2/08/23 - Music of the Spheres, Part 2

Author’s Note: This story takes place two decades after the events of Sentience. You can read Part 1 of this story here.

---

The beginning half of the century had been littered with a potpourri of augmented reality devices, before Microsoft’s ViReal came along and wiped the floor. 

It was a straightforward procedure to implant the corneal component. Cataract surgery centers were already assembly-like in nature, with surgeons walking through a string of prepped OR’s like chess grandmasters in a simultaneous exhibition. Turning these assembly-lines into corneal implant centers turned out to be both operationally simple and hugely profitable.

ViReal (and its associated walled garden of products) became ubiquitous within a decade. By the time the Northwest Union seceded from the rest of the States, nearly every person on Earth had one of its implants. 

That made the Ned Yelson, the director of the Blackbox division, possibly the most powerful person I’d ever met.

“Pleased to meet you, Detective Jameson,” he said, shaking my hand.

“Same to you too, Mr. Yelson. Thanks for coming down to meet me in the lobby. I know you must be busy.”

“Of course. I take this matter seriously.”

We took an elevator up to a balcony office. It was modestly furnished but had a terrific view of the surrounding landscape. Yelson poured me a cup of tea.

“I’ve transferred a file to you already with most of the relevant information, but I admit I withheld some details” he said, as I sipped on the tea. 

“Go on,” I said.

“First of all, you have to understand that what you’re about to hear is only known by a small group of individuals. Within the Union government, it is considered a Special Access Program on-par with our nuclear weapon protocols. I was given permission for this conversation directly by the head of national security.”

I blinked.

“Do I want to be hearing this?” 

“You could always withdraw from the case. It would be a loss for both of us.” 

“Ah. Go on, then.”

Yelson paused for a moment, as if he were choosing his words carefully.

“The long and short of it is that we install a backdoor into every Vi-Real implant, and Elias discovered this when she shouldn’t have.”

The information hit me like lightning. There had long been conspiracy theories about exactly this scenario, but never any evidence. Publicly, Microsoft uniformly denied its existence. Every version of its implants had also had their code cracked open by some group or another immediately on release, only to be found to be utterly benign.

So to have it confirmed was like learning that the babysitter who had been taking care of your kids was actually an axe murderer.

“We’ve never used it,” Yelson said quickly. “It was installed twenty years ago, before Perez’s Peace was in effect, as a national security guarantee.”

“You mean, as a weapon.”

“As a weapon, yes. Or as diplomatic leverage, or as a nuclear deterrent - you could call it any number of different things. We’ve never used it.”

“And Elias was working on this backdoor?”

“No. She was silo’d in a completely different department, one responsible for audio-visual integration. We still don’t know how she discovered the backdoor’s existence, nor how she accessed the encryption key needed to use it.”

Yelson clicked a button by the foot of his armchair and a projector turned on, casting a screen against the wall. 

“This is security footage from earlier today, showing the backdoor’s editing room. It’s the only place the code for the backdoor is able to be edited.”

The projection showed a small cluster of desks with keyboards in an empty conference room. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about the room - until suddenly, a woman flickered into existence. She was tall, wearing business casual, and typing quickly at a terminal. Several seconds after apparating into existence, she started, looking around, almost as if she realized she could be seen. Then she quickly got up to leave the room. 

“Was that a jump cut?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s the moment the first of the solar flares hit, shorting out ViReal processors.”

The gears turned slowly in my mind. What could one do with a backdoor into the visual processing software for every ViReal on the planet? Why would a solar flare show a woman apparating out of thin air?

It clicked.

“Holy shit. She turned herself invisible.”

“Yes.”

“She used the backdoor to scrub herself out of the visual field of every corneal implant and camera. Not only that, but…” 

I leaned forward, thinking. 

“Play the footage back one more time?”

Yelson clicked a button, and it played through again. This time, I stared at the keyboard in the moments before she popped into existence. 

“There are no keyboard depressions from when she’s invisible. She’s also editing out her physical interactions with the world.”

“Yes, it’s a nice touch, isn’t it?” Yelson said. “I would almost be impressed, if the situation weren’t so dire. The only reason we caught her was because the first of the solar flares was unexpected.”

“You got lucky. Or rather, she got unlucky.”

“Yes.”

“That begs the question though, what was she doing in the editing room?”

“She wiped her work before she left. But from what we can tell, she was trying to insert a package of her own code into the next cochlear implant update.”

The magnitude and sheer gutsiness of what she was attempting hit me all at once. All of a sudden, I felt afraid.

“That package of code, whatever it was… it would have been pushed to every ViReal user on the planet. And the only reason it didn’t ship… was because of a freak celestial occurrence.”

“Yes. Unfortunately.”

---

The solar flare was over by the time I left BlackBox Labs. When my implants turned back on all at once, I jumped. Suddenly the world was back to what I was used to - colorful, crisp, hyperreal.

“Detective Jameson, you have three messages,” Vi said in my ear. 

“Before I open them, turn off visual augmentation please.”

“All of them, ma’am? Even myopia correction?”

“All of them.”

The world flickered, becoming a little bit more grey, a little bit more blurred. I sighed. If this kept on for long enough, I’d have to find a pair of actual glasses - which these days were only sold at antique stores as fashion accessories. 

But I could breathe a little easier with vision augmentation off. I was spooked by the idea of someone hacking my vision to make themselves invisible to me. 

“You can play my messages now, Vi.”

Message 1:

“Hey Jameson, we have ID’s on all three bodies in Elias’ basement. Brief summary:

Body 1: 37 year old man, sentient, a hotel manager at La Rouge. Reported missing 47 days ago. 

Body 2: 69 year old woman, sentient, retired English teacher. Reported missing 24 days ago.

Body 3: 55 year old woman, sentient, union organizer. Reported missing 23 days ago.

No shared contacts between any of them, suggesting that they were selected and killed at random. All appear to have died of dehydration, although that is awaiting verification by Pathology team.”

Message 2: 

“Hello Mrs. Jameson, this is John one of the scrub techs. Dr. Mei Jameson is asking me to relay a message since she’s currently scrubbed in on a case. Ahem ‘Tress, I’m going to be stuck at the hospital later than usual today. The solar flare really messed with our O.R. schedule. Can you pick up the kids?”

Message 3: 

“Hey Jameson, we got a tip. Seems like Elias was part of a non-sentient rights group which was becoming increasingly radicalized over the past several years. There’s a member, Sarah Peters, who wants to talk to you. Sending you her location.”

I asked Vi to send a quick message to Mei that I wouldn’t be able to pick up the kids, copying the school staff on the message so that they were automatically enrolled in the after school session. It was the second time the week that we’d done this, and I felt a wave of guilt. Tommy and Jen had been having trouble in school recently, and Mei and I had recently sat down to talk about scaling back our work to spend some more time at home.

For the Elias case, I had a few options in front of me, but Sarah Peters seemed the most promising. The tram ride over was quick, passing through a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. It was noticeably more downtrodden, most stores having barred windows. It reminded me that with a physician and detective’s salary, our family was better off than most in the city.

When I knocked on Sarah Peters’ door, I half-expected no answer. Most tips were a dud, and I was well-used to witnesses flip-flopping at the last moment. But after a moment, the door opened and I found staring at a middle-aged bookish-looking woman.

“Detective Jameson?” she said. 

“That’s me.”

“Is anyone else with you?” 

“No, but you should know that per policy, my implants are recording at all times, including right now.”

“That’s fine. Come in.”

I followed her to her living room. It was a small, pitiful apartment, smelling mildly of mildew. Two cats watched me from behind a counter in the kitchen. I made a mental note to take an anti-histamine later.

“I heard you have some information on Elias’ disappearance?” I said. 

She fidgeted in her seat.

“Not the disappearance, no. But…” she hesitated, as if unsure of herself. 

“Any information would be helpful,” I said. 

“We were part of the same group. The Bastion of the Mind. A pretentious name, I know. But are you familiar with it?”

“Non-sentient rights advocacy group, from what I’ve heard.”

“We primarily helped with non-sentient refugees from hostile countries. Helped them relocate, integrate into the community. That’s how I met Elias - we were working on trying to build refugee housing in some of the higher-income neighborhoods in Seattle, which for the most part was a losing battle.”

Internally, I winced. I lived in one of those neighborhoods, and the topic of high-density housing for non-sentients refugees was a contentious one, even after all these years.

“That seems like an admirable enough goal,” I said, keeping my face neutral.

“It was, but… you have to realize, people came from all sorts of backgrounds. Some of us held on to a lot of anger.”

“Which included Elias?” I asked.

“She didn’t talk too much about it at first. But I heard through the grapevine that she had a sister who was sent to one of the organ farms overseas,” Sarah said. 

“And over time, I saw her get frustrated by the work we were doing. ‘None of this solves the root of the problem,’ she would say. ‘Which is that every day, non-sentients are being used as meat.’ She kept on repeating that phrase. That overseas we were being used as… well, you know as well as I do what happens outside of the Union.”

I nodded. I was here in an official capacity as an officer of the law, and therefore I had no political opinions. But it was an open secret that the international ban on non-sentient organ farms was a farce. 

“One day, she asks me to come over to her house. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s huge. Like one of those mansions you see in period pieces. She tells me that she’s been working on a way to fool the P-detectors, and that she needs other non-sentients to test it on. And, everyone knows that that’s impossible, that people have tried a million times but that it’s foolproof - but I thought, why not? She looked so earnest, so excited, she said she was so close. So I sit down in this chair she had prepared in the basement, and she glues on some electrodes to my scalp - “

I leaned forward, holding my breath.

“- and she plays me some noises through my implants. And she just looks at me, waiting, but honestly, it just sounded like white noise, and I told her that. ‘You don’t feel anything? Joy, or excitement, or euphoria?’ she asked. And I told her no, it was just noise, just random sounds jangling around my skull with no rhyme or reason to it. And then she took the electrodes off, and said she was going to use my implants as electrodes now, and she did the same thing - but again it was all just noise.”

“Did she do anything else?” I asked. 

“No that’s the strange thing. I asked her what it was all about, and she said that if I were sentient, that I would have heard the most beautiful music, that I would have never wanted it to stop. ‘A lifetime of satisfaction in a string of unending moments,’ she said. And she looked so happy - I’ve never seen her happy like that before, never. And then the next day, she disappeared, and no matter how many times I pinged her, she never responded.”

I sat back in my chair, the facts all jumbled up in my brain, none of it making any sense. Meanwhile, I could feel my allergies starting up. In a moment, I’d be a continuous stream of sneezes. 

What was Elias working on? She had some kind of music she was working on… and she had a backdoor into ViReal implants… 

“Did you see anyone else while you were there in the basement?” I asked. 

“Anyone else?” Sarah said. “No it was just us.”

“Let me rephrase. Did you know of anyone else who did anything similar with her, or notice signs that anyone else had been in that basement?” 

“No?”

The rest of the interview was a wash. Sarah had no other information of practical use, but it did allow me a better picture of Elias. She seemed like a lonely person, from what I could tell, and one who had become increasingly isolated in the period leading up to her disappearance.

I uploaded our conversation into the Police Department archives, and made my way back to the tram station. I wasn’t used to this part of town, and my Detective’s uniform made me stick out. I passed by a shop that had been graffiti’d - “P-zombie scum” sprayed in broad, red lettering - and quashed a familiar feeling of resentment that rose up in my chest. Someone had sprayed something similar on our driveway when Mei and I first moved into our neighborhood.

Vi interrupted my thoughts right then. “Detective, we have a reported sighting of Elias by the waterfront. This was about 2 hours ago, during the solar flare. I’ll send you the location.”

On the tram ride over, I temporarily reactivated my corneal implants to look at the map. What was by the waterfront? A couple of high-rise apartments. A fancy open-air mall. A cluster of restaurants.

And a ViReal satellite office with a data-center.

I arrived ten minutes later, the puzzle of the case spinning like the sides of a rubik’s cube. It felt like something big was happening. Elias was planning something, but I couldn’t quite figure out what. Ned Yelson had said that he had increased security at the main headquarters, where Elias had been caught on camera… But there were so many ViReal offices, it was impossible to secure them all. And it was impossible to tell employees that they should be watching for an invisible infiltrator, when the very existence of such technology was a state secret.

As my worry grew, my walk turned into a jog. The ViReal satellite office still a block away, I called the Department.

“Seattle Police Department, this is the operator, how can I help you?”

“Hey Frances, can you patch me through to Captain Lark?” I asked.

“Sorry Jameson, he’s in a meeting. Leave him a message?”

“Need to speak with him now,” I said, a bit out of breath as I went up a flight of stairs.

“I’m obligated to ask you - “

“Moondog urgency,” I said.

“Alright, patching you through - “

There was a brief ‘ding!’ as the call switched over to Lark’s implant.

“This better be important, Jameson,” Lark said, sounding stressed. I wondered what meeting he was in.

“I need three backup teams sent to my location, stat. With their ViReal implants turned off while onsite. And I also want two gun-drones, manually operated with auto-aim turned off. The Elias case just blew up.”

“Jameson - “

“I’ve sent you a brief with everything I know so far. Elias is in this building. I’m going after her.”

I turned off my corneal implants right as I approached the front door of the ViReal office. My heads-up directional navigation disappeared, and the world became slightly more blurry, like someone had smudged my vision with their thumb. 

People used to get laser eye surgery for this, I thought. Incredible.

I burst through the lobby door and up to the front desk, and pulled up my badge in V-space. Odd that I can’t see what I’m pulling up. 

“By the power vested in me by the Union’s citizens, sentient and non-sentient alike, I, Detective Tress Jameson, declare emergency powers authorization of the highest elevation,” I said. “Post-hoc court mandate will follow within 24 hours.”

I had only ever used those lines once previously, after I had been shot during the assassination attempt on Jessica Perez. A strong sense of deja vu filled the back of my throat like bile. I quelled a sense of panic, knowing that if I let my mind run free it would fixate on the memory of being shot.

The two clerks at the front desk gawked, but the company camera must have seen my badge in V-space, because the double doors in front of me immediately swung open. 

“You,” I said, pointing to one of the clerks. “Evacuate the building. Assume that there’s an active shooter here.”

“Evacuate?” she said. But the building heard me, and klaxons sounded high above, through the speaker system. I knew that simultaneously, an automatic alert had just been sent to the implants of every employee in the building, along with instructions to the nearest exit. In a few minutes, the lobby would be flooded with escaping employees.

“Building!” I said. “Take me to the databank room.”

A lane of lights appeared along the flooring, and I ran along the path it created. I passed by half a dozen employees alone the way, most looking confused. They must be wondering whether this is real or not, I thought. Everyone always wants to believe at first that it’s a drill.

The interior of the building was larger than expected. It was built during the neo-neon era, with sharp contrasting colors giving it an early 2000’s EDM vibe. As I got tired, my run became a jog, which became a power-walk. 

“Vi, how long until backup is here?” I asked.

“The closest officer unit is 4 minutes and 35 seconds away from the outer perimeter of the building,” Vi said. “There are five gun-drones en route. The closest will arrive in 3 minutes and 25 seconds.”

“Please confirm that the gun-drones have auto-aim off. Set to incapacitating rounds. Then upload to their remote operators a scan of Elias’ face and tell them to shoot on sight.”

“Finding remote operators is currently estimated to take 15 minutes, due to the rarity of their necessity.” 

Gun-drones had been around for decades, ever since the mass-production of quadcopters became feasible. The combination of reliable facial-recognition technology and an aim response times measured in nanoseconds meant that they could sweep through a crowd and pick off targets with unerring accuracy. There was no fighting a gun-drone - if you could see it, that meant it could see you, which meant it had line of sight and you were already dead. But it also meant that no one had piloted an auto-aim-disabled drone for years - I imagined that the Department was figuratively scrambling to dust off old binders filled with the instruction manuals. 

The hallway ended in a big set of double doors, which I assumed was the databank. I was out of breath, and made a mental note to do more cardio after I finished this job.

“Vi, one last thing. Ask the building to data-quarantine itself and prevent any uploads into ViReal architecture being used by the public. If not possible, call Yelson and ask for a ViReal codefreeze. Actually, do those both simultaneously. Also, tell Yelson that Elias will probably be expecting a codefreeze and may have a way around it. Also, call Triple A and make sure my life insurance policy is updated.”

It had been a long time since I’d thought about my sidearm. It was purely ceremonial, given the ubiquity of gun-drones, and there had been several proposals to abolish it. “A remnant of a more brutish time,” the Times had called it. “When man, with all his irrational tendencies, was allowed the instruments of murder.”

But I took it out now, the metal unfamiliar in my hands. I hoped the muscle memory from my Academy days would take over.

I burst through the door. 

There she was. Elias. She had an array of USB’s in front of her, and was in the midst of plugging another in.

“Police!” I shouted.

She ignored me, typing something into the terminal. 

“Put your hands up!” I said. 

“It’s Detective Jameson, isn’t it?” she said. Her voice was calmer than I expected, especially for someone who had a gun pointed at her. 

“Put your hands up NOW!” I shouted. 

She waved her hand, and a projector cast an image on the wall. It was a video of an elementary school classroom. As I watched, the video panned down to look at a desk, where a small hand was doodling on a sheet of paper. I knew that hand. That was Tommy’s hand. We were watching a livestream through Tommy’s corneal implant.

“You’re going to put down your gun,” Elias said. “Or your son - Tommy, is it? - is going to - “

I fired a bullet in her head. 

Her body vanished. It reappeared the next seat over. Without even thinking, I shot her head again, this time with a double-tap. Her body vanished and reappeared again.

“I’ll give you that one for free,” she said. “But you have three seconds to drop your gun or your son eats shit.”

Blinding rage gave way immediately to fear, and I dropped the gun. 

“You turned my corneal implants back on,” I said. I hadn’t considered that she’d be able to do that.

“Bingo.”

“Are you even in this room?” I asked. I walked over to where she was sitting, waving my hand through her head. It was eerie, seeing my fingers superimposed over what looked to me like a flesh-and-blood human. It felt obvious, in retrospect, that if she could remove herself from implants’ vision, that she’d also be able to create fake avatars of herself.

“I’m not going to answer that.” 

“What is any of this supposed to accomplish?”

“I have a suspicion you already know the answer to that,” Elias’ avatar said. Her voice came from a corner of the room, rather than from the avatar’s lips. But it was entirely possible that that was a fake-out too, and that she had hijacked my cochlear implants to ventriloquy a false location using stereophonic sound. 

“You found a way of wire-heading sentients using their implants,” I said. 

“What a simplistic way of describing my work,” she said. I turned my head. Was the sound still coming from the corner of the room? Did it move?

“Fine. You found a way to use ViReal implants as EEG leads to monitor the brain’s multi-layer prediction modeling system. And by feeding a sentient individual the right audio cue at the right time, you can maximize the resulting reward stimulus from said unpredictability, creating a euphoric experience that will continue until - at least for the three victims in your basement - the individual dies of dehydration. The Samizdat made extant, in other words.”

I felt like we were both stalling for time. I was waiting for reinforcements - where were they? they should have arrived by now - while she was presumably finishing her upload. She must still be in this room. Where was she? 

“The Samizdat?” she asked.

“Nevermind,” I said. I was convinced now that the origin of her voice was fake. It was too obvious. None of the other terminals had any keyboard depressions; but of course she would be removing her visual footprints. Were there any shadows that was out of place? Any sounds? It must be impossible not to leak some kind of audiovisual cue.

“So what, you’re just going to use the backdoor to upload this globally? And kill off every sentient as part of your little holy war?” I asked. “95% of the human population, gone, just like that?”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “I’m not a monster.”

“Leverage, then. Holding some portion of the sentient population hostage. Children, mostly, so as not to impact the global economy or critical infrastructure. Actually, hold on, you’d hold the children of the sentients hostage - especially those of world leaders - and use that to demand the abolishment of organ farms or the Camps or whatever the fuck else is on your international agenda.”

“Close enough.”

“And Perez’ Peace can go screw itself, right?” I said. Where were the gun-drones? The backup? They had my real-time location, and should have arrived by now. Unless Elias had turned that off in my implants as well. She very well could have created a false beacon somewhere else in the buildings. Maybe she had run them into a brick wall somewhere.

“Everyone always talks about James Perez as if he were a saint. He wasn’t. Do you know that he was the one who green-lit the backdoor project? All while he was preaching peace between sentients and the likes of you and me? He was a goddamn hypocrite. His peace was never going to last, no matter what his daughter or the U.N. or our government want the world to think. I’m just pulling the trigger of the gun he built.”

She must be anchored to this room. Uploading the software would be a time-intensive process. And she must have been unarmed, otherwise I would be dead already - and she knew that if she gave away her location, then I would have the upper hand.

Did she really have the software uploaded already into Tommy? Or Mei? Or was it just a bluff, to make me drop my gun? 

If she uploads this software, they’re dead anyway, I thought. The only people immune to this are non-sentients. 

I picked up the gun. 

“What are you doing?” she said. “I’ll kill your son. I’ll do it. I really will.”

I ignored her voice, looking across the room. There were twelve terminals in total. I had already shot at two of them. I had six bullets left. She had already been here for at least two hours - the upload must be close to done. 

I fired at the terminals in succession, five times for five terminals.

“Your son is DEAD, Jameson!! DEAD,” she screeched. She sounded panicked, which was good. 

Only one bullet left. I grabbed a chair and threw it at a column of terminals. Nothing. I’d have to use chairs to smash the terminals, saving my bullet for when I was able to bait out her location.

At that moment, a gun-drone burst into the room. It crashed into the back wall and bounced off, creating a dent in the plaster. No one had flown these remotely in ages, so the operator must have been struggling with the controls.

Elias stood up from the back row of the terminals - and looked like a mirror image of me. 

“Shoot to kill!” she said, pointing at me. “Before Elias uploads the program!” 

I raised my gun and fired at her. 

The shot went wide. 

The gun-drone swiveled to point at me, and I could practically see the operator at the other end of it, looking at me and seeing the spitting image of Elias, their finger on the trigger button.

And then it swiveled towards the real Elias and fired twice, two electric rounds hitting her in the chest. She fell to the ground, convulsing. 

“Thank god,” I said. “I thought for a moment that - “

Then the gun-drone swiveled back to me, and fired at me at point-blank range.

---

I woke up in a hospital bed. Mei was sitting in a lounge chair next to me.

“Mei?” I said. 

“Hi Tress,” she said with a smile. “You’re at UW main campus hospital, the date is February 8th, 2079, the President is Lars White, you were shot with an incapacitating round two days ago, Tommy is safe and fine, the upload was stopped three minutes before it would have gone live.”

“Oh,” I said. 

“And this is the fourth time we’ve had this conversation,” she said. 

“The fourth?”

“It’s from the morphine drip,” she said. “I just told them to back off on it. Which means hopefully you’ll remember our conversation this time, but also your whole body is going to start hurting like hell in the next half hour.”

“Oh,” I said. 

“Sorry,” she said. She was still smiling, but there was a pained expression to it. She brushed my forehead and gave it a kiss. “I’ll tell them to convert it to a morphine PCA.”

“Why did…” 

“The remote operator was fairly certain their first shot had actually hit Elias - the giveaway was that she said ‘shoot to kill,’ when you had said to use incapacitation rounds. But then they felt they had to be certain, so Lark made them shoot you too, on the off-chance that they were wrong.”

She clenched and unclenched her hand for a moment. I rarely saw her this angry. 

“I gave Lark a piece of my mind,” she said. 

“Mei…”

“Next, you usually say that Elias would have been totally safe if she’d just stayed invisible, and used the backdoor to make you look like her - then Department would have shot you and thought they’d gotten her. But we think she panicked, so, she made a misstep there.”

“Am I really so predictable?”

“Always the same questions in a row,” she said. “You ask about Tommy, me, the backdoor, why you were shot, and then Elias. Do you want some casserole?”

“Ah crap. It’s Tommy’s birthday isn’t it?” 

“You had some cake earlier with him when he visited. Then fell asleep as we were opening presents. Jen gave you a drawing, by the way.”

She pulled out a crayon drawing. There were the four of us, standing in front of our house, the roof lopsided and the words “get better soon Mommy” written sloppily at the top. 

“I love it,” I said. 

“I’ll tell her you said that,” Mei replied. 

I leaned back on the pillow. My chest was starting to ache, and I caught myself taking shallower breaths to stop my ribs from hurting as much. From the corner of my eye, I saw a young woman in a white coat peek her head in, see Mei, and then quickly leave.

“Mei, what did you do to that poor intern?”

“I may or may not have put the fear of God in her and her attending,” she said. “The department head of internal medicine is involved directly in your care now.”

“You know how I feel about VIP care.”

“A little fear is healthy,” Mei said with a shrug.

I sighed. “So what now?”

“Well, officially the entire incident was deemed a terrorist attack. You and I are the only people in the general population aside from Lark who know about the backdoor. Perez’ Peace remains as it always has been. You’re now doubly a hero, since your name was leaked to the press.”

She gestured to the other half of the room, which was filled with a dramatic variety of bouquets and cards.

“Oh great,’ I said. 

“The government’s security division has given you a cover story,” Mei said. “Since you’ll be getting a great deal of press. And apparently Jessica Perez is visiting you tomorrow, both in her official capacity as a U.N. diplomat and as a private citizen who owes you a debt. She said something about wanting to recruit you as a sentient-non-sentient ambassador.”

“Ugh.”

There was a moment of silence. I felt suddenly very tired.

“I don’t want to think about the future. Can we talk about anything else? Literally anything else?” I said. 

Mei tilted her head, thinking for a moment. 

“Well, the other day at school, Tommy told his teacher that his dead grandmother was still baking him casserole, and…” 

And with that, I relaxed back into the bed, and felt the tension leave my body all at once, as I held Mei’s hand and listened to her voice lull me back to sleep.