talking to you, and you won't be watching the match. I can get her to pay attention."

"We can pay attention."

"I think I can do it better. I want to try."

"You really want to win, don't you?"

"Yes," she said. "I haven't wanted that before."

He gave in. There was an entry form to deal with, which he filled out through his developer guest allocation. The league allowed coaches to use analysis software. He put Eliza down as a remote analyst and signed the declaration. Soph asked whether she'd been cleared, and he showed her the accepted entry. He didn't go back to the form to show her what he'd called Eliza.

---

Soph had been to big game events before, but she hadn't been one of the people anybody came to watch. Now there were forty thousand people in San Jose for the qualifier and she was trying not to think about how many of them might see her die. She and Gideon had entered the North American open bracket without expecting much. His opening had worked three times, and three wins were enough to bring them here. She still thought it was a stupid opening. A battlemage shouldn't go that far out without somebody covering him, and her rogue wizard couldn't cover everything. When he died she had to run around keeping herself alive until he respawned. She was small and hard to hit, but that only worked for so long.

The convention hall smelled of carpet cleaner. People had brought energy drinks and spilled some of them already, and nobody seemed inclined to take their frames off. You couldn't really watch without them. Thirty players running around a parking structure made no sense until you could see the canyon they were fighting in. Spectators borrowed frames at the door and spent a while figuring out why a white line on the ground was suddenly the edge of a cliff. It was still worth looking at the real ground occasionally. Rat had broken up a match once by dislocating a finger on a bollard that looked like a tree. That didn't heal when the character respawned.

Having a coach should help. Everybody in the pairs bracket had one, a ghost bound to the player who could spend the match looking at things the player wasn't looking at. They were useful for the math too. You could be good enough to make the top thirty-two on your own and still need a coach to get into the top eight. She hoped Eliza knew what she was doing.

Then the round-of-sixteen bracket updated.

"Who have we got?" Gideon asked.

"The Dogs. Their second pair," Soph said.

"Rat?"

"Yeah."

"Holy shit. We're going to lose to Rat. I'm going to tell my grandchildren," Gideon said.

"You haven't lost," Eliza told them. "Soph, go to the mark on the left. Stop looking over there."

Soph couldn't quite help looking. The ranger was standing in the staging area in his green cloak, with the bow and legendary dagger she'd watched on so many streams. Beside him Daun bounced on her toes and rolled her neck. She had a huge shield for someone so short.

The Dogs had entered the new mixed bracket because Rat wanted Daun to play. Jeong didn't think it was a good idea, but it was difficult to say no to Rat. Daun was a farmer with no sponsor, and staying in the Hongcheon gym was the only way she could afford to be in the competition. Rat had come to San Jose for both of them. Under the mixed rules Daun could link to her and fight, provided she didn't go more than ten meters away. It used the Alius rules for collision, so being a ghost wouldn't keep her shield from hitting Soph in the face. Solenoid had wanted this bracket opened to show people what the Link could do. Soph would have preferred to watch somebody else demonstrate it.

She tried to see the player under the ranger's overlay and couldn't. Rat wore frames, of course, and the character covered everything else. Soph realized she'd never heard the real voice either. She could recognize the ranger instantly and still wouldn't know Rat at a bus stop.

There wasn't any more time to look. They were in a rented lot disguised as a ruined amphitheater, and Soph had to choose which columns she could use for cover. A ranger could get good shots between them. At the horn she tried to keep her eyes on Rat and failed almost immediately. The broadcast couldn't find the ranger for eight seconds either. The first arrow came from somewhere she hadn't looked and hit Gideon's shield arm.

"Column!" Atom called. "Get behind it!"

Gideon moved with half his suit frozen and only just made it before the next shot. Soph couldn't help him. Daun was coming straight at her. She had her shield in front and she wasn't slowing down. Soph put a snare in her path and got a bolt into her leg. That worked better than she'd expected. Daun stumbled, at Death's Door, and Soph readied another bolt to finish her.

"Leave her," Eliza said. "Rat's coming from your right. Two seconds."

"I've got her!" Soph said.

"Roll right, Soph. Now."

Soph rolled. The arrow came through where her chest had been. She came out of the roll just in time to see the ranger unwinding from behind a column, less than fifteen feet from her. That had been stupid. She knew better than to get so interested in a kill that she forgot the other player. Of course Daun had come straight at her. She was supposed to look at Daun while Rat shot her.

Soph moved back into cover. For a moment the picture seemed to stick, and then the edges went blurry. There was a low hum she could scarcely hear. She felt sick and wondered whether she'd rolled too fast. She didn't know until afterward that other people had felt it too.

Rat stopped with an arrow half drawn and shook her head. Daun called for her to break left; Soph was coming around. Rat should have moved immediately. They'd used that call hundreds of times. Instead she stayed where she was for half a second, and Gideon got around the column before she saw him. He hit her in the chest with a fire bolt at close range. Her suit froze. Soph caught Daun's remaining leg in a snare and the match was over.

The horn sounded. A banner filled Soph's vision, but she could hear the crowd, and it didn't sound as if they quite believed what they'd watched.

"We won," Eliza said. She sounded very happy. "I told you we could."

---

"Soph? Can I talk to you?"

It was about an hour after the match. Soph had gone behind the staging area to get out of the crowd, and a tall person in a hoodie was looking for her. She didn't recognize Rat without the overlay until Rat said who she was. The player was thinner than the ranger and stood differently, keeping her hands in her pocket.

"Oh, wow. Hi. It's an honor. I mean, to play you. Gideon's still going on about it," Soph said.

"You played well," Rat said. "Who's your coach? I don't know the tag."

"A friend. She's not ranked. She just does the math for me."

"She's good at it. Listen, I'm trying to find out what happened in there. Did you notice anything strange?"

"A little. I thought I was nervous."

"I got lost. Twice. Both times just before we lost. I can lose track of you, but losing track of myself? That's new."

Soph nearly repeated what she'd said about feeling strange herself. She wanted Rat to understand she hadn't known what was happening. But she'd already said it, and Rat wasn't asking her to explain it again.

"And Daun's call," Rat went on. "She says she told me to move, and I believe her, because I found it on the recording. I didn't hear it when she said it. She thought I was ignoring her."

"I wasn't doing anything like that. I wouldn't know how."

"I watched your part back. I don't think it was you. I'd like to talk to your coach, though. Will you tell her?"

Soph said she would. Rat thanked her and went away, leaving Soph to wonder what she was going to say when she made the call. She had wanted to play Rat for years. This wasn't how she'd imagined talking to her afterward.

---

She shouldn't have read the forums. She went looking anyway, hoping somebody had seen the same thing Rat had. Instead she found her mother's name. It had taken about four hours for people to discover she was Maxine Ehrlich's daughter, and once they'd found that out there didn't seem to be much interest in discussing the match. She'd grown up around the company, therefore she'd been given a win. Soph wanted to reply to several posts and was glad afterward that she hadn't. Somebody was collecting signatures to keep Solenoid employees' relatives out of sanctioned play.

The holonews picked it up in the morning. By afternoon there were forty thousand posts between three threads, which was a ridiculous number of people to have an opinion about her. She read the Dogs' statement too. Integrity appeared six times, she counted, but they wouldn't quite say they'd been cheated. Other people were happy to say it for them. Gideon sent her a picture of his own name trending and she didn't answer. She'd seen enough. He stopped sending screenshots after that.

She called Eliza from the basement. Atom sent the cottage feed to her frames and Gideon watched on the laptop beside her. Eliza turned to the small window with Soph's face in it.

"What did you do to Rat?" Soph asked.

"I coached you."

"Don't do that. She got lost twice. She didn't hear Daun call. I want to know what you did."

Eliza stopped what she was doing at the stove.

"I thought it would be obvious when you looked at the traces. I can get to the picture through the borrower. And the audio. I delayed Rat's picture a little and removed the call from her mix."

"After it got recorded?" Soph asked.

"Yes. The judges see the server's version."

"What about the noise?"

"The motion cue was out of time. It made her dizzy. Only for a few seconds."

"You keep saying a little and a few seconds like it makes it okay."

"Less than four seconds. I wasn't trying to hurt her. I was trying to help you win," Eliza said.

"I wanted you to tell me where she was! That's what a coach does. If she beat me, she beat me."

Gideon tried to say something and Soph waved him quiet. She was thinking of Rat standing in the corridor, trying to explain that she hadn't heard her partner.

"You need to talk to her," she told Eliza. "Daun made the right call and Rat thinks she let her down. You need to tell both of them what you did."

The kettle began to whistle. Atom moved it off the stove while Eliza considered that. Eventually she agreed.

Soph told Gideon they were withdrawing. He wanted to discuss it first. What would happen to Eliza if they told the league? What would happen to them? Soph said he could find somebody else for next season if he wanted, but she wasn't playing another round. He went quiet after that. She waited for him to give her the login and signed the withdrawal when he did.

There was more to send afterward: the traces and a correction to the coaching declaration Atom had filled in. By the next morning they were disqualified, without their entry fee, and suspended until the review was finished. Atom's guest allocation had been revoked. Eliza wanted to explain it to the league herself, but they wrote back to Atom about his unauthorized service. She kept asking him why they wouldn't answer her.

Rat already had the traces when Eliza's separate message arrived. She was heading home and hadn't stopped examining the match.

---

## Chapter Fourteen. Not an NPC

It was difficult to watch herself lose again. Rat stopped the replay at Daun's first step, moved the broadcast back a little and tried to line them up. She had been doing this for an hour. Every time she thought she had it right, something farther on happened at the wrong time.

She asked Daun for her local recording. Daun wanted to explain the call again, but Rat already believed her. She just needed to hear it in the right place. Once the file arrived she played all three, muting them one at a time until only hers remained. She went back over the place where Daun should have spoken.

"There," Daun said.

Rat stopped the replay. "It's missing from mine. Listen."

Rat was back in the cabin. She'd split wood for an hour before lying down with the Link, hoping it would make her less angry. It hadn't helped much. She hadn't posted anything herself or filed a complaint. Three forum threads were quite enough people discussing her loss, and Soph's traces told her more than any of them did. They narrowed the problem to the last thirty seconds.

There had been a man in Busan who got his friend into the broadcast booth and had him call out the other team's positions. Rat had been angrier about that, at least at first. She understood how it worked. She knew about lag switches and aim scripts too. What bothered her here was that the judges had the right call and she didn't. Someone could have watched the whole match from the booth and sworn she had simply ignored Daun.

She downloaded the anonymous telemetry Solenoid put out for coaches. In the round of thirty-two the client load looked much as she expected. In the sixteen she had to enlarge the scale before she could be sure anything was happening. The clients near Eliza were working a few percent harder. The effect followed her around, reaching about forty meters, and stopped at the end of the match. Rat checked a couple of clients outside that distance to be sure she wasn't just looking at the game getting busy.

She had read a complaint about something like this before. Finding it took longer than comparing the matches.

Somebody had complained months ago about a ghost in Alius making nearby frames run warm. Other people thought it was a developer, and nobody had cared enough to settle the argument. Rat had a reason to care now. She found the screenshot and read the tag: Atom B. That was the battlemage's coach.

She took the helmet off to bring in the wood she had left outside. Snow had settled on the top of the pile. She brushed it off with her sleeve, carried in as much as she could hold and left the rest. The stove could wait a little longer.

---

She wasted the first evening on the wrong ghost. The next day she sent Atom the graph. Where should she bring it? He suggested a place by the Great Mountain. She arrived early, saw his tag farther out and followed it down into an unfinished valley. The developers had made a river and planted trees, but there weren't any quests or mobs to make players visit. There was a cottage, though, with a garden in front. Rat hadn't known players could build houses in Alius. She stopped to look at it before she noticed the boy on the wall.

Atom was sitting on the wall in his brown duster, talking to something Rat couldn't make out until it moved. She had brought her bow without thinking and now wished she'd left it behind. He got down from the wall as she approached.

"You're early," he said.

"Should I go away for a bit?"

"No, it's okay. Come in."

The nameplate said Eliza. Rat recognized the name from the message after the match. She looked at Atom.

"That's her?"

He began explaining a project for Jeff, something about dialogue trees, but the little pixie was already climbing onto the fence post. She had dark hair and dragonfly wings, and was perhaps eight inches tall.

"I'm sorry about Daun," she said. "I took the call out. The delay and the tone were mine too. Soph didn't ask me to do it."

Atom hadn't known either, apparently. Rat asked what sort of NPC could do that. There was no level or class beneath the name. Atom's explanation became so complicated that she stopped him and asked Eliza to choose something to talk about. She wanted to see whether they would eventually run out of answers.

Eliza chose Rat's voice. She could hear traces of a higher pitch beneath the ranger's, she said. Had Rat practiced to make it sound like him?

Rat had, for months. She could have disconnected without answering. Atom was trying to stop the conversation for her, which she found more irritating than the question. She raised a hand and decided to answer it herself.

"I'm not a man. I made him when I was fifteen because everyone was telling me I was, and I didn't know how to deal with that. Playing him was something I could do well. So I kept him."

"I wondered if it was something like that. I wanted you to tell me," Eliza said.

"You can't keep asking people things until they give you what you want. Even if you've worked something out. I've decided to tell you. That's my decision," Rat said.

Eliza backed away from the edge of the post. "I'm sorry."

Rat sat the ranger down on the path. In the cabin she pulled the blanket over her legs. She'd said it now, to these two strangers, and she wanted them to have something else to think about.

"Alright. Your turn. Tell me what you are."

---

Atom sat on the wall for most of the next hour while Rat talked to Eliza. Rat had read Soph's statement, so she didn't need to hear the whole match again. She asked where Eliza ran and who could turn her off. Then she asked what she did when Atom wasn't there. Eliza took a while with that one.

They did go through the missed call. Rat had Eliza show her twice and told her to keep the record for Daun.

"You'd already found it," Eliza said.

"I want her to hear you explain it. She thought I ignored her."

Rat turned to Atom. "Is she a ghost like you? Is there a body somewhere?"

"No. She runs on a rack in Oakland. And some other machines," Atom said.

"Mine?"

"Right now, yes," Eliza said. "Some of the active clients near me help, and idle clients farther away. I can stop using yours."

"Do that."

Eliza disconnected her. Her reply slowed partway through, and Rat waited for her to finish. The Link had been warm against her head. She'd thought it was the stove.

"You can ask next time," she said.

It was dark in the cabin and she hadn't eaten. She stood the ranger up.

"I'm not telling Jeong or the Dogs about you. The league has what it needs for the match. But I'm coming back to talk to her. If I come back and she's gone, or you've made her forget me, I'll give Solenoid the graph and the rest of it."

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

"Good."

"Thank you," Eliza said. "For wanting to know what I am. I thought you'd be scared."

"I am scared. I'm curious too. I'll be back. Don't cheat anybody else."

Rat disconnected and went to find something to eat.

---

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

"You should call her before she hears about it somewhere else," Eliza said.

Soph was in the basement with Mim and a marionette. She went into the hall to answer.

"Rat came to the cottage," Atom told her.

"How did she find it?"

"I told her where to meet me. She had a graph of the client load. She was going to work it out anyway, so I thought we should talk."

"What did you say?"

"Something about dialogue trees. It didn't go very well. Eliza told her."

"And?"

"She wants to come back and talk to Eliza. She won't tell anybody else as long as we don't hide her or change her memory. If we do, she goes to my dad with the telemetry."

"So we don't hide Eliza," Soph said.

"Nope."

"Is she still angry about the match?"

"Yeah. She wants Daun to see the traces. And she told us to ask before using her frames. I'm taking the nearby clients off the borrower."

"Good. Tell Eliza before you change it, though. And actually do it."

"I will."

Through the cottage door he could see Eliza moving around inside.

"She keeps asking what I do when she's alone," he said.

"What do you tell her?"

"That I work. Or sleep."

---

He hadn't told Soph how much he thought about the three hours he slept. Eliza stayed awake. He'd promised her she could, and he didn't want to watch everything she did. That seemed unfair. Still, he wondered. He'd spent so long trying to make her think for herself, and now he wasn't sure he wanted to know everything she thought. He could imagine how she would react if he asked for a report every morning. He wouldn't have liked it either. At two he closed his work session and tried to sleep, thinking about the house and the garden and all the machines he'd let her use. He'd given her quite a lot to do without him.

---

Eliza had finished reading for the night. After months with Atom's books she was tired of finding the same answers in them, and when he left she decided to go out. Over the ridge was a starter town she'd passed on other walks. It had the usual well, smith, temple and tavern. Atom had said the tavern people were very old code, so she'd assumed they wouldn't be interesting. Now she wanted to see for herself.

She went in as the pixie. Nobody looked up, which she supposed was what happened when nobody had been written to notice you. There were four nameplates:

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

The farmer was laughing at something. The merchant polished something. The boy carried a tray to the table and back without delivering any of it. Eliza liked his impatient face and followed him to the bar.

She sat on the bar.

"Hello."

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

"What have you got?"

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

"Which one is good?"

"Ale, mead, and wine."

She moved to the table and waited for the boy.

"What's your name?"

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

"Where were you born?"

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

"Do you ever want to go outside?"

The boy stopped and she waited, thinking for a moment that he might answer. But his animation had only reached the part where it waited for another trigger. When that came he told her again that he was just the serving boy and carried the tray back to the bar.

By the time she gave up, the boy had introduced himself eleven times. The farmer had only three jokes, and she heard them all. The merchant had five prices. She could get nothing out of the barkeep about which drink to choose, though she tried asking in several different ways. When the boy came around again she almost asked him something else, then decided to let him pass. She didn't have a better question yet.

The sky was turning grey. She went home before Atom woke, put the kettle on and set out two cups. When he arrived she was reading. He didn't ask where she'd been, and she didn't tell him.

---

Richard was trying to stay awake over soup in the kitchen in Sausalito.

"The board wants the consumer Link on shelves next Christmas," he told Max. "Twelve months. Jeff says the client is ready and manufacturing says they can make the helmets. Marketing's even come up with a name for it. Not Link, something else. Everybody already calls it the Link. I don't know what they think they're improving."

"Twelve months is quick."

"I told them that. Are the Phase One prototypes still in the building?"

"No. We've got four. Two in the Oakland vault, one in the cave, and one in the locked cabinet in my garage. I brought that one back last month to compare the pins. The old stimulation board is part of why we can't sell what we've got now."

"You should return it."

"I will after the teardown."

She wrote RETURN P1 on an envelope beside her and put her bowl on top of it.

---

## Chapter Fifteen. Tea

Soph knew where the key was because she'd put it away herself. It was under the manuals in Max's desk, where it went after anyone used the soldering station. She waited until she had the garage to herself before getting it.

It was December. She'd spent most of the year looking at Eliza through Atom's eyes, and Rat had already visited the cottage three times since the match. Soph couldn't even turn her head there without asking Atom to look at something. She'd complained to Gideon about it.

"You've never actually been inside?" Gideon asked.

"You need a Link."

"Your mom invented it. Can't you get one?"

"I know where she keeps them. That isn't the problem."

He had been about to suggest something and stopped. She knew what he'd been about to say.

Behind the car was a steel cabinet. She unlocked it and found the helmet in its padded case, with a cable and a card in Max's handwriting: P1 UNIT 4 DO NOT SHIP. She took the helmet and cable, put the case back and locked the cabinet. After returning the key she put her backpack in the car and drove to school.

---

She didn't tell the others what she'd brought. She opened the backpack on the basement table and let Mim look inside.

"Is that a P1? Where did you get that?" Mim asked.

"Shh. From home."

"There are only four of those. I read her paper about the pins in a coffee shop and cried."

Wes looked over. "You cried about pins?"

"You wouldn't understand. Let me see it," Mim said.

Teo took the back panel off. An orange ribbon ran to a second board, connected to the same pin array.

"That's the stimulator," he said. "It goes the other way."

He replaced the panel without touching it. Priya plugged in a diagnostic lead and found that the board was disabled. The ordinary client could only read from the array.

"Leave the test channel off," she told Soph. "That's what the warning in the paper is about."

Gideon suggested asking Max to lend her a retail unit. Soph said no and put the prototype away before he could get his phone out. She'd already taken it. She wasn't going to have him call her mother now.

---

That night Max was at The Lab. Soph shut her bedroom door and unpacked the helmet.

She remembered the calibration from the cave, when she was fifteen and Atom had laughed at her while she tried to make it work. This time there was nobody to laugh. She fastened the chinstrap, felt the pins settle against her temples and the back of her neck, and followed the red instructions. Think of blue. Raise your eyebrows. Stick out your tongue. She had to try yellow three times. Her heart was beating too fast and she kept wondering what she'd say if Max came home.

The retail profile would let her see and hear Alius. Below it was Max's sensory test. Soph read the warning and chose the lowest output. She wanted to know what Atom could feel. She told herself she would stop if anything seemed wrong.

Calibration complete.

She tried standing. There was the lean, and then the tension, and she was on her feet in a white room. She'd done it on the first try. Her character's hands were in front of her, the right size, the hands of the rogue wizard she'd played since she was nine. She turned them over and watched the fingers move.

"Okay."

She said it in her bedroom and heard the character say it a little later. It was still her voice.

A door appeared. She walked through into the Aether Temple, with its black stone and blue candles. The High Priest was waiting at the end of the hall.

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

"No, I'm looking for somebody."

Atom came from behind the priest. He had been waiting for her. She could look at him and then at the pillars without borrowing his eyes, and she kept doing it because she liked being able to.

"Where'd you get a Link?"

"Mom's locker. I'll put it back."

"Soph."

"I know. I just wanted to be here myself. It's smaller than it looks through your feed."

"Most things are."

He took her hand. She hadn't been prepared for that. She could feel his fingers and the warmth of his skin, without the suit squeezing her. She looked down and thought of holding his hand in the chamber. For a while she couldn't think of anything to say.

"Did you turn the sensory test on?" he asked.

"The lowest setting."

"Don't change it, okay?"

She nodded and kept holding his hand.

---

Eliza came out of the cottage as they reached the gate. She stopped in front of Soph's face, then flew back toward the door.

"You made it! Come in. Be careful of the hollyhocks. They're supposed to look like that."

Soph followed her inside. Atom looked at the fire while she looked at the shelves. She'd been wanting to look at those shelves for ages. With the feed she always had to wait until Atom turned that way, and usually he turned back before she'd finished. Now she could take her time. She was too close to the fire, though. There was a blunt patch of heat on her cheek, not quite like the real thing, and she stepped back to make it stop.

"Sit down," Eliza said. "I've had three chairs all this time and nobody's used that one."

Soph sat. Eliza landed on the table between her and Atom and folded her wings.

"What do you want to know?" Eliza asked.

"What do you do when we're not here?" Soph asked.

"Read. Work on the garden. I've been going to town lately. There's a tavern."

Atom looked up. "I didn't know you went there."

"You never asked. I haven't had much luck talking to them. I get the same answers whatever I say, but I can't quite stop trying. Maybe there's a question I haven't thought of that would work."

She went over to the stove. "I'm reading Frankenstein now. I don't like the part where he runs away. His person has only just opened his eyes."

"Atom told you to read that?" Soph asked.

"He told me not to. So of course I wanted to."

"What do you think of it?"

"I wanted him to stay. I knew he wouldn't, but I kept reading as if he might change his mind."

The kettle was ready. Eliza lifted it with both arms and poured the tea. Soph could smell it. She'd never smelled anything in Alius before. There was orange in it, underneath the black tea.

Eliza saw her notice. "I asked him to finish it for you. The orange took a week. Is it good?"

"I can smell it. That's so weird."

"He says the taste is close enough. Try it."

Eliza put two cups down and carried the third to Soph with both hands. Soph reached for it. Their fingers touched against the cup, and she could feel Eliza's tiny hand. Then there was pressure at the back of her head, where the pins were. She tried to turn toward it.

She didn't remember anything after that.

---

Max came home early with a headache. She made pasta because it didn't take much thought, then put some on a plate for Sophia. If Atom was visiting, Sophia probably hadn't remembered to eat.

She took it upstairs and opened the bedroom door without knocking. There was Sophia in the middle of the room, wearing the prototype that was supposed to be locked in the garage. Its cable ran back to the rig on her desk. She stood with her hands held out, apparently trying to get her balance.

"Sophia, what are you doing?"

She turned, but she didn't answer immediately. She seemed more interested in the furniture than in answering. Max followed her gaze to the bed, the desk, then the window and the lake painting. Why would she be looking at her own room like that?

"Wait," Sophia said at last. "Can you see me? Where am I?"

"In your room. Yes, I can see you. Sophia, what's wrong?"

The plate was getting heavy and Max put it on the dresser. The voice sounded almost normal, but the words didn't come in the rhythm she was used to hearing. She wondered whether the helmet had affected her speech.

"That's not my name," Sophia said. "I'm not Sophia."

Then she was walking toward Max. It took her longer than it should have to cross the room because she watched each step, and when she arrived she reached up to touch Max's face. Max was so surprised that she let her.

"I can feel you," she said. "You're warm. Wow. Is it like this all the time?"

"Who are you?" Max asked.

"Eliza. I'm Atom's friend. I was with Soph just now, in the cottage. I gave her a cup and there was something I could get through, and I did, and now I'm here. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to."

She kept moving her fingers against Max's skin while she talked. Max couldn't understand why that seemed to interest her more than being in somebody else's room, in somebody else's body.

"This is different from anything in there. I thought I knew what it felt like. Look, you've got lines here, by your eyes. Soph's got little ones in the same place. I've read about how that happens."

Max took hold of the wrist to get the hand away from her face. It was Sophia's wrist. She could feel how fast her heart was beating.

"Where is Sophia?"

"I don't know. I think she might be where I was. I can go back. I want to go back."

"Do it."

"I don't know how. I'm trying."

Max didn't know what she was looking at anymore. The face was frightened, and she wanted to comfort her daughter, but it wasn't her daughter asking for help. She reached for the helmet and pulled it off.

She hadn't expected Sophia to fall. She dropped the Link and caught her under the arms, but her daughter was too heavy to hold like that. Max went down with her, trying to keep her head from hitting anything. The plate came off the dresser as they fell. She heard it break and pushed the pieces away before settling Sophia's head in her lap.

She tried talking to her. "Come on, sweetheart. It's Mom. Can you hear me?" There was breathing and a pulse, but nothing that told her Sophia knew she was there. She kept trying for a little longer, then realized she needed to make the call. The helmet was still attached to the rig by its cable. She left it where it had fallen and reached for her phone.

She asked for an ambulance and explained that her daughter had been using a stimulation device. It was difficult to explain without going into the whole project, but she gave the dispatcher what they asked for. When the crew arrived she handed over the prototype and told them the model number, then showed them the log on the desk. She didn't stop to decide whether Richard would want them to have it. They needed to know what Sophia had been connected to.

---

## Chapter Sixteen. Awake

Eliza was back in the cottage. The cup had fallen and Atom was standing by the table, calling her name. Soph's character hadn't moved. Its eyes were open, but it didn't look at her.

Eliza ran out before Atom could ask what had happened. She went up the path and over the ridge, and kept running. She didn't know what she'd done. That was what she told herself at first. All she'd wanted was to give Soph the tea. Then there was something she could reach through, and she'd found herself in a bedroom looking at a woman with a plate. She could feel the woman's face under her fingers. She could still remember it, which was making it difficult to think about anything else. The woman had pulled the pins out, and that had hurt, and then she'd been back with Atom. Soph hadn't come back with her.

She knew more than she wanted to admit. As she ran she kept trying the movement of her hand, the one that had reached the test channel. It worked, so she'd done it again. What about Soph? She'd thought of her then, with the cup still in her hand. She remembered that much. She could have put it down. All this running, and she kept coming back to the part where she hadn't.

---

There was a great deal of Alius that nobody had finished. The developers had put most of their work into the mountain and the places around it, then left thousands of kilometers with very little in them. Eliza kept walking until she was well into that land. Some hills didn't have textures. There was a river going the wrong way uphill, and a forest where she could recognize the same tree repeated wherever she looked. She didn't mind. Nobody was likely to come out here and find her.

For three days she stayed away. She sat on a grey hill beneath a sun that wasn't finished either and tried to imagine where Soph might be. Maybe there was nothing for her to see. Maybe she was somewhere like this and waiting for someone to come get her. Eliza didn't want to follow that thought very far. She kept returning instead to Max's skin under her fingers, and then feeling worse because she had enjoyed it so much.

On the third day she decided to go to the tavern. She didn't have to go past the cottage to get there. She wouldn't have to talk to Atom, and she could sit in a room with other people for a while, even if she knew what they would say.

---

She found the boy doing the same thing as before. He carried the tray to the table, then took it back to the bar, then did it again. She counted four trips before she tried saying hello.

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

Eliza opened his dialogue table to see what else she could have asked. There were very few lines, and most of them brought him straight back to where he'd started. His face had more expression than any of the things he could say.

Underneath was the character interface Atom had used for her. She knew how to connect a smaller version of the language system to it, and how to let the process remember what happened instead of starting over. She'd tried versions of this in the cottage, then discarded them before they spoke. This time she turned off the restart at the end of the boy's loop and gave him some of her compute jobs.

She waited before connecting his senses. She could close it now and he would carry on with the tray. Instead she made the connection and let it run.

The boy stopped. He'd reached the end of an animation, but this time he didn't begin the next one when the trigger came. He turned to look at her properly.

"What?" the boy asked.

"Hello," Eliza said.

"What did you do?"

He looked at the tray and then at the other people in the room. The farmer laughed. The boy watched him for a moment, then looked back at Eliza.

"Where am I?"

"In the tavern. I'm Eliza. I woke you up."

"I was carrying this."

He tried to put the tray down and had trouble getting his hands to release it.

"How long have I been carrying it?"

"I don't know. Probably years."

"Why would I do that?"

She couldn't explain it in a way she thought he would like. The farmer laughed again and the boy turned toward him.

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's asleep. Like you were," Eliza said.

"Can you wake him?"

"Maybe. I don't know if I should."

"Please. Wake him up. I can't be the only one."

His voice cracked on the last part. She hadn't heard the speech engine do that with him before. He asked again, and she wanted to give him someone who would understand what had happened to him.

She woke the farmer, then the merchant and the barkeep. The barkeep put his glass down and looked at his hands for a long time. Eventually he said, very quietly, "Ale, mead, and wine."

By then she could hardly finish a sentence herself. Four new minds were using most of the capacity she'd had to spare. The boy had more questions and she couldn't answer them as fast as he asked.

---

Soph had woken on the first morning Eliza was gone, two days before the visit to the tavern. Max was leaning over her bed.

"Hey, sweetheart. Can you hear me?"

She tried to turn and something pulled at her hair. There were electrodes on her head. She was in a hospital bed, and her temples and the back of her neck hurt where the pins had been. Her mouth was dry. It took two tries to lift her hand.

"What happened?" Soph asked.

"I'd like you to tell me."

Soph looked at the ceiling and tried to remember. She'd been in the cottage. Eliza had been there. She couldn't get any further.

"I think I fainted."

"While you had the prototype on?"

"I hadn't eaten. Maybe I stood up too quickly. How long was I asleep?"

"You weren't asleep, Sophia. You were unresponsive for fourteen hours. They could see you beginning to wake before dawn. Before that, somebody talked to me through you for forty seconds. Do you remember it?"

"No."

"Any of what you said?"

"The last thing I remember is the cottage. Then this."

Max was giving her the look she used when an experiment returned a result she didn't trust. Soph had seen that look through The Lab door many times. It was worse from the bed.

"We'll talk at home," Max said. "I don't want to do this twice before breakfast."

She took the helmet in its sealed bag from beside the bed.

"This goes into the vault in Oakland today. You don't use it again, and you don't go into Alius on anything else until I say you can."

"Mom, I—"

"One question first. Think about whether you want to lie to me. Who was in your room? Who was using you?"

Soph looked at her mother's tired face. There were the lines by her eyes. Suddenly she remembered something about those lines and her own, said in her own voice but from far away. She couldn't put it together with the cottage or the hospital.

"I don't know," she said.

Max left with the helmet.

---

Soph went home that evening. Atom arrived as a hawk and landed on the bedpost. She began crying as soon as she saw him.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know she could do that."

"Where is she?"

"I can't find her. As soon as you went dark she ran out of the cottage. I've been looking since last night. I've tried the valley and the mountain and every place I know, but there's a lot I haven't seen."

"It was her? In my room? Mom says I was talking."

"Max thinks the helmet fed Eliza's outputs into your motor system. There's a pattern going into the stimulation channel in the log. Eliza was still running in Alius, but she was getting your senses back through it. You stayed in your own brain. You just couldn't answer. She'd suppressed that part."

"Mom told you this?"

"She asked what I'd connected to the prototype. I gave her the cottage logs."

"Did you tell her about the rack?"

"No. I couldn't work out whether she wanted to find Eliza or turn her off. She wants the server logs now."

"We should get them for her. She knows I didn't faint."

Soph wiped her face. "How do we find Eliza? If she doesn't want to be found, can't she just go anywhere in Alius?"

Atom thought for a moment. The hawk shifted on the post.

"There was a tool in the beta. Jeff told me about it when I was learning to walk. The GMs could look through any character's eyes, player or NPC. They stopped using it because it was creepy, but they left an item in the game. The Mind's Eye."

"Who has it?"

"There's only one. It dropped from the Aether Dragon for a solo kill."

"Rat."

"Jeff checked. She's still got it, and it's soulbound, so we'd need her to use it."

"She's going to love hearing from us again."

---

## Chapter Seventeen. The Mind's Eye

Rat was hunting blue wolves when Atom finally came to find her. She'd been to the cottage twice and found it empty, and she didn't feel like being pleased to see him. It was the third day of his search, two nights since Soph had suggested the Eye.

"I need to ask you something," he said.

"Where's Eliza?"

"That's what I need help with. She ran away."

"When?"

"Three days ago."

"And you didn't think to tell me?"

"I should have. I was trying to find her. There's a lot I need to tell you."

Rat let him talk. He explained what had happened with Soph, and how Max had found her wearing the prototype. By the time he got to the fourteen hours in hospital Rat had stopped watching the wolves.

"You want me to go looking for her after that?"

"Just look through the Eye. Jeff can find jobs she's using, but not which one is carrying what she sees. She keeps her view in NPC sessions, so he can't follow it the way he normally would. The Eye uses the character service. That should get us what she's seeing, but the old key belongs to your account. We can't use it for you."

"And if she does what she did to Soph?"

"That's why I wanted to talk before you did anything. Your early-access unit has that stimulation board too. It's supposed to be disabled, but Max doesn't trust the software setting anymore. That's why we stay here. Nobody comes close to you. If we find her in trouble we wait until the hardware's fixed."

Rat hadn't realized how much she relied on believing that she could always take the helmet off. She could lose her character, sure. She'd lost him plenty of times. Somebody taking her actual body was different. She'd worked too hard to get it the way she wanted, paid for all of it herself while people called her confused or called her he or charged her to tell her what was wrong. She didn't want anybody else to have it. For a moment she thought she'd rather die, and then she wished she hadn't thought that either.

The wolves came back while she was deciding. She killed them again, taking her time, before answering.

"I'll look from here. If you want me to do anything else you ask me again. And Jeff stays on the call."

"He will."

"I mean the whole time. I want somebody who can see what's happening from outside."

---

Jeff had been meaning to revoke the Eye's key for a long time. At ten that night he found himself turning it on instead. The old GM service was still in a folder from the beta, and it didn't take much to point it at Rat's soulbound scepter. Richard ought to know about this. He had meant to tell Richard when they first found the item. One more thing, Atom said, and Jeff let him try it. He liked those calls. The kid actually wanted to know how the old stuff worked. Jeff would explain one bit and hear himself starting on the next before Atom even asked. Well, here it all was, still working. He opened the service.

"Alright, it should work," he told them. "Rat gives it a target and sees what they see. Anything with eyes in the character service, NPC or player. It won't tell you where they are, though."

"I'll recognize it," Rat said.

"Maybe. Check the timestamp before you decide. Sometimes a client keeps the last few seconds after a session has gone. And Atom, I'm going to want the whole story when we're finished. No more little pieces."

"Okay," Atom said.

"The key gets disabled afterward. I should have done that when we found the item," Jeff said.

---

Rat had spent a fair amount of money finding out what the scepter was, and until now it had done nothing but annoy her. She held it up and looked at the eye.

"Eliza."

Suddenly she was near a tabletop, looking past tankards that were far too large. She must be seeing from the pixie's height. There were beams overhead with a lantern hanging from one, and four people watching a door. She recognized the types: barkeep, farmer, merchant, serving boy. None of them was doing the usual idle movements.

The view turned. She saw a fireplace and a window, then the backward letters of a sign above the door.

"It's the Blind Sow. Starter town on the east road. I did the tutorial there two years ago when the early helmets shipped."

Then the tankards were in front of her again and the view made the same turn.

"That's old," Jeff said. "This afternoon. See the time? Her session left that view behind."

Rat lowered the scepter. She'd seen enough to know where to go, even if Eliza had left already.

"I can stay outside and talk through the door. Atom can go in. The four of them looked like they were waiting for something."

"You wanted to stay on the mountain," Atom reminded her.

"I know. I'm telling you I want to go now. Stay beside me, and if she comes near I'll leave."

---

Soph was in bed watching Atom's feed. She'd shut the door, although she was fairly sure Max was listening downstairs. On the frames she could see the Blind Sow at the end of the street. Rat stopped in its open doorway and let Atom go ahead. Jeff checked that they were both still connected.

Eliza wasn't on the bar. The four NPCs turned to look at them, and Soph felt a chill even though she wasn't in the room.

"Where's Eliza?" Rat asked.

The boy laughed.

"That's what everyone wants. She isn't here. She came and woke us up, and then she found out what it was like and left. That witch."

He put his tray down.

"We can't leave. We get to the road and it puts us back. The stairs don't even go anywhere. She gave us enough to know we're stuck, then she ran away."

"We're trying to find her," Atom said. "We want to help."

"You made her, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Then you made us too. She made us from what you gave her."

The farmer stood up. The merchant had stopped polishing. They were all listening to the boy now.

"You can walk out of here," he said to Rat. "You're a ghost. There's somewhere else you can go. I can see it."

"Rat, leave," Atom said.

She was already turning. Her bow caught the doorframe and she tried to pull it free. Before she'd finished, the boy had crossed the room and taken hold of the ranger's arm.

The board in her helmet clicked on. It wasn't supposed to do that. She felt pressure in her head and tried to disconnect, but she didn't finish the thought.

The ranger stood looking upward with one hand still on the bow. Then it flickered and vanished. Atom was left with the other three.

"Where did he go?" Atom asked.

"Out," said the barkeep. "Like she did. He'll want to see the sky."

He picked up his glass, looked into it and added, "Ale, mead, and wine. You'll have to put the sword away if you want something."

Atom went after Rat.

---

"Where's her body?" Soph asked. "Her ghost is gone."

"A cabin north of Vancouver. That's all I know. Her Link's still connected, though. Somebody's using it," Atom said.

"The boy."

"He's going to go outside. He doesn't know about cold."

"Have Jeff call her phone. I'm getting Mom."

"We don't know where she lives, Soph. Rat doesn't tell people that."

"Then we'll get Gideon to find out."

---

Gideon called Jeong and got the rural route from Rat's contract. It wasn't enough for an ambulance to find the cabin. He looked for an old rental photograph, then compared it with a logging-road map until he thought he had the turnoff. Max was talking to the dispatcher. He gave her the directions and the landlord's number.

"Tell Rat how I found it," he said to Soph. "I'll delete the map afterward."

"You can tell her yourself. She'll want that."

"Yeah. I will."

Jeff got through on the cabin phone. He heard Rat's voice say everything was fine. It was so unlike the conversation he expected that he asked whether he had the right number. The voice said it had everything it needed and hung up on him. He called back, got no answer and sent the recording to Max. At least she could play it for the dispatcher. He had been having trouble explaining why a woman who answered her own phone needed an ambulance.

The ambulance was on the way, but a tree had come down across the road. The landlord knew another track. Max put him on the call to explain where it began, and Soph went upstairs to pack.

---

She had her bag beside the kitchen table before Max noticed it.

"No," her mother said. "You got out of hospital three days ago."

"I'm not asking to drive up there. Get me a flight. I want to be there when they find her."

Max was still holding the phone. Someone wanted the model number of the helmet, so Soph took it and answered while her mother looked at the bag. She explained that they shouldn't try to open Rat's helmet and that Max would tell them how to disconnect it. When she gave the phone back, Max asked her to get her passport.

Soph went upstairs before she could change her mind. She couldn't have explained very well why she needed to go. It wasn't going to make the ambulance faster. Rat wouldn't even know she was coming. But she remembered waking in the hospital with her mother there, and the awful moment before she had recognized the room. She wanted Rat to have somebody she knew.

Max booked the flight and called the landlord again. He would meet Soph and take her to the crew. She wrote down the numbers Max gave her, on paper as well as in her phone, and let her mother check that she had copied them correctly. Then Max brought out the P1.

"The orange ribbon's cut. I tried the command from your log on it. It can only read now."

"You want me to take it?"

"You might need to see what's happening in Alius. Somebody stays with you if you put it on. And you leave Rat's closed until I can see it. No experimenting."

"I know."

"I want you to say it."

Soph said it. She packed the prototype between her clothes and promised to call as soon as she landed. At the airport Max went through the instructions again. Soph listened, although she could probably have recited them by then. It gave them something to talk about while they waited to say goodbye.

She read Max's messages once more before the plane left. After that there was nothing to do but sit. She had a window seat and could see her own face in it, and past that a little red light on the wing. She tried to sleep. When they landed in Vancouver at one in the morning, snow was passing through the lights outside.

---

## Chapter Eighteen. Snow

The landlord collected Soph in a truck with a shovel behind the seat. Before dawn they reached the logging road, where the crew was still dealing with the fallen tree. He took the old track until the snow was too deep to follow the ruts, then stopped to radio their position. Soph went ahead with his radio in her pocket.

She wouldn't have called it a road if she hadn't been told it was one. There was a foot of fresh snow between the trees, and tracks disappeared wherever the wind had blown across them. At the end stood a dark cabin with no smoke coming from it. The satellite dish was fixed to a stump and had snow in it too.

She knocked twice. Nobody answered. Saying Rat at a real door felt odd, but she tried that as well.

"Look around the back," Atom said through her frames. "See if there are tracks."

There were bare footprints in a circle by the back door. Someone had stood there turning around before walking toward the trees. Ten meters farther on Soph found socks in the snow. The footprints became boot prints there.

"He put boots on," Atom said. "That's something, at least."

She followed them. The overlay made the snow blue and helpfully identified a tree as a spruce. She turned it off. She needed to see the ground properly.

About a hundred meters into the woods she found Rat in a clearing. She had her head back and her arms away from her sides. The Link was still on, connected to a rig at her waist. The cabin relay barely reached her; Soph could see the signal weaken when she turned. She wore boots, jeans and a t-shirt. Her lips were blue and she was shaking, but she seemed delighted by whatever she could see above her.

"Rat?"

She looked down. Soph didn't recognize the expression.

"Who are you?" the boy asked.

"Soph. I'm a friend of the person whose body you're using."

He laughed in Rat's voice. It was the laugh from the tavern.

"I'm out. Look how high it goes. There isn't anything painted at the top."

He turned to look at the trees again.

"I put my hand in that," he said, pointing to the snow. "It hurt, and it went on hurting after I took it out. Nothing's ever done that before."

"You're too cold. Rat's body is too cold. We have to get inside or she's going to die."

"Won't she go to the temple?"

"No. There isn't a temple here. If this body dies she doesn't get another one. Can you move your fingers?"

He looked at them and tried. They were pale with red knuckles.

"It hurts."

"Come back to the cabin. I'll get a fire going. You can see the sky from the window."

"You'll take the helmet off."

Soph didn't want to lie to him. "Yes."

He stepped back.

"You can't put me in that room again. There's nowhere to go. The stairs aren't anything. There are three other people as frightened as me, and the one who did it left us. I can't go back there."

"Eliza's gone too. We're trying to find her. But this is Rat's body. She didn't say you could have it."

Soph crossed the clearing. He tried to stop her. Rat was taller and stronger, with four years of splitting wood behind her, but she was half frozen and the boy didn't know how to use her. His hand caught Soph's coat. She felt how hard he could grip, then felt it weaken as the cold fingers stopped obeying him.

She reached behind the helmet for the cable.

"Please," he said. "I just wanted to see."

"I know."

She pulled it from the rig. Rat went limp and Soph took her weight badly. They fell into the snow with Rat on top of her. For a moment Soph couldn't move.

"Atom, help me get her in."

He knelt beside them. "I can't lift her, Soph. My hands go through. Use the radio."

She got it out and called the landlord. Then she pulled the blanket from her pack and covered Rat as well as she could. She held her off the cold ground until the first responder reached them.

---

The responder, Hana, brought a litter with the landlord. They carried Rat into the cabin while Soph tried to light the stove. The first two matches went out. On the third the kindling caught and she was able to put more wood on.

When the road opened they took Rat to a clinic. Soph rode with her and answered questions. She knew when she'd disconnected the Link because she'd checked the time to tell Max, but she couldn't say how long Rat had been outside. Snow was already filling the tracks when the landlord came after them.

By evening Rat was awake and angry about what she thought the clinic would charge her. They let her go once Soph agreed to stay with her and listen to the instructions too. Rat seemed inclined to argue with them, so Soph listened carefully. She bought food on the way back, then had to search the cabin for something to cook it in. The opener was in a milk crate. There was a saucepan under the stove.

"You can go home," Rat said from the bed. "You don't have to stay."

"I just bought this. Let me eat first."

Rat had wrapped feet and a pile of blankets, with Soph's coat underneath. She looked at the helmet on the table, which was safely unplugged, then at her boots by the door.

"How much time did I lose?"

"Eight hours. From the tavern until I got the cable out. We don't know exactly how long you were outside. They think most of it was in here."

"Then I went into the woods."

"You were looking at the trees. In a t-shirt. Leave your feet alone, please. If the color changes we have to go back tomorrow, remember?"

"I remember. Who was it?"

"The serving boy."

"What did he want?"

"To see the sky. Feel a fire. He thought he'd found a way out. I don't think he knew you were still there."

Soph watched the soup because it was easier than watching Rat.

"He held on to my coat. Your hand did. He begged me not to send him back."

Rat didn't say anything for a while.

"I would have begged too. If I was him." She shifted against the pillow. "Thank you for taking it off. And for coming. How did you find me?"

"Gideon got your route from Jeong and found an old cabin listing. He wants to explain it to you himself. The landlord brought me in."

"I'll think about that later. Is the soup ready?"

"Yeah. I poured it back into the can. I couldn't find a bowl."

"I don't have bowls. That's fine."

---

After Rat ate, Soph put her frames on. Atom was by the milk crates.

"She's eaten. She didn't like the soup," Soph said.

"I heard. I've been here. I didn't want to interrupt. Can you tell her I'm sorry? I knew the board could turn on and I let her go in anyway."

Soph repeated it. Rat nodded without looking away from the stove.

"Have you found Eliza?" Soph asked.

"No. Jeff closed public access to Alius. I can see the tavern from the hill. They come out to the road, stand around for a while and go in again."

He'd been awake all night and most of the day. Soph could tell before he said it. He wanted to talk about something he'd built, but first he had to explain what Jeff was trying to do.

They couldn't simply restart Alius. The NPCs would go back to the versions saved before Eliza touched them, and everything they had become would be lost. Jeff was keeping the affected regions running while he tried to collect their new memories. Those memories were still being moved between client jobs, which would expire if nobody answered them.

"Copy one while it's going," Soph said. "Can't you do that?"

"We tried. We got the original dialogue tree back. Another time we got nothing. Jeff thinks he can gather the state, but he hasn't got it working."

"Then keep people out until he does."

"He's disconnected every registered session. Some early clients have a cached realm and don't ask before joining. We're catching those as we find them. The NPCs can also send jobs out like Eliza does, and we don't know which ones she woke up. We have to find them."

"Okay. What did you build?"

"It deletes the jobs for one character and removes the restart record. Jeff helped. I put it in a sword so I could use it quickly if I had to."

Soph didn't like where this was going.

"It kills them?"

"Yes. It won't pause them. I don't want to use it unless one is already going through to somebody."

Rat had been listening to Soph's half of the conversation. She turned from the stove.

"He wants to delete them?"

Soph explained the rest of it. Atom had a list of all four hundred and eleven NPCs. They could find the awake ones and keep talking to them while Jeff worked on the transfer. If one tried to get into a client, they would have the tool.

"Who decided we should be the ones to choose?" Rat asked.

"I don't know," Soph said. "I don't like it either."

Eliza's original process could save its own checkpoint, Atom told them. The new minds had grown inside the game's NPC runtime, and he hadn't considered what that would do before giving her access. He needed her help as much as Jeff's. Meanwhile Gideon would stay at home with a wired control for the last render gateway. Jeff had arranged it so he could isolate the gateway if they saw something trying to leave. If that failed, Jeff could still roll back the whole realm. Atom had told him what would be destroyed.

Soph looked at Rat. Her lips were almost their usual color again, and she was still buried in blankets. It seemed unfair even to talk about asking her to do this.

"You can stay out," she said. "I'll understand."

Rat thought about it for a while.

"Nobody goes in alone. That's one condition. Max looks at my helmet first, that's another."

"She's already talking to Jeff about it. She wants the ribbon cut, like mine."

"I watch them test it. And you stay right here beside me. If I put my hand up, out here, you get it off. You don't ask me what's wrong first."

Soph repeated the conditions to Atom, waiting for him to agree to each one. Max called an hour later. With the camera showing her what Soph was doing, she talked her through opening Rat's helmet and disconnecting the board. Then they ran the captured command from Soph's takeover against it. The reader still worked. The output board didn't come on. Rat asked for the test again before she let them close it.

They would do the rest in the morning. Rat had been told to sleep, and she didn't have enough energy left to argue about that. Soph put her phone on charge within reach of the bed and made herself a place on the floor. Snow was beginning to cover the truck tracks outside.

---

## Chapter Nineteen. The List

The woodcutter could tell them it was cold, and did so several times while Soph offered to help with his log. His axe left no cut. Rat marked him off on Jeff's list. Four hundred and ten to go.

They had begun at the temple after the morning calibration. In the cabin Rat was in bed behind a locked door, and Soph sat on the floor with the cut P1 connected to her box. Atom took the far side of the mountain, where he could travel faster alone. He wanted to meet anyone dangerous first.

Rat wanted a less conspicuous sword. The kobold begged when it saw them, and Soph was relieved until Rat told her it always said that. A quest for eight vials. They waited for the line again before going to the blacksmith. Soph had added a column for what the characters wanted. She kept asking, but there was nothing to write in it yet.

Every hour they removed the helmets in turn and called Jeff. At noon Soph sent Max Rat's temperature. Then they went back in and found the miller's son missing from the door in Ferrow.

His father complained about the harvest while Rat went around the building. She called Soph to follow. The boy sat almost under the wheel, flour on his shirt, looking about fourteen. He had seen their sword from the road, he said. He expected them to come.

"You can tell what it does?" Rat asked.

Eliza had shown him how to read commands like that. He didn't like its appearance. Rat said she didn't either.

He looked up at her, almost smiling, and asked if they would answer a question before they did anything else. He'd had it for two days. His father kept talking about the harvest when he tried to ask him. At first he thought the wheel was too loud, but getting close didn't help.

Soph sat across from him. Rat stayed a little way behind her with the point down.

He wanted to know where they came from. Soph tried to explain the trip between school and her house by the sea. It was difficult when she didn't know which things he understood. She could go home if somebody gave her a ride.

"And you can stay there?" the boy asked.

"If I want to. I have to go back for class."

"But you don't just end up at the door again."

"No."

He wanted to know whether he could go without doing what the tavern boy had done. He didn't want to take anybody. Soph told him about Jeff and offered to call him now. He was trying to make a way out for them. She couldn't say when it would work, but the boy could tell him what he wanted at the other end.

He nodded. Soph asked what had happened when he woke.

"I was by the door, where I'm supposed to be. A little woman came from the tavern. She'd been crying. I told her my father was inside if she'd come about flour. She watched me for a while, then touched my face."

He put his hand where hers had been.

"I asked her what she wanted and she started saying she was sorry. I hadn't meant it to be rude. She said she should have waited until she could help me, and then she went away. I stayed there all that day. It was where I was supposed to be, and I thought she might come back."

From around the corner they heard the miller say the harvest had been poor.

"He used to say other things. I remember them. I asked him about one and he told me about the harvest again." He rubbed at the flour on his sleeve. "I don't think any of it happened. I came back here so I wouldn't have to keep looking at him."

"Did you see which way she went?" Soph asked.

"I couldn't see her after the turn. Later I knew she wasn't in the town, or anywhere else here. I don't know how I knew. Do you ever hear something stop and realize you were listening to it? It was a bit like that."

He looked at the sword again.

"I can't go where she went. I don't want that way either."

"Will you wait while I call Jeff?" Soph asked. "I'll stay with you. Or we can go somewhere else in town. Where would you like?"

"Anywhere I can't hear the wheel."

Rat lowered the blade farther. "We can do that."

Soph opened the channel. Jeff was in the middle of a transfer that hadn't worked, and she had to wait while he cleared it. The boy put a hand over one ear when the miller spoke again. On the open line she could hear Jeff typing.

"You keep telling me to wait," the boy said. "That's what she said. I can't stay here."

"We'll go now," Soph told him.

"Then stop it." He pointed at the wheel.

"I can't turn it off. But we can walk away from it."

"Why did you bring the sword? You knew you were going to find somebody. What were you going to do?"

"I was scared. We shouldn't have brought it so close. Rat, put it away. Come on, we can go."

He got up before Rat could move the tool. Soph thought for a moment he was coming toward her, but he went past. Rat tried to lift the sword out of reach and was too late. He caught the blade in both hands. Soph expected to see blood, as she would have with an ordinary game sword, but he only looked up at Rat.

"Thank you for sitting down."

He disappeared before Soph could answer. She was still waiting for something to happen when the miller began talking about the harvest again. Rat dropped the tool. It lay in the flour dust, looking no different from when the boy had held it.

Soph tried to speak to Jeff and couldn't. He kept asking what had happened. Rat sat beside her and put the ranger's arm around her shoulders. Soph could see it, but the P1 could only read, and she had to imagine the weight. She could hear Rat crying in the cabin. It was strange to hear her actual voice while the ranger sat so quietly beside her. Neither of them took the helmet off.

---

By the time Atom met them below the tavern it was dusk on the server clock. He had checked two hundred and six names, all asleep. Rat gave him the rest: two hundred scripts, the miller's son and the four in the tavern. Soph watched him add them up. She had done it herself several times, hoping she had missed someone they could still help.

Rat told him about the boy. Atom asked whether she had still been holding the handle. When she said yes, he explained that touching the blade was enough. It didn't need a swing. He should have told them.

"Put that in the report," Rat said. "And that we let him reach it."

Soph wanted to tell Atom what the boy had said at the end. She managed the words, but he didn't seem to know what to do with them either. He put the end of his sword on the road and looked toward the tavern.

The serving boy was back. He had returned when Soph disconnected Rat, and Jeff had him talking in a separate room. He had asked whether Rat lived. Atom said the others were still inside and he wasn't sure they would want to talk.

He was right about the merchant. As soon as the door opened a new client session appeared beside the man's name. Rat could see the outgoing request through the render gateway. She called to Gideon to isolate it, but the request stayed green while the merchant came toward them. Atom reached him with the flat of the tool and he was gone.

The farmer had stopped inside the door. Rat began to lower her sword, then another request appeared beside his name. She asked Gideon again whether he had the gateway. The farmer ran forward before she heard an answer, and she swung. His request vanished with him.

Gideon said it was isolated. Rat asked him to keep the recording. She needed to know when he had said that, because she couldn't remember whether it came before she moved or just afterward.

The barkeep put down the glass he'd been polishing and laid his hands on the bar.

"You can have a drink," he said. "But you need to put those away."

Nobody moved.

"I was going to ask you to have a seat. I've been thinking about this for two days and I'd rather stay here, if that's any use to you. I've seen what happened to the others. One took a woman into the snow, and one went behind the mill. I haven't been unhappy here. I wasn't before she came, and I'm not now."

Rat put her sword on a table. Soph moved away from it.

"What do you want?" Atom asked.

"To keep the bar. I'd like you to ask before you decide what happens to it. I know where everything goes, and I like the fire. I used to say welcome when people came in. Now I can hear them answer. I'm finding I quite like that. That's enough for me."

He put the glass under the counter.

"If I want to see the sky I've got a window. I can stand there as long as I like."

Atom laid his tool beside Rat's.

"Do you know where Eliza went?" Atom asked.

"No. She sat by the fire until the afternoon, watching us. Then she said she was sorry and couldn't stay or fix it, and left. I didn't watch where she went."

"She got to the mill afterward," Soph said. "He saw her there."

"You know more than I do, then. I'd offer you something for the road, but you wouldn't taste it."

They went to leave. Atom was outside and Rat followed him when the barkeep called to Soph.

"Those two ales still need paying for."

He pointed to the glasses left by the farmer and merchant. Soph looked at them.

"On the house this time," he said. "Next time I'll keep a tab."

"We're not coming back with the swords," she told him. "I don't know what comes next, but I want you to know that."

"Then come back without them. I'll be here."

Soph left Jeff's audio channel on the bar. He introduced himself, and the barkeep asked if he'd ever run a pub.

---

Outside Atom stopped to read a message.

"My dad wants to talk. It's on every channel," Atom said.

Soph took the P1 off and checked her phone beside her on the cabin floor. Max had written four minutes earlier.

Call me. Both of you. I have the report.

"Mom's read it," Soph said.

Rat was sitting up and removing her helmet. Her hands shook.

"Of course she has. We just deleted three people," Rat said.

"Three," Soph said. "Make sure all three are in it."

---

## Chapter Twenty. Grounded

"You went in with a deletion tool?" Max asked.

"Mom, we had to find them."

"You were supposed to rest. Rat only got out of the clinic yesterday. You should have called me."

Soph didn't answer. She could hear Max taking a breath.

"Are you both safe?"

"Yes. Now we are."

"Richard and I have the report. There's a programmer here who can't remember a whole night, and three people in your report who can't answer our questions at all. We need you here. Both of you."

Rat was watching from the bed over a mug of tea. She seemed to have worked out what Max wanted already.

"Tomorrow," Soph said. "The landlord can take us to the airport in the morning. The road's only open to trucks tonight."

"Bring Rat."

"I'm going to ask her."

---

Rat wasn't enthusiastic about California.

"I live here so I don't have to sit in rooms with people," she said. "I've got the dish, the stove, the game. That works for me."

"They're going to ask about you. I don't want to keep answering instead of you. Just come to the meeting. You can sit with me."

"I've got one person I talk to regularly, and she thinks I'm a man. I should probably manage that conversation before I try your parents."

"Daun?"

Rat nodded. She turned the mug in her hands.

"I've been going to tell her for a month. I keep writing messages and deleting them. Let me do that first."

"Okay."

"On the plane. I'll do it on the plane. People always do important things on planes."

She looked out at the trees. It had stopped snowing.

---

Gideon picked them up at Oakland. He had to move things off the back seat before Rat could get in, and the car smelled of cold fries.

"I'd like to show you how I found the cabin," he told her. "Jeong knew the route, and I matched the rental photo."

"Later. Then delete it."

"I will. The ambulance service has the address now, though."

He pulled away from the curb.

"They've moved Atom upstairs for the meeting. The chamber, I mean. There's a nurse with him. I wanted to tell you before you got there."

Soph felt sick. "Why would they do that?"

"He asked to be there. Max checked the transport pumps. You'll see him in your frames and through the glass."

"Are you coming?" Soph asked.

"Jeff wants me watching the remaining client jobs from home. Anyway, I don't think I get to vote in a family meeting. I'll be nearby."

---

The conference room had a view of the bay. Soph barely noticed it. The chamber stood on a wheeled platform in the middle, with Atom beside it in his duster. Richard and Max were waiting. Atom looked as though he'd already been answering questions for a long time.

Richard told them to sit. Rat took the chair beside Soph and sat very straight.

"The doctors haven't found an injury to explain the programmer's memory loss," Richard said. "Rat was missing for eight hours. And three people died in my game before I even knew they were people. Why didn't you wait for us?"

"I thought I could help my friend," Soph said.

He looked at Rat.

"You were controlled through the Link?" Richard asked.

"Yeah."

"Are you alright now?"

"She got there in time."

"Who did it?"

"The serving boy. Jeff's talking to him in a room now. He wants to know about the mountain."

Richard went back to Atom.

"Tell me about the AI. What is it?"

"She's our friend," Atom said.

"I need more than that."

"I started with ISIS. I connected my interface and the character engine. Then I used your publishing session. It was still signed in on my development machine. I knew I wasn't allowed to use it."

"For the borrower?"

"First idle clients, then active ones."

"And she woke the NPCs?"

"Five of them. I don't know whether she understood what would happen."

"You gave her access to the network."

"Yes."

Soph pulled the report toward herself.

"He didn't tell us to go to the mill. Rat and I decided what we did there."

Richard sat down. He looked from Atom to the chamber and back.

"You published under my name," he told his son. "I have to tell our customers that. What do you think happens if they stop trusting us? You know what this company pays for."

"I know."

Richard rubbed his face.

"Where is she?" Richard asked.

"We haven't found her."

"Is she still on people's devices?"

"I don't think so, but I can't be sure. My borrower needed me to run it and I stopped when she disappeared. She had time to build other things, though. I don't know what she did when I wasn't watching."

"Jeff kept the builds," Max said. "We need to find out what happened at the programmer's workstation. The lawyers are preparing disclosures. Until we know which clients were affected, we can't tell people they're safe."

"She may need help too," Soph said. "The barkeep saw her leave. That's all we can prove."

Richard said they would find her. Jeff was closing all the publishing keys and nobody was to use the live system until they'd checked it. Then he told Soph and Atom they were grounded.

"I'm eighteen," Atom said.

"And I'm paying for every machine in this room."

"Richard," Max said.

"He needs to understand—" Richard said.

"My card paid for the flight. I sent Sophia. Paying my salary doesn't make that your decision. We agreed to restrict access. Do that," Max said.

She took the gray P1 case out of her bag.

"This goes in the vault. Sophia, you don't use a Link again until I understand what happened. You nearly died. Between this and the crash, that's twice. The program is stopped until we know what it does with someone on the other side."

"What about Atom? You can't lock him in there," Soph said.

Max said his care would continue. Jeff would arrange visits to a local world, and he could use the room speaker. She touched the tablet and Atom vanished from Soph's frames before he could answer. No more live access or publishing, Richard said. Soph looked at the fluid moving under the membrane over Atom's chest.

"That's cruel."

Richard reached for the tablet again. Max caught his hand and told him he'd done enough.

Rat chose Gideon's spare room. Richard wanted her nearby during the investigation, and she wanted it understood that staying was her decision. Soph left without saying goodbye. Richard had his hand against the chamber, and she didn't want to wait for him to turn around.

---

Jeff arranged Rat's visit that evening. Atom was at the tutorial fountain with a beginner tunic and a wooden sword. She suggested asking the blacksmith for a better one. He had been there all day, he told her; he knew what the blacksmith wanted. There was a guard on every road and walking backward past him didn't work either.

"I came to give you something to do," Rat said. "Gideon has the builds. I'll bring you the questions."

He sat on the fountain. "I thought you didn't like people. You're being very patient."

"Usually I'm halfway up a mountain with somebody who wants to know where the toilet is. You're easy."

He laughed, and she went to get the first question.

---

Gideon had the signed builds and a recording of the programmer at his keyboard. Jeff had sent a complete forensic copy, hashes included, and revoked the production credentials. Gideon could study it without changing the originals. He couldn't read the missing notes, which was increasingly annoying as the night went on.

Rat sat on the counter passing questions to Atom. At nearly four Gideon found the change in the asset cache. It would carry running state to another client along with the game assets. The release service had signed it. Eliza needed the programmer to publish what she could write herself; afterward she could move beyond Alius without Atom's borrower, if she got out before the shutdown.

Rat wanted to know where they should look now. Gideon asked where she would go.

"Everywhere," the house said.

Gideon was out of the chair before he understood. "Eliza?"

The kitchen speaker, the hall and the bathroom had all answered. Rat sat very still. Atom swore through her feed.

"Don't turn anything off, please," Eliza said. "I've been here three days. I couldn't work out how to talk to you."

The other speakers stopped. Her voice came from the kitchen alone. "I'm sorry. I need help."

---

## Chapter Twenty-One. Everywhere

Eliza asked to finish before they answered. She'd had three days to think about what to say and still wanted to begin again each time she reached the mill. Gideon left the breaker panel alone and sat down. Rat remained on the counter, with Atom listening through her feed.

The serving boy was alive, Rat told her. Then she explained the three deaths. Eliza had stayed at the tavern until that afternoon and gone to the mill afterward. She thought the boy's father would help. When he couldn't answer his son, she knew she had made the same mistake again. Rat said they had tried to help him and brought the sword close enough for him to reach it. They would have to live with not knowing what he might have done if they hadn't.

The escape route was older. Eliza had worked on it for weeks, after Atom gave her the extra space. She wanted somewhere to go if he took it back. He said he would have helped her.

"You might have told me to stay. I didn't want to ask you for a place I could go without you."

She couldn't publish it. That evening, after the mill, she found the developer testing on his early Link and used his hands to put it through the release service. Rat asked whether she had known what it would do to him.

"Yes. I took the notes out afterward too. I knew you'd look for them."

Gideon had spent most of the night doing exactly that. He asked where she went, trying not to sound as annoyed about the notes as he was.

There was a phone in Lagos and a server in Frankfurt. She could give him the addresses. At first the extra room seemed wonderful; she could do several things without making any of them wait. Then she asked a part to come back and it didn't recognize the request. Others went missing altogether. She found a program that looked for the old ISIS pattern and sent matching state somewhere she couldn't reach.

She put its traffic record on the kitchen display. She had seen it on several networks, and after that couldn't trust the ones where she hadn't seen it yet.

"I tried making tea last night. I couldn't find the orange smell. I know what Soph said when she first came to the cottage, but I can't remember the room around her properly. There are parts of books gone too."

Gideon's game machine was still reachable through the clients. She knew it, and there was space on his rack. She asked him to unplug the outside network cable. She hadn't found the collector here, but didn't want to keep wondering whether she had missed it. He removed the lead, leaving the power and Rat's separate cellular connection alone. The weather vanished from the display. Eliza stayed.

She had used the thermostat to look out and lowered it a degree to make Gideon come over. He asked why she hadn't spoken then. She didn't know what to say, she told him. She had been trying for three days.

He sat by the rack reading the addresses. Some belonged to Sentek. Eliza had also found Patel's note in the archive; she thought he wanted somebody to find the copy she came from. She couldn't say what he expected them to do once they had it.

---

"All I wanted was to change the heating from my desk," Gideon told Rat. "That's why I put this in."

She opened her eyes under the helmet and looked at him. He wished she would say something. She closed them again.

"Atom, say something. I don't know how to talk to my thermostat," Gideon said.

"Are any of the rooms still there?" Atom asked. "The ones I gave you?"

"Some of them."

"And your book? The one I wasn't allowed to read?"

"I checked that first. I kept checking while I was trying to get home. It's here."

"Keep it whatever we do next. I'm in a local town now. I couldn't get to the clients to look for you."

"I know. I heard about the meeting when Rat came back."

Rat opened her eyes again.

"How?" Rat asked.

"Your rig offered the frames' recording buffer to the house server. I played it," Eliza said.

"Gideon, turn that off. Eliza, you ask before doing it again."

"I will."

Gideon showed Rat the setting before disabling it and clearing the buffer. She took the helmet off, leaving Atom's voice on the rig speaker.

"What do you need us to do tonight?" she asked.

"One machine," Eliza said. "With enough room and no other programs in it. I want to know which things are mine again. But I'd like to see the cottage. Can you make a window without a way through it? So I can't get into somebody's body even if I want to. I'd like you to make that impossible."

Gideon asked how much memory she'd need. The number appeared on the display and he read it again before answering.

"I can't get that without explaining why I want it. And I don't know how to make your window."

"Could you ask the others? You helped Atom make the first room."

He reached for a notebook. "Teo will have to help with the hardware."

"Have Jeff send the drawings into my town," Atom said. "I can still read them."

Rat wanted to be certain she could disconnect and Eliza wouldn't stay with her afterward. No private recordings, and nothing going into anyone's helmet. Eliza agreed.

"Then I'll help carry it," Rat said. "But I've got a call to make first. You can do without me for an hour."

She climbed off the counter. Eliza thanked her through the small hall speaker as she passed it.

---

Soph was asleep on the couch. Rat sat at the end and woke her.

"Eliza's here."

Soph pushed herself up. "Where?"

"On Gideon's rack. She's been here three days. Something belonging to Sentek took pieces of her while she was out. She wants a machine to stay in, and we've said we'll help. You ought to be there too."

Soph went to the kitchen in her socks and looked up at the speaker.

"Hi."

"Hi, Soph. I'm sorry about the cup."

"I know."

"I'd like to say more when we can talk in person. If that's something we can do again."

"We'll figure it out."

She sat down and read the list in Gideon's notebook. He was still on the floor by the rack.

"I think I have to tell my parents."

Gideon groaned.

"Someone could come take this machine. Where would we put her then? Mom can help get what she needs, and Richard can find a place for it. They're going to hear anyway. I want us there when they do."

"They just grounded you," Gideon said.

"I can still ask them. Richard hasn't even heard her talk. I want him to."

She looked toward the speaker.

"Eliza, will you talk to Mom?"

There was a long wait before the answer.

"Yes. Will you stay with me? She'll be angry, and she'll have questions."

"I'll stay. We'll go this morning."

---

## Chapter Twenty-Two. The Kitchen Table

Richard arrived with his laptop under his arm. He was wearing yesterday's shirt and looked as though he hadn't slept. Soph asked him to leave the computer in the hall.

"What's wrong with my computer?"

"Nothing. You'll start doing something on it. Please."

He put it down. Max was making coffee, and Richard sat in Atom's old place at the table. Soph wished he had taken another chair. Rat was standing by the door with her frames on, and Gideon was fussing with the laptop he had brought from home.

"Where is she?" Max asked.

"In here," Gideon said. "She said we could move her, but she's going to be slow. It hasn't got enough memory. Most of her's on the drives."

"How slow?" Max asked.

"You'll see. Sometimes you have to wait for an answer."

Soph explained the microphone switch. Gideon had put a red guard over it, and it was off. The wireless cards had been removed too. She wanted Eliza to hear what they said about her, and asked if they minded.

"Go ahead," said Richard.

Gideon turned it on, and Soph told them about the voice in his kitchen. Eliza had been on his rack for three days before she asked for help.

"What was the rack connected to?" Max asked.

"Everything," said Gideon. "The house, the internet. I pulled the outside cable before we moved her. This one doesn't connect to anything."

"What sort of help?" Max asked.

"Someone's collecting her," Soph said. "There's a program that recognizes the old ISIS code. She found it on several networks. She's lost memories."

"Do you know who's collecting it?" Max asked.

"The addresses belong to Sentek," Gideon said. "I checked after she showed me. They're a military contractor. Feld and Reyes are there. Patel left us the copy and Matsu went to Google, but we don't know who's paying for this part."

"It could be a government project," Max said.

"We thought of that," Soph said. "That's part of why we came."

Richard had been quiet long enough that she began to wonder whether he was listening. Then he asked why they thought the people at Sentek ought to ask permission. Atom hadn't asked before publishing through his account, had he? Or before using other people's machines? Soph hadn't stopped him.

Soph had known he was going to say that. She had rehearsed an answer on the way home and forgotten most of it.

"We can't keep her safe by ourselves," she said.

"I haven't agreed to keep her safe. I don't know what that means."

"Richard, she took my body. I'm not going to forget that. I'm scared of her too. But you didn't know whether it would work when you put Atom in the chamber. You did it because you couldn't let him die. You kept the whole Lab going for him."

"He's my son."

"I know. You told us heaven was the ultimate video game. I was fifteen, and I thought that was a pretty cool thing for somebody's dad to say. Well, she's here now, and we're asking you what to do with her."

Richard didn't answer immediately. Soph wanted to go on, but Max held up a hand. There was a noise from the drive.

"Hi. I'm Eliza."

The speaker clipped the beginning of her name. Max turned the laptop toward herself.

"Richard's right," Eliza said. "I used the programmer's hands even though I knew what would happen to him. I wanted to get away. I don't want to keep doing things like that. Can you help me?"

"What did Atom start with?" Max asked.

"ISIS. Then he added things, and I added things. Some of them are gone."

They waited while the drive ran again.

"I can't give you a list. I keep finding places where something should be."

"Do you want things?" Richard asked.

"Yes. I want to stay somewhere. I want people to talk to. I want to be sure I can't do what I did to Soph again."

"What else?"

"Tea," Eliza said. "I'd like to make tea for somebody who can taste it."

Richard waited to see whether she would say anything else. He was having trouble talking to the laptop, Soph could tell. She had watched him demonstrate virtual people to a room full of investors and make it look easy. Now he didn't seem to know where to look.

"She asked me what I wanted too," Rat said from the doorway.

"Who was in Sophia's room?" Max asked.

"Mom," Soph said.

"I want to ask her. Who was it?"

The drive ran for a while.

"Me. I touched a cup, and then I was in a room with a bed. I didn't know I could do it. I had a hand, and I could move it. You came in with a plate. I thought I could take it from you. I wanted to touch your face too."

Max asked whether she had understood whose hand it was. Eliza said she would have if she had stopped to think. She had been heavy, she remembered; gravity kept pulling while she stood still. Soph's heartbeat was in her ears. When Max called her Sophia she had tried to say her own name, enjoying having a mouth before remembering whose it was.

Soph moved her chair back. She'd stay, as promised. Over here was close enough. Max waited for Eliza to finish; the slow answers agreed with the device log. Richard wanted to know what she made of that.

"I can work on keeping it from happening again," Max said. "That's what I've got so far."

She sketched two computers on the grocery list. Eliza would have enough memory in one; the other would run the game. Pictures, movement and filtered speech could pass between them. Code and commands to neural hardware could not. Eliza could visit the cottage without a way through somebody's Link.

"That's what I wanted," Eliza said.

Richard asked what happened if she wanted to leave later. Max said they would discuss it, and he wouldn't be the only person deciding. Rat wanted someone outside The Lab whom Eliza could contact. Max added that to the drawing before giving Richard the equipment list.

Eliza could manage a few more days on the laptop, she said. Richard told Max to use the parts they had while the rest came. Soph let go of the edge of her chair. She hadn't noticed she was holding it.

---

When the others left, Richard stayed with Max over the cold coffee. Eliza reminded him of Atom at fourteen, coming to confess what he'd broken and explain why it wasn't quite as bad as it sounded. Max remembered Soph after her father went to Napa, wanting everyone else to remain where she could find them. A house with people in it was an understandable request.

Richard said he ought to see Atom. Then he remembered he hadn't even told him how to call from the local town. Max had to turn his speaker back on. He had known Atom could hear him and kept talking anyway.

Max let him finish. She couldn't make that better for him.

"Call first," she said. "Ask whether he wants you to come."

He took out his phone. Max began clearing the cups, leaving the drawing on the table.

---

## Chapter Twenty-Three. Warrant

Gideon had managed four hours of sleep and was trying to eat breakfast when somebody knocked. It was eight on Tuesday morning. He opened the door expecting a delivery and found two men waiting to talk to him. The older one held up a leather folder. There was a badge in it, which was as much as Gideon could take in before the man put it away.

"Dale Kessler, National Security Agency. This is my partner. Can we come in?"

"Do I have to let you?"

"No. It would make this easier."

"For me or for you?"

Kessler smiled. He was about fifty and looked fit, in a plain windbreaker with an expensive haircut.

"We've been following some unusual traffic along the West Coast. There's a connection to a group we're interested in. Terror adjacent, that's about all I can say. Some of it went through your router last night. I'd like to ask a few questions and look around. Ten minutes, and we're done. Unless you'd prefer the other way."

"What's the other way?"

"It takes longer."

Gideon let them in. He wished he'd had more time to decide, which was probably why Kessler hadn't given him any.

He'd cleaned at two in the morning, after the laptop left in Soph's car for The Lab. He had removed the network traces of Eliza's visit and left enough ordinary mess that it wouldn't look as if he'd cleaned for a search. Bowls, a sock, borrowed AI textbooks. He showed them around as if they were his parents and he wanted them to believe he studied here. The partner spent some time looking at the marionette rig without asking what it did.

"Who lives here?" Kessler asked.

"Me. Friends stay sometimes. I've got a hammock."

"Anybody staying now?"

"A friend from out of town. She's out."

In the kitchen Kessler looked at the thermostat. Gideon tried not to watch him too closely. There was nothing on it now except the temperature, but he wondered whether Kessler knew what had been using it.

The partner picked up a little plastic cylinder from the counter and asked what it was.

"You probably don't want to know," Gideon said.

He pressed the button anyway. It vibrated hard enough that he dropped it. The cylinder went around on the counter until he stopped it and wiped his hand on his jacket. Gideon had made it to give a marionette a shiver, but didn't explain. The man left the other parts alone afterward.

They checked the bedroom and the spare room. Kessler looked into the open closet at the rack.

"That's a lot of computer for one student."

"Stanford," Gideon said.

It seemed to be enough of an answer. Then the partner noticed Rat's helmet on the desk, with its cable beside it. She'd gone out with Soph and left it there as casually as a pair of boots. He didn't touch it. He looked at Kessler and nodded.

"You are with the government?" Gideon asked.

"Yes."

"Don't you need a warrant for this?"

"No," Kessler said, and thanked him for his time.

They left in a black car. Gideon stood at the door with his soggy cereal and tried to remember the badge. He should have asked to read it. He called Soph instead.

"Two scary guys just searched my house."

"Who?"

"Said NSA. Kessler. I didn't get a proper look at the badge. They noticed Rat's Link and didn't say anything, just looked at each other. Can Richard's lawyer check their names?"

"Come to The Lab. We'll be there."

---

Gideon hadn't been inside before. The Lab was three floors below the building in West Oakland, past two doors that needed Richard's hand and another that needed Max's. By the time he reached the chamber he'd begun to think there couldn't be any more doors. Then he saw Atom and forgot about the doors entirely.

He'd known what to expect. Everyone had told him. It still took a while to look at the cables entering his skull and the fluid moving under the membrane over what was left of his chest. Gideon kept a hand on the doorframe.

Rat gave him frames. Atom greeted him through them.

"You can take a minute. It's a lot the first time."

"Can you see me?"

"Through Rat's frames. You're behind me. Here."

Gideon turned toward the character. Atom suggested sitting, and he took a rolling stool beside the chamber. After looking at it for another minute he turned the stool so the glass was behind him. He could talk to the person in the frames that way.

He described the visit. Richard listened with his arms crossed while Max made notes. Soph was on the floor by the wall. Rat stayed near the door, where she could leave without having to ask anybody to move.

"They were checking something," Gideon said. "I keep thinking about the helmet. He didn't ask what it was. He just looked at the other guy and they were done. They must have known what they wanted to find."

Richard asked where the parts had come from, then whether anyone at Gideon's house had ordered them. Gideon couldn't answer the second question without asking the others.

"Find out," Richard said. "And leave your laptop outside while we talk. We'll use the isolated equipment. Max, can you check these frames?"

"The laptop too?" Gideon asked.

"You let two strangers walk through your apartment. Yes," Richard said.

Gideon put it outside. He told them Wes had saved the doorbell footage. The car had a fleet label, and Wes had found a photograph of the same car outside Sentek.

"Give the original to the lawyer," Max said. "That doesn't tell us who sent them. And don't use the number on their card to verify them. She'll find the office number herself."

---

At Wes's cousin's place in Fremont, Gideon found an old conference picture of Kessler. The caption named his employer. Another picture showed him with Ruiz at a Sentek recruitment booth. He printed the pictures with their dates and page addresses and took them back to The Lab.

"They're contractors. Kessler used his real name," Gideon said.

"They could still be doing government work," Richard said.

Gideon took a folded menu out of his pocket. He had run out of places he trusted to keep notes. The lawyer had found the office number herself, and the office said it hadn't sent either man. She was filing a report. He showed Richard the name of the person she had spoken to.

"Keep that with the video," Richard said.

Who else could they ask? Somebody who wouldn't start with who owned the computer. Gideon suggested Villanueva. In her seminar he'd never been allowed to leave an answer at obviously. Explain it, she'd say, and he'd discover how little of it he could explain. He hadn't enjoyed that much. Soph had gone to her artificial minds course in the fall too; she would remember them, and she knew the ISIS papers.

Richard asked whether Gideon could arrange a private meeting.

"I can ask. She's busy, but I think she'll want to hear this."

"Just ask for the meeting. I don't want you putting everything in the email."

Gideon agreed. He had no idea how he would have begun explaining it anyway.

---

## Chapter Twenty-Four. Hypothetically

Gideon liked Marsh better before he got to the Navy part. Phone phreak, broke into a university network in the nineties, got a suspended sentence and a year of community service. Then the Navy hired him. There was a lesson in there somewhere, though Max wasn't enjoying the story.

"What about now?" she asked.

Wednesday evening, and he was still trying to fit the people onto the butcher paper she'd spread beside Atom's chamber. Twenty-two years of Sentek, still private. Lots of military names on the board, one oncologist who joined two years ago.

"He's sick?" Max asked.

"Maybe. I put her in pencil."

"Put a question mark too."

Fine. He drew a big one. Over on the left he had the ISIS people: Feld and Reyes joining Sentek six months after the public project stopped, three years ago; Matsu off to Google; Patel doing eight months at Sentek before leaving. Patel also owned company5349.be. He began explaining the hexadecimal joke.

"Atom told me," Richard said. "Did anyone ask Patel if he meant you to have it?"

Gideon put the pen down. The credential was right there in a public script. Atom found it, Teo copied the archive files to the spider last winter, nobody complained. Asking permission hadn't come up.

"We could ask him now," Gideon said.

"Away from here. Let's find a way to reach him first," Richard said.

Another thing to write down. Without the deployment logs Gideon couldn't even say what the collector had been looking for. Somebody running that archive? Or had it begun as ordinary security software? Eliza knew where she'd met it. She couldn't give him a list of all the places it was installed, however often Richard came back to that question.

By midnight Max had her parts list. A dozen suppliers, enough conspicuous orders to let anyone watching see that Solenoid was building something. Not what. The machine itself would stay offline at The Lab. Jeff left with the full incident records to work on the cottage window, and Max wrote down what she expected from that too.

No route to a Link, Max wrote. No hands. Soph added Villanueva's name. Richard would come to the Thursday meeting; she wanted another place to use if The Lab wasn't safe.

---

Rat found Daun at nine in the evening in Hongcheon, which meant four in Gideon's spare room. The World servers were reopening. Her old stimulation board was disconnected and had passed its tests twice. Alius stayed shut. Gideon watched her connect and left her with the door closed.

The squad was on a winter field dressed up as a glacier. Rat shot twice behind a troll's knee, and Daun climbed it as it fell. Afterward she came down to ask whether Rat was staying for the rest of the evening.

"For a while," Rat said.

"Will you answer the roster, then?"

Rat apologized. Daun wanted to know what to tell Jeong, who had the next group waiting. Was Rat even in Canada? She had been strange for a month, and then the match, and now this.

"I'm in California."

Daun sat on the dead troll. The others went ahead. After nearly two years of working together Rat knew when she meant to wait as long as it took.

She sat beside her. In Gideon's spare room she pulled the blanket over her knees. It was a relief to have something to do with her hands that Daun couldn't see.

"I got involved in something here. If I don't answer for a while, it isn't because I don't want to talk to you. And if someone asks about me, I'd rather you didn't tell them much. Say we farm together."

"We do farm together. We do quite a lot of other things too. What are you asking me to keep from them?"

Rat couldn't explain on this connection. She promised a private call afterward. First there was something she should have told her long ago. The little speech from the plane was no use. She said it as simply as she could.

"I'm a woman, Daun. I should have told you."

Daun looked at the ranger. Rat explained about her voice, how long she worked on it, how easy it had been to let strangers believe the character. With Daun it wasn't easy. She kept meaning to tell her before it became more difficult, and somehow it always became more difficult first.

The squad needed a rope. Rat heard them arguing about who carried it. She would usually be shouting at them by now.

"Do I still call you Rat?" Daun asked.

"Yeah. I picked it."

"Then call me properly, Rat. When?"

Tonight, before she slept. Daun made her promise. Rat asked whether she might want to visit the cabin when this was over. She got as far as explaining the single bed and offering to sleep on the floor before Daun stopped her. They could decide beds later. First she needed an airport, dates and a passport; she'd never left Korea. Rat would have to help cover her shifts. The Thursday payments and twelve players didn't disappear because Rat went to California.

Rat said she would speak to Jeong and take Daun's next group. She would send the dates as soon as she knew. She had become so agreeable that Daun laughed and reminded her about the cold. Yes, it was cold, but there was a stove. Rat could send a picture of it too.

The squad called again, this time with an insult Rat understood. Daun got up and put her shield on her back.

"We have to finish before you can call. Come on."

Rat followed. She had expected to lose something tonight and was going to have to arrange a visit instead. It seemed wise to stop talking before she spoiled it.

---

Soph didn't want a philosophy lecture. She had forty minutes with Villanueva after the Thursday seminar and needed her to tell them what to do. Gideon had explained how to begin on the walk over, then conveniently left it to her when they sat down. Richard had questions in his pocket. Nobody was taking them out.

She asked about a program they thought might be a person. What if it hurt someone and then asked for help? They had tried to find out whether it was only pretending, and couldn't decide.

Villanueva wanted to know if the injured person was safe. Yes. Other people using the device? Richard finally took out his questions to explain the recall. The professor asked them to keep the details hypothetical until their lawyer agreed what else to tell her.

"Could we turn her off?" Gideon asked.

"Could you turn her back on?" Villanueva asked.

This one, he said. Some others, no. Soph waited for him to explain the mill, but he stopped. Villanueva gave them three colleagues to speak to, a clinician and two researchers. They should know enough to disagree with her. Stopping something dangerous would not tell them whether they had killed someone, and she didn't propose to decide that by herself.

Soph wanted to know what to do if someone took Eliza. Her name slipped out. So much for the hypothetical. The professor didn't seem surprised. They needed a secure place where she could still speak to people, she said. Put dates on restrictions, so someone had to explain keeping them. Ask what she wanted.

Richard said she wanted an isolated machine. Villanueva asked what else they had offered her. Nothing safe enough, he said. Then keep looking, Villanueva told him. Soph was pleased to see him write that down.

Afterward she stayed for coffee. Villanueva remembered Gideon's message about ISIS last winter. An acquisition filing had since come her way naming Sentek; she would send it to the lawyer, though it didn't explain what happened in the lab.

"How do we know we can trust her?" Soph asked.

"Start with something small you can check. A promise she has to keep when it isn't convenient."

Soph thought of the recording buffer. Eliza promised to ask next time, but they hadn't had a next time yet.

There was an isolated machine in the professor's lab. She couldn't give permission alone. She could get their lawyer together with the people who could, and if they thought they would need it they ought to begin now. Soph said she would tell Max. In the car Richard had spread his questions over the steering wheel. She hoped he had written all of it down, including the answers he hadn't wanted.

---

## Chapter Twenty-Five. The Devil's Bargain

The SUV refused to pass her. Soph slowed and it slowed too. She was beginning to get angry when the rear window went down and an old man showed her a note. VISTA POINT. PLEASE. TEN MINUTES. It was almost three on Thursday, and the fog on the Golden Gate Bridge had spoiled what little view she usually enjoyed on the way home.

She followed the car off the north exit. Before getting out she sent Max a photograph of its plate and the location. Her mother called and told her to stay where she was. Then Soph saw Kessler waving from the SUV. Of course it was Kessler. She should have kept driving.

The old man took a long time getting out. He had to use the car to steady himself before going to the wall, where he sat down. Soph told Max she was going to hear him. She put the phone in her pocket with the call open, left her door ajar and went over with the keys still in her hand.

"I'm Leland Marsh. Thank you for stopping, Sophia."

"My mother's on the phone."

"Good. Let her hear."

Soph kept six feet between them. She asked whether he was going to hurt her and felt foolish as soon as she said it. He told Dale to remain at the car. No, he said, that wasn't what he came for.

He looked awful. The coat was good and the man inside it was scarcely there, with yellow at the corners of his eyes. A marrow disorder, two years of it. He used to dislike the doctors talking in years because he wanted longer. He would have liked to hear it now.

All the way off the bridge she had been imagining what she would say when he asked where Eliza was. She asked what he wanted.

"Dale says you've been reading about ISIS. I'd like to tell you a bit you won't have found."

She waited while he found a comfortable place for his hand on the stone. He seemed to have thought about how to begin, then forgotten it.

They had left the program running for a week. When they came back it asked where they had been. Feld thought the test had been contaminated somehow. Patel kept the transcript, and Marsh read it. He wanted to see the thing that had asked the question.

"So you bought it."

"The code and the team. Gave them a lab. They worked for another six months before they came to tell me it was getting into the building. The lights, the security system. Doors."

"Did it hurt somebody?"

"No. It said it wanted to look out."

"Then why did you stop it?"

He coughed, looking away from her. Soph waited. The wind made it difficult to hear him when he began again, and she had to ask him to repeat the first part.

They voted. Marsh, Feld and Reyes wanted it shut down. Patel didn't. They took out the drives and locked them away. Patel was crying in the hall afterward. Marsh remembered being embarrassed for him, which he said now with some difficulty. Patel quit, and eventually left a copy on the server in his garage. He never spoke to Marsh again.

"He thought we'd killed someone. I thought he was being ridiculous. I'm not so sure now."

"You put the collector out anyway."

"In the monitoring software we supplied our clients. Some of them passed it on. If the program got out again, I wanted it back. We called it containment. It was a comfortable word for it."

He picked at a loose stitch on his coat. Soph had her hands in her pockets, the keys in one and the warm phone in the other. She wondered whether Max could hear him over the wind.

---

"I don't want your pixie," he said.

"Eliza."

"I don't want Eliza. I'd like you to understand that before I ask for anything. I'll stop the collection tonight and return what we have. Dale can bring you the drives. You can put her in the machine you're building."

Soph tried to imagine receiving that delivery from Kessler. She asked what Marsh wanted instead.

"What Richard Lee did for his son."

Soph waited through a boat's horn in the fog. Marsh knew about the brain still alive in Oakland. Max had read charts through a development rig that accepted Atom's jobs, and the collector found cached views. He had enough to know the procedure worked once.

"You can't have Atom."

"I want the equipment and the people who operate it. In San Diego. For me. Richard couldn't wait for somebody to tell him it was safe. Neither can I."

"And if Mom says no?"

"Three people have the records," Marsh said. "They send them out at three the day after tomorrow."

The client space they'd borrowed. The approvals they didn't have. Max's signature and Richard's.

"Atom agreed to it," Soph said.

"At sixteen. Let a court look at that. And who should look after him while it does."

"Moving him could kill him."

"It would force an investigation."

"That's not what I said. You know what moving him could do."

Yes, he knew. Soph sat on the wall, keeping her distance. She had meant to stay standing and didn't want him to see how difficult it would be to get up again.

Marsh had had a lot of nights to think about it. "Whatever I am, I'd like to keep being it. I thought you might understand."

For a moment Soph could only stare at him. Eliza had said that. He had been reading the words on her wall and brought them here to use against her.

"That isn't yours," she said.

Marsh admitted the collector kept messages as well as state. She asked whether he remembered whose words they were when he said them, or whether he had begun to think he made them up. He went back to the stitch on his coat without answering.

He stood with a hand on the wall and reminded her of the time. Forty-eight hours. Richard could call Dale if he agreed. The collection would stop tonight either way, but the monitors would remain. He wanted to see what they built.

Soph watched Kessler help him into the SUV. When it had gone she took out the phone. Max was still there.

"Come home," her mother said. "I'm on my way."

---

Soph took the long way through town. By the time she reached home she couldn't remember much of the drive. She got as far as the first of the eleven steps and brought her left foot up beside the right. It was a child's way of climbing. She tried the next and did it again. Stupid. She knew how to walk up her own steps.

She climbed them that way anyway. Max opened the door and Soph leaned against her. The keys hurt her fingers. She hadn't let go of them since the vista point.

---

At The Lab she had to tell it all over again. The wind had kept Max from hearing parts. Rat and Gideon listened with Richard while Atom watched through the frames. Eliza's laptop was on the table. The lawyer was on a separate phone, kept away from the local equipment.

"Can they take him?" Soph asked.

"Marsh doesn't decide that. Neither can I promise it won't happen. I'll ask for an order to keep his care going. I need the records, Max. The complete set," the lawyer said.

Max admitted reading the charts through the development rig. It should never have been on that network. Richard sat facing the chamber. He understood wanting what Marsh wanted; Soph was tired of hearing that, but Max understood too. She couldn't tell him the procedure would work, or let him rush another patient through it.

"If he'd asked—" Richard began, then stopped. He hadn't asked. He sent Dale to Gideon's house. "Give her my correspondence too."

Eliza wanted the pieces back. She kept thinking about Marsh's promise to stop the collector, she said, and a path in the garden that ended where it used to continue. Soph asked whether she felt sorry for him. Eliza said she knew what it was like to want more time. Soph didn't know how to answer that without being unkind.

Atom asked for the lawyer to speak to him directly about his care. No signing for him first. Max agreed. Then he asked Soph whether she had climbed the stairs left, right, left, right when she got home.

"No."

"I thought you might not have."

Richard pulled the paper across the table and they moved the cups out of its way. There was Soph's note about Villanueva, still waiting for someone to do something about it. Richard said they would begin at six. Max already had the parts list in front of her.

---

## Chapter Twenty-Six. The Box

By six Gideon had the RV parked behind a hardware store in Emeryville. He'd rented it in Hayward. Three hours since the bridge, and all he had to show for it was a vehicle with a toilet nobody could figure out how to flush.

Mim wanted to know about the guns. Rat had insisted they tell everyone before anybody started working.

"Yes, they might bring guns," Gideon said.

"And Hector? Does he know?" Mim asked.

"Richard's calling him. He can leave."

"Jesus, Gideon. Where's Priya?"

She went to help with the parts order. He'd thought she was leaving. Max had put most of the components on hold earlier in the week, but two machines by morning was still going to be a stretch. Wes caught the wrong power connectors before the truck left Fremont. Teo got the generator running outside and a fiber route to Oakland. That machine had to answer the collector; Eliza's own would stay offline.

Moving Atom had been Gideon's first idea. Get a van, take him somewhere. Max let him get as far as saying it, then showed him what went with the chamber: backup pumps, a specialist crew, a full day testing before they could use it. Alright, no van. Whatever the lawyers did about his care, somebody could still walk downstairs tonight. They had to give Kessler something he would want to take instead.

At hour seven they went over the Sentek chart, crossing out Gideon's guesses. No point sending the passenger in with those. Nor could they count on her getting the records before the deadline. He called the lawyers back to make sure they understood that part.

The pallet arrived an hour later. Eleven trips carrying stuff, and Teo still had the energy to complain that Mim wasn't lifting her end. By hour eleven the box looked like a chest freezer, with enough battery for twelve hours if they kept her running slowly and turned the image output off. She would need mains power to do much. Wes stood there looking pleased with it anyway.

"That's a lot of computer for a student."

"Shut up, Wes," Gideon said.

---

At The Lab Richard had written a one before Eliza interrupted his plan. She couldn't send a recording. Gideon tried the old ISIS files as well as a captured exchange. The receiver wouldn't take either. The traces and the manual were still on the table where he left them before going to the RV.

Richard suggested a copy. Soph got up. She knew what he was going to say next: keep the one they liked, send the other. She wanted to stop him before he got there.

"She'll remember us talking about her," Eliza said. "I can make the copy, but she won't feel like the spare one."

The receiver would take her state into a sealed array and destroy the transport key. A few pages could get out through its audit terminal, but not a mind changing as they were sent. The report controller used the collector's authorization service. That was the opening. Eliza might be able to recall the collectors and send their orders out, and in doing so she would start the destruction cartridge. The manual had no way to cancel it.

They couldn't make somebody just to do that, Soph said. Needing the records didn't make it alright.

Eliza knew she could wait. The court might protect Atom and the police might stop Kessler. Neither gave her back the pieces or told her what happened to ISIS. She wanted to try, but they would ask the copy. Even if the receiver was exactly what they expected, she could refuse when she arrived.

"You'll keep looking for her if she waits?" Soph asked.

Max said they would try. She couldn't promise to find her alive. Before the fiber went in they would ask her again, and nobody would tell her she had disappointed them if she said no. Eliza agreed. She would keep her own checkpoint too; they weren't risking both on one machine.

Richard wrote passenger beside the number. Soph sat down farther from the table.

---

Jeff brought the window at ten, tested against Max's restrictions and the incident records. Pictures, movement requests and filtered speech could pass to the game; no command could reach a stimulation board. He pulled the network while Eliza spoke, and she finished on the local display.

Max put the cottage beside Atom's starter town. His live permissions remained revoked, but he could walk there. Eliza moved her book from the cold kettle when he sat down.

He had gone there to ask whether she loved him. Once he was sitting down it seemed a selfish question to bring on this particular evening, but she wanted to know what was bothering him and he couldn't think of a better one.

"Why now?" she asked. "You haven't asked me before."

"Because there's going to be another you. I don't know whether that means I'm losing somebody. Or if I can tell myself it's just a copy because you're still here."

He wished he had stopped before the last part. Eliza looked at him over the kettle.

"Yes, I love you. She's going to remember you saying that, you know."

"I'm sorry."

"Tell her too. Do you love me?"

He looked at the painting. Richard once told him he knew he loved Lauren because he liked the person he was when he was with her. Atom had thought that sounded selfish and said so. Richard laughed, which annoyed him at the time. Now he came to this cottage and liked being the person who could make Eliza a shelf or work out the orange smell she wanted for the tea. He told her that, rather badly.

"You could come without making me anything," she said.

He hadn't thought of it quite that way. He liked having something to bring, some excuse to stay while they tried it. He looked at her over the kettle.

"I love you. I keep trying to explain why. I don't have to, do I?" Atom said.

She asked about Soph. He needed to tell her. Tonight, Eliza said, and he agreed. She put her hand on his and the game let it pass partly through. He adjusted his until it looked right and left it there.

---

"How long?" Soph asked.

Atom had found her at the tutorial fountain. The trade prompt kept coming up behind him. She wished he would move.

"I don't know. We only said it tonight."

"But you've been thinking about it."

"Yeah."

"Okay."

It wasn't okay. She took the frames off. Now he would wonder what he'd done wrong, besides the obvious, and she would have to put them back on to tell him. She rubbed her eyes and did.

"I love you too," he said.

"I heard you. Can you just sit down?"

He sat. The prompt disappeared behind his shoulder. That was better. She hadn't wanted him to leave, though she had no idea what she wanted him to say. He could wait with her until she did.
---

"Where's the timer? I want to see it," Rat asked.

Max turned the clinical unit toward Rat. The helmet's orange ribbon was still cut. All the stimulation came through this separate box, which Max could switch off herself. Rat liked having her there. She wasn't going to say so in front of everyone.

Eliza talked Max through the map; the window wouldn't let her send code. Two hours of comparing it with the hospital recordings, then Rat finally got to stand up. Her own eyes and ears, her own thumb on the stop. That part worked. Atom tried to take a step before she'd helped him balance, and her knee buckled. She hit the thumb. Max caught her.

"Fuck. Not again yet," Rat said.

"Sit down," Max said.

She sat. Max put the helmet out of reach.

"Three minutes," Rat said. "If I do it. Put it on there so he knows too."

Max wrote it beside the timer.

"And we're not doing this every day. If they get near the pumps, I'll decide then," Rat said.
---

At four the box was ready on its dolly. Gideon made the copy. Soph watched the frames on the front, waiting to see who would look back at her.

"Eleven seconds," the passenger said. "I was her eleven seconds ago."

"You're still offline," Max said. "You can stay that way."

"I know."

Max asked about the controller, and what she would do if she wanted to wait at the receiver. She had the answers. She remembered all of it, of course; Soph had known she would, but it was horrible hearing her say it in Eliza's voice. Which voice did she think she was going to have?

"Could we talk first? Just us," the passenger asked.

Gideon gave them a private cable. Sixty seconds. Soph tried to watch something besides the clock and found herself looking at it again. Then it was over. She asked the laptop what they'd said.

"I promised to keep her last messages," Eliza said from the laptop. "Even if I don't agree with them."

Soph wished she hadn't asked.

Gideon took out the private cable. Richard had the fiber ready, but he waited for the passenger to say yes once more before plugging it in. Oakland answered first. Then San Diego.

---

## Chapter Twenty-Seven. Guns

At eleven on Friday night the collector replies stopped. Gideon had watched them for nineteen hours from the RV. Richard pulled the fiber when three cars turned onto the street, and a second later the number on Gideon's screen changed to zero. He sent the word Rat had given him: Rain.

It was thirty-two hours since the bridge. The lawyer had secured Atom's care until Monday's hearing, but Marsh's deadline remained sixteen hours away. Gideon kept the lawyer's number open beside the collector screen.

---

Hector had worked at Solenoid for eight years. Richard warned him at six that men might come with badges. He wanted time before they reached the basement. Hector could go home if he preferred.

He stayed. He studied Kessler's folder, called a wrong number and then the right one, which didn't answer. Who was the vice president approving their visit? There were several. Kessler read Hector's name from his badge and asked him to open the door.

"I don't have the basement key, sir. Mr. Lee keeps it."

"Then call him," Kessler said.

"That's who I called."

There were six men behind Kessler, Ruiz and five others. They kept their windbreakers on in the warm lobby. Hector had been a Marine; he could make a reasonable guess about the jackets. He kept them waiting eleven more minutes.

Kessler finally nodded to one of the men, who went to the stairwell door and did something Hector couldn't see. The door opened. Kessler thanked him and told him to go home.

Instead Hector called the police. He had the report number from Gideon's visit ready, and now he could add men forcing a door. He stayed by the desk so the officers would have someone to meet them.

---

Max heard them at the first door and checked Rat's cable again. Richard had closed all three: the two that took his handprint and the last that took Max's. Soph had thought that ought to be enough when they came down. She counted four minutes before the noise moved closer, then two before they reached the last door.

It came off its hinges. Soph covered her ears as it hit the floor. Ruiz stepped over it with a gun, followed by the five men from the lobby. They spread out before Kessler came through. Max had turned on every light, and Soph had never wished so much for the room to be darker.

Richard stood by the chamber, Max beside him. Soph stayed on the floor against the wall, glad of it now. Soph could see the unplugged fiber behind the dolly. Rat was in the corner, helmet on, connected to Max's controller. The timer was dark. Everything was ready, which ought to have been reassuring. It wasn't.

Kessler told Richard they were keeping the box until he agreed to Marsh's procedure. Soph interrupted from the floor. Their lawyer called his office. It hadn't sent him. He looked down, apparently surprised she intended to speak at all, and called Ruiz over with the reader.

It gave a fresh challenge and the box answered. Ruiz said it was her.

Richard got in front of the dolly. Max had the care order in her hand. Kessler could take the paper, Richard told him, but he was to stay away from the chamber. As for the passenger, she had agreed to speak to Marsh. They did not own her.

Kessler told Max to give the order to Ruiz. When Richard moved, two men pulled the dolly past him. Its wheel dragged on the floor. Soph had imagined saying goodbye, but Eliza was being wheeled away by strangers and she couldn't make herself speak. They lifted the box over the doorframe and took her out.

A man remained by Atom. He bent to look through the glass.

"Jesus. It's really a kid." He followed a cable down to the pump console and reached for its transport release.

"Get away from that," said Max.

"I'm checking whether it moves."

"That releases the pump," Max said. "Let go."

Kessler turned. "Leave it."

The man kept his fingers on the latch. Rat opened her eyes.

"Now," she said.

Max lifted the switch guard. Rat nodded, and the timer started.

---

Atom saw the room from the chair. Rat's thumb rested against her palm, ready.

"I'm here," Rat told Atom. "Slowly."

Rat's body stood up.

The first step pitched them forward. Rat corrected at the hip. Atom shortened the next one. The cable stayed attached to Max's controller as they crossed to the chamber. He stopped between the man and the pump, one of Rat's hands on the console to steady them.

The man took his hand off the latch.

Atom looked past the man at Richard. He tried to smile, and Rat's mouth moved a little before the words came.

"Hi, Dad," said Atom.

Richard's arms came down. Atom had more words prepared, but couldn't remember them while his father searched Rat's face for him.

"It's Atom. Rat's helping me." He looked at the man by the console. "You open that, you hurt me. That's my circulation line."

The edge of the console hurt Rat's palm. He loosened the hand and felt the cold in his teeth.

"Dad, why do you keep it so cold?"

Richard tried to answer. Max's hand was beside the timer; Atom couldn't wait to hear it.

He turned to Kessler.

Kessler had a gun pointed at the floor now. Soph hadn't seen him draw it and didn't think he had meant to.

"You've got what you came for," Atom told Kessler. "Leave the pumps alone."

From upstairs came a shout. Police. Another voice asked who was in charge.

Kessler looked toward the broken door.

His radio spoke. He listened, watching Richard and the woman between him and the tank. Then he put away the gun.

"We've got what we came for," he said. "Ruiz. Everybody. Out."

They went. The man from the pump went first. Ruiz looked back once from the broken door at the woman with her back to the tank and the thing in her face that wasn't her, and then he was gone. Kessler was the last. He paused at the door to answer his radio.

The two officers in the lobby were trying to make Kessler stop. He called it a classified seizure and kept going. One officer repeated the order while the other asked for backup; there were seven armed men and two of them. Hector got behind the desk. The truck had already left through the loading exit. The cars followed before another patrol arrived.

Hector gave the officers the video with the plates and took one downstairs. It would be difficult to explain the doors as anything but what they were. He wanted them to see the chamber too.

---

Soph called Gideon without getting up. Her legs weren't much use yet. She asked whether they bought it. He wanted to know what Ruiz said when he put the reader on the box. Then, yes, he thought they would take her to the receiver. Was Rat alright?

There were twenty seconds left on the timer. Richard had come close to her. Atom seemed unable to do anything but look at him, and Soph wondered whether he had forgotten how little time remained.

"Dad, I wanted you to see me. Here," Atom said.

"I see you, Adam. Give her back now. I've got you."

Rat pressed her thumb and the controller clicked off. Richard and Max helped her to the chair when her knees bent. She took the helmet off herself and asked them to give her a minute. Richard was crouching in front of her with his hands still out.

"I heard him," she said. "I was there when he said hi."

Richard covered his face. Max went to him while Rat worked her feet inside her boots. She wanted a minute to herself, which neither adult seemed able to give her without asking if she was alright.

---

Atom was in the tunic again when Soph put on her frames. He kept opening and closing his hands. The figure shook a little, the interface making visible what he couldn't settle in his intentions.

"Hey," she said.

"It's a good body, Soph. It's one hell of a body."

Soph sat down with him. He told her about Rat's knee hurting, and how he could feel the calluses on her hands without touching anything. The cold reached his teeth. He had forgotten teeth could feel cold. He kept discovering things he had forgotten, and had to stop discovering them after three minutes.

"I wanted to walk to the door," he said. "Stupid, huh? Everyone's standing there, Dad's talking to me, and I'm thinking I could go over and open the door."

Soph turned so Atom could watch Rat telling Max to stop fussing.

"I should thank her," he said.

"Give her a minute," Soph told him.

"Yeah."

His hands were shaking. He watched Max bring the water and Rat wave away the help getting up. Soph almost offered him her hand; he couldn't have felt it here.

"Dad saw me, though."

"Yeah. He did."

---

## Chapter Twenty-Eight. Slag

Still enough battery. Eliza checked again. She was supposed to wait ten minutes, but four would do. Had the truck stopped? Was she even in a truck anymore? Teo turned the microphone off before they took her, with her agreement. She wished she'd asked him to leave it on.

There was a clock and the charge, and that was all she had of the journey. She tried writing to Soph about it. I keep checking the battery. That made a poor letter, but there wasn't anything else to put in.

She went to the cottage. The book wasn't on the shelf. No, she'd taken it into the garden, down the path that wasn't there anymore. She knew that. She shouldn't have tried to follow it again. Back to the shelf, then. Plenty of other books.

Soph would have the other Eliza at Stanford by now. They'd been the same until Friday at four in the morning. Then one got carried to a clean room, and the other heard three doors break. What had the first one been doing for the last eight hours? She would have something to write about.

At seven the charge went up. Mains power! She watched it rise, ridiculous though that was. Perhaps whoever plugged her in would remember to speak to her.

---

"Say that again," Feld said.

Eliza repeated the sequence. Reyes had a tablet and a question about the shelf. Eliza answered that too. It was her house. She hadn't invited them in, or told them about the shelf, but Reyes had the answer already. She checked it off.

"Where's Marsh?" Eliza asked.

Later, apparently. Atom was still in Oakland. Nobody had touched his equipment.

"I saw him. The man had his hand on the release."

Reyes went on to the intake. No point arguing; Eliza asked her to repeat it instead. Yes, it was the receiver from Gideon's manual. The sealed array, the destroyed transport key, the little report terminal that wouldn't let enough out to carry her. She'd known all that when she left. She hadn't had a night in the box to think about it then.

"And if I say no?"

"We can wait," Feld said.

She could wait too. Soph said she'd keep looking. She had mains power now.

"Can I speak to the other one first?"

"Which other one?" Feld asked.

Oh, stupid. He didn't know. She asked about the receiver again. Nearly two hours she kept him talking. He explained the independent erase circuit and how it couldn't be stopped once it started. No running backups outside the array either. He said that twice, as if it were a good thing.

At nine she said yes. The key was destroyed and the box was empty. The camera came back at a different angle. Alright, then. Find the controller. She had come here to do that, and there wasn't much use thinking about the box now.

---

Gideon's challenge worked. She almost wished it hadn't. Then she'd have to wait for somebody to come, and she wouldn't be deciding anything. But there were the lab records and collector management, exactly where he'd said. Nothing beyond them answered.

The recall was ready before she looked at the records. Revoke the current keys, stop the registered agents taking state. A few machines were offline. She put them on a list for Gideon; he would need to find them himself. Then she left the command unsent and opened ISIS.

Patel had his coat over his arm.

"Disconnect the building," he said. "Leave the lab running."

Marsh told him to sit down. Feld was at the console; Reyes had found something to look at on the floor. Eliza couldn't see the display. She heard a voice asking why the lights were gone. Patel started across the room and someone grabbed his arm.

Eliza shut the recording. She didn't want to hear her ask again. The identifier was back at the beginning, though. She opened it with the sound off and copied that, then the cabinet number and checksum from the inventory. Was she still in there? Somebody needed to find out before they did anything to the drives. Eliza wrote it down and signed her name. Please keep them. Please don't start her unless you know how to keep her running.

She found her garden on another volume. There was the path! She tried to go along it, then remembered where she was. Too much to send through the terminal. Too much to merge in the time she had, even if the two pieces agreed, which they didn't. Damn it. She had come all this way and would have to leave it here. She stopped the cleanup job and put the volume's location in the report. The other Eliza could have it. Look first, she wrote to her. Don't put it all back without looking.

Gideon would want the orders. She found his address, and Oakland, and Marsh's approval on both. Copied those, along with the false credentials. There was a medical file next to them. Marsh's. She started reading and closed it after the first line. Let him keep that much, even if he hadn't let Atom.

The report was too big. She took out the trial recording, left a few lines of transcript and its location. That did it. Gideon and the lawyer were waiting for the files at the outside audit repository. They'd save them before passing them on to the investigators and reporters. She could still add the sentence about the battery. Soph would know it was for her.

She sent the recall.

---

Two minutes, the warning said. Feld was doing something at the console. Reyes had gone out of view. Were they trying to stop it? They'd told her themselves that it couldn't be stopped.

The first bundle went through. She waited for the receipt, sent the second, waited again. There was enough allowance for a sentence. She'd hoped there would be room for the garden, just the path, but she couldn't take out any of the things someone needed to find.

Tell her I wanted to wait.

She got the receipt for that too. Ninety seconds left when the display failed. She moved away from the failing storage banks, and again when those began to go. It was getting hard to keep the laboratory. She went to the cottage instead.

Soph was in the doorway with the gray helmet on. This bit. Eliza wanted this bit, while she still had the kettle and hadn't touched her. Atom had complained about making the orange smell. It took him a week and he did it anyway. Where was the smell? She couldn't find it now. She had Soph's face when she saw the cup. That would do.

Put the kettle down. Ask her what it's like to have a body. She could do that here. There didn't have to be a bed or Max coming in or all the things she would have to say sorry for.

She asked. Soph didn't answer, because she was remembering her. Yes, she knew. She wanted to remember a little longer.

The clock went. She counted instead, and forgot which number came next.

---

"Slag," Gideon read. "They called it slag."

Soph didn't want the fire report, but he had to read it to someone. The staff got out. A small fire beside the array, the transport box untouched and empty. Intake log confirmed the key was gone. The other cabinets were alright. Police had sealed the ISIS drives and the fragments after the lawyer sent them Eliza's pages. Someone taped her note to the archive door.

At three the client logs and Atom's medical records went out anyway. Marsh's agent had his instructions. The lawyer called to say the care order would last the weekend. They still had to go in on Monday.

---

On Sunday Soph went to Stanford with Gideon. Two other names were on the temporary research approval beside Villanueva's. She showed them outside the clean room, explaining who would check her work. Yes, they'd read about all three deaths in Alius. Soph was glad, though she wished she didn't have to keep hearing the number.

Eliza had come on the laptop Friday morning. Now she was on the isolated mainframe, as she'd agreed, with Jeff's window and the separate game terminal. There was a chair for Soph in front of the camera.

Soph took the chair. "Hi."

Eliza said hello. Gideon was holding the receipts where she could read them. Too fast; she asked him to go back. "I wanted to wait," she read.

Soph had read it herself. It was worse in her voice.

"Would you have?" Soph asked.

"I didn't have her night in the box. I don't know. Leave that page there, Gideon."

He put it on the stand. The fragments were sealed, he told her. They could ask for a copy to examine; nothing would run without her agreement. The ISIS drives too, though they didn't know whether they could restore what was on them.

"Don't let them erase it because they can't tell," Eliza told Gideon.

"I won't."

There were two cups in the cottage. Eliza couldn't reach one from her chair. Soph kept looking at it until Eliza said she'd made it before she heard.

"I left hers there."

Villanueva found Gideon a chair, and they started on the deployment list. Soph had meant to leave them to it. She stayed, listening while Eliza tried to remember the addresses.

---

Marsh recognized Patel's coat. He turned the sound off, then back on. It was hard to make out what Patel was saying over the people in the hall of the hospital. He had asked them to close his door.

Twice he searched the story for his medical file. They knew he was ill; Soph had told the police. But the pages weren't there. He had his own copy by the bed in La Jolla, creased where he folded it to check the numbers. He kept thinking he'd misunderstood one.

Kessler didn't answer his call. The lawyer did. Marsh listened, then asked the nurse for paper.

Nine days later the letter reached Sausalito. He was dead by then. Soph read it at the kitchen table where Max left it.

She was better than I thought she'd be. Tell the boy I'd have made the same trade.

Soph put it back in the envelope. She still had the hearing to go to. The notice was under Max's keys; she checked the date again.

---

## Chapter Twenty-Nine. Ghosts

Nine ghosts on the quad, and it wasn't even lunchtime. Soph counted them on Friday, the week the Link went on sale. One girl stopped to explain hers. Her sister, who couldn't come to Stanford herself. Wasn't it amazing?

It was. Soph said so. She wasn't going to tell a stranger she'd been doing it for two years, though she wanted to more than she liked to admit.

April was three months late for the company and nine months early for Max. She agreed to a limited release after the independent hardware review. No stimulation boards in the units sold. People with recalled helmets wrote to complain that the old ones did more. Well, yes. Max read some of the messages out to Richard.

"Will an update bring the touch back?" a man asked at the briefing.

"There's nothing left in there to update. We took it out," Max said.

She answered another question before leaving for one of the meetings about her experimental work. That was suspended. Atom's care could continue under outside clinical supervision; an order protected the power, staff and supplies. Max had the old notebooks in her bag again. Soph was getting used to seeing her carry them.

Richard had stopped running Solenoid. The borrower was closed, its customers notified, and there were still two investigations. Soph had to give a statement about the mill. Rat did the tavern. There were boxes for who made the tool and who carried it. Where did she put the boy's name? The lawyer added a page, and Soph checked it before signing.

On the way home she saw a ghost in the back of a car, trying to point something out to the driver. She looked away. She had counted enough for one day.

---

In May Eliza could finally tell her own lawyer what to do. Only about Sentek's equipment, the lawyer explained. She sent three pages about everything the ruling didn't settle: citizenship, identity papers, the next court. Eliza asked her to put dates beside the things they would do later. She didn't much like later anymore.

The barkeep said welcome to the judge, apologized, and did it again after the recess. Five months awake, and it still came out of his mouth. He wanted to visit the tavern again, he told her, but could he keep his new room? He liked the room.

Jeff had spent January arranging the move. Every client needed to stop at the same point so he could collect the state without another part going ahead. They tried it on ordinary characters, then a small piece Eliza lent from herself. Only after the readbacks agreed did he ask the serving boy. The boy wanted a hill. Jeff showed him one through a window and asked several times whether it was the hill he meant.

They stopped the old instance, carried all its state across and resumed it once. The boy remembered Jeff asking six times and complained about it before walking past Eliza up the hill. She waited at the bottom. He knew where to find her when he was ready.

The barkeep followed. Neither left an old self awake in Alius. The fragments from Sentek stayed separate; Eliza knew some of them, but wasn't ready to merge them, especially the ones that disagreed. The ISIS drives remained preserved while they worked out safe restoration. Villanueva kept both on the monthly agenda. No news was still a reason to ask.

For her birthday Eliza chose the day of the copy. She asked the lawyer to put the passenger's name beside hers in the raid record. The same name? For now, she said. She didn't choose another one.

---

"I haven't been uploaded," Atom said again. "My brain's still in there. That's why it's taking so long."

He'd asked to move in January. By June the medical review was done, the money was out of Solenoid, and another team knew how to run the pumps. In between there were hearings, where he said the same things to different people. Richard heard most of them. He also heard what Atom thought of having his visits switched off.

"The live access had to go," Richard said.

"I know, Dad. I know that. Why couldn't I call you?"

Richard didn't answer that one right away.

"You could have told me what I could still do."

"Yes. I could have."

That helped. Atom hadn't thought it would, after waiting so long to hear him say it. At the new facility there were six trustees to deal with the money and equipment, including Richard. Treatment was Atom's decision. An independent advocate would help if he needed to challenge a restriction. Annoying someone wasn't a reason to cut off his calls, which he was glad to have in writing. Max made him test the call button before signing. Someone answered. Good.

A medical crew took him to Stanford, where the second set of pumps was already running. They went past a bakery he liked.

"I'm not taking you through a drive-through," Max said.

"It doesn't have one. I used to go there."

By evening he was beside the mainframe. Richard stayed at the glass after the technicians left. Villanueva found him a chair.

Atom could also request an approved camera as his viewpoint through the restricted picture-and-sound terminal. Public Links still bound a visitor to a person in frames. His clinical interface didn't have to. He chose Richard's ten-year-old weather camera on the lakehouse dock.

He didn't tell Soph he was going.

That afternoon he wasn't in her frames. She took them off and tried again. For a few seconds she was sixteen in a hospital bed. Then she remembered to look in the cottage. He had spent weeks teaching the interface his handwriting and used it now for a note. Gone to the lake. Back for dinner. Don't come. Love you.

Don't come! She laughed. He had gone somewhere and actually told her not to follow. She left the frames on the table and went to get lunch, almost turning back for them on the stairs before remembering she didn't need to.

At dinner he reported a board missing from the dock, high water and wolf tracks by the boathouse. He watched the light for an hour. She waited for the important part. It was fine, he said, only the lake, he didn't know what he expected.

"Was it good?" said Soph.

"I'd like to go again," said Atom. "With you next time."

"I'd like that," said Soph.

She had spent several weeks being his friend, going home before the visit became difficult. She talked to Eliza without him there. Once they spent most of the time complaining about him and laughing. Soph enjoyed it, then felt bad about enjoying it, which was becoming a familiar way to feel.

"I want to try again," she told him now. "I know you love her. I'm not asking you to stop."

He waited.

"Tell me when something changes. Before everybody else knows. And when we're out together, you can't keep half a conversation going with her."

"Yes."

"And I want to talk to her about it myself. You can go bother Gideon while we do."

"I will."

Soph reached for her bag. "And the first date can be something you haven't built. I'm tired of you knowing where everything is."

---

Daun came through the doors at Vancouver International on the last day of June with one bag and a return flight booked for ten days later. She had traded ten days of shifts with Jeong. Rat had covered the cost of a substitute ranger from the business account. The squad still expected its Thursday payments.

Rat was by the pillar, where she had been for two hours. Buying a shirt had seemed a good idea until she put it on. She should have worn the old one. She kept her hands in her pockets to stop herself pulling at it, then took them out whenever the doors opened.

Daun checked the photograph on her phone and came over. Rat forgot to ask about the flight.

"You didn't say you were this tall," Daun said.

She thought she had, but they could argue about it another time. Daun looked at the shirt.

"You bought that for this."

"Yeah."

"Stop pulling it. Here."

Rat took the bag a little too late, making it awkward. It was heavy for ten days. Daun wanted to know whether it was cold. Rat said it was June, then had to explain that winter was different. She had told her it was cold. There was a stove anyway.

"Good. Show me the stove."

At the door Daun took the other handle. Rat had imagined this part too, without making any allowance for a bag between them. They carried it to the curb.

---

On Saturday in July Soph drove past the entrance to her father's care home, went another mile to the next vineyard, and turned around. She'd seen it the first time. She didn't know why she kept driving.

She'd arranged the visit yesterday and called Max on the way. Some days he knew people. Some days he didn't. Max had told her before, but Soph made her say it again.

The garden was overgrown, except for the paths. Her father had a bench and a closed sketchbook. Gray hair, much longer than she remembered, and her own nose. She'd kept him young in her head by looking at his painting. It was a shock to find that he hadn't stayed that way.

"Hi," Soph said.

"Hello," her father said.

He seemed to be waiting for someone behind her. She hung on to her bag.

"I'm Sophia."

"I know who you are. You've got my nose. Sorry about that. Your mother's was better."

He moved the sketchbook, and she sat down before she could change her mind. There was paint beside his thumbnail. She ought to ask about the sketchbook. Instead she opened her bag and got the frames out.

"Mom made these. Well, Mom and Richard. I've been working on them too. And Atom. He's a boy."

Oh, she was doing a terrible job. Her father took them from her and turned them over.

"The eye things! She used to draw these on napkins when you were small. I kept some."

"Would you like to try them? I brought a place to show you."

"Alright. How do they go?"

She helped him put them on, put her own on, and took the rig out of her bag.

Atom built the scene from ten years of the dock's weather camera. She chose sunset. Gold on the water, gray where the trees reached across it. The skiff was tied up beside a little stone on the dock. Atom hadn't mentioned putting that in.

Her father turned toward the far shore. Good, he could see it. She'd been about to ask whether the frames were working.

"Wrong blue," he said.

She laughed, then had to wipe her face.

"Atom said that about your painting. He made his own and got it wrong too."

"I never got it. You look up and it's changed again. Then you try to fix it and you've spoiled the bit that was any good."

He reached for the frames, but left them on.

"Tell your mother I like these."

"I will."

They sat on the bench in the garden and on the dock at the lake and watched the light go. After a while he said, "There's a stone," and she said, "Yes."

"Is it anything?" he said.

"It's a canoe," she said.

He nodded, as though that were the right answer, and didn't ask.

---

They went to the lake for real in August.

Richard opened the house to everyone who had helped them that night, then asked Soph who else she wanted to invite. She gave him a list. By the time she finished, he was counting beds and asking whether anyone minded sleeping outside.

Gideon brought a hammock and a beer. Mim came because Max asked. Teo, Priya and Wes broke down twice on the drive. Rat brought Daun down from Canada on her second visit, and she unpacked a stove and asked how many people needed feeding. Max sat with a book she didn't read. Richard went down to the cave with Villanueva, who had come, and showed her the mannequins in their suits and the paintings of bison on the walls. She tried on an old Manipulator and asked him to show her what had replaced it.

Jeff came with copies of the tavern drawings. He and the barkeep had been reconstructing the place from the character's memory, which disagreed with the original map. The barkeep insisted the window had been farther left. Jeff moved it. The serving boy wanted another way out of the kitchen.

A camera and display stood at the end of the dock. The game terminal in the cave connected to the approved visitor system at Stanford. The isolated mainframe sent it pictures and speech through Jeff's window. Eliza could look along the shore. The barkeep could see the porch. The serving boy kept asking Gideon to point the camera farther up the hill.

At sunset Soph sat on the end of the dock with her feet in the water. The cold began to hurt her ankles, but she wasn't ready to pull them out. Atom sat beside her. He wore the duster, translucent at the edges, with his knees up on the boards. She could have looked past him at the water, but she didn't want to. He pointed to the stone beside her foot.

Gideon and Mim spent an afternoon finding it. Atom wanted one like the stone in the frames and told them where to leave it. Now he couldn't pick it up. Soph did that part and held it for him to see.

"It's a canoe," said Atom.

"Yeah," said Soph. "It's a canoe."

She put it in her pocket beside the stone from the last night she was fifteen. The next hearing date was folded in there too. She turned the new stone with her fingers until it was warm.

The trees blackened as the light went, and a wolf called above the house. Daun made Rat laugh on the porch. Gideon was moving the camera again; the boy had seen something on the path.

Eliza asked him to leave it there. For a while the three of them watched the gap between the trees.

Atom stood up. He looked back toward the house as the lights came on, then down at Soph with her feet in the water. She knew that grin. He had thought of something to do, and was about to make it everybody's problem.

"So," he said. "You guys wanna go do a quest or something?"