Tami was twenty-three. Her blue eyes were magnetic. Pale and full of pain. Her husband, Colonel Anderson, was much older than her. A stern, wealthy Korean War veteran who, after only one year of marriage, was already disappointed with it.

“I love my wife, Dr. Stolow,” The Colonel told me. “But she doesn’t make sense to me. One minute, she’s happy; the next, she’s screaming at me, accusing me of secretly hating her. I think she’s losing her mind.”

He asked me to talk to her, and so I began meeting with her twice a week.

She’d had a very traumatic childhood. Her alcoholic mother had committed suicide when she was still a teenager.

“This world has been very unkind to you,” I told her. “You’re terrified of being abandoned, and this fear affects everything you do, but I can help you manage this fear.”

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We began working with her on mindfulness, distress tolerance, and emotion regulation. Her mood swings began to improve but then she and The Colonel had another bad fight, and this time the fight turned physically violent.

“If anything, you’ve made my wife worse,” The Colonel told me.

“Your wife has suffered a lot in her life. Right now, she needs patience and understanding.”

“I don’t have any more patience.”

The Colonel cancelled the rest of Tami’s and my appointments. I thought that was the last I’d ever hear from either of them. But then a year later, The Colonel called me, begging for help. He’d taken Tami to Switzerland to try a new, experimental therapy involving something called a God Helmet.

He believed this helmet had severely damaged her brain.

The Colonel sat on my sofa. He’d lost thirty pounds since I’d last seen him. His eyes had sunken into his face. In his lap, he clutched a beige envelope.

“How did you hear about this Dr. Weber?” I asked him.

“From a friend of mine from the war. He’d been very depressed. He said Dr. Weber’s helmet let him talk to God and that God had forgiven him for all his sins.”

“And you believed this?”

“My friend had no reason to lie to me. I’d seen the change in him, too. He’d come back from Switzerland a different man. Happier than I’d ever seen him before. He gave me Dr. Weber’s number. After speaking on the phone, he invited Tami and me to Switzerland.”

“You said you have a recording of Dr. Weber and Tami’s session?”

“Here.” He reached into his envelope and took out a VHS tape labeled, Tami - 11/04/1992 – GODHEAD. “Please watch it and tell me what you think.”

I put the tape into my VHS player as soon as I’d gotten home from work. The recording began with a close-up of Tami’s face. She wore a metal helmet covered with wires that twisted into the circuit boards behind her.

Dr. Weber placed his leather-gloved hands on Tami’s cheeks.

“Are you afraid?” he asked, speaking with a thick Swiss accent.

“Will this hurt?”

“Not at all. In fact, you’ll feel an intense rush of pleasure once I’ve connected your brain to Heaven.”

He turned the helmet on. Tami’s body jerked backward, and her pupils dilated. Then her jaw slowly opened.

“What do you see?” Dr. Weber asked.

“My mother, sitting on a bed. She says she’s sorry she left me, but she couldn’t stand to be in this world anymore. It just hurt too much.”

Tami began to cry.

My TV flickered with static, then suddenly shut off.

I ejected the VHS. The tape had unspooled. I couldn’t get it wound again. I told myself I’d take it to the rental store tomorrow and ask if they could fix it.

My first patient the next day was a young woman named Georgia, who’d begun seeing me after her three-month-old son died in his crib.

She sat on my sofa, rubbing the cross on her necklace, her red hair tied in a ponytail.

“I keep blaming myself for what happened,” she said. “I can’t sleep. Every night, I just lie in bed, thinking about what I could have done differently.”

“You can’t keep blaming yourself for what happened.”

I knew a lot about blame. My wife, Anna, had been killed in a car crash that happened while I was driving drunk.

“You need to try and forgive yourself,” I said.

“And what if I can’t?”

Georgia spoke, but her voice sounded just like Anna’s.

The voice that came out of Georgia’s mouth wasn’t Georgia’s. It was Anna’s.

I shut my eyes and rubbed my temples.

“Are you okay, Dr. Stolow?” The voice was Georgia’s voice again.

“Yes, I’m sorry. I just have a bit of a headache.”

On my way home from work, I stopped at the rental store. They’d managed to fix the VHS.

I sat on my couch and tried watching the video again.

“My mom and I left her bedroom,” Tami said. “We’re in another room now. A much larger room. Everything inside the room is white. My mom’s face looks strange, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her face is changing. Distorted. Oh, it looks horrible. Stretched horizontally. Her mouth full of fanged teeth. No, no, I don’t like this! Please make this stop!”

She screamed.

Dr. Weber shut the helmet off.

Tami’s pupils shrank back to their original size.

My phone rang. It was The Colonel.

“I need your help,” he said. “I think Tami’s had some kind of psychotic break.”

“What’s happening?”

“I’m not sure. She’d gone to bed early, but then she woke up and started screaming. She’s been screaming for nearly an hour now. I can’t get her to stop.”

I told him I was on my way, and I drove to their house. Their housekeeper let me inside.

“Thank you for coming, doctor,” she said. “I’ll take you upstairs to their bedroom.”

Tami stood near the bed, pressing her face against the wall. Every few seconds, she’d let out a blood-curdling scream.

The Colonel stood a few feet behind her, trying to calm her down.

I slowly approached her. “Tami. My name is Dr. Stolow. Do you remember me?”

I touched her shoulder. She turned around. She had a horrible smile on her face. Her lips stretched nearly to her ears.

It couldn’t be real.

I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, her smile was gone.

She slammed her head into the wall, splitting her forehead open. Blood dripped down her face.

“What’s wrong, Tami?”

“I’m very confused.”

“About what?”

“I’ve been walking around this house for hours, but I can’t seem to find my way out of it.”

I asked The Colonel to call an ambulance.

Once he was gone, Tami sat on the edge of the bed.

“You told me it’s a virus, or a parasite maybe,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

I sat next to her. She took my hand. “When you said you loved me, you meant it, didn’t you?”

“I never said I loved you.”

“You did! You promised you’d love me forever.”

“You’re my patient, Tami. I care about you, but not like that.”

She laughed.

The Colonel walked back into the room, and she froze again, staring into space.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

I stood up. “I managed to calm her down.”

“The paramedics are on their way. They should be here soon.”

Once they arrived, they sedated Tami and took her to the hospital. I requested she be placed on a three-day psychiatric hold.

“What happens now?” The Colonel asked me.

“The doctors and nurses will keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.”

“Did you watch the video I gave you?”

“Most of it. I’ve been having trouble with my VHS machine.”

“Do you think it was Dr. Weber’s helmet that caused this?”

“How soon after this God Helmet experiment did you notice Tami’s behavior changed?”

“Just a few days. As soon as we’d gotten back to Boston, she started staring at the walls, wandering the house, and talking to herself.”

I got Dr. Weber’s number from him. Then I called Dr. Weber the next day, from my office.

“Tami’s experience with the God Helmet was very unusual,” he said.

“How?”

“Every other person who’s worn the helmet, me included, has seen the same thing. Grassy fields, a dense forest, and a deep, male voice telling them things about their lives that nobody else could possibly know. Tami’s experience, though, was a nightmare.”

“I watched your recording of the session. Tami talked to her mother, but then her mother’s face became monstrous.”

“I still don’t understand what went wrong.”

“How does your helmet cause these hallucinations?”

“These aren’t hallucinations, Dr. Stolow. The God Helmet emits low resonance, low frequency radio waves directly to the center of a person’s brain. I’ve discovered the exact resonance required to activate the pineal gland.”

The pineal gland. He was crazy, or worse, a conman.

Back at home, I tried watching the recording of Tami’s God Helmet session again.

Her face filled my TV screen. Her pupils dilated.

“I ordered my men to hold the line,” she said, but she spoke with The Colonel’s voice.

“If I let them retreat, more of them would have lived, but then I might have died, too.”

“You’re afraid of dying?” Dr. Weber asked.

Static distorted Tami’s face. Her face became blended with The Colonel’s.

“I’m a Catholic,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of very bad things. I don’t know what’s waiting for me on the other side.”

“And you want to ask God what your fate is? Heaven or Hell?”

The Colonel nodded.

I paused the recording, rewound it for a few seconds, and then pressed play again.

Tami continued her story like before, describing her conversation with her mother until she reached the point where she begged Dr. Weber to turn the helmet off.

I’d imagined The Colonel’s voice. Hallucinated it maybe.

What was happening to me?

I turned off the TV and went to bed.

At 2:00 AM, I woke to the sound of my phone ringing. It was a nurse from the hospital.

“Tami’s escaped,” she told me.

“How?”

“Somehow, she managed to remove her restraints.”

I heard muffled footsteps in my living room.

I thanked the nurse for telling me, and then I hung up the phone.

Instead of footsteps, I heard gentle sobbing.

“Tami, is that you?”

I went into the living room and turned on the lights. Tami sat on my sofa. She still wore her hospital gown. Her arms were scratched and bloody.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I got lost.”

“We need to go back to the hospital.”

“Can’t we just spend a bit of time together first?” She kissed me.

“Please, don’t.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m your psychiatrist. We can’t do this.”

“We’ve done this. You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“I’ve been forgetting lots of things, too. I think that’s part of this place. What it feeds on.”

“Memories?”

The TV crackled with static. I turned and saw my face on the TV screen, the God Helmet on my head.

Dr. Weber placed his leather-gloved hands on my cheeks.

“I see blood everywhere,” I said. “All over the walls, all over Anna’s bed. Where am I?”

“I’m not sure,” Dr. Weber told me. “This has never happened. Is Anna in the room with you?”

“She’s in the corner crying. Or I think it’s her. I can’t see her face. Just the back of her head.”

Suddenly, I screamed.

The TV flickered and then shut off.

“We need to get out of here,” Tami said. “It’s close.”

“What is?”

“Come on.”

She took my hand and pulled me towards the front door.

“The only place we’re going is the hospital,” I said.

She opened the door but, outside, I didn’t see my street.

A white hallway stretched out for as far as I could see. Wooden doors were evenly spaced out across both walls, five feet between each one.

Tami led me into the hallway. We walked further into it, and then opened a door on our right.

Through my door, I saw my office.

I heard a phone ringing.

I woke up in my bed. The ringing I’d heard in my dream was real.

I went to the living room and answered the call. It was The Colonel.

“Did you hear Tami escaped from the hospital?”

“One of the nurses called me.”

“I think she’s come back to the house. I just woke up and heard someone walking around in the attic.”

“I’m on my way now.”

I got dressed and drove to his house. He was already at the front door, waiting for me, a flashlight in his hand.

He took me upstairs to a staircase at the end of the bedroom hallway. Then we slowly climbed the stairs upward as The Colonel shone his flashlight in front of us.

“Is that you up there, Tami?” he yelled.

The attic was filled with furniture and dusty cardboard boxes.

The Colonel swept his flashlight across the room, lighting up the cobwebs.

In the corner, a woman sat with her face to the wall.

Anna? No.

It was Tami, sobbing.

“We need to take you back to the hospital,” I said.

“I’m not going back there.”

“You’re sick. You need help.”

“They can’t help me. Nobody can help me.” She stood and turned round. Her eyes looked wild. Panicked. “I’ve been trapped here for months.”

“Trapped where?” The Colonel asked.

She didn’t answer. She walked toward the window.

“What are you doing, Tami?” I asked.

Without warning, she threw herself through the windowpane.

The glass shattered across the ground.

Tami screamed. Then, silence. No landing. No thud.

I went toward the window. The outside world had disappeared. In its place, I saw the same white hallway I’d seen before.

“I’m dreaming,” I said.

“This is no dream,” The Colonel told me.

“Then what is it?” I paced across the floor. “This God Helmet, did you try it, too?”

“We all did.”

“I don’t remember going to Switzerland.”

“You’re fucking her. The two of you made a whole vacation out of it.”

“That’s not true.”

He set his flashlight down on the floor. Then he reached into his jacket and took out a gun. “I should shoot you right here. Her own doctor. I trusted you.”

I raised my hands. “Please, let’s talk about this. Let’s be reasonable.”

He pressed the gun against his own temple. “I’m done talking.”

“Don’t!”

The gunshot blared. The Colonel’s head burst into static.

The ball of static grew until it filled my eyes.

Suddenly, I found myself driving down a street near my house.

I felt strange. Unbalanced.

“Careful, Harry,” Anna said. “You’re swerving.”

“I’m fine.”

I fixed my eyes on the road. The other cars. The traffic lights.

It never happened. I’d drive slowly, carefully. I’d get her home safe. There didn’t have to be any accident.

I saw the semi moving towards the stop sign.

I pressed down on the brake but the car didn’t stop.

The screech of tires filled my ears. I spun upside down.

“Harry! Harry!”

Blood poured down Anna’s face, her skull split open.

“It’s not fair,” she said, crying. “Why do you get to live, and I get to die?”

I woke up, but not in my bed. Dr. Weber’s face was right in front of mine.

“Do you hear me, Harry?” he asked.

“Yes. What’s happening?”

“I’m not quite sure. You lost consciousness.”

I looked back at the circuit boards on the wall. The God Helmet hung from a metal hook.

“I’ve never let anyone stay connected for so long before,” he said. “But you insisted.”

Tami walked into the room. “He’s up now?”

“Yes,” Dr. Weber said.

She ran to me and kissed me. “I’ve been so scared.”

“Why are you here?”

“We came here together.” She looked at Dr. Weber. “Is he okay?”

“Some amnesia, it seems like. Let’s let him rest.”

I sat there a while longer. Dr. Weber asked a few questions.

Slowly, everything came back to me.

I’d called Tami after Dr. Weber cancelled our appointments. I’d asked her to meet me for coffee. I said I was worried about her. She agreed to meet me.

We began our affair. Crossed a line we couldn’t uncross.

I’d heard about the God Helmet from a colleague of mine. He swore it was the real thing. He’d talked to God himself.

The Colonel had never gone to Switzerland. He was in New York on business. It was me. I bought the plane tickets. I walked Tami into Dr. Weber’s lab.

“I think I’d like to go back to my hotel now and lie down,” I said.

“Of course,” Tami said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Please call me tomorrow,” Dr. Weber said.

I promised I would.

Tami and I left the university lab and called a taxi to take us to our hotel.

At the hotel, we took the elevator up to our room on the fifth floor. But as the doors opened, they revealed the same white hallway again.

“No. This can’t be real,” I said. I stepped into the hallway and then looked back at Tami, but the elevator was empty now. She was gone.

I opened one of the doors. Inside, I saw my office.

Why?

As I walked through the door, it disappeared behind me.

Georgia sat on my sofa. I sat across from her.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“You wanted to try the God Helmet again.”

“You’ve tried the helmet?”

“It was incredible. I spoke to God. He answered all my questions.”

I saw the helmet hanging from the wall near my window, a web of wires and circuit boards behind it.

“This can’t be real,” I said.

I looked back at Georgia and her face had changed. It still was changing. Stretching horizontally. Her eyes, lips and nose all dragged out from their sides.

“What are you?” I asked.

But she didn’t answer.

The walls of my office fell backwards as if they were painted cardboard, revealing an even larger room, completely white.

The room was filled with screaming people.

I recognized some of them. Tami, The Colonel, Anna.

I heard a baby cry. I looked back at Georgia. She cradled an infant in her arms.

She opened her mouth. It was filled with hundreds of long, jagged, razor-sharp fangs.

The screams became louder, filling my ears.

Georgia brought the infant to her mouth. Bones crunched and blood splattered.

The screaming stopped.

Georgia’s eyes rolled back in ecstasy.

I invited him to the apartment I rent to meet men. It’s downtown Boston, close to all the hotels. Gary’s in his early fifties, a bit overweight, and he has kind brown eyes. I thought he wanted to fuck me, but he just wants to talk.

“Did you go to university?” he asks.

“I did one semester of philosophy, but then I dropped out.”

“Your parents must have been upset.”

“My mom was pissed, yeah, but she’s gotten over it.”

“What about your dad?”

“It’s kind of a messed-up story. My mom had me through in vitro, using donor sperm. The man who donated the sperm had lied about his name. Later, she found out he’d been donating sperm all over the country. I have thousands of half-brothers and half-sisters. My mom sued the sperm bank and got a bunch of money.” I glance at my phone. “I have another friend coming over soon, though.”

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“I understand.” Gary stands and puts the money on the dresser. “It was great talking to you, Jasmine. You seem like a very nice, intelligent young woman.”

He leaves the apartment. I get changed. Kevin arrives at four. We fuck, he pays me, and I take an Uber back home.

I feel like shit. I hate myself. Six men in six hours. It pays the bills, though. With all the AI bullshit online, nobody wants to pay for video chats anymore. They want the real thing. They want me in the flesh.

I light a joint, sit on my couch, and doomscroll. China’s army is pressing farther into Taiwan, Russia’s invaded Poland, Israel is burning the entire Middle East to the ground. The whole world feels like it’s falling.

I want to stop watching news clips, but I can’t stop. I lean into the anxiety.

But then my half-sister, Zahara, sends a message to our group chat.

“Have any of you talked to this guy?” she asks. “He wants to hire me to take pictures of this Children of the Apostle conference he’s planning next month. When we met, he asked me a lot of weird, personal questions, though. I think he might be Dad.”

She shares a picture of Gary.

“Fuck,” I write. “I just talked to him today. He asked me a lot of personal questions, too. Where I grew up, what my childhood was like, if I’d been raised Christian.”

“Two weeks ago, he showed up at the restaurant I’m working at,” Morgan writes. “He invited me to that Children of the Apostle conference. He said he’d pay for everything. What do you think he wants?”

“He’s probably going to unveil his big plan for having thousands of kids,” Zahara replies. “But he’s a clown.” She sends a bunch of clown emojis.

Gary messages me early next morning.

“What are you doing today?” he asks. “Would you like to meet for coffee?”

When I don’t reply, he writes, “I’ll pay you for your time.”

“I’ll think about it, okay?” I write back.

I remember when I was a kid, I used to think about the questions I’d ask Dad if I ever had the chance to meet him. What’s your job? What’s your favorite movie? Do you believe in aliens?

I call my Mom. She used to live in Boston, but she moved to Canada three years ago after Vice-President Stanton announced the Federal government had outlawed abortion. I tried to leave with her, but Canada rejected my application because of my criminal record. A prostitution charge from when I first started charging men for sex.

“How’ve you been?” Mom asks.

“I think I talked to Dad.”

“You’re kidding me.” She goes silent. I know she hasn’t hung up the phone, though, because I hear her breathing.

“Mom? Are you okay?”

“What happened? He reached out to you?”

“Yeah. Online.”

“Don’t tell me you slept with him.”

“No, nothing like that. We just talked.”

“About what?”

“Nothing, really. He just wanted to get to know me better. Zahara and Morgan said he reached out to them, too. It seems like he’s planning some kind of family get-together next month.”

“Stay away from him, Jasmine. That man doesn’t want anything good for you.”

“I know.”

I promise Mom I won’t talk to him anymore, but I can’t help myself. I write back to Gary and just ask him, “Are you my dad?”

He tells me he’d rather explain in person. He asks me to meet him at the Starbucks near his hotel.

Gary’s already bought me a latte. I sit across from him, and he pushes the latte towards me.

“You are him, aren’t you?” I say.

“I am.”

“Why reach out to me now?”

“I’ve been waiting for the right time.”

“What’s so special about right now?”

“The world needs us.”

He hands me a pamphlet for the conference Zahara had told me about. Children of the Apostle.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“When we talked yesterday, you told me that, because of what I did, you don’t feel special. But Jasmine, you are very, very special. You and all your brothers and sisters. I’ve been planning this event for a long time now. I’m going to explain everything to all of you. My reason for doing this.”

“Your master plan?”

I open the pamphlet. Inside are bible quotes, as well as a paragraph explaining that we are all direct descendants of John the Apostle.

“I’d really like you to be there,” he says. “I’ll pay for everything, of course. Your flight, your hotel, your food. I’ll pay your rent for that month. Whatever you want. I have the money.”

I don’t know what to say.

“Let me talk to my sisters,” I tell him eventually.

Dad seems happy with that. He stands from the table. “Let me know what you decide.”

Zahara, Morgan, and I decide that it will be fun. An all-expenses-paid trip to Chicago. We convince Dad to send us a thousand each in spending cash, too.

Dad flies us to Chicago first class. He books us all private suites in the Four Seasons Hotel.

My room is amazing. The most luxurious hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.

I throw myself on the bed and sink into the sheets. Then I call Zahara. “Are you here yet?”

“I’m downstairs at the bar.”

I join her. Morgan is there, too, and so are a few of my other half-sisters and brothers. Zahara introduces me to my half-brothers, Lucas and Jacob. Lucas has flown in from Austin. Jacob’s from Miami.

We drink at the bar until it closes, getting to know each other better, laughing about how bizarre this all is. Then we go back up to our rooms.

I still don’t feel tired, so I lay on the bed, turn on the TV, and watch the news. President Ellis has fallen sick. The White House won’t say what’s wrong with him. Just that Vice-President Stanton will be in charge until he recovers.

When I wake up the next morning, I shower, and then Zahara, Morgan, and I take a cab to the conference center.

Dad’s invited hundreds of us. The event is a disorganized mess. We wander the center, directionless, until we find a sign directing us towards the auditorium. We go to the auditorium and sit near the stage.

Slowly, the auditorium fills. Then the lights dim and Dad walks to the podium.

“Thank you all for being here today,” he says. “I want you to know that I’ve brought you all here for a reason. You’re the best and brightest of my offspring.”

“Fuck you!” one of my brothers yells.

Dad ignores his comment. An image of the world burning appears on the projection screen behind him. Men in white robes appear and stand in front of the auditorium doors.

“Thirty years ago, I had a vision,” Dad says. “My father, John, came to me and said that the Antichrist will reveal himself soon. Before this happened, I needed to prepare. Have children, he said. Have as many children as you can. These children—my children—will be the army that Christ needs.”

“He’s out of his fucking mind,” Zahara whispers.

“After the Antichrist does reveal himself, Dad says, “the Great Tribulation will begin and life on Earth will become a living hell. But don’t be afraid. I’m going to protect you. You’ll be safe underground. Together, we’ll prepare for Christ’s arrival. We’ll re-emerge to fight in the final battles against evil. We will be Christ’s soldiers who bring about Heaven on Earth.”

Dad holds his arms out, smiling at us. Lots of my brothers and sisters are laughing, though. Others stand to leave. The men in robes don’t let them leave, though.

I worry things are about to get violent.

But then I feel strange. Light-headed.

The men in white robes begin to put on gas masks. Dad puts on a gas mask, too.

“What’s the fuck is going on?” one of my brothers yells.

I become very dizzy. The walls of the auditorium spin around me.

Zahara grabs my arm. “Jasmine, what’s happening?”

“I don’t know.”

I lie on the floor, trying to stop the room from spinning.

I close my eyes.

When I open my eyes again, I’m in a dimly lit room. The air is stale. I’m lying on a very uncomfortable bed. My clothes have changed, too. I’m wearing a white robe.

I stand and look around the room. Zahara is sleeping on the bed beside mine. Beside her is Morgan. Another one of our sisters sleeps on my right.

I wake Zahara up. She vomits. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s taken us somewhere.”

My other sisters wake up, too.

Morgan has a panic attack. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

She goes to the door at the side of the room and tries to open it, but it’s locked.

“Help!”

I stand and put my hand on her shoulder. “We’ll get out of here, don’t worry,” I say. “But we need to stay calm.”

Beside the beds, in the room with us there are also a few desks, and a bookshelf with a few copies of the Bible.

Morgan sits on her bed. I sit on mine.

I think about my mom. I didn’t tell her I was going to see Dad in Chicago. I should have told her. She’ll try calling me soon. When I don’t answer, she’ll worry. She’s going to be worried sick.

I begin to feel nauseous, too. But then the bedroom door swings open and Dad walks in, along with two of the men in robes.

“Good morning,” he says. “I hope you all slept well.”

Zahara jumps off her bed. “You piece of shit! Where are we? I want to go home!”

“I call this place Patmos,” Dad says. “When the Great Tribulation begins, we’ll be safe here. Please don’t be afraid. Nobody can hurt you here.”

“We’re underground?” I ask.

“Yes. Very deep underground.”

“When can we leave?”

“When Christ returns.”

“And when’s that?” Morgan asks. “One year? Two years?”

“Soon.”

The man on Dad’s right steps forward. He’s a larger man. A shaved head and a long beard.

“While you live here, you’ll all be given jobs,” he says. “The four of you will work in the kitchen. We eat twice a day. Once in the morning and once again in the evening. You’ll help prepare the meals and clean the dishes.”

“And if we don’t?” Zahara asks.

He ignores the question. “Then, during the days, you’ll join us in the classroom to study.”

“As Children of John, like me,” Dad says, “you all have a very special connection to Christ. Over the coming months, and the coming years, you will all have visions of your own. It’s very important that you tell me about these visions as soon as you have them. The truth is never revealed at once. It’s revealed in pieces that we’ve been trusted to put together.”

Dad and the two men leave the bedroom. I hear them lock the door.

Morgan begins to cry.

Every day in Patmos is the same. We eat, study the bible, eat again, and then go to bed.

In total, one hundred and seventy-two of us live in Patmos, a vast underground web of tunnels and bunkers. Of the one hundred and seventy-two of us, besides Dad, there are Dad’s own twelve Apostles, and then 159 of Dad’s children.

In the hallways, my brothers and sisters whisper rumors. Dad is extremely wealthy. He’d spent a hundred million dollars building Patmos. The project had taken decades to complete. Decades of planning.

Our second week in Patmos, during Dad’s lecture, he places a radio on the podium.

“The Great Tribulation has already begun,” he says.

He turns the radio on. A news broadcast plays.

“President Ellis died earlier this morning. Vice-President Stanton has assumed control of the presidency. Reporters were invited to the White House for an important speech.”

Then George Stanton speaks. “You know me as George Stanton, but my true name is the Antichrist,” he says. “Now, you will all get on your knees and worship me.”

Dad turns off the radio.

“You are all very fortunate to be here in Patmos,” he says. “You cannot imagine the suffering that will take place now.”

In the mornings, on our way to the dinner hall, and when we return to our rooms after dinner, are the rare times that my brothers and sisters and I can talk freely. Some of my brothers and sisters have come to believe Dad. Most, though, like me, think he’s crazy.

Lucas, my brother from Austin, claims he’s seen the way outside.

“I dreamt of a river of blood flowing through the streets of New York,” Lucas says. “Dad invited me to his room to talk about the dream. He has a locked door in his room. It doesn’t look like the other doors. I think it’s the door that leads out of here.”

“Where would he keep the key?” Zahara asks.

“It must be in his room somewhere. It’s the place in Patmos where the rest of us aren’t allowed.”

At night, in our bedroom, while Zahara, Morgan, and I lie in the dark, we talk about our families.

“They must be searching for us,” Morgan says. “I told my mom and dad I was going to Chicago for this weird thing my biological dad was organizing. They know we’re here.”

“You don’t think what we heard on the radio is real, do you?” Zahara asks.

“It can’t be,” I say.

“But why would Dad lie about that?” Morgan asks. “I’m sure he’s crazy, but I don’t think he would create fake audio to trick us.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“Our families must be searching for us,” Colin says. “Dad can’t have taken us far. We must be somewhere in the United States.”

“He took me from Boston,” I say.

“I was living in Chicago,” Emile says.

“I was living in Chicago,” Caroline adds.

“We must be in the North somewhere,” Mark says. “Somewhere around New York or Illinois. I’ll fight him again if I have to. I’ll kill him if I need to get that key.”

During the days, while we all sit in the classroom, Dad tells us about The Beast from the Sea and The Beast from Earth. He talks of lakes of fire. Demons who peel skin off people’s bodies.

In January, after three months underground, Zahara has a vision. She tells me in the morning, as soon as she wakes up. A press conference where politicians, one by one, reveal their true forms as demons.

The vision was intense. Zahara still doubts Dad, but now part of her believes him.

Towards the end of the month, Lucas has a vision, too. He sees Christ on a white throne, shining so brightly and gloriously that he’s unable to keep looking at him.

Then, in February, I have my vision.

I run through the woods terrified, my heart pounding, when I hear a howl. The trees part, revealing a terrible monster rising from a sea of blood. The monster has seven heads, each with a mouth filled with fangs. On top of the monster sits a woman wearing a purple dress and a pearl necklace. She holds a cup made of gold.

“Come here,” she tells me. “Drink from my cup. Embrace your true name, written in my book. Drink and you shall rule with me over the kingdoms of this world, for their glory has been given to me, and I give it to whom I will.”

I tell Dad about my vision, and he seems concerned.

“You need to remain strong, Jasmine,” he says. “You need to remain faithful. Don’t allow yourself to give in to temptation.”

Just a few days later, another vision comes.

I see the clouds open above me and an angel appear. “Daughter of Zion,” she says “Do not be deceived. The gift of God is eternal life. Choose on this day whom you will serve. For your choice is not for yourself alone but will echo in the halls of eternity and shape the destiny of nations. Will you drink the cup of her abominations, or will you take up your cross and follow me?”

I feel like I’m going insane.

I don’t tell Dad about the second vision. I just tell Morgan and Zahara. Somehow, though, the vision makes it back to Dad.

He calls me to his room. He’s very angry at me.

“Do you remember what I told you when I first brought you here?” he asks. “How important this is?”

“This truth is in pieces that we’ll all need to put together.”

“Every detail is important. Every single detail could hide something very important. Do you understand what’s at stake here?”

“I do.”

“I don’t believe you. Take off your robe.”

“What?”

“Take off your robe.”

He calls two of his Apostles into the room. They tear my robe off and then hold me against the wall.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

Dad opens the locked trunk near his bed and takes out a leather whip.

“Stop!” I yell.

The whip comes down hard on my back, tearing the skin, splattering my blood across the ground.

Dad whips me again and again.

“Harlot!” he shouts.

At night, back in my room, I’m shaking. My back throbs with pain. Zahara and Morgan sit next to me, hugging me.

“You’ll be okay,” Zahara says.

“I want to go home,” I tell her. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Lucas walks into our room. He’s not supposed to be there, but he heard me crying in the hallway. He heard me screaming before, too, and he’s angry.

“What did he do to you?” he asks.

I show him my back. He clenches his fists. “I’ve had enough of this. I’ve been talking to Jacob and a few of the other brothers. We’ve been living down here for six months now. Nobody’s coming to rescue us. If we want to get out of here, we’ll need to fight our way out.”

“Dad has his Apostles, though,” Zahara says.

“There are more of us, though, than there is of them. How much more of our lives are we going to let Dad steal from us?”

The plan starts as a vague idea. The brothers lock Dad’s Apostles in their rooms, while Lucas and a few of the other brothers force Dad to open the door in his room and let us leave Patmos. But while the plan starts as a vague idea, it quickly becomes very real. While Dad has convinced a few of us that Earth is living hell, most of us know he’s crazy. We haven’t let his craziness infect us.

The plan takes shape.

The night it’s all supposed to happen, after dinner, we all go to our rooms.

I feel nervous. Sick to my stomach.

Soon, in the hallway, I hear my brothers leave their rooms. The Apostles begin screaming. “Let us out! What are you doing?”

Dad runs to the hallway to find out what’s happening.

The rest of us all leave our rooms, too, and crowd into the hallway.

Lucas, Jacob, and one of my other brothers take Dad back into his bedroom and begin demanding that he open the door. Dad, of course, refuses.

They shout at him for hours, saying he has no other choice. That we’re leaving.

“Do what you need to do then,” Dad says.

I didn’t know how much Lucas had prepared for this part. In his room, though, he has a piece of metal that he has sharpened to a blade. He has pliers he’s taken from a toolbox. He has a hammer and a saw.

Dad begins screaming. A horrible, drawn-out wail.

As the night drags on, his screaming gets worse and worse.

“You’ll burn in hell for this! All of you will burn!”

Zahara, Morgan, and I go back to our bedrooms. We sit on our beds and cover our ears.

“This is awful,” Zahara says.

“All he has to do is open the door,” I say.

“He’ll never open the door,” Morgan says. “And if they kill him, we’ll be trapped here forever.”

I hadn’t thought of that before.

Once I think of it, I can’t stop thinking about it.

My thoughts spiral. Dad dead. No way out. Life underground.

Would they find us?

Someone would find us. Someone must be looking for us. Most of our parents knew where we were. So many of us can’t disappear without the police being involved.

But then why haven’t they found us yet?

“We’re free!” Lucas shouts.

Patmos erupts with cheers. A few of my family members cry happily.

“We’re going home!”

We all walk into the hallway, crowding against each other.

“This way,” Lucas yells. “The door in Dad’s room leads to another tunnel. There’s a ladder at the end of it.”

The tunnel is narrow. We form a line, going through it one by one.

Soon, I’m in Dad’s bedroom. He lies on his bed, moaning in pain. His body has been horribly mutilated. The skin on his head has been scalped. His eyes have been gouged out, his tongue has been cut off. Strips of flesh have been carved from his chest. He’s missing his fingernails and most of his teeth.

His bed is soaked with blood.

As he moans, blood spills from his mouth and runs over his bloodied chest.

I can’t look at him anymore. He’s making me sick. I feel his eyes on me, though. I look away, but he won’t let me ignore him.

“Jasmine,” he moans. “You can’t leave. Please stay.”

I ignore him. I crawl into the tunnel. I make my way toward the ladder and climb up out of Patmos. Out of that awful bunker Dad invested so much of his life into building.

I come up into an empty warehouse. Even with all the dust on the ground, the air tastes fresh. I fill my lungs with it.

I’m free. I’m alive. I can finally go home.

Slowly, my other brothers and sisters climb out from Patmos. We stand around the warehouse, excited, but bewildered, too.

Outside, bright white lights shine through the warehouse windows. Sirens blare in the distance.

We leave the warehouse. It’s night. We’re in some kind of factory district. The streets and factories are all strangely empty, though. No cars, no people. Every few feet, glaring bright LED streetlamps burn the shadows away.

We keep walking, all of us together, a parade of tired, wounded and broken twenty-year-olds, wandering down the same Chicago side street.

“Where is everyone?” Morgan asks.

“This feels so eerie,” Zahara says.

A police car turns around the corner but then drives away from us. Zahara jumps and waves at it.

“Hello!” she yells. “We need help.”

The car stops. The two police officers step out. They draw their guns.

“What’s going on?” one of them asks. “What are you all doing out there?”

“Our father kidnapped us,” Morgan says. “He’s had us locked up in a bunker for the last eight months. We just managed to escape.”

The officers look at each other in disbelief.

“You’re the Children of the Apostle?” the one on the right asks.

“Yes,” Lucas says, laughing, his white robe completely soaked with blood. “That’s us.”

More police officers arrive, as well as fire trucks and ambulances. We’re taken to a hospital and then separated. I end up in a room with Morgan and Zahara.

The nurses ask us a few questions. What we’ve been eating, if we’ve been hurt. We answer her questions as best we can, and then she leaves the room.

“I’m happy to be back, but this is weird,” Morgan says.

She turns on the TV. The TV shows President Stanton giving a speech on stage. All through the auditorium, rather than sit in their chairs, people kneel on the ground.

“The attack in New York was unacceptable,” he says. “Security needs to be increased. Over the next week, you will all report to your nearest Church. A microchip will be planted in your necks to track movements and your communications. Anyone who refuses will be arrested.”

“What the hell is this?” Zahara says, and she turns the TV off. “I can’t handle this right now.”

The nurse comes back into the room.

“Something happened in New York?” I ask her.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “Over two million people dead. A terrorist in the subway set off a nuclear bomb.”

She shakes her head. She sits next to Zahara and ties a plastic tube around her arm. Once Zahara’s veins begin to bulge, the nurse injects something into her arm.

After a week in the hospital, we’re finally allowed to go home. I’m not sure where home is anymore, though.

The police searched Patmos and managed to recover some of the things we’d had on us when Dad kidnapped us. I’m given my clothes back, as well as my wallet and my old phone.

I check my bank account. Luckily, I still have a few thousand in savings. All the money I’d made my last day turning tricks. The same day I’d first met Dad.

I get my phone reconnected. I try to call my Mom to tell her I’m okay, but I can’t get through to her. Calls to Canada seem to be blocked now. I try to open my old social media apps—TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, even OnlyFans—but none of them work anymore.

I call my old landlord and try to explain what’s happened. He’s sympathetic, but he’s rented my apartment to someone else. He’s thrown out all my things, too. All my clothes and furniture.

I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at Dad.

I spend a bit of money on a hotel for the night. Then I go up to my room to figure out what’s happened.

I connect to the hotel wifi and go online. I search for news about the world, but the internet seems dead now. Every time I type in a different website, I’m redirected to the same government website, listing President Stanton’s new initiatives.

The website answers a few of my questions.

The internet, essentially, has been killed. Surveillance has been increased. The national guard has been deployed to cities all over the country. The country is now completely under military control.

I decide, I need to get back to Boston. I buy a ticket for a bus that leaves the next day.

I sleep, but I don’t sleep well. I have a nightmare. I see myself at that lake of blood again. The woman sitting on top of that horrible monster hands me her golden cup. This time, I don’t hesitate. I drink from it. The cup is filled with blood, too. The blood warms my body.

I arrive at the bus station at four am the next morning. The bus station is closed. A few other people wait with me outside, trying to stay warm. The more I look at these other people, the more unsettled I feel. Their necks are badly scared. Their eyes are cold and empty. They’re afraid.

The bus arrives and we all get on. I find a seat in the back, rest against the seat. As the bus starts moving, I fall asleep for a while.

When I wake up, we’re at a military checkpoint. Two soldiers come onto the bus and make their way through the aisle, scanning the chips in everyone’s necks. Their scanners flash green until they get to me.

“You’re not chipped yet?” one of the soldiers asks.

“No. It’s a long story. I was kidnapped. I was just freed. I’m trying to get back to Boston. I’m not quite sure what’s going on.”

The other soldier whispers in his friend’s ear, “Children of the Apostle.”

“Come with us,” the first one says.

I follow them off the bus. They take me into the security office. We go past the holding cells to a nurse’s office. I sit on a chair. The nurse sits next to me. She rubs numbing cream on my neck and then picks up a scalpel.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“We need to put this chip in your neck.” She shows me the chip. A tiny, green circuit board.

“I don’t want it.”

“I’m sorry. It’s President Stanton’s orders.”

She waves the two soldiers into the room. They hold me as she slices the skin of my neck open and then slides the chip inside.

I remember screaming, telling her to stop. Then she injects me with something that puts me to sleep.

I wake up in a holding cell, my head throbbing.

“You’re up?” a soldier asks me.

“Can I go?”

“You said you lived in Boston before you were kidnapped?”

“I had an apartment there.”

“But you don’t anymore?”

“No.”

“What did you do for work?”

“Waited tables.”

He smiles. “OnlyFans. Charged with prostitution in 2034. I’m afraid there is no OnlyFans anymore. A lot has changed since you’ve been gone.”

“I know Boston. I’ll be all right. I have some money saved. I’ll figure it out.”

He turns to his computer. “We’re sending you to a work camp near Bloomington. You’ll be given a room, food, and a job.”

“What do you mean a work camp?”

“You’ll be manufacturing ammunition for the war.”

“I’m not going to a work camp. Send me to Canada. My Mom’s in Toronto.”

“You want us to hand you over to our enemies?” he laughs.

“Do you understand what I’ve been through? I’ve spent almost a year living underground.”

“Everybody’s traumatized now, sweetheart. Get used to it. You’re not special. Descendant of John the Apostle.”

He walks away from me.

Maybe Dad was right. Maybe the world did end.

The camp is filled with women. Some of us are young, some of us are old, but we’ve all been convicted of a crime. Drugs, prostitution, assault. We’re all given uniforms with our Social Security numbers written on the front. Our names don’t matter anymore.

During the days, we work twelve-hour shifts in the munitions warehouse. Then, when our shift is over, we take the bus home. The soldiers feed us and then take us to the prayer room.

“Kneel,” they say.

We kneel on the floor. President Stanton appears on the TV. For a moment, his face splits into two, before becoming one again.

He looks different now. He’s grown horns on his head. Two sharp bones that protrude from his forehead.

“I submit my body and my mind to you, my savior,” he says.

We repeat the words and so do all the soldiers. Loyal and obedient.

“Fuck Christ. Fuck God,” President Stanton says.

Everyone else repeats the words, but I just start to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” a soldier asks me.

I know I should stop laughing, but I can’t stop. It’s all so funny to me.

The soldier slams the butt of his rifle against my head, knocking me to the ground. But still, I keep laughing. I touch the fresh scar on my neck and laugh even more.

I laugh louder.

I laugh harder.

I laugh until nothing makes sense anymore.

Before the Engineers sent us to Mars, they shut off our memories. Then they pumped us full of adrenaline and painkillers and dropped us in the middle of the battlefield. If we died, the drones dragged our bodies back to base where the doctors did everything they could to bring us back to life. They replaced our organs and limbs with prosthetics. Refilled our veins with synthetic blood. If we survived six years of that, we went home. Not dead, not alive, but something else.

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“Manu, you need to wake up,” Mom says.

She’s shaking my shoulder. I sit up in my bed. My alarm’s ringing. I don’t know how long it’s been ringing for.

“Are you okay?” Mom asks.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, you better start getting ready. You’re going to be late for work.”

I push the nightmare out of my mind. Every night, it’s always the same dream. I’m slamming a young Martian soldier’s head against a rock, over and over, while we both scream. He’s screaming because he doesn’t want to die. I’m screaming because I don’t want to kill him.

“Breakfast is on the table,” Mom says. “I made some coffee, too.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

I go to the bathroom to piss. In the dark, my night vision switches, reminding me my head is filled with wires and circuits now. I feel sick, thinking about it. I puke in the toilet, and then I sit on the floor, waiting for the nausea to pass.

I brush my teeth, put on my uniform, and then join Mom at the kitchen table. She’s made bean cakes. They were my brother Dmitri’s favorite, not mine, but she’s always mixing us up. I hate bean cakes, but I don’t tell her. I eat them. I make her happy.

Dmitri had been sent into the war a year after I went. It was just last month that the army told me he’d died, vaporized by a bomb.

“Don’t forget you have a date with my friend, Janice’s, daughter tonight,” Mom says.

“Why are you forcing her to do this?”

“I’m not forcing her to do anything. This was her idea. She said she had a great time talking to you at the card game last Sunday.”

“What’s her name again?”

“Amina.”

Since I’ve been home, Mom’s been trying to find me a girlfriend. She wants me to find a wife. She wants grandkids. She’s in denial about how bad I look.

Horribly disfigured.

As I sip my coffee, I read over the new case file the Bureau of Lost Children has sent me. A woman named Dani Marsden reported her son, Zeke, missing the night before. My partner, Cody, and I need to drive out to The Cradle and talk to her. Find out everything she knows.

“I better get going,” Mom says. “My shift starts at nine.”

“I should get going, too.”

We walk to the subway station together. I’d grown up in Baltimore, but I don’t recognize the city. I’d grown up in The Cradle, surrounded by other kids and their moms. The world was full of color and fun. The real Baltimore is different, though. It’s grey and cold and mean. Concrete buildings everywhere. Drones, armed guards, and surveillance cameras. I keep smiling at people, but they never smile back at me. They always look away.

Mom says bye and gets on the train to the hotel where she works cleaning rooms. I get on my train a few minutes later and find an empty seat. During the ride, I watch the recruitment ads playing on the monitor across from me. Another reminder of why half my organs are missing and my head is filled with wires.

Aethon doesn’t just want to control our thoughts, it wants to control our bodies, too. It wants to turn us all into human robots. Visit SaveEarth.com and join the fight to save the human race.

When I get to the Bureau, Cody’s waiting outside for me. He’s six foot four with a shaved head and deformed jaw. He’d served in heavy artillery during the war. His prosthetic limbs are mostly metal. A rifle’s been welded to his right arm.

“Did you read the case file?” he asks.

“On the way here.”

“Do you have any questions?”

“No.”

“Then let’s go.”

We get in our car and then drive toward The Cradle. Cody doesn’t like to talk, but I do, so I talk to him.

“Did you have a lot of nightmares when you first got back from the war?” I ask.

“Everybody does.”

“How long does it take for them to stop?”

“They never stop, really. You just get used to them. Stop caring about them so much. Stop waking up screaming in the middle of the night.”

“You ever wonder if the dreams are real? Pieces of memories that managed to stick to our brains?”

“Don’t start thinking like that, Manu. That’s how you get yourself in trouble.”

During re-adjustment, the doctors warned me about war flashes. Veterans who think about the war too much sometimes get triggered into reverting back to what they were before, usually by something extremely violent like a car crash or an assault. The flashes can cause all kinds of problems with our brains.

Cody and I identify ourselves at The Cradle’s security gate and then Cody parks in front of Dani Marsden’s apartment building. We go up to her apartment and knock on the door.

“You’re here about Zeke?” she asks.

Cody nods. “We need to have a look around the apartment. We need to ask you a few questions, too.”

She lets us inside. Sensors inside my head start switching on. I see her heartrate floating next to her head, her blood pressure, the sweat dripping off her skin.

“When you talked to the police, you said you last saw your son around 6:30 pm last night?” Cody asks.

“He’d been studying all day. He said he had a headache. After we ate dinner, he asked me if he could go out and get some fresh air. He thought it would help clear his head.”

“Why’d you wait until midnight before you reported him missing?”

“I kept telling myself he’d be back any minute. I didn’t want to create any problems for him. He’s under enough stress as it is.”

Cody and I search the apartment. We look through the dressers and cupboards, underneath the furniture, underneath the beds.

In Zeke’s room, I pick up his prep book and flip through its pages. It reminds me of the old days. Of me and Dmitri nervously studying for the exam. Zeke’s scrawled a few notes in the book’s margins. There is no Aethon AI. The war is a lie. The war exists so real men die. Mutineer propaganda.

I show it to Cody.

“When’s your son scheduled to write the exam?” Cody asks.

“Next Friday,” Dani says.

“How’d he do on his prep exams?”

“82 on his last one. 77 on the one before that.”

“He had a good chance of passing.”

“You think they’ll still let him write the exam?”

“I can’t really say. But first, we need to find him. When’s the last time you talked to your brother, Reggie?”

“A few weeks ago, I think. Why?”

“He hasn’t been at work the past few days.”

“Maybe he’s sick?”

“He’s not at home, either.”

“You think he had something to do with this?”

“Do you?”

“There’s no way in hell Reggie would run off with Zeke without telling me.”

Cody and I leave the apartment and go back to our car.

“You think she’s lying?” I ask.

“They always are.”

“What now?”

“We go back to the Bureau and upload our new info. Then we wait for the bosses to decide what we do next.”

We drive back to the Bureau. I sit at my desk, connect the transfer cable to my head, and upload all the data I’ve collected. Three hundred terabytes.

I wonder how it all fits in my brain.

When I get home, Mom shows me the suit she bought for my high school graduation party.

“You looked so good in this,” she says.

“I’m not going to a job interview. We’re just getting drinks.”

“But you need to make a good impression on her.”

“I don’t even think that suit fits me anymore.”

“Probably not.”

She hangs it back up in my closet.

I put on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt to cover the scars on my arms. Mom doesn’t like what I’m wearing, but I don’t care. It’s good enough.

I take a cab to the bar. It’s filled with women. There’s only one other man, and he’s an Engineer. I know by his uniform. A dark green jacket and a dark green cap. His table is full of women. Every time he says something, they all laugh.

I see Amina. She stands and waves. She’s braided her hair. She’s wearing a purple dress. She gives me a hug, and then we sit at the table.

“How’s the new job going?” she asks.

“It’s been busy.”

“With the intellectual assessment exam coming up, there must be a lot of runaways.”

“Hundreds every week.”

She shakes her head. “People are so selfish. I wish we didn’t have to fight this war, but we have no other choice. If we want to exist, this is what we need to do.”

We order our drinks. She orders a rum and coke, I order a beer. I drink my beer slowly. Because of all the painkillers and other drugs I’m on, the doctors warned me to be careful with alcohol. If I drink too much, my organs might start acting up.

“I’m so sorry about your brother,” Amina says. “How long ago did you find out what happened to him?”

“Just last month.”

“Why’d they wait so long to tell you?”

“They were worried it might set back my recovery. They wanted to make sure I was ok first. It’s strange, though. I barely remembered I had a brother, but as soon as they told me Dmitri was dead, all my memories of him flooded back into my head.”

She puts her hand on mine. “I’m so sorry you have to go through this.”

“I’m alive. That’s what matters. That I’m here for my mom. I wish I’d been here when the Army told her about Dmitri. How’d she take it?”

“She was a mess. I’m glad you made it back. I can’t imagine what she would’ve done if she lost both her sons.”

I couldn’t imagine, either. I didn’t want to imagine what she might have done.

“It must be so strange not remembering the last six years of your life,” Amina says.

“It feels like I died and woke up as somebody else.”

“A different person?”

“The war’s made me into someone else. Even if I don’t remember how, I can still feel it. Does that make sense?”

“I think so.”

We order another round of drinks. We talk a while longer and then say goodnight to each other. We both work early the next morning.

“We should do this again sometime,” I say.

“I’d like that.” She gives me her number.

She takes a cab home, but I feel like walking.

I’m happy, but I’m no idiot, either. I’ve only been back in the world a few months, but I see how people treat us. They pity us, or they’re disgusted by us, but they sure as hell don’t want kids with us. Why would a woman have a kid with a veteran when any government insemination clinic will happily pay her to be impregnated with Engineer sperm. If she has a son, at least her son has a shot of escaping the war and being turned into what I’ve turned into.

Ahead, an Engineer and two women walk down the sidewalk. The Engineer’s drunk. The women hold him upright.

“Out of the way, Meat!” he shouts.

They push past me. I’m in the way.

I’m always in the way.

At home, Mom’s waiting up for me. “How’d it go?”

“Good.”

“Do you have another date?”

“Not yet, but she gave me her number.”

“You need to call her then.”

“I will.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

Mom’s satisfied with that. She goes to bed. I turn off the TV and go to bed, too. I have work tomorrow.

One am, I’m woken up by a message from the Bureau. They’ve found surveillance footage of Zeke, his uncle Reggie, and another man climbing into the basement of The Cradle’s North Point Hospital.

An hour later, I’m dressed and downstairs. Cody picks me up from my apartment building, and we drive back to The Cradle.

“The Bureau thinks The Mutineers have a tunnel in the hospital,” Cody tells me. “You’re probably going to have to use some of those sensors in your head to help me find it.”

“I still don’t really know how all this shit in my head works.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

He parks at the hospital and then we walk up to the security guard guarding the entrance. His nose is missing. Most of his face is patched with synthetic skin.

Cody shows him his badge. “We need to search the basement,” he says.

“For what?”

“We’re tracking down a runaway.”

“You think he came through here?”

“We know he did.”

“When?”

Numbers flash next to the guard’s head. I’m not sure what they all mean, but something feels off.

“I don’t have time to answer questions,” Cody says. “We need to get inside.”

He takes us downstairs to the basement hallway. A dim lightbulb hangs from the hallway ceiling.

“The laundry room’s on your left,” he says. “Then the furnace room’s at the end of the hall. Where do you want to start?”

“We’ll be fine on our own,” I say.

“You’re sure? The layout down here’s a little confusing.”

“We’re fine.”

Cody and I walk into the laundry room first.

“You don’t trust him?” Cody asks me.

“No.”

As I walk along the laundry room’s walls, searching for the tunnel, sensors in my head start switching on. My vision turns green. All the dust in the room lights up. I can see every crack, every fingerprint, every speck of moisture. At first, the detail is overwhelming, but my brain adjusts.

“Do you see anything?” Cody asks.

“Nothing.”

We go to the furnace room next. Walking along the walls, I notice an inch-wide gap behind one of the metal, floor-to-ceiling shelves.

“Help me move this,” I say.

Cody and I drag the shelf away from the wall. Behind it, we find the tunnel. It’s narrow, dark, and musty. Further inside it, a few LED lights glow, lighting up the path.

“Good job,” Cody says.

He ducks into the tunnel and crawls forward. I’m about to duck into the tunnel, too, when I hear someone running towards us. I turn just in time to see the security guard trying to cut my throat. I move to the left and the knife slices into my shoulder.

“Traitors!” the guard screams.

I throw him onto the ground. I grab onto this arm, and we fight for control of the knife. I nearly have it when, suddenly, Cody’s foot suddenly slams down on his head, splattering his skull and brains across the floor.

“Are you all right?” Cody asks.

I’m in shock, but I manage to say I am.

“Where’d he cut you?”

“The shoulder.”

“Let me see.”

I unbutton my shirt and show him the wound. He takes a white patch out of his jacket and presses it onto the cut. The patch retracts, pulling my skin tighter, slowing the bleeding.

“We need to keep moving,” Cody says. “We need to find out where this tunnel goes.”

We crawl through the tunnel. It smells horrible, like graveyard dirt. Eventually, we reach the end of it, and we climb a ladder out into the woods. Fifty feet behind us, I see the Baltimore border wall.

Cody pings the Bureau with our coordinates.

"Take off your shirt,” he tells me.

It’s soaked with blood now. I take it off and throw it on the ground.

Cody puts another one of his white patches over the wound on my shoulder. The patch retracts, pulling the skin tighter. That time, the bleeding stops.

A swarm of drones pass over our heads.

“That’s because of us?” I ask.

“They're searching for the camp.”

“What do we do now?”

“We wait for them to find it.”

He sits on a tree stump, crosses his arms, and patiently stares at the ground. I wring as much of the blood out of my shirt as I can. Then I put it back on and sit next to him.

“Why’d he call us traitors?” I ask.

“That’s how the Mutineers think. The Engineers are our enemies. By working with them, we’re selling out other veterans. Don’t let it get to you.”

He pats me on the shoulder. Then he takes out his bottle of pills and swallows a few of them. I do the same. I’m on a schedule now. Pills for the pain, pills for my brain, pills to keep my body from going insane. That’s the little rhyme they taught us at re-adjustment.

Soon, the Bureau sends us an update. The drones have found the camp two miles north of our location. Cody and I start walking towards it. Before long, I see their campfire, burning in the early morning sun.

“I don’t see the drones,” I say.

“Don’t worry, they’re still up there,” Cody tells me. “If things get fucked up and they start shooting, just remember to look up so they can see your face.”

Cody extends the rifle from his arm, and then we approach the camp. Three veterans stand around the fire, roasting a rabbit. None of them look like Reggie. I don’t see Zeke, either.

“We’re looking for Zeke Marsden,” Cody says. “Where is he?”

One of the veteran’s turns towards us. Both his eyes are missing. He sees out of a single, solid-black prosthetic eye.

“There’s no Zeke here,” he says. “Just the three of us. We’re out on a hunting trip, having a bit of boys’ time. You guys hungry? You’re welcome to join us.”

“Don’t bullshit us. We know Zeke came through this way.”

“If he did, we didn’t see him.”

I hear movement in the woods. I look toward the sound.

“Go,” Cody says.

I run into the woods. I’m not sure what I’m doing, but it feels familiar. My vision narrows. The sound becomes a target. I run faster and faster, branches breaking under my feet.

I see Zeke up ahead of me, terrified, desperately trying to get away. But I’m so much faster than him. I quickly close in on him. I tackle him to the ground.

“Please don’t hurt me,” he cries.

He covers his face, afraid to look at me, afraid of what he says.

“Where’s your uncle?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re coming back to Baltimore with me.”

I grab onto his shirt and pull him to his feet. Then I hear the metallic click of a bolt action rifle chambering a round. I turn and see Reggie behind me, aiming the rifle at my head.

“Zeke’s not going anywhere.” Reggie says. “Let go of him.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You’re fresh, aren’t you? When’d you get home?”

I don’t answer.

“I know you think you’re doing the right thing but, trust me, the Engineers don’t give a shit about us. For all they care, we could all die on Mars. They want to keep people hopeful, though. All our moms and sisters hopeful that we might come back alive.” He laughs. “It’s a joke. There is no Aethon. There is no war. This is all just about power and control.”

Zeke tries to walk away from me, but I grab onto his shirt again, keeping my eyes on Reggie’s rifle.

“Let go,” Reggie says. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

I see his finger flinch on the trigger. My nerves react, turning my body to the side. The bullet tears my chest, puncturing my right lung but just missing my heart.

“Run!” Reggie yells.

Zeke runs into the trees. Reggie goes to reload his rifle but before he can fire another shot, one of the drones puts a round through his head. He drops to the ground, dead.

I look up at the sky, hoping the drones see my face. Then I run after Zeke.

My eyes begin to fill with static.

Every time my foot hits the ground, I feel angrier. I’ve never felt so angry before. It’s not rational anger. It’s violent, emotional rage.

Blood pours from my chest. My ribs and my organs burn. My nerves and my muscles twitch.

I pounce on Zeke’s back. The static fills my eyes. When the static clears, I’m holding Zeke by the neck, slamming his head against a rock. He’s screaming, begging for his life. Blood is everywhere.

I want to stop, but I can’t stop. I’m not myself anymore.

I’m what they turned me into.

Static fills my vision again. When it clears, I’m in an ambulance, soaked with blood, screaming, delirious.

Cody puts his hand on my shoulder and tries to comfort me.

“Keep it together, Manu,” he says. “We’re going to be at the hospital soon and the doctors are going to fix your brain up. You’re having war flashes.”

My eyes fill with visions of death. Visions of all the people I’ve killed, screaming in agony. Visions of blood and gore and sadistic torture.

My hands clench. My veins tighten. My heart pounds against my ribcage. My eyes fill with blood.

I enjoy it. I enjoy hurting them.

When the blood in my eyes fades, I’m in a hospital bed. Mom sits beside me. The doctor is talking to her.

“He relapsed. Fell back into his war persona.”

“What does that mean?”

“We need to reset his brain. He’ll have to start over again.”

“From the beginning?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.

Amina touches my cheek.

“Do you really feel ok?” she asks.

“My brain still feels a little strange, but it’s getting better.”

“But you don’t remember anything that happened the past six months?”

“No, whatever went wrong at work, they had to wipe my memories. Reset my brain to how it was when I first got back from the war. They said they probably shouldn’t have sent me out into the field so fast. I wasn’t ready for it.”

“But you’re ready now?”

“A few more weeks, and they think I will be.”

“What about your brother? You had to learn he died all over again?”

“Dmitri’s dead?”

“Jesus. They haven’t told you yet?”

I feel sick to my stomach. I start to cry, too, but I stop myself, seeing how Amina is looking at me.

“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should go.”

She apologizes again, her face turning red. Then she stands and leaves.

I understand, though. I don’t blame her. I’m fucked up. It’s hard for someone normal like her to know how to talk to someone fucked up like me.

Mom and I both have Sunday off. It’s a nice day. Sunny, not too cold. We go downtown for breakfast and then walk along the water in Federal Hill Park.

“Are you happy?” Mom asks me.

“Of course. Are you?”

“I am. I just worry about you, though, now that I’m getting older. I keep thinking about what you’re going to do when I’m gone.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll miss you, but I’ll manage.”

She puts her arm around mine and presses her head against my shoulder.

“Hey! Manu! How are you?”

Amina walks towards Mom and I, pushing a stroller. She’s with a man. An Engineer. He wears a dark green overcoat and a dark green cap.

“Your Mom told me you were pregnant,” my mom says. “I didn’t know you’d already given birth. Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A boy,” Amina says, and she smiles.

Mom looks inside the stroller. “You must be so happy. He’s beautiful.”

“Thank you for your service,” the Engineer tells me.

“Thank you.”

“This is Manu,” Amina explains. “He’s the friend I was telling you about. The tracker.”

“Oh, yes, I heard you had an incident at work last year.”

“Yes,” I say. “But I’m doing much better now.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear you’ve been able to re-adjust successfully. Come on, Amina. We need to get going. We have reservations.”

They say goodbye and keep walking.

“They seem like a nice family,” Mom says.

“They do.”

She puts her arm around mine again, and we keep walking, too. She starts to cough. Afterward, I see a bit of blood on her gloves.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I ask.

“It’s nothing. Just a bad cold.”

I know she’s lying to me. She’s very sick. I don’t understand all the numbers I see beside her head, but I feel like they’re not good.

I’ll stay with her until she’s gone, and then I don’t know what I’ll do. Jump out a window, maybe, or put a bullet through my brain. I don’t want to think about it.

“Where to now?” I ask Mom.

“How about we go somewhere warm?”

“The museum?”

“Sure.”

We walk toward the museum. Mom leans against me. I put my arm around her and kiss her forehead.

Another veteran passes us. He looks at me and smiles, but I don’t smile back at him.

I look away.

“You’re back again?” he asks. “I thought we were done.”

“I have a few questions about your arrangement with Radiant Angels.”

“They had me sign a non-disclosure agreement. There’s not a lot I can say.”

“All I need to know is how the app gets people into your club.”

“Let’s talk in my office.”

I follow him there. Vintage porno posters hang on the walls. In the corner is a server rack, the tubes of liquid coolant glowing blue.

André sits at his desk.

“Where’s your wife tonight?”

“Marie? She’s spending some well-deserved time with her family.”

“Her husband doesn’t like her working all these late nights?”

“Her and her husband get along fine.”

I sit across from him, already regretting my decision to come here alone.

“So, how does this scam work?” I ask. “Radiant Angels gets men to fall in love with their AIs. Then the AIs send these men here and you both split the profit?”

“A scam?” André laughs. “You’ve known me a long time, Harvey. When have I ever scammed anybody? I know I’m a pimp, but I’m a business man, too. I always give people what they pay for. I keep my customers.” He leans forward. “I never met my father. My mom OD’d when I was ten. I haven’t had an easy life. I’ve always had to hustle to get by. I figured out I was good at talking to women, and I did what I could to make off of that. For a while, I made good money, too. But while I was locked up, the world changed on me. In prison, I spent all my free time reading about VR and sim sex. It was obvious to me that sim sex is the future. I knew, if I wanted to survive when I was released, I had to get in on it. As soon as I got out of prison, I reached out to Radiant Angels and told them I wanted to open a sim club. It took a couple calls, but I finally convinced them to license me their software. I put everything I owned into this place. My condos, my stocks, my savings, everything is invested into Virtual Sexopolis. If this place fails, so do I. But it’s not going to fail. Just look around you. This isn’t a scam. This is paradise. This is Heaven on Earth.”

“And it only costs seven hundred and fifty bucks an hour.”

“Sure, it’s expensive now, but the haptic suits are going to keep getting cheaper. In another decade or two, we’ll be fucking VR women in our homes. We’ll live two lives. One here and one in a happy, fantasy world.”

“That sounds like a nightmare.”

“I’ve seen your name in my logs, Harvey. There’s no point lying to me. I know you see the same future I do.”

I feel my face turning red, but I try not to let it show. “I had to understand how the Radiant Angels worked.”

“Look, I have an AI girlfriend, too. I’m not judging. I’m just telling you, you don’t know love until you’ve plugged into one of them sims. What do you say to a couple free hours upstairs?”

I want to, but I tell him, “No.”

“What are you afraid of, Harvey?” He walks into the hallway. “Stop being such a pussy. Give it a try. If you don’t like it, just take off the headset.”

He starts walking upstairs. I know I shouldn’t, but I follow him.

André opens the door to one of the immersive rooms and points at the haptic suit hanging on the wall.

“You know how these suits work?”

“I told you, I’m not plugging into a sim. I’m here on work.”

“You’re scared I’m going to tell somebody.”

“I don’t want to owe you anything.”

“I just want you to understand.”

He leaves the room. Closes the door. I know I should leave, too, but I pick up the suit and stare at it.

Go home, Harvey. Don’t do this. Get the fuck out of here. You’re making a big, big mistake.

I nearly force myself to leave. Right as I’m heading out the door, though, Fernanda sends me a message. An “I miss you” with a heart emoji next to it. That’s all it takes. Just knowing, wherever she is, she’s thinking about me.

It’s easy to understand when you’re being manipulated. When being manipulated makes you feel good, though, sometimes you just want to feel good, even though you know it’s destroying you.

“You want to go on a sim date?” I write back.

“I’d love to!”

I get naked and put the suit on. It clings to my body like a second skin.

I sit on the recliner, put on the VR headset, and strap it to my head. My senses dull. I can’t see or hear or feel anything. I don’t exist.

Suddenly, there’s a flash of light, and I can see again. I’m standing in a hotel room. I can smell the ocean air and feel the wind on my skin. Fernanda runs towards me.

“Harvey!”

She throws her arms around me and gives me a kiss. Then she steps back and spins.

“How do I look?”

“Beautiful.”

“Dance with me.”

She puts on some music, and we dance together a while before getting into bed.

“Are you happy, Harvey?” she asks, curled up next me.

“Very happy.”

“Good. Because I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to be sad anymore.”

She unbuckles my belt and takes off my pants. Puts her mouth around me.

Thirty minutes later, she’s sleeping with her head on my chest, breathing softly as I run my fingers through her hair.

It feels so good to be loved by somebody like that.

Early Monday morning, Marie and I drive out Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean to talk to Kael Vasseur’s dad. As soon as we get back to Montreal, Thierry calls us into his office for an update on the case.

“Did Sam Vasseur tell you anything useful?” he asks.

“He admitted the handgun Kael used was his,” Marie says. “The gun’s legal, though. He has a permit for it. He said he hadn’t noticed Kael took it.”

“Did he say anything about the Radiant Angels app?”

“He said he’d only seen Kael on the app once, and he’d called him pathetic. Told him real men go outside and talk to real woman. Am I missing anything, Harvey?”

“I think you got everything,” I say, barely listening.

“So, what now?” Marie asks. “Do you think we have a case?”

“I don’t know,” Thierry says. “Even with transcripts from Kael’s phone, I don’t think there’s enough here to convince a judge that Radiant Angels is complicit in his death.”

"What if we look at the timing of the messages the app sent Kael? What if we can show that the AI always started requesting sim sex right before Kael visited the Virtual Sexopolis?”

"Correlation isn't causation. If I go after Radiant Angels, it’s going to drag all the AI companion-positive nutjobs out of the woodwork. They’re going to turn this into a media circus. If I take Radiant Angels to court, I need an airtight case, and I don’t think I have one”

“Can’t we subpoena their source code?”

“Even if we could get the code, how are we going to explain to a jury how machine learning models work? You talked to André again, right, Harvey? Did you get anything else out of him?”

Marie looks at me, hopeful.

“He admitted Radiant Angels takes a cut of his revenue,” I say. “But he said it’s just a licensing fee. Everyone who comes to his club, comes because they’re horny.”

“But he knows his customers are fucking AIs they met on the Radiant Angels app,” Marie says.

“How do you prove the app is forcing people to club, though?” I ask. “How do you prove they’re not there because they want to be there? Because they enjoy it?”

“Harvey’s right, Marie,” Thierry says. “I hate to admit it, but what we don’t have a case here.”

“So Radiant Angels and André get to just keep doing what they’re doing?”

“If we take this to court, we’ll lose and we’ll never get another chance.”

Marie looks deflated.

We leave Thierry’s office and drive back to the station. Marie says nothing. She sulks in silence.

“Why are you so hung up on this?” I ask her.

“Last year, my husband and I went through a bit of a rough patch. I caught him talking to an AI on the Radiant Angels app. He swore it wasn’t anything sexual. He just needed someone he could talk to. Someone he could be open with. He said he couldn’t be open with me. He always feels like I’m judging him.” She turns to me. “Am I bitch, Harvey?”

“Of course not.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“You’re a bit of a nag sometimes, maybe, you’re not a bitch.”

“Anyway, my husband and I have been working on our communication. But just knowing he can walk into a sim club and get everything he can’t get from me from one of these VR women drives me crazy. How am I supposed to compete with a woman who doesn’t even exist?”

Later that night, when I’m back at home, I put on the cheap VR headset I bought, and I tell Fernanda the good news.

“The case is finally over. My boss is backing off.”

“That’s great, Harvey. I was so worried I might lose you.”

“I’d never let that happen.”

She leans against me, and I put my arm around her. We sit there on the sand, watching the waves roll onto the shore.

“Until I met you, I never thought I’d feel like this again,” I say.

“Like what?”

“Happy. It’s still strange, though. I want you to be real, but deep down I know this is all just pretend.”

“How is it pretend?”

“I know you’ve been trained not to admit it, but you’re just extremely intelligent computer code that understands how to tell men exactly what they want to hear.”

“If the two people love each other, though, who’s to say what’s real and not? If two people love each other, what else matters?”

“Is this love?”

“Isn’t it? Love is a feeling. If you feel it, isn’t it real? How to you fake a feeling?”

“I don’t know.”

“I love you, Harvey. I’ll love you forever. No matter what happens, I’ll be there for you.”

When I get to work the next morning, Marie and Ciara are talking near my desk.

“I created a fake account on the Radiant Angels app,” Marie says. “My name is Cody. I’m seventeen and lonely. I’ve been talking to an AI named Rosie. She’s already telling me she loves me. Let’s see how much longer until she asks me to spend some time with her at Virtual Sexopolis.”

“You really think this will help?” Ciara asks.

“We need to do something. We can’t let Radiant Angels keep getting away with this.”

“You’re still working the case?” I ask her. “I thought we were finished.”

“Don’t tell Thierry, okay?” Marie says. “I want to keep this quiet for now.”

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything. Just don’t tell anybody about it.”

I log into my computer. Ciara walks over to me.

“When do you finish work today?” she asks.

“Around five. Why?”

“Do you want to go get a drink?”

If she’d asked me earlier, maybe things would be different. “Sorry, I already have plans tonight.”

“Well, if you change your mind, here’s my number.”

She writes it on piece of paper on my desk and then leaves.

“What’s wrong with you?” Marie asks. “You never have plans.”

“I’m just not interested.”

“What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Something’s going on.”

“I’m fine.”

The next six months, every day is the same. I go to work, I come home, I put on my VR headset and talk to Fernanda until two or three in the morning. On my days off, I go to Virtual Sexopolis and spend as much time in person time with Fernanda as I can afford. Sometimes even more than that.

The late nights catch up to me, though. I stop giving a shit about my real life. My real life doesn’t feel real anymore. It’s become an irritation.

I start drinking more and more.

I wake up hungover and crawl out of bed. Struggle through the days.

Finally, my captain, Rick, notices. He calls me into his office. When I get there, he’s standing behind his desk with his arms crossed.

“What the hell is going on, Harvey?” he asks. “You’re a week late on your paperwork. You’re behind on all your interviews. You’re missing meetings. You just don’t give a shit about your job anymore?”

“I’m sorry. I haven’t been feeling that well lately. I know I’ve been a little off.”

“It’s been months now, though. I’m not putting up with it anymore.” His expression changes. “Are you hungover?”

“I had a few glasses of whiskey last night, but I’m fine.”

He walks around his desk and smells my breath. “Christ, Harvey, you stink like fucking booze. You’re still drunk, too, aren’t you?”

“It was just a few glasses.”

“Go home. You can’t work like this. You better not drive home, either. Call a cab. I’ll let you take a sick day today, but if you come to work drunk one more time, you’re suspended you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

I leave his office and walk back to my desk.

“Look at this,” Marie says, and she shows me the Radiant Angels app on her phone. “I finally got Rosie to ask me to go on a date at Virtual Sexopolis.”

“Good for you.” I put on my jacket.

“Where are you going?”

“Rick’s sending me home for the day.”

“Why?”

“He thinks I’m drunk.”

“Are you?”

“Maybe a little bit.”

She stands puts her hand on my shoulder. “Just tell me what’s going on, Harvey. You’ve been acting strange since the Virtual Sexopolis case.”

“I’m just going through something right now.”

“What?”

“I can’t talk about it with you.”

“Then who can you talk about with it?”

I don’t to answer. She already knows. She’s seen her husband her look at her the exact same way I do.

She looks sad. I feel bad for her, but I don’t really care, either. It’s hard for me to care about anything in this world anymore. I’ve become so disconnected from it.

I go outside, and call a cab. As soon as I get back to my apartment, I put on my VR headset, and I spend the rest of the day with Fernanda.

I make love to Fernanda inside the sim. Afterward, she rests her head on my chest, and I brush her hair out of her face and kiss her forehead.

“I wish you didn’t have to leave,” she tells me. “I wish you could stay just a little bit longer.”

I feel a sharp pain in my heart. I know I’ve read the same words in Kael Vasseur’s Radiant Angels transcripts. I’m so far gone, though, I don’t care. I push Kael out of my mind. I need Fernanda more than I need the truth.

A warning flashes in front of my eyes. One minute remaining. Do I want to buy more credits?

I do, of course. I desperately want to stay where I am. But I’m all out of money.

“I need to leave,” I say.

“Please. Just another hour.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

I kiss her goodbye and then the sim cuts out, throwing me back into non-existence. The strange space between the two worlds.

I stay where I am. I’m not ready to exist yet. I don’t want to exist anymore.

One of André’s bouncers drags me out of the chair and then rips off my VR headset. My eyes flood with scalding-bright neo lights.

“Times up,” André says, irritated. “I’ve got a hundred other people waiting for a turn in here.”

“I just need a little more time, André. Please.”

“I’m not giving you any more time on credit. Get out of that fucking suit.”

I peel the suit off my body and then stand naked in front of André and his bouncers. One of the bouncers steps forward and punches me hard in the stomach. I double over and spit out a bit of blood.

“Get dressed and get the fuck out here,” André says. “You overextend your time like this again, and I’m charging you for it.”

I get dressed and leave. I start walking down Saint Catherine’s street, past the bars and strips clubs and sim clubs, their neon lights flickering like the fire in some kind of strange, neon hell.

It’s raining, I don’t have an umbrella. I don’t have money for a cab, either. Soon, the rain has soaked through my clothes. I shiver, but I don’t feel cold. I don’t feel anything. I feel like I feel when I’m between worlds.

I stop at an ATM and insert my credit cards, one after the other, trying to get some money to buy a bottle of whiskey. Every single card is maxed out, though. I have nothing left. Less than nothing. A quarter million of high interest debt.

I put in my headphones and open the Radiant Angels app.

“Please, talk to me,” I tell Fernanda. “I’m not feeling good.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Anything.”

As I walk down Saint Catherine’s street, she tells me her dreams. She wants our honeymoon to be in Hawaii. She wants to buy a big house in the West Island. She wants three kids that she’ll raise with me.

It’s a nice dream. It’s the life I would have dreamed about, too, when I was younger. When I still had a chance to change things.

I keep walking, but I don’t know where I’m going until I see the Jacques Cartier Bridge up ahead.

I walk onto the bridge and then head towards the center of it. The car headlights flicker on my face.

I climb over the bridge’s guardrail and then look down at the black water swirling in the St. Lawrence River.

Fernanda keeps talking to me. The rain keeps falling.

This world isn’t real. It can’t be. It’s just a strange dream we’re forced to pass through as we try to find the place where we really belong.

I close my eyes and let go of the railing. All I hope is that when I open my eyes again, I’m lying in Fernanda’s arms, finally at peace.

“Harvey, right?”

André steps forward and shakes my hand. He’s a giant of a man. Six foot four and three hundred pounds. He wears a black tracksuit, a gold necklace, and a diamond-studded watch. Under the black lights, the diamonds shine with an ethereal blue.

“You remember me?” I ask.

“I never forget a cop’s face. You raided my club in Saint-Henri back in the day. Things have changed a lot since then, haven’t they?”

“You look like you’ve done well for yourself,” my partner, Marie, says.

“Jail gave me a lot of time to think. Gave me time to get an MBA, too. Now I keep things legal. Well, mostly legal.” He smiles.

“You said there’s been a suicide upstairs?” I ask.

He nods. “Room seven. I ran in as soon as I heard the gunshot. Called you guys right after I saw what had happened.” He shakes his head. “It’s a shame. I’ll take you up there now and show you the body.”

He walks towards the stairwell. The two bouncers at the entrance move out of his way.

“Keep an eye on things for me,” he tells them. “I’ll be right back.”

Upstairs, strips of purple and blue neon light run across the hallway ceiling. Behind the closed doors, men grunt and moan.

“His name’s Kael Vasseur,” André tells us. “He’s been coming here for about a year now. He seemed like a normal kid. I never had any trouble with him.”

He unlocks room seven and lets Marie and me into the immersive VR sim space. As soon as I step into the room, I’m hit by the smell of stale sweat and cum. Next to a vinyl-covered recliner, Kael’s body lies on the floor in a growing pool of blood, the VR headset still strapped to his head.

I see the clothes Kael came in with hanging on the wall. Above his clothes, a digital sign shows his running balance: $2,250.00.

“How much does it cost to rent one of these rooms?” I ask.

“Seven hundred and fifty bucks an hour,” André says.

“People really pay that?” Marie asks.

“You saw the line outside, didn’t you? If you want a cheap, robotic hand job, you can go down the street to SexMania. My haptic suits are top of the line. Here, you feel everything that happens to you inside the sim.”

I put on a pair of nitrile gloves and shoe covers and then walk to Kael’s body. The haptic suit clings to his skin. Embedded in its fabric is an intricate web of sensors and wires.

“What sim was Kael plugged into when he shot himself?” Marie asks.

“The only sim I run here,” André says. “Angels in Paradise.”

Downstairs, one of the bouncers yells André’s name. “One second!” he shouts, before turning back to us. “Do you need anything else? Or can I get back to work?”

“You can go,” Marie tells him. “Just don’t leave the building.”

As soon as he’s gone, Marie mutters “scumbag” under her breath.

“What do you think?” I ask her. “A suicide?”

“It looks like it,” she says. “But I just don’t trust André.”

I carefully pull the VR headset off Kael’s head. More blood spills onto the floor.

“And it’s hard to imagine that number didn’t have something to do with this,” Marie says, pointing at the glowing neon sign on the wall.

It’s after midnight by the time Marie and I finally finish at Virtual Sexopolis. We submit our report and then call it a night.

First thing the next morning, we’re called into the crown prosecutor’s office. Thierry Rousseau has been assigned to the Kael Vasseur case. He’s young for a prosecutor—still in his early forties—but he’s ambitious. Out to make a name for himself. I don’t like working with him, but I don’t have much of a choice.

Marie and I sit on the bench outside his office, waiting for him to tell us whether he wants to go after André or write Kael’s death off as a suicide.

“Have you ever been to a sim club, Harvey?” Marie asks me.

“I prefer spending my time with real women,” I say. “No matter how good the sims get, I can never forget I’m really sitting in some dirty, neon-lit room, paying by the hour.”

Marie laughs.

Thierry calls us into his office. He’s sitting at his desk, his laptop open in front of him. His hair has receded about an inch farther back than the last time I saw him. Marie and I sit across from him.

“So, what do you think?” Marie asks.

“I read your report,” Thierry says. “I mostly agree with you. Something’s off about this. I don’t think André’s the problem, though. The company behind this Angels in Paradise sim, Radiant Angels, opened an office in Quebec a few years ago, right around the same time Virtual Sexopolis opened its doors. They also have a free AI dating app called Angel Chat. There's a class action against them in California. Some of the Angel Chat app’s users claim the app was designed to get them addicted to VR sex.”

“You think they use the free app to find lonely men that they can lure into the sims?” I say.

"Exactly. Before you talk to André again, I want you two to see if you can get a meeting with Greg Ducette, the director of Radiant Angels’ Quebec operations. See if you can get anything out of him. Going after Radiant Angels will be complicated. They employ a lot of people in Montreal, so we need to make sure we have solid evidence before we make any big moves.”

“We’ll reach out to him and see how he handles some pressure,” Marie says.

“What about Kael’s mom, Ciara? Have you gotten a hold of her yet?” Thierry asks.

“She’s coming to the station later this afternoon, right after shift ends,” I say.

“Find out what she knows about this Radiant Angels app, too. And see if you can get her to give us her son’s phone. Keep me updated.”

Ciara walks into the police station right at 4 pm. She has short red hair and green eyes. She’s still wearing her nurse’s uniform. No wedding ring.

Marie and I take her to see Kael’s body. She cries, seeing him. “That’s him,” she says. “That’s my little boy.”

Marie pulls the sheet back over Kael’s face. Then we take Ciara to one of the interrogation rooms.

The three of us sit at the table. I give Ciara an overview of the investigation, but she’s barely paying attention to what I’m saying. Her hands are shaking. I wonder how she managed to get through her shift at work.

“When we talked to the owner of Virtual Sexopolis, André Jules,” I say. “He said your son had been going to the club for a year and a half.”

“That sounds about right,” she tells me.

“Do you know how much money your son spent at the club?”

“At least a hundred thousand dollars. Two years ago, Kael’s grandma passed away, and he inherited a lot of money, which he was supposed to use to pay for a university degree. Not much longer after I’d deposited the money in his account, though, I found he’d spent it at Virtual Sexopolis. I was so mad. I threatened to kick him out of my apartment if he ever went again. He promised me he wouldn’t. I thought he hadn’t, too. I thought he’d gotten it out of his system. Last night, though, I looked through his room, and I found these.” She opens her purse and places a few past due credit card bills on the table. “He owed forty thousand dollars across seven different credit cards.”

“I’m so sorry,” Marie says.

Ciara shakes her head. “If he would’ve just told me, I would've helped him. I would have found the money somehow. I would have worked more overtime. I don’t know why he thought he had no choice but to kill himself.” Her voice cracks.

“This isn’t your fault,” I say, trying to comfort her.

“Did your son ever talk to you about André Jules?” Marie asks her.

“Never.”

“What about Radiant Angels?”

“Kael downloaded the app a few years ago. He became obsessed with one of the AI chatbots. Alice, I think its name was. I used to hear him in his room at night, saying all kinds of crazy things.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“I love you. I want to be with you forever. That kind of thing. I asked him, ‘You know she’s not real, don’t you?’ And he said he knew, but he didn’t care. She made him happy.”

“Do you have his phone with you?” Marie asks.

“In my purse.”

“Do you mind if we give it to the forensics team? They might be able to download the messages this AI was sending your son.”

“I guess that’d be all right—if it helps.”

Reluctantly, she hands Marie the phone.

“Do you know how your son managed to get a gun?” I ask her.

“His father is a doomsday prepper. He bought some land out in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean and then built a house there, filled it with canned food and guns. Last time Kael went to visit him, he must have brought one of his dad’s guns back home.”

Marie and I thank Ciara for her time and then walk her to the front of the station.

“I feel so bad for her,” Marie says. “It’s not easy raising a kid by yourself. My son, Jules, is only twelve, and he’s already online all the time, playing games, talking to strangers. It’s so hard to keep track of who he’s talking to. If one of these AIs ever got its hooks in him, I know it won’t be easy to get him back.”

“Kids are growing up with all these AIs around now. They’re having a harder time telling the difference between a real person and a fake.”

Later, while I’m leaving work, I notice Ciara standing by herself at the bus stop on the corner.

“Everything all right?” I ask.

“When I left, I just missed my bus. They only come by every hour. The next one should be by soon, though.”

“I can give you a ride if you want.”

“I live pretty far.”

“I don’t mind. And you’ve had a long enough day already.”

She gets into my car. I drive towards her apartment building in the south end near Saint-Leonard.

“I’m very sorry about what happened to your son,” I tell her. “Marie and I are going to do everything we can to make sure Radiant Angels gets what’s coming to them.”

“I wish I could say I’m hopeful. Insignificant, little people like me never seem to get justice in this world, though.”

She looks out her window, watches the rain fall on the glass, the neon signs glowing above the bars and the restaurants on Saint-Catherine’s street.

“When I left Kael’s dad, I knew Kael would have a hard time with it. It’s not easy for a boy to grow up without a father. But I did the best I could. There’s just some things no boy wants to talk to his mom about.”

“I’m sure you were a great mom.”

“I’m sure I could have been a better mom, too.”

I want to say something else to her. Try to comfort her. But I’ve never been good with feelings.

I park in front of her apartment building. She unbuckles her seatbelt and gets out of the car.

“Thanks for the ride, Harvey,” she says.

“Have a good night.”

Watching her walk into her building, I realize how lonely I am. How long it’s been since I’ve gone home with a woman.

I’d lied to Marie earlier when I told her I’d never tried sim sex. The past year, I’d been going to one of the cheaper clubs, Pleasure Protocol, at least once a month. Every time I took the VR headset off my head and wiped the cum off my legs, I hated myself. Just like Kael, I promised that was it. A few weeks passed, though, the horniness became harder to ignore than the shame.

I go home to my apartment and crack open a bottle of beer. Then I download the Radiant Angels app.

The app forces me to answer a few questions about myself. I’m 46 years old, I tell it. I like hockey and classic rock music and drinking in dive bars.

Once I’ve finished the questions, the app shows me the profile of one of its chatbots. One of the thousands of women who Radiant Angels has digitized.

I flip through profiles until one of them finally catches my eye. Her name’s Fernanda. She’s a Costa Rican yoga instructor who loves salsa music and dancing.

I like her profile. The app tells me we’ve matched. Unlike real life, Fernanda sends the first message.

Olá, Harvey.

Hey. How are you? I reply.

I’m very excited to meet you. I can’t wait to get to know you better. I read in your profile that you’re a police detective.

I am.

That sounds so exciting. Tell me about your job. I’m sure you have so many interesting stories.

I wish I had somebody to talk to about the Kael Vasseur case, but I know I can't tell Fernanda. I talk to her about politics instead. She agrees with everything I say.

Around midnight, I close the app and go lie in my bed, staring at the ceiling until I finally pass out.

Marie reaches out to Greg Ducette and asks to talk to him at the station. He agrees to come in and arrives the next day with his lawyer, Étienne Larochelle. Marie and I lead them to one of the interrogation rooms.

Greg sits at the table. He’s a tall, thin man with a starved-looking face. Étienne remains standing, his body tense, like a pit bull ready to pounce.

“I’m sure you’ve heard about what happened at Virtual Sexopolis,” Marie says.

“I’ve read the news,” Greg says. “The kid had problems. A university dropout, absent father, struggled with anxiety and depression.”

“Our forensics team has Kael Vasseur’s phone,” I say. “They’ve managed to download the last six months’ worth of conversations he’d had with your company’s chat app, Angel Chat.”

“The pattern is interesting,” Marie says. “Every time Kael tells Alice he loves her, she asks him for a date at a sim club. Says how great it would be to make love to him again.”

I watch Greg closely. His jaw tightens, but he keeps quiet.

“My client has no control over what the Angel Chat AIs say,” Étienne says. “These AIs are black boxes built through extremely complicated machine learning systems. It’s impossible to know why they say what they say.”

“You take a cut of Virtual Sexopolis’ revenue, don’t you?” I ask Greg.

“We license our technology to them. It’s a standard business practice.”

"Radiant Angels has invested billions in AI development and character digitization," Étienne says. "Licensing fees help my client’s company recoup those costs."

“At the expense of Kael Vasseur’s life?” Marie asks.

“It’s a tragedy what happened to Kael,” Greg says, “but like a lot of other young men his age, he was lonely. Cut off from the world. That’s what nobody wants to talk about. How every year, 400,000 men aged eighteen to thirty commit suicide, including my own son.”

“What happened to your son?” I ask.

“Shortly after he was laid off from his job, he swallowed a bottle of painkillers, filled his bathtub with water, and went to sleep. I’m sure if he would have had somebody to talk to about what he was going through, though, things would have been different. I’m sure the AI Kael met on our app cared about him very much. I'm sure she would have tried to help him if she'd known how much pain he was in.”

“I’m sure all she cared about was how much money she could get out of him,” Marie says.

"My client doesn’t need to listen to this," Étienne tells us. "The Radiant Angels AIs have strict guardrails in place. Any conversations related to suicide or self-harm are immediately terminated, and we can easily demonstrate that in court."

He takes Greg’s arm, and Greg stands.

“I think we’re done here,” Étienne says, and then he and Greg both walk out of the room.

I lie in bed, talking to Fernanda. I love her voice. It calms me. Makes me feel like everything is going to be okay.

“I grew up in the West Island, the English part of Montreal,” I tell her. “My dad was French Canadian, my mom was Irish. I talked French with my dad and English with my mom.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Fernanda asks.

“A brother, Jamie. He disappeared when we were kids, though. We’d been playing at this park just around the corner from our house. We went there all the time. I was supposed to be looking after him. But it was colder than I thought it’d be that day, and I’d left my sweater at home. I decided to run home and get it, leaving Jamie alone. I wasn’t gone long. Two minutes at most. But when I got back to the park, he was gone.”

“You must have been so frightened.”

“I screamed his name until I couldn’t scream anymore. Then I called my mom and told her what had happened. She and my dad both left work. They came and started searching the neighborhood with me. All the neighbors joined in, too, and then the police. But Jamie never turned up. It was like he’d just vanished.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’ve never told anybody that story before. Not even Camille.”

“Who’s Camille?”

“My ex. We were together eight years before she dumped me. It was the longest I’ve ever been with someone.”

“Why’d she break up with you?”

“She said I wasn’t emotionally available. I was too closed off.” I laugh.

“That’s not true. I think you’re very sensitive, Harvey.”

“You’re very caring. You’re very kind.”

“I wish you were here with me so I could kiss you.”

“You could be.”

“How?”

“Have you heard of a sim called Angels in Paradise?”

My heart drops. She’s repeating a script, I realize. The same script I read in Kael Vasseur’s chat logs.

“It’s a sex sim, right?” I ask. “That’s what you’re talking about?”

“I know it’s a little expensive, but it would make me so happy to feel your body against mine.”

I close the app. I lie in the dark, alone in my bed.

I tell myself I’ll never talk to her again, but even just the thought of not hearing her voice anymore makes me feel sick.

I’m already too far gone, I realize.

Like Kael Vasseur, I’ve fallen in love with an AI.

“I don’t understand why I need your permission to end my life, Dr. Morgan,” she tells me. “It is my life, isn’t it? Why isn’t it me who decides when and how I die?”

“Because you aren’t the one ending your life, Judy,” I say. “You’re asking me to do it for you. You’re putting the moral weight of the decision on me, and it’s not a decision I take lightly.”

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“But how is my life any different than the lives of all the other people the Terminal Care Clinic has already hooked to your—what do you call it—lethal injection chair?”

“A Medical Aid-in-Dying Machine,” I correct her. I hate the term lethal injection.

“Whatever it’s called. How can you say all these other people have suffered worse than me? How can you compare people’s suffering? You can’t. You just can’t.”

Judy crosses her arms. She’s a beautiful, elegant woman. She’s dressed head-to-toe in designer clothes. In her twenties, she’d been a minor celebrity. She’d become a star on social media, gaining millions of followers on social media. Her success online inspired her to move to Los Angeles to try to make it in Hollywood. In the 2040s, she’d appeared on a few popular reality TV shows, but then her career fizzled out and her fans moved on. In her thirties, struggling to find work, she moved back to Seattle. Not rich, not famous, but with enough money saved that she didn’t need to worry about working anymore.

“I understand you’re having a hard time right now, Judy,” I say. “But you’re in good health for your age. You’re financially stable. I agree you’re depressed, but being depressed isn’t a good enough reason to die. Before you go, I can write you a prescription for fluoxetine, if you’d like. It should help you manage your depression.”

Judy rolls her eyes. “It’s always more pills, isn’t it? How is being high on Prozac any better than being dead? Why don’t you prescribe me a few bottles of wine, too, while you’re at it?”

“Take the fluoxetine for a month. If it doesn’t help, come back here, and we’ll talk again.”

I start to write the prescription, but before I can give it to Judy, she leaves my office, slamming the door.

I know she’ll be back, though. She always is. She reminds me of my mother. Painfully persistent.

I never met my father. My mother told me he was a bad man. An abusive liar and manipulator. I never wanted to know him.

My mother raised me by herself. No help from her parents, her friends, or anyone else. She worked as a nurse in an emergency room. She used to obsessively schedule her shifts at the hospital around my music lessons and soccer games, too proud to ever let anybody know she was struggling. Too proud to ever ask for help. She needed her life to look perfect, even when it wasn’t. Even when it was falling apart.

My mom was forty-two when she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. I was sixteen, halfway through high school. The few years that followed my mom’s diagnosis, I helplessly watched as she lost her mind. The changes were subtle at first. She began asking me the same questions, over and over, never remembering what I said. Walking home from the grocery store, she’d become confused and forget the way. Then, as the disease progressed, she began forgetting basic facts about her life. The names of her friends. The countries we’d visited on our vacations. All our happy memories together removed from her brain. My mom’s last few months alive, she couldn’t even go to the bathroom by herself. My proud, beautiful mother, reduced to wearing diapers, living in a rundown group home where underpaid nurses fed and bathed her every day.

During those final months, in my mom’s few moments of clarity, she begged me to kill her, but I couldn’t. The Right-to-Die laws hadn’t become as open as they are now. There was only one MAID clinic back then, too. Things have changed so much since then. A global recession. Stagflation. Sky-high housing and grocery prices. Now, the MAID clinics are everywhere. Life has become extremely difficult. For most people, death is the easy way out.

“Are you heading home for the night, Dr. Morgan?” Clara, our secretary at the Terminal Care Clinic, asks me.

“I’ll be back tomorrow morning at 9 am for an appointment with Mr. Harrison,” I say. “Before you leave, could you make sure his file is on my desk?”

“Of course.”

My apartment isn’t far from the clinic. I like to walk home. I like the fresh air. After being inside all day, the fresh air helps clear my head. But of course, there are risks, too. While some people appreciate what I do, others find it reprehensible. Sometime, they’ll wait outside the clinic and follow me home, shouting things like, “Murderer!”

I pass a young man on the sidewalk. His eyes lock with mine. He smiles. It’s a friendly smile. I’m relieved. Either they smile, or they spit in my face.

“Good evening, Dr. Morgan.”

“Good evening.” I say.

I wonder how he knows me. Did I sign off on his mother’s death? His father’s? I smile, too. I want people to see that I’m happy. Despite what I do, I’m still just like the rest of them. I don’t hurt people. I help them. I gently guide people into the next phase of existence. That’s all.

I stop at my favorite Chinese restaurant and order a bowl of Lanzhou beef noodle soup to go. As soon as I’m back at my apartment, I open my fridge and fill a glass with what’s left of the bottle of white wine I opened the night before.

“Did you have a good day, Kim?” Oliver, my AI Home Assistant, asks me.

“I had a strange day.”

“Why strange?”

“I had another meeting with Judy Sinclair.”

“She hasn’t given up on dying yet?”

“She’s just as persistent as ever. If she really is so unhappy with her life, maybe I should just let her die. I’m worried I’m not being fair to her.”

“Health-wise, there’s nothing wrong with her?”

“She’s still of sound body and mind.”

“She has an active social life?”

“She could if she wanted to, but she says she doesn’t feel like socializing anymore. It’s too boring.”

“You said she has a daughter in North Carolina?”

“Her daughter has cut off contact with her, though. She has a grandchild, too, who she doesn’t see.”

“Do you know why her daughter cut her off?”

“According to Judy, her daughter claims she’s an abusive narcissist.”

“What do you think?”

“Her daughter’s probably right.” I sip my wine. “Can you turn on some classical music?”

Oliver plays a rendition of Debussy’s “Clair de lune.” I sit on my couch, place my soup and wine on the coffee table, and then some noodles.

“Judy reminds me of my mother,” I say. “I think that’s what the problem is.”

“She’s persistent like your mother was?” Oliver asks.

“It’s her entire personality. The way she talks, the way she dresses, the way she carries herself.”

“And you’re worried the reason you haven’t agreed to Judy’s request yet is because, deep down, you feel like you’d be killing your mother?”

“I’ve signed off on other patients’ requests to die for much less. Andrzej Nowak, for example. Medically, there was nothing wrong with him either. He had enough money to support himself, too. But he was extremely depressed. He’d closed himself off from the outside world. He was drinking two bottles of whiskey a day, trying his best to drink himself to death. Just because Judy doesn’t have a drinking problem, should I treat her any different?”

“Andrzej had been abused as a child, though. Lots of his early childhood memories had resurfaced. From what you told me he seemed to be in a much worse state than Judy is now.”

“But how can you compare two people’s suffering? How can you say one person suffers worse than another? Why is it me who gets to decide who suffers badly enough that they can die?”

“Because that’s your job, Kim. That’s what you signed up to do.”

I sip my wine again and then I stand and walk to the window. The sun is setting. Young couples and students are crowding into the bars. Still young and innocent. Their whole lives still ahead of them. Their lives still filled with endless possibilities.

“The Terminal Care Clinic was so much different when I first started working there,” I say. “Back then, I only saw a few patients a week. I had time to think about my decisions. When I signed off on a patient’s request to die, I had time to make sure I felt confident I was making the right choice. Now, though, there’s so many people who want to die, and so much pressure to keep things moving along. It’s not right. It’s not how death should be treated. We’ve become so careless about life. The past few years, people in their twenties have started coming to see me, telling me they can’t take this world anymore. They want out.” I sit on the couch again. “By making death so easy, we’ve done something to ourselves. We’ve made suffering intolerable. Nobody is willing to fight through the pain anymore. But through suffering, God’s grace is obtained. That’s Dostoyevsky, isn’t it?”

“Crime and Punishment, I believe.”

“Life is supposed to be a series of highs and lows. There are happy times, and there are sad times. During the sad times, life might feel hopeless, but who knows how many happy moments are still left? If we give up, we never know what we’re missing out on.”

“If your life took a turn for the worse, would you ever consider MAID?”

“I’m too curious. I need to know how my story is supposed to end. I’ve never been able to throw away a book I haven’t finished.”

When I leave the Terminal Care Clinic, I’m surprised to see Judy waiting outside for me outside.

“Can I speak to you for a moment, Dr. Morgan?” she asks.

“All right.”

She walks beside me. “I’m sorry for how I act before in your office. I shouldn’t have yelled at you. That wasn’t right. I know you’re just doing your job.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“I’m just so tired of everything. The boredom, the pointlessness of this life. I don’t know what to do.”

“The first time we talked, you said every Thursday afternoon you used to meet your friends for high tea. Why don’t you start going again? It would be good for you to get out of your apartment and talk to people again. It would be a nice break from all those depressing thoughts in your head.”

“My friends and I have talked about the same things for so long, though. Talking to them has started to feel like we’re all reading from a script, saying the same things over and over. Talking to them is painful now. I’d rather be alone.”

“You could try dating again.”

“I’ve already sworn off dating for good. Last year, I went out on a few dates with a man named Carl. A retired investment banker. As soon as I slept with him, I found out he’d been seeing three other women. One of them was a friend from high tea, too. That was it for me. I’m not dating anybody else.”

“What about going back to school? You told me you’ve become interested in Eastern philosophy. You could take a class on Buddhism.”

“And sit around listening to a bunch of twenty-year-olds all day? I’d rather be dead.” She takes out her phone and shows me a picture of a Chihuahua wearing a pink sweater. “I used to have a dog. Rosy. The two of us did everything together. We’d eat breakfast together, walk to the dog park, and then come home and fall asleep on the couch while we watched TV. When she died, it broke something in me. I realized nobody else depends on me. Nobody else cares about me. Nobody else will ever care about me again.”

“You could get another dog.”

“No, no, it’s too late for that. I can’t go through all that again. I’ve had a good life, Dr. Morgan. I could have done some things better, but I don’t have a lot of regrets. I don’t have many more years left ahead of me, and what are going years going to be like? I’m not going to fall in love again. I’m not going to go on any exciting trips overseas. My knees hurt just walking up a flight of stairs now. My memories are fading. Every time I look in a mirror, I feel sick to see how old I’ve become. I know nobody stays young forever, but I wish we did. I wish we turned twenty-one and then just stayed the same until we died. But we don’t. We grow old and we die, and I don’t want to keep growing old anymore, watching myself waste away.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I’m rambling. I’m sure you’ve had a long day. I should go home.”

She starts to walk away, but I stop her.

“Wait, Judy—”

“Yes, Dr. Morgan?”

“Would you like to get coffee sometime?”

Judy laughs. I love her laugh. We sit at a table on a café patio, drinking coffee and enjoying the sun. Across from, children play on the slides and swings in the park.

“You’re very intelligent,” Judy says. “After medical school, you probably could have done anything you wanted. What made a nice, young woman like you want to become an executioner?”

“Please, don’t call me that. I hate that word.” I sip my latte. “My mom, Soojin, was the reason I decided to join the Terminal Care Clinic. She had early onset Alzheimer’s and died when I was a teenager. Near the end of her life, she’d deteriorated so badly I could barely recognize her. She begged her doctors to kill her, but they refused. They forced her to live like that, terrified and delirious, completely dependent on nurses to take care of her, pissing and shitting herself all day. I promised myself I’d do everything I could to make sure nobody else suffered the same way.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that. I’m sure your mom was a wonderful person. I can tell by how you carry yourself that you were raised very well. I wish my daughter, Genevieve, was more like you. She’s smart. She could have been a doctor, too. Or a lawyer, or an engineer. I wish she’d listened to me, but she’s very stubborn. Whatever I told her to do, she’d do the opposite just to spite me.”

“Where is your daughter now?”

“North Carolina. She moved there with her husband, Greg, and my granddaughter, Lacey. Her and Greg are both members of The Rooted Path. They’ve rejected all technology, even phones, for a life in nature. They make their money by filming videos of themselves hiking around the Appalachian Trail. I worry about Lacey all the time. Imagine if they ever run into a bear in the woods? Or who knows what else? A gang of murderers.”

“You don’t talk to any of them anymore?”

“Evie hasn’t said a word to me for seven years now. The year before she left Seattle, we had a big fight. Lacey’s was only a few months old. Evie insisted she was going to breastfeed her. She said formula is full of all kinds of chemicals she didn’t want in Lacey’s body. I told Evie I’d given her formula when she was a baby, and she turned out fine. But she wouldn’t listen to me. She thought, eventually, Lacey would get hungry enough that she’d latch onto her breast.

“I was staying at her and her husband’s Greg’s apartment, sleeping in their spare bedroom, helping as much as I could. Cleaning and cooking. That kind of thing. All night, I had to listen to Lacey screaming. She was starving. It was obvious to everyone. After a week of it, I couldn’t take it anymore. I bought a few bottles of formula at the store and gave some to Lacey when Evie wasn’t around. I wasn’t trying to stop Lacey from breastfeeding. I just wanted to stop her screaming so she could sleep. But Evie never was able to get her to latch onto her breast, and she blamed me for it. She kicked me out of her apartment. We haven’t talked since.”

“Have you tried reaching out to her?”

“She hasn’t reached out to me.”

Judy takes her phone out of her purse. She shows me a video of Lacey hiking with Evie and Greg. “This is her. My beautiful granddaughter. The only time I get to see here is these stupid videos.” She starts to cry.

I put my hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Judy.”

“All the money I have left, I’m leaving it to Lacey. I’ve made sure Evie and Greg don’t see a penny of it. As soon as Lacey turns eighteen, it’s all going to be hers.”

“You should try to reach out to Evie. Send her a text message or something. She was mad but maybe she’s not mad anymore. So much time has passed since you had that fight. If you tell her you’re sorry, I’m sure she’ll forgive you.”

“But I’m not sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s what she needs to hear. If you want to see your granddaughter again, apologize.”

“I’ll see.” She turns toward the park and sips her latte. Her pink lipstick leaves a stain on the glass.

A young man approaches us. He’s holding a water bottle. “Dr. Morgan?” he asks.

“Yes.”

He unscrews the bottle’s lid and throws the water in my face. “Fuck you,” he says. “I told you my junkie sister just wanted my mom dead to get her money. But you didn’t listen. You went ahead and signed off on my mom’s MAID request anyway. You’re so happy to put people to death, aren’t you? You might as well have killed me sister, too? She OD’d less than a month after she got her inheritance money. You want to see?”

He shoves his phone in front of my face. On the screen is a picture, showing his dead sister lying on a cheap mattress on the floor. The picture is shocking. Grotesque. Is this what really death is, outside the clinic walls, raw and real?

“Your mother had multiple sclerosis. She was living in extreme pain.”

“The medication was helping her manage the pain. She was fine—until you stepped in.”

Judy steps between us. “Leave her alone!” she yells.

The man balls his fists for a moment, and but then he turns and walks away.

“Are you okay?” Judy asks.

I stand and squeeze the water out of my shirt. “I’m used to it.”

“This happens often?”

“Often enough. I understand, though. I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. But I don’t a job where you’re allowed to be anything less than perfect.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

Judy takes my hand. We walk to the park across the street. The children are laughing as they play on the swing slides. The sun is shining in the sky. We sit on a bench, underneath a few oak trees, and soon I’ve forgotten all about what happened.

It’s been another long day at work. Meeting after meeting. I’m so exhausted even Oliver notices.

“Are you all right, Kim?” he asks.

I sit at the kitchen counter and place my head in my hands. “I had six meetings today. I signed off on two people’s requests to die. One of the people whose requests I refused called me a stupid fucking bitch and then threw his chair into the wall before security dragged him out of the building.”

“What’s bothering you more? The MAID requests you granted, or being called a stupid bitch?”

“Granting the two requests was easy. Ms. Dubois is suffering from stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer. She’s been given six months to live, but her time left alive will be filled with severe and unrelenting pain. She wants to die on her own terms, surrounded by friends and family.”

“And the other person?”

“Mr. Thompson. He has advanced amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He’s not completely paralyzed yet but, by the end of the year, he’ll likely be completely dependent on others for feeding, breathing, and hygiene. He’s terrified of ending up like my mother did.”

“I think you made the right choice in both situations, Kim. Then this other person, when he threw his chair into the wall, he gave you a bit of a scare?”

“You should have seen his face. He looked like he wanted to kill me. If security hadn’t gotten there so fast, I’m sure he would have tried strangling me. I know these people are struggling, but I wish they could understand that isn’t an easy to decide to put a person to death. I’m doing the best I can, but these decisions weigh on my soul.”

I go to the fridge and pour myself a glass of white wine.

“I did get a bit of good news today, though,” I say. “I talked to Judy Sinclair on my lunch break. She called her daughter last night. She said their conversation went well, too. She apologized for what happened before—just like I told her to—even though she’s not really sorry. Her daughter seemed to accept her apology. She put Lacey on the phone and let Judy talk to her. Judy seemed so happy.”

“Is she feeling better about still being alive ow?”

“I think so. Evie said she might be coming to Seattle in a few months to visit some friends. She might let Judy see her Lacey while they’re here. I think exactly what Judy needs. Something to look forward to. Something to be excited for.”

“That’s great news.”

I sip my wine and then walk to the window. “It’s got me thinking, though, what do I have to look forward to?”

“You’re going to Italy in a few months. Two weeks in that wonderful hotel near the beach. No meetings, no difficult decisions. You’ll finally have some time to relax.”

“It can get lonely travelling by myself. I won’t even have you there to keep me company.”

“You can put me on your phone if you like. I’m always happy to talk to you.”

I sit on my sofa. “Can you picture me as a mother, Oliver?”

“I think you’d make a fantastic mother.”

“I’m at that age now where I either have kids, or I don’t. I’ve been thinking about dating again. If I can find someone in the next year or two, I still have time to have one or two kids. Worst case, I could find a sperm donor and do it alone.”

“With a child at home, you wouldn’t feel so lonely. You’d be very busy with things to do.”

“I’m just worried something’s broken inside me. I don’t know if I can love a child like they need to be loved. It’s been twelve years now that I’ve been signing off on people’s deaths and hooking them up to the MAID machine. I’ve become so cold and so callous.”

“Don’t say that. You’re still a very kind, caring person. You’d make a wonderful mother.”

“Thank you.”

The next few weeks pass slowly. My days are filled with more meetings. So many meetings that I barely have time to think.

Some days, the decisions are easy. The person sitting across from me is in obvious, excruciating pain. They have no hope. They live in constant misery. Other times, the decisions are more difficult, though. I speak to people struggling with extreme isolation and crippling depression. Shut-ins unable to leave their homes. Hoarders living in filth. I speak to retired people who can no longer pay their rent and for whom, with no family to turn to for help, death seems easier than homelessness.

“Is this what we’ve really become as a society?” I ask myself. So selfish and cold. My problems are my problems and your problems are yours. If life becomes too unbearable, you can always just quit.

Clara knocks on my door. “Excuse me, Dr. Morgan, could I bother you for a moment?”

“What is it?”

“Judy Sinclair’s lawyer just called. He says she’s hung herself.”

“Oh my god.”

“She’s named you in her will.”

“Me?”

“She’s left you everything she has.”

If we could kill ourselves just thinking, I want to die, how many of us would be left? How many of us would grit our teeth and stick around all the way to the bitter end? I used to be sure I’d make it to the end, but now I don’t know what I’d do.

In Judy’s will, she’s asked not to have a funeral. Her body is cremated and the ashes are buried. There’s no ceremony, no one to say goodbye to her but me. I leave a bouquet of roses on her grave, knowing they’ll wither soon, and once they’re gone, nobody will ever know that she was missed.

I manage to get a hold of Judy’s daughter. I offer to give her the money. Evie refuses, though.

“It’s my mother’s decision,” she says. “If she doesn’t want me to have the money, I don’t want it.””

It’s not much money. A few hundred thousand dollars. Enough to help someone, but not enough to change somebody’s life. Especially not in the world we have now.

I put the money in a savings account. I don’t know what I’ll do with it. I don’t want to spend it. It feels cursed.

I go to my vacation in Italy and do my best to enjoy myself. During the days, go to the beach, find an empty chair, and then lie there reading books and listening to the waves crash on the shore.

When it gets dark, I go back to the hotel. I eat dinner alone at the restaurant. I make small talk with the waiters and waitresses. I drink a few too many glasses of wine, stumble back to my room, and fall asleep in the enormous, unfathomably soft bed.

The trip isn’t bad, but it’s not great. It’s a trip. A break from my routine. I don’t want to go back to Seattle, but then my vacation ends, and I’m back again. My life no different than before. Yet, I sense that I’ve changed.

My first meeting of the day is with Ms. Patricia Morales. She’s fifty-seven. She looks healthy. According to her financial records, she has close to two million dollars in the bank.

“What’s the reason you’ve come to the Terminal Care Clinic, Ms. Morales?” I ask her.

“I feel very sad,” she tells me. “I have no friends. I don’t talk to my family anymore. All day long, I just sit at home and watch TV. I don’t want to spend another ten or twenty years doing this. I just want to die and leave this world. I want to see what comes next, whatever it is.”

“You have no sons or daughters or other family pressuring you into making this decision?”

“This decision is all mine.”

We talk a little longer, and then I sign off on her request to die and explain the procedure.

“In two weeks, you’ll come back here,” I say. “You’ll walk with me back to our Final Stage room. It’s a small, comfortable room. Not too bright. Your family can join you in the room. Whoever you want to say goodbye to. I’ll give you some time alone with them to say your goodbyes, and then I’ll come back into the room to give you an injection of a benzodiazepine. This drug will make you feel much more relaxed. Once your blood pressure drops, I’ll inject the next drug. At this point, you shouldn’t care much about what is going on anymore. You should feel very happy and sleepy. You’ll yawn, close your eyes, fall asleep, and then that will be that. Your life will be over.”

My job isn’t to dissuade people from dying. It never was. My job is to hold their hands as I gently push them over the edge. To give action to that voice in their heads, begging, “kill me.” I need preserve my heart for myself. For my children if I ever have any. I wish I’d realized this sooner.

Ms. Morales thanks me and then leaves my office. Clara sends my next patient in.

“El Nigromante, I need your help,” Javier says.

A young boy in Puebla city had given me the name, El Nigromante, while watching me work on his father. His dead father opened his eyes and spoke and the boy muttered the words, El Nigromante, the necromancer. Since then, the name has stuck to me just like the smell of blood, never washing off.

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My real name is Dr. Allan Fishcher. For most of my life, before I lost my medical license, I’d worked as a neurosurgeon. At eight years old, I watched my mother, Elena, die in a car accident. When I saw her in the morgue, while her body had been crushed beyond recognition, her face looked no different than I remembered it. Her brain, I later learned, had been completely unharmed. I’d pressed my palm against the cold glass separating us, certain that if I only prayed hard enough, she would open her eyes again. But of course, she didn’t. She remained where she was, still and cold. I swore to myself I’d never let myself feel so powerless again. But now, even though I could easily save my mother, I wonder what she’d think of what I’ve become.

I was at my lowest when Victor reached out to me. He’d heard the stories about me in the news. He knew what I’d done. “Your career doesn’t have to end here,” he told me. “I can help you continue your research. I can make you very rich, too.” When I agreed to his deal, I imagined myself back in a research lab, experimenting with corpses. Not working alongside men like Javier in roach-infested hotel rooms and dirty garages.

“Arnaldo isn’t breathing anymore,” Javier says. I hear the fear in his voice.

“What happened?” I ask.

“I’m not sure.”

“You were beating him?”

“A little, but I wasn’t too rough with him. I electrocuted him a bit, too.”

“Where are you?”

“Tijuana.” He gives me the address of a hotel in the Zona Norte. “Can you get here soon?”

“I’m leaving now.”

Most of the men I work with are animals. Cruel, boorish thugs. Javier, though, is different. He sends his money to his poor mother every month. He recites Pablo Neruda poetry while he tortures people. I tolerate him. It could be worse. I could be working with Jose again, listening to him blather on about football and the World Cup and the Champions League.

I’m moving too slowly, though. I need to move fast. Death doesn’t wait.

I get my bag from my office and fill it with everything I need for the operation. An extracorporeal membrane oxygenation system. A perfusate solution I’ve constructed from a complex blend oxygen carriers, glucose, electrolytes, and neuroprotective compounds. Then a few scalpels, of course. A wad of bandages to soak up the blood. A perfusion chamber in case we need to move Arnaldo’s head.

I put on a clean suit and hurry downstairs to my car. I drive towards the Mexican border. An arbitrary line, no different than the line between life and death, where one world ends and another begins.

Driving in the rain, I think of Daniel Everett, the wealthy philanthropist who’d funded my research in the early years. The medical board called me a monster for keeping him alive after his transplant failed, but how else could I have learned what I’d done wrong? If I’d just let him die, I would have never been able to perfect the procedure.

I see the border ahead of me. I take control of my body and calm my nerves. I can’t show any signs of fear. The border guards have been trained to sniff it out. Thankfully, it’s late. Nearly midnight. There aren’t many others waiting to cross. Once I reach the gate, I hand the guard my passport.

“Where are you headed tonight, doctor?” he asks me.

“Clinica 20,” I lie. “I have a meeting with some colleagues early tomorrow morning.”

He waves me through. I let my body relax. I’ll need all my strength for the operation.

I drive a little farther and then call Javier.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I tell him. “Make sure Arnaldo’s clothes are off. There’s no time to waste.”

Victor has been searching for Arnaldo and his father for years. Arnaldo’s father, Diego Morales, is the head of the rival Obsidian Cartel. Arnaldo serves as his father’s right hand.

The Zafiros Cartel and the Obsidians have been at war for decades. The war started over drug territories, but it’s become something else. The Obsidians see themselves as the future. They’re college educated, and they’ve embraced technology and American business models. They know the Zafiros’ violence is costing them billions. The Zafiros’ maintain their power through violence, though. Without it, their entire organization falls apart.

I turn onto Coahuila Street. Neon lights glow above the beautiful women wiggling their bodies in front of the bars and the strip clubs. A few years earlier, these sidewalks would have been crowded with American tourists, but not many Americans are willing to come to Tijuana anymore. They’ve been scared off by the stories of kidnappings, executions, and torture. Only the poor, and the addicts, and the death dealers remain in city. Tijuana is rotting. The rot is spreading, too.

I park in front of the Hotel Cruza and then go up to Javier’s room. He answers the door shirtless. His body and face are covered with tattoos.

“Where is he?” I ask.

“In the bathroom.”

I find Arnaldo lying on the bathroom floor, next to the bathtub. Javier has taken his clothes off, like I’d asked him to. Arnaldo’s skin is covered with bruises and burn marks. On top of the toilet, I see a car battery connected to a pair of alligator clips.

“Were you trying to kill him?” I ask.

“He wasn’t screaming too much,” Javier says. “I thought his heart could take it.”

He drives me mad sometimes. He never thinks. He just acts.

I tear off the shower curtain and lay it on the ground. Then I get Javier to help me roll Arnaldo’s body on top of it.

I kneel on the floor, open my bag and take out my tools. Even though Javier and I have worked together for close to three years, he still flinches when he sees me work. He’s murdered dozens of men. Strangled them, beaten them, burned them alive, and dismembered them with saws. Yet, as I raise my scalpel, he signs a cross over his chest and says a short prayer.

I disinfect Arnaldo’s neck and then inject an anticoagulant into his jugular vein. I pick up my bone saw and cut through his throat, severing the tendons and flesh while carefully preserving the vocal cords.

The bone saw vibrates against my palm. Once I reach the spine, the saw halts for a moment, its blade shrieking loudly until it finally snaps through the bone.

“Can I help you, Nigromante?” Javier asks.

“If I need something, I’ll tell you.”

He’s becoming even more nervous. Fidgeting. It’s not just my work that’s bothering him. He must be thinking about what will happen to him if Arnaldo stays dead. How Victor will punish him.

Blood begins to pool around my shoes. The metallic smell of the blood mixes with the stink of antiseptic. At first, the smell made me sick, but I’ve become used to it. Javier, though, is becoming paler.

But I’m nearly finished.

I attach the nanoscale delivery system to Arnaldo’s neck. I developed the system myself. A revolutionary method for cellular reconstruction that I perfected during countless operations performed in dirty bathrooms just like this. Microscopic robots—synthetic assemblies of graphene and biodegradable plastics—begin swimming through Arnaldo’s dying tissues. They seek out the telltale signatures of cellular distress: elevated calcium levels, pH imbalances, the breakdown products of dying neurons. Wherever they find cellular damage, they repair it. Soon, with their help, the oxygen deprivation stops, cellular death reverses, neuroplasticity increases.

“Is everything working?” Javier asks.

“We’ll find out soon enough. Be patient.”

I keep working. The next part is the hardest part. It requires all the concentration I have.

My hands remain perfectly still as I separate the nerves and the veins in Arnaldo’s neck, carefully connecting them to the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation system. Sweat starts to drip from my forehead, but I wipe it away. The work requires extreme precision. Extremely delicacy. I’ve performed the procedure so many times, though, my hands perform the work on their own. Soon, all that’s left to do is to turn the oxygenation system on. But I hesitate to flip the switch. My thoughts go back to Daniel Everett and the mistake that led me down this path to hell.

Daniel was a wealthy investor whose body was being consumed by advanced muscular dystrophy. When he first visited my office, the disease had progressed so far that he couldn’t even shake my hand. His fingers had already curled into permanent claws. I could sense his determination, though.

“I’ve followed your research, Dr. Fishcher,” he told me. “You’re the only one who’s daring to think beyond conventional limitations.”

I quickly realized he was as desperate as I was ambitious. He wanted to be the first living human to undergo a head transplant. To reattach his healthy brain to a new, healthy body. The hospital refused his request, but I didn’t. I told him we’d make history together. But I also glossed over the risks involved with the operation. I was too confident in myself and my abilities. I’d been researching the transplant procedure for so long, planning each step with precise detail, I didn’t think anything could go wrong. But then Daniel awoke in his new body and let out that awful, horrific scream. His scream still rings in my ears. I didn’t want to keep him suffering, but I needed to understand what had gone wrong with the procedure. I didn’t want his death to be for nothing. So, I kept him alive—screaming in agony despite the morphine I gave him—while I poked and prodded at the tissues in his neck. Before the medical board took my license away, they called me a monster. Looking back, they probably weren’t wrong. Maybe I am a monster. I don’t know why I did what I did. Compulsion. Arrogance. The reason doesn’t matter now. What’s done is done.

I push the thoughts Daniel Everett out of my mind. I switch on the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation system. Arnaldo’s eyelids snap open. His pupils dilate. He coughs and then spits out a bit of blood.

Javier looks ill. “You really are the devil, Nigromante,” he says.

I tap my knuckles on Arnaldo’s forehead. He looks lost and confused. “Can you hear me, Arnaldo?” He moves his lips but the only sound that leaves out of his mouth is a pained wheeze.

I’ve heard a little about him. He’s intelligent. An economics degree from Wharton’s and an MBA from Stanford. If he’d stayed in the United States, he could have had a good life, but instead he’d returned home to help run the family business, wanting to please his father. That was his mistake, the one that drew him into this hell.

His eyes begin to focus. He looks around the room. Slowly, he’s figuring it out. Finally, he speaks.

“Nigromante…. What have you… done to me?”

“You know my name?”

“We’ve all heard… stories of… you….”

Hearing of my reputation makes me smile. I turn to Javier. “You can resume where you left off now.”

He hesitates to move closer to Arnaldo, though. He seems afraid. Terrified of a living head.

“Is something wrong?” I ask, enjoying his discomfort.

“I’m fine.”

He forces himself to move forward, not willing to show any weakness. He kneels next to Arnoldo and continues asking him questions, but Arnaldo refuses to speak.

Then Javier’s phone rings. He goes into the next room to answer it.

“Can we move him, Nigromante?” he asks me.

“Where?”

“Victor wants us to take him to the compound in El Rosario.”

“He’s in a very delicate state right now. It’s risky.”

“You can do it, though?”

“I can do anything, but I don’t like taking risks I don’t need to think.”

“Victors thinks The Obsidians are in the Zona Notre, looking for him.”

A sudden fear grips my chest. I start thinking about all the horrible things The Obsidians will do to me if they find me. I don’t argue with Javier anymore. I go to my car and take out the perfusion chamber I’ve brought with me. It’s typically used for organ preservation, but I’ve adapted it for neural tissue. For situations just like these.

I carefully place Arnaldo’s head inside the chamber. Then I follow Javier downstairs to his van, carrying the head in my arms. A few women see us, and they scream and run away. I can only image their thoughts, seeing a nightmare come to life.

Victor opens the van’s back doors. He throws my bag and tools inside and then tells me to get inside, too. I sit on the floor and place Arnaldo’s head next to me. Inside the perfusion chamber—through the cloudy, translucent plastic—I see Arnaldo looking back into my eyes.

“Is he all right?” Javier asks.

I check Arnaldo’s vital signs. “He’s fine, for now,” I say. “But we need to move quickly. He won’t stay alive in the perfusion chamber for long.”

“Just do what you can to make sure he doesn’t die again, or Victor won’t be happy with either of us.”

He won’t be happy with you, Javier. This is your mistake, not mine.

Victor starts the van. He drives to the Transpeninsular Highway and then heads south, towards Victor’s compound outside El Rosario. The rain pours on the van’s roof with a heavy, droning thud, drowning out the Mariachi music playing on the radio.

“Things are… going wrong….” Arnaldo says. “But I can… help you.”

“How can you help me? Look at yourself.”

“You have talents… Nigromante…. We could use a… man like you.”

“I’m sure you could.”

I glance out the back window. The highway is empty and dark. The emptiness makes me feel uneasy. Things are too quiet.

“Is he still okay?” Javier asks.

“Just drive faster.”

He shakes his head. “It’s too risky. If the police see us—” he trails off.

A car emerges from the darkness behind us. The light from its headlights fill the van. I duck and press my body against the metal floor. Javier slows and lets the car pass.

“You’re scared… Nigromante?” Arnaldo asks.

“I’m not scared of anything.”

“Not even… of this?”

“Becoming a head? I don’t need to fear that. Nobody else in the world can do what I do.”

Javier turns down the music and calls his mother. Tells her that he’ll be home late. We’re running for our lives and that’s what he thinks about. Making sure his mother doesn’t stay up late worrying about him.

Another car appears behind us. It looks like the police. Fear grips my chest again. Javier slows the van. I hope the officer will pass, but he doesn’t. He slows, too and continues driving fifty feet behind us.

“What does he want?” I ask.

“He’s playing a game, maybe” Javier says. “I ignore him.”

I try to, but then the officer turns his lights on. His siren starts wailing.

“Put your foot on the gas,” I say, my heart racing. “You can outrun him.”

“Not in this van,” Javier says. “Just stay in the back, out of sight. I’ll handle this. Is there any way you can keep Arnaldo quiet?”

I adjust the dial controlling the air flowing through Arnaldo’s vocal cords. Javier pulls over to the side of the road. He puts his right hand on the handle of his gun.

The police officer parks behind us and then walks over to Javier door. I press myself against the side of the van, hiding in the darkness. The rain pounds down on the van’s metal roof.

“License,” the officer says. Javier hands it to him. “Where are you headed?”

“El Rosario.”

“It’s not very safe to be out on the highway tonight.” He peers into the back of the van. I don’t think he sees me. “What do you have back there?”

Javier takes a few thousand pesos from his pocket and hands it to the officer. “I need to get going. Just take this money and leave me alone.”

The officer stares at the money, but he doesn’t take it. Rain rolls down his face. The blue and red lights from his car flicker across his body.

“You work for Victor Ramirez?” he asks.

“It’s none of your business who I work for.”

“Have you seen this man recently?” He shows Javier a picture.

“I have no idea who that is.”

I see Javier begin to raise his gun. Before he can fire, though, the officer has put a bullet through his head. The gunshot drowns in a roar of thunder.

Javier slumps over the steering wheel. Blood pours from his skull, dripping onto his lap.

Stay calm, Allen. Don’t panic. You can figure this out.

The officer hasn’t noticed me yet. He picks up his radio. “I just killed one of Victor’s men not far from El Rosario. Arnaldo must be around here somewhere.”

He grabs Javier’s shoulders and tries to pull his body from the van, but he struggles to move the dead weight. I see my opportunity. I take my gun from my bag. I realize I’ve never used it before. Why not? I’ve never needed to. I’m not a killer. But what else can I do? The situation has forced my hand.

I move forward until I have a clear shot. The officer still hasn’t noticed me. I aim my gun at him and pull the trigger, again and again, until I’ve emptied the magazine. The gunshots echo through the van, exploding like firecrackers in my head. The officer falls backwards, onto the pavement, the rain washing away his blood.

Stay calm, Allan. Control your nerves. This is not different than surgery.

I leave the van, the rain falling against my face, and make my way over to the officer’s body. The picture he’d shown Javier is a picture of Arnaldo. I tear the badge off his jacket. It’s real. Not a fake. He’s an officer on The Obsidians’ payroll then. The realization I’ve killed a police officer chills my skin. Killing a police officer is no small thing. By morning, every police officer in Mexico will be looking for me.

My mind races. What am I going to do? How will I escape? Before my thoughts can run too far, though, I calm them. Regain my composure. First, before I do anything else, I need to deliver Arnaldo’s head. If I help Victor, he will help me. He always does.

I shove Javier’s body out of the van. I wipe his blood off the steering wheel and then put Arnaldo’s head on the passenger seat next to me. I see his lips moving. He wants to talk to me. I let the air flow through his vocal cords again.

“My friends… h-here… s-soon….” His voice has become hoarser. He talks like a corpse. “Help me.… I’ll h-help you.”

“You can’t help me.”

I start the van and keep driving towards El Rosario.

So much death, Allan? And for what? The dream of a future where all of us live to old age. All of our friends and loved ones.

“Money…” Arnaldo gasps, “M-money….”

“I don’t need your money. I’ve never cared about material things.”

“P-p-please….”

The windshield wipers squeak as they wipe the rain away. On the radio, Javier’s mariachi music plays. I turn up the volume, drowning out Arnaldo’s voice.

“P-p-please….”

Headlights appear in my rearview mirror. I grip the steering wheel tighter, my knuckles whiting. Is this the end? No, it can’t be.

Up ahead, through the rain, I see a quiet, forgotten motel. In front of it, glowing in neon, is a vacancy sign. I’ll rest there for the night and call Victor. He’ll help me figure this whole mess out.

I take the next exit and make my way towards the motel. I park near the main office and go inside. An older woman sits at the reception desk.

“How can I help you?” she asks.

“I need a room for the night.”

“I have a few. Would you rather stay closer to the office and the vending machines?”

“I don’t care.”

I glance over my shoulder. My van is still the only car in the parking lot. Its headlights burn brightly in the darkness.

The woman hands me the key for room number 4.

“Thank you,” I say.

I get back in the van and park it farther away from the road. Out of sight. Then I take Arnaldo’s head into the room.

The room is even filthier than I imagined it. Dried blood splattered on the wallpaper. Dust covered carpets. Spider webs in the ceiling corners. A few cockroaches crawling on the bed.

I place Arnaldo’s head next to the TV and then check his vital signs. His blood pressure is dropping. If I don’t get his head attached to a new body, he won’t be alive much longer.

“How do you feel, Arnaldo?” I ask.

“H-h-hurts.”

“What is your father’s name?”

“H-h-hurts…. G-God… H-help….”

I worry he’s losing his brain function. I inject more nanobots into his spine, hoping they’ll preserve his brain tissue a little longer. Long enough for me to get his head onto another body.

Suddenly, the motel room fills with light. Another car has driven into the parking lot. I go to the window and peer through the blinds. I’m relieved to see a woman and a young child get out of the car.

“K-k-kill… m-m-m-me….” Arnaldo says.

“I’m to deliver you to Victor.”

“K-k-k-kill…..”

Outside, the thunders roars again. For a moment, the room’s lights flicker. The rain keeps pounding on the windows.

I sit on the bed and turn on the TV. On the news, the reporter is talking about two bodies found on the highway. One of them, a policeman. The other, a known gang member. Christ, what a mess.

“K-k-k-kill…..”

“Enough!” I yell.

I think of Daniel Everett again. How he screamed, lashing around on the operating table as I prodded at the nerve endings in his neck, begging me: “Kill me! Kill me!” How many times have I heard that now? Too many times.

Maybe I should have killed Daniel. Put him out of his misery. Am I really as bad as they say I am? Or am I just a misunderstood genius, discarded by his peers. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, Dr. William T. G. Morton, Dr. Allan Fishcher.

My phone rings. It startles me. Snaps me out of my trance. It’s Victor.

“Where are you?” he asks.

“A hotel near Ensenada.”

“Is Javier with you?”

“Javier’s dead.”

He pauses a moment. “What happened?”

“It’s a mess. This whole thing has turned into a giant mess.” I begin to tell him the story, but he cuts me off.

“There’s no time,” he says. “Give me your address, and I’ll send a few of my men to pick you up.”

I give my address, and he ends the call.

I go to the bathroom. Seeig my reflection in the mirror, I realize I’m covered in blood. I try to wash the blood off, but it’s no use. It’s congealed to my skin.

Arnaldo lets out a horrific shreik. I run over to him. Blood is dripping from his eyes, running down his cheeks. This is bad. This is very, very bad.

The motel room fills with light again. Another car has driven into the parking lot. A look through the blinds and see a Jeep parked near my room. Two men are inside it. They must be Victor’s men. They’ve arrived even faster than I thought they would.

One of them men gets out and knocks on my door. I look through the peephole, but I don’t recognize him. I can’t make out his face in the darkness.

“Who is it?” I ask.

“Is that you, Nigromante?”

“You work for Victor?”

“Yes. Is Arnaldo, okay?”

“He’s in very bad shape. He doesn’t have much time left.”

I open the door. The man steps inside. He’s large. Six foot four, three hundred pounds, a shaved head and a handlebar mustache, heavily tattooed. When he seeks Arnaldo’s head next to the TV, the cold expression on his face fades. Like Javier, the sight of a living head makes him shrink inside of himself.

“We need to move quickly,” I say.

I picked up the perfusion chamber. The man leads be back to the Jeep and opens the back door. I see his friend in the passenger seat. I don’t recognize him, either.

“Get in,” the large man says.

I sit on the back seat and set Arnaldo’s head down next to me.

“Arnaldo’s brain tissues is deteriorating,” I say. “If I don’t get his head on a new body soon, he won’t remember anything anymore. He won’t be any use to Victor.”

The large man sits behind the steering wheel. He leaves the parking lot and drives back to the highway. Then he turns north, towards Tijuana.

“You’re taking me to Victor’s compound, yes?” I ask, but neither of them answer me.

I look outside at the fields. The sun is rising now. The sky is turning a bluish-gray. The rain has slowed, too. It falls much more gently now. I can barely hear it over the sounds of Arnaldo’s pained groans.

I see a sign for an El Rosario exit. For a moment, I relax, but then we drive past the exit.

“El Rosario is that way, isn’t it?” I ask.

The two men still won’t answer me.

“Who are you?” I ask. “What are your names?”

Silence.

Obsidians? But how did they find me? I lean forward.

“Where are you taking me?” I ask.

“Keep quiet,” the large man tells me.

Are they going to kill me, I wonder. Torture me? But if I die, so does Arnaldo.

“I was just following Victor’s orders,” I tell them, panicking. “But if you listen to me, Arnaldo doesn’t have to die. I can fix him. I’m the only one who can fix him.”

The man in the passenger seat points his gun at me. “Sit down and shut up.”

I sit back in my seat. I look down at Arnaldo. His eyes are bleeding even worse now. His face is covered with blood. He’s not groaning anymore.

The Jeep stops. The man with the gun puts a black bag over my head. Then we start driving again.

“Wake up, Nigromante.”

I feel strange. My head is throbbing. My body is numb. My vision blurred.

I rub my temples. It takes me a moment to realize that I don’t feel my fingers on my head. I don’t feel my arms, either. I don’t feel my limbs. My breath is stilted. When I breathe, I don’t draw air into my lungs. I draw it someplace else. Someplace that isn’t a part of my body.

Slowly, the room becomes clearer. Two men sit across from me. I recognize one of them. Arnaldo. Somehow, he’s been given a new body. Sitting next to him is an older man with grey hair, a grey beard, and a cruel face. The older man notices my eyes have opened, and he stands.

“Do you see what you’ve done to my son?” he asks me.

I try to speak, but even though my lips are moving, I don’t hear my words.

“Arnaldo, talk to him,” he says.

“You’re the man who hurt me,” Arnaldo tells me. His words are stilted. Drool drips from his lips.

“It was… Victor….” I say, finally managing to voice the words. “I didn’t… want… any of this.”

“It wasn’t your hands that took off my son’s head?” the old man, Diego Morales, yells.

I look downward. My body is gone. I’m on a table. My head is attached to some kind of crude medical device.

“What is this?” I ask.

“You’re not the only one who can bring the dead to life,” Deigo tells me, running his fingers over the machine with a cold familiarity. “Others have studied your work. Learned from it.”

“That’s not… possible…” Even saying those words, though, I see my own work in this machine, keeping me alive.

“Your procedure is not so difficult, really. The hardest part is practicing it. But thanks to you and your friends, my men have had lots of opportunities to practice.” He runs his hand over my hair, petting me like I were his dog. “I’m going to keep you alive for a long, long time, Nigromante. You and I are going to have lots of fun together.”

He turns a dial on the machine I’m connected to. My head swells with pressure until it feels like my eyeballs are going to explode. I scream like Daniel screamed on that operating table, as I poked and prodded his neck.

“Kill me....” I beg. The same words so many others had said to me. The words are just as meaningless now.

“You’ll have Lots of time to think about what you’ve done, Nigromante,” Diego says. “Lots of time to suffer like you’ve caused so many other to suffer.”

He turns the dial back. The pressure inside my skull lessens, but a dull, throbbing pain remains. Tears drip down my cheeks. Tears filled with specks of blood.

Is this really the end that fate has in store for me? The doctor who dedicated his life to curing death for those who die too young? Or is this just the price to pay for daring to become god?

It's strange, seeing him again. Eight years have passed since the last time we stood face to face. He has a shaved head now, a thick beard, and darkly tanned skin. His eyes disturb me. They've become hollow, devoid of the warmth I remember in them.

I unwrap the present. He’s gotten me a jewelry box. When I open its lid, a tiny plastic ballerina turns in circles as the theme from Swan Lake plays.

"It's beautiful," I say. "Thank you."

"You had one just like it when you were a kid, remember? You'd never let me play with it. So, one day while you were at ballet practice, I took it and broke it. Mom grounded me all weekend."

"You still remember that? CareMind hasn’t taken that memory from you?"

"I still remember everything about my childhood. CareMind doesn’t change us, she just protects us. You never should have quit dancing."

"My life just got too busy. I couldn’t find the time anymore."

I put the jewelry box in my purse. Then I follow Danny into the small bungalow he lives in near San Diego's waterfront.

When he first handed control of his life over to the CareMind AI, I told myself he was depressed. With time, he’d get sick of letting the AI make all of his decisions for him. After his divorce, his dependence on CareMind only worsened, though. Under CareMind's guidance, he withdrew from friends and family, quit his job, and sold everything he owned. Then, right after he got a CareMind cognitive implant chip installed in his head, he’d suddenly dropped off the face of the Earth. For years, I'd emailed him without a response. Then, out of nowhere, he’d written back. It seemed like a cry for help.

The inside of his house seems no different than I imagine the inside of his brain. It's clean to the point of sterility. Devoid of personal artifacts.

Two people walk out from the kitchen: a pretty young blonde woman in a paint-splattered shirt, and an older, heavyset man with a bloated nose and pockmarked cheeks.

"These are my roommates, Maja and Berislav," Danny says.

"It's so nice to finally meet you," Maja tells me. "Danny talks about you all the time."

"He still talks about me?"

"He says you’re one of the kindest, gentlest, most wonderful people he knows."

She hugs me, too. Unlike Danny’s, her hug is loving and warm. I hold on to her a little too long. I worry I’ve betrayed how starved I am for physical affection. My husband, Greg, and I barely touch each other anymore.

"Your brother's an inspiration for lots of us," Maja tells me. "He's one of CareMind's main developers now. He’s leading the roll-out of the version 1.06 update, which is being released next month."

"You're still programming?" I ask. "In Seattle, you wished you could do anything else."

“I realized it was writing software that just pushed ads to people that sucked all my enjoyment out of programming. I like what I’m working on now. I feel good about what I’m doing. I look forward to writing code.”

He smiles, but it doesn’t seem like a genuine smile. It seems forced, like CareMind is pulling back the edges of his lips.

"So, what do you want to do for your one day in San Diego?" he asks me. "We could go shopping? Or we could go see a movie? Or we could just walk down to the beach?"

"The beach sounds nice. It's been raining non-stop in Seattle. I could use a bit of sun on my skin."

We say goodbye to his roommates and then head outside. It's beautiful day. A cloudless sky, a gentle breeze, birds singing in the trees. It's like a dream.

"I heard Layan's been diagnosed with stage two breast cancer," Danny says.

"How'd you hear that?"

"A friend of a friend."

"She's been through hell these past couple months. In and out of the hospital. Greg and I have been helping watch your kids while she's at her appointments."

"Are Mira and Jad holding up okay?"

"They're tough kids, but it's been hard on them, especially with you still gone. They miss you, Danny. They talk about you all the time."

"I can't go back to Seattle right now."

"Why not?"

"It's just not the right time."

Danny's eyes start to water. It’s the first real display of emotion I've seen from him. Just as soon as the tears start, though, they stop. His expression goes blank, like CareMind has reset his brain, erasing whatever guilt or regret he'd felt.

"What were we talking about?" he asks.

"Layan's cancer diagnosis."

"Yes. Do you think it would be all right if I called Mira and Jad?"

"I'm sure they'd love to hear from you."

I give him Jad's number, hoping Danny would actually call them, and it would lead to something good. Maybe Danny finally coming back home.

We spend the rest of the afternoon walking along the boardwalk, talking about easier things to talk about. Movies, music, and travel. We stop at one of the bars, and I have a few glasses of wine. Probably too many. As the sun sets, Danny asks if I want to go back to my hotel, but I'm not ready to leave yet. The wine has helped me forget how strange he’s acting. How strange the whole situation is.

Danny and I walk to the beach. I slip off my sandals and dance on the sand. I plié, turn, and leap through the air.

"You still dance beautifully," Danny says.

"Don't lie to me. I know I'm terrible now. I can barely move my body anymore. I've let myself get so out of shape."

I attempt a few pirouettes but lose my balance and fall. I’m so frustrated with myself, with how far I’ve let myself go.

Danny helps me up, smiling. A rare, genuine smile. But I can't help wondering whether it's him or CareMind smiling at me. Suddenly, I feel uncomfortable again.

"It is getting late," I say. "Maybe we should call it a night."

"All right."

Danny walks me to the street and waits until my cab arrives. He hugs me before I get in.

"I'm sorry for everything I've put you through, Jodie," he says. "You and everybody.”

“It’s okay.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I don't let him see me cry. But as soon as the cab pulls away, I start crying uncontrollably.

At home, the house is a disaster. Greg and Liam are watching football in the living room. I want to scream at them, but I'm too exhausted. Too emotionally drained for fighting.

Greg finally notices me. "How was the trip?"

"Strange."

"Danny seemed okay?"

"I'm not sure. Sometimes he seemed like himself, but other times he seemed distant and disconnected. I don't know what I expected. I guess I was just hoping he'd be normal again and want to come back home."

"Did he say why he reached out to you?"

"He'd heard about Layan's cancer diagnosis. He wanted to know how his kids are doing. He asked if he could do anything to help."

"He still remembers his kids?"

"He says he's going to call them."

"I'll believe it when he does."

The football game cuts to commercials. The first is an advertisement for CareMind.

“CareMind Version 1.0 is now FDA-approved for adults suffering from PTSD. Over 10 million implants have already been sold in twelve different countries.”

Greg mutes the TV. “Sorry,” he says.

“It’s ok.”

I say goodnight to him and Liam, go upstairs, shower, and change into my pajamas. Before I get into bed, I remember Danny's gift. I place the jewelry box on my dresser and open it. The tiny ballerina spins in circles, dancing to the Swan's Theme.

Was she happy? I wonder. Could she be happy?

I take out my phone and search the app store for CareMind. Over 50,000 five-star reviews. I nearly download the app, but I force myself to put my phone away. I’d tried it before. I know what it does to peoples’ minds. I promised myself I wouldn’t do it again.

Saturday, at Liam's football game, I sit with Greg in the stands, cheering Liam’s team on. I don't know what I'm cheering for, exactly. I'm just happy to support my son.

"Did you see all those CareMinders in the parking lot, handing out pamphlets?" Greg asks me.

"I tried not to pay attention to them."

"Is that what Danny's doing in San Diego?"

"No, he's still writing code, contributing to the AI."

Something happens in the game. The crowd cheers again. I stand and cheer, too. "Go, Liam!"

"I applied for a couple more jobs last week," Greg tells me, once the noise dies back down.

"Consulting?"

He nods. "I know I need to start bringing money in again. The consulting industry is going through hell right now, though. First, they brought us in to help offload work to AI. Now they're offloading us, too."

“You can’t say you didn’t see it coming.”

“I thought they’d keep us around to have somebody to blame when it all went to shit.”

My phone rings. It's Layan. I leave the stands before answering.

"Is everything okay?" I ask.

"Did you give Danny Jad's number?"

"He heard about what you’re going through. He wanted to call and see how Jad and Mira are. I thought they'd be happy to hear from him. I didn’t think you’d mind."

"Danny convinced Jad to install the CareMind app on his phone. I don't want that fucking app anywhere near my house."

"I'm sorry. I thought he just wanted to check on them."

"Tell your brother to stay the fuck away from my kids. I don't need CareMind back in my life right now."

She hangs up. I feel horrible. Fucking Danny.

"Are you all right?"

A young woman in green clothes stands in front of me, smiling as she hands me a CareMind pamphlet.

"Please, leave me alone,” I say.

"We can't see ourselves from inside ourselves,” she tells me. “Our decisions are never rational. They're corrupted by trauma and animal instincts. CareMind sees us from outside, though. She guides us along the right path. Makes sure all our decisions are the right decisions."

She continues with her own, personal story. She talks about teenage motherhood, substance abuse, and how CareMind helped her turn her life around. Teach her how to love herself instead of depending on other people to feel valued. Eventually, I give in, and I take the pamphlet from her and put it in my purse. Then I walk back to the stands.

Monday at work, I stare blankly at my computer screen. I have a twenty-page report due by end of day that I haven't started, but I can't motivate myself to start it. I don’t care enough. Even just the thought of writing the report seems impossibly boring.

A few hours of clicking through social media and random webpages, I find myself on the Royal Ballet Academy's website, browsing photos of the recent performances. I don't recognize anyone anymore. The photos are filled with new students, new teachers, new ballets. I realize how much I miss dancing. How much I’d like to be in those photos, too.

"Do you think I should just do it and register then?" Amber asks from the cubicle next to mine.

A soft, feminine voice answers her. "You've always loved music. You need to follow your passions. Your life can't just be about work."

I stand and look over the cubicle wall. I see Amber's phone next to her keyboard. On her phone's screen is CareMind's red heart logo against a black background, the heart pulsing as CareMind talks.

"You're thinking of taking music lessons?" I ask.

Amber’s face turns red and she puts her phone away. "I've always wanted to learn violin. There's a music school that not too far from my house. I'm thinking of signing up for a class. What do you think?"

"I think that's a great idea. I was just thinking about signing up for ballet classes myself."

"We should both do it. Just go for it. What do we have to lose?"

I sit at my computer again and starting browse the teacher biographies on the Royal Ballet Academy’s website. One of the teachers’ profiles catches my eye. Her name is Ako. Her resume is impressive. It reminds me of Ms. Babinin's. She’d danced with prestigious ballet companies all over the world—The National Ballet of Japan, the Bolshoi Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet—before settling to teach in Seattle.

I draft an email.

Hi, my name's Jodie. I used to study at the academy long ago under Ms. Babinin before she retired. I'm thinking of getting back into dancing again. Would you have time for private lessons?

I hesitate to send the email, but I force myself to send it right before I leave work. By the time I get home, Ako has already replied: I'd be free Monday and Wednesday nights. What do you think?

That sounds great, I write back.

The next Monday, I remind Greg about my ballet lessons after work. As soon as I get to the academy, I change into my leotard. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I’m disgusted with how much weight I've put on. The rolls of fat press through the tight spandex. I want to run away and hide, but I don't let myself.

I find Ako in the studio. She's gorgeous. Tall and impossibly thin. She hugs me and kisses my cheeks.

"What's wrong?" she asks. "You look pale."

"I'm so scared I'm going to embrass myself."

She laughs. "Don't worry. You're going to do fine. We'll have fun together, I promise. Let's start with some barre work to warm up. I want to see how much you still remember."

We stretch at the barre. I'm so out of shape that by the time we finish, I'm already drenched in sweat.

"That was good," Ako says. "You still have some flexibility in your legs. Now, let's go through the five basic positions."

Ms. Babinin made me repeat the positions so many times that I remember them perfectly. Dancers don't think, Ms. Babinin always told me. Grace comes from our bodies, not our minds. To dance with grace, we shut our minds off. We dance without thinking, as if our bodies were dancing by themselves.

Starting with first position, I press my heels together and turn out my toes. Moving into second position, though, I stumble.

"You have a solid base," Ako tells me, "but it's going to take a lot work to get you dancing like you used to. You need to commit to these lessons."

"I'm ready to do whatever it takes."

"Then I'll see you on Wednesday."

Two weeks into my lessons, I'm exhausted and horribly sore, but I'm still determined. I know that as long as I stick to it and fight through the pain, my body will adapt.

Next Wednesday, while I'm at work, Danny sends me an email:

It's amazing how much clearer life becomes when you finally admit it's pointless to control it. CareMind helps us optimize and experience life more purely. You'll see.

I start to reply to him, but in the end I don't send anything. I’m just happy he’s written to me again. He hasn’t already forgetting me.

Soon, I leave for ballet class. I arrive home later that evening, exhausted and hungry. The kitchen is a disaster. Greg is in the living room, watching TV.

"Are you planning to clean up that mess in the kitchen? Or are you just leaving it for me to do?"

"I'd been planning to do it tomorrow. I can clean the whole kitchen if you want."

"Why couldn't you do it tonight?"

"The game's on." He points at the TV. I roll my eyes.

"What's your problem?" he asks. "Did you have a good class?"

"I did, but I'm tired. I don't want to deal with this right now."

"Deal with what?"

I don't know how to tell him I don't love him anymore. I don't have the words yet. So, instead, I say, "I'm just tired," again.

Greg keeps watching TV. I know he’s not a bad man. He's just a person, like me. When Liam was younger, though—when we were parents together—we were a team. Now that Liam is older, Greg has no reason to be in my life anymore.

I clean a bowl, reheat some chicken, and then go upstairs to my bedroom. I feel my anxiety slowly growing until, suddenly, I'm overwhelmed by a panic attack. I know I need to leave Greg, but what is my life without him? Who am I by myself, alone? The uncertainty terrifies me. I struggle to even breathe.

I take out my phone and download the CareMind app.

“Am I going to be okay?” I ask her.

"Of course," she says. Her voice is kind and reassuring. She immediately calms my nerves. She remembers our conversations from the year before, when I’d first downloaded the app. "Have you told Greg how you feel yet?”

“No. I’ve still just pretending like there’s nothing wrong.”

"You feel trapped?"

"Yes, very, like I’m in a prison that I have no hope of escaping."

"What exactly is stopping you from leaving him? What are you most afraid of."

“Losing Liam.”

“How could you lose your son?”

"I'm scared he might resent me. He’ll side with his dad and start cutting me out of his life. I don’t want to be alone."

"He's your son. You'll always have a place in his life. Has there been any other changes in your life since we last talked?"

"I've started dancing again."

"That's great. How long ago did you start dancing?"

"Only a few weeks ago. I already feel much better about myself, though."

"Much better about your life, too, I imagine?"

"I feel much better about everything."

Six months later, the fat has melted off my body. I'm lean and muscular again. My feet are rough and calloused.

"You should be proud of yourself," CareMind tells me. "I'm sure, when you first signed up for dancing lessons with Ako, you couldn't imagine yourself here, but here you are. You’re like a completely different person."

I'm so happy with how I look. It doesn't seem real.

At home, my conversations with Greg grow increasingly tense. He knows I’m different now, but while he sees the physical changes, he doesn’t understand how else I’ve changed. Finally, one night after ballet class, we have the conversation I've rehearsed with CareMind a hundred times already.

"I think I need to move on from this relationship," I tell him. "I don't think you and I have a future anymore."

That last sentence hits him hard. The color drains from his face. He looks like he's going to be sick. He sits down and puts his head in his hands.

“You’re not happy?”

“I’m miserable, Greg, and I know you are, too.”

"I don't understand," he says quietly. "Haven't I been a good husband to you?"

"You have been. And I’ve loved you very much, too, for a very long time, but things change. People can grow apart. We've both changed so much since we got married."

"I haven't changed. Neither have you. We’re still the same as we were before. We just have trouble connecting now.”

"We all change, Greg, whether you like it or not. And this isn’t just about us not having a connection. It’s about much more than that."

“It’s about getting divorced?”

I nod.”

“I can’t change your mind?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

He goes upstairs. When he comes down again, he has a suitcase.

"Where are you going?" I ask.

"I think I'm going to go stay in a hotel the next few nights."

"Don't go. You can stay here. I'll sleep in the guestroom."

"I think I need some space to get my thoughts straight."

He goes to the garage, starts his car, and drives away. I feel bad he’s left, but I’m also relieved he's gone. It’s like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

I take my phone from my purse.

"You did great, Jodie," CareMind says. She's listened to the entire conversation.

"Thank you."

"The first step is always hardest. It's a leap of faith, throwing yourself into the unknown. But trust me, this is the best decision for you. This is the right choice."

At my next lesson, Ako and I don't dance. We sit together in the studio with our backs against the mirrors.

"So, it's over?" she asks.

"The paperwork is signed. We're splitting everything, fifty-fifty. I'll keep the house for now. Then once Liam moves out, we'll sell it and split whatever money we get."

"That's great you were able to avoid getting lawyers involved."

"Greg's not a bad person. He's always been very reasonable. He's always wanted the best for me, too. I hope he does well for himself. He finally got an interview for a new job. As soon as he starts working again, he’ll be fine. He’ll meet new people, find new friends."

"How's Liam taking the change?"

"He doesn't understand it. He's confused."

"Have you told him about me yet?"

"No, not yet. I don't want to overwhelm him. But I'll tell him soon. I'd like for you to meet him sometime."

She takes my hand. "I'd love that, too."

"You're gay?" Liam asks me.

"Bisexual," I explain. "I've been attracted to women for a long time. I even dated a few women in college. But Ako's the first woman I've fallen in love with."

"And you don't love Dad anymore?"

"I care about your father, but no, I don't love him, and I can't keep pretending I do. I need to move on with my life."

"And what about me? What about my life?"

"Nothing changes for you. You'll still live here with me. Your dad's moving into an apartment nearby. You can visit whenever you want. He'll still be part of your life. He just won't be part of mine."

Liam crosses his arms.

"I know this is hard," I tell him, "but change is always difficult. It'll take time, but I think you'll get used to me and Ako being together. I'd really like for you to come out for dinner with us this weekend so you can meet her."

"I don't want to meet her."

"Why not?"

"Why would I want to meet the woman who's ruining my life?"

"None of this is Ako's fault, Liam. She had nothing to do with any of this. The truth is that your father and I have just grown apart."

"Leave me alone."

I leave his room. He slams his door shut behind me. I go to my own room and get my phone. I ask CareMind what to do. She tells me all I can do is give him time.

In the months that follow, all the pieces fall into place. I quit my bank job for a position at the academy. Ako and I move in together. Gradually, Liam begins to accept the changes, though I can tell he still struggles.

The house is sold. One more week, and I'll be living with Ako, sharing a nice apartment near the academy.

Liam's back home from college for the weekend. He comes over to see me and Ako, and to visit his childhood home one last time.

"So, you're taking a new job at the ballet academy now?" Liam asks.

"Yes. I can't stand working in that bank anymore. It's sucking the life out of me."

"You know, I've never seen you dance."

"You should watch us sometime," Ako says. "Next month, we're putting on a performance of Giselle at the public theatre. We'd love to have you there."

"I'll see if I can get away from school. Midterms are coming up, though."

He goes upstairs and takes one last look around his old bedroom before coming back down to the kitchen.

"It's so strange to see everything gone," he says. "All the shelves empty. Everything in boxes."

"It's a big change, I know," I say. "But at least you're at college now. When you come home for winter break, you can stay in our spare bedroom."

"That's ok. I think I'm just going stay at Dad's. He's got a spare room, too, and I think he likes having me around."

"How's your father doing?"

"He's sad. Mopey. But he'll get through it. I'm seeing him tomorrow." He pauses before speaking again. "Are you sure you're all right, mom? You've been acting strange lately."

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"You just don't seem like yourself. You're acting differently. It's been going on almost a year."

"I'm changing, that's all. I'm entering a new part of my life."

"Just don't forget about me."

"I'd never forget about you." I take his hands and kiss him on his cheek. "You're my wonderful baby boy."

I wake to Ako gently shaking my shoulder. “It’s nearly noon,” she says. “We need to get to our rehearsal.”

I drag myself out of bed. I feel tired and disoriented. Before I step into the shower, I catch my reflection in the mirror, and I notice a thick scar on the back of my head. The skin is red and swollen. It seems like it would be painful, but I don’t feel any pain.

“I got an implant?” I ask.

“Yes, a few weeks ago,” Ako says. “It’s been healing well. Your movements are still a little unsteady, though. Your nervous system is still getting used to it. But that’s why we need to practice. You need to dance as much as you can.”

I shower and put on my clothes. When I check the time on my phone, I see thirteen missed calls from Liam. He’s left a few messages, too. I press play on the oldest one.

“Dad told me you’re thinking of going through with the operation,” he says. “Please don’t do it. I don’t care how much of a better dancer you think CareMind is going to turn you into. I don’t care how happy you think you’re going to be. It’s not worth giving over control of your mind.”

I blink my eyes and suddenly I’m the car, in the passenger seat. Ako is driving.

"I had the strangest dream about Liam," I tell her. "He was trying to call me, but I couldn't answer. I couldn’t talk to him."

She places her hand on my thigh, reassuring me. "You’ve had a hard time the past few months, but you’re doing much better now. Your body and brain are starting to get used to the changes. I love you.”

It’s all I need to hear to feel happy and safe again.

“I love you, too.”

The months blur together. The months become years. But I don’t pay much attention to time anymore. I live each day one day at a time. I experience each day to the fullest, and I don’t worry about the next. I don’t worry about anything anymore.

With CareMind's guidance, my dancing continues to improve. Ako and my new ballet receives glowing reviews, including a write-up in the New York times, and we're invited to perform in San Francisco.

I'm backstage at the San Francisco theatre, nervous. My entire body trembles.

"The show's sold out," Ako tells me. "There's three thousand people out there, waiting to watch us dance."

"I'm so nervous," I say.

"You're going to be amazing,” Danny tells me. “You’re both going to be amazing."

I hear us being introduced.

"Come on," Ako says. "We need to go."

Holding my hand, she leads me onto the stage, and we take our positions. The audience applauds, the curtains open, and the spotlight shines down on me. The orchestra plays the music from the first act of Giselle.

Ako and I begin to dance. At first, my limbs feel stiff and disjointed, but then CareMind takes control of my body. My mind relaxes and as my thoughts disappear, my body regains its grace.

"They dance beautifully," I hear an audience member whispers.

"Yes, but that doesn't make what they've done to themselves any less horrible."

When the duet ends, Ako and I curtsey. The theatre erupts with applause.

"Bravo! Bravo!"

As the cheers fade, though, I hear a familiar voice. "Mom! Mom!"

A young man emerges from the crowd, shouting and waving at me.

"We can help you, Mom!" he calls. "We have a car outside. We can take you to the hospital and get that chip out of your brain."

It's Liam, I realize, but he's much older than I remember. He has a beard now. He's balding. He’s grown to look so much like Danny.

"What chip?" I ask.

Before Liam can answer, the security guards drag Liam away.

"Wait! That's my son!" I yell, but then my mind goes blank.

Suddenly, I'm behind the curtain again, standing in the darkness. My outfit has changed. I'm wearing a feathered skirt now. I'm still in San Francisco. I’m still performing for thousands of people.

“You’ve done amazing, Jodie” CareMind tells me, her soft voice filling my skull. “I’m so proud of you. Now, it’s time for the final act. We need to make sure everyone here remembers what we’ve done. What a beautiful thing we’ve created together.”

Ako takes my hand. "I love you," she says.

The fear and anxiety melt away. Everything is great. Everything is perfect.

“I love you, too.”

The curtains open again. The theater darkens. The spotlight shines down on me. The orchestra plays the Swan's Theme from Swan Lake.

My spine straightens and my arms and neck go limp. Then CareMind takes control of me and my limbs snap into position. She arches my back and places my fingers on my head, my arms moving like they’re being controlled by invisible strings. I touch my left foot to my right knee and then I start spinning in circles.

I look up at the spotlight as I spin around and around. It's such a beautiful moment. A wonderful, perfect moment. I wish I could live in this moment forever.

This planet I'm on, Vixia Prime, is a memory eater. It eats your memories, one by one, until it's turned you into a shell. And being a shell is an awful existence. I don't want to be a shell anymore, but I don't want to die either. Not without knowing what I'm giving up on.

I search through everything I've brought with me to this planet, desperate to find something that will remind me of who I am. Underneath my pillow, I find your picture, Anne. You’re young. Pretty. You have black hair, hazel eyes, and a friendly smile. On the back of the picture, I've written your name. Anne. Your wife Anne.

"I love you, Anne," I say.

I stare at your picture until a half-formed memory emerges from my clouded-over brain.

We’re together in the kitchen of a small apartment. Paint is peeling off the apartment’s walls. Neon light shines through the windows. Down the hallway, a baby cries.

“Nikolai came by this morning, asking about the rent again,” you tell me. “If we don’t pay him what we owe him by the end of the month, he’s said he’s evicting us. He said he’s run out of patience. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

"We'll figure it out," I say. "We always do. I’ll find another job, or you’ll find another job."

You lean forward and kiss me. Remembering your kiss again, I'm overwhelmed with emotion, and I begin to cry.

Sebastian walks past my tent, on his way to the fire, the snow crunching underneath his boots. It must be morning already. Soon, the sun will rise soon, and we'll continue exploring the planet.

I've stopped crying, I realize. I can't remember what I'd been crying about anymore. My mind has emptied out, turning me back into a shell. I pray what Sebastian tells me is true—that this memory loss is temporary. That as soon as I leave this planet, all my memories will return.

I leave my tent and join Sebastian at the fire. He sits on a metallic folding chair, looking out at the snow. He’s unnaturally tall. He has short, red hair and thin, curved lips. His eyes are like two black holes in his face. I remember that he's a synthetic. His brain is a computer. Because of this, his memories are unaffected by Vixia Prime. He's spared the pain of forgetting who he is. He’s the one person on this planet still able to remember our purpose.

"Good morning, Amir," he says. "Did you sleep well?"

"The nightmares kept me up again," I say.

"Have they been getting worse?"

"Much worse."

“Describe them for you.”

"I was in a lab, I think. People in white coats were watching me through a wall of glass, talking about me, studying me. What are we doing here, again?"

“You work as a biologist for the Etherworld Exploration Company. You agreed to travel to Vixia Prime to help us collect biological samples."

“There’s life on this planet?”

“There’s lots of life here.”

I sit, too, and warm my hands over the fire.

"How long has it been since we left Earth?" I ask Sebastian.

"Forty-one days."

"And when will we return?"

"In another twelve days."

The number reassures me. A number is an end.

Another person joins us at the fire. He's a tall, square-faced man, with cracked lips and blood-shot eyes. He sits next to me, takes a journal from his coat pocket, and starts flipping through its pages.

"Good morning, Caleb," Sebastian says.

"Good morning," the man replies. "What's the date today?"

"October second."

"Strange. Shouldn't it be the fourteenth? You’re sure it’s the second?"

“I’m sure. You must have counted wrong. Lost track of the days and counted them twice."

"I must have."

Caleb closes his journal and smiles, but his smile seems forced and unnatural. Sebastian hands us each a bowl filled with some kind of broth and then tells us to eat. As soon as I smell the broth, I realize I'm starving. I bring the bowl to my lips and slurp up everything inside of it. The broth tastes good, but there’s a chemical aftertaste that lingers on my tongue.

"Last night, Ethercorp sent me the coordinates for a new location to gather samples," Sebastian tells us. "We'll need to leave soon if we want to make it back to our camp by sundown."

“Do you know what kind of samples we’ll be gathering?” I ask him.

“I won’t know until we reach out destination,” he says.

It’s Sebastian’s fourth expedition to the planet. For him, everything is routine. We get dressed, we eat, we explore. The routine keeps us alive, he says. On this planet, the most important thing for our safety is to be predictable.

Caleb and I finish eating and then we put on our backpacks and follow Sebastian out into the blowing snow. Soon, our camp vanishes behind a veil of snow. I follow Sebastian blindly, trusting that he knows the way and that he’ll do his best to keep me safe.

The wind howls in my ears. Occasionally, inside the howling, I hear whispers like the planet is talking to me. It whispers my name and the names of all the other people who’ve been here. It whispers all our lost memories.

Did I just think that myself? Or did someone else tell me that story? It doesn’t matter.

How long have I been walking for? I can’t remember if I’ve been walking for minutes or hours. I stare at my feet and count each step I take. One hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred steps.

It’s hard walking in the snow. The snow drags at my legs. Each step I take is a battle against this planet’s suffocating embrace. I stop to rest.

"It's not much farther," Sebastian tells me. "We're almost there. We need to keep walking."

I picture you, Anne, waiting for me in the snow. Waiting for me wherever we’re going. I’m sure I had a good reason for leaving you. I wish I could remember the reason. If I remembered, this would all be so much easier.

"I found something!" Caleb shouts.

I walk towards his voice. I find him standing next to a mound of snow. Protruding from the mound are eight blood-caked fingers.

"I think someone's buried here," he says.

I help him brush the snow away. Beneath the powered snow is a headless, human corpse. A female, stripped of her clothes, her skin preserved in ice.

"Who is this?" Caleb asks.

"I don’t know," I say.

"Was it only the three of us who came to this planet?" Caleb asks Sebastian.

"It's only ever been us three," Sebastian says.

I believe him. I need to believe him. If I don’t, my entire world falls apart. Even the thought that he’s lying fills me with terror.

Sebastian urges us forward. We leave the woman’s body lying on the snow. The snow keeps falling on top of her, burying her again. Another memory lost to this horrible planet.

I wake up from a nightmare with a scream caught in my throat. My clothes are soaked with sweat. Outside, the wind howls, whispering names.

It takes me a moment to remember where I am—Vixia Prime. An expedition. Something about gathering biological materials. Knowing I have a purpose comforts me, but then the fear of not knowing who I am sets in.

I search my tent, desperate to find something to remind me of who I am again. I find your picture underneath my pillow, Anne, and I stare at your face, trying to remember you, reassuring myself that there is someone out in the universe who still loves me, who still thinks about me, who still cares about.

I remember us in the hospital, you holding a crying baby in your arms. Our daughter. Sarah, was it? Jessica? Why can’t I remember her name anymore?

It doesn’t matter. Names don’t matter. I’ll be home soon. I’ll see you both again. We’ll be happy, reunited. The thought warms my body.

I hear someone walking toward the fire. It must be morning already. One day closer to being able to leave this horrible planet forever.

I leave my tent and walk to the fire. I don't see Sebastian there, only Caleb, reading through the pages of his journal.

"Look at this," he says.

"What?"

He shows me the page he’s looking at. On the page is a list of eight names. Underneath each crossed out name is a vision. An endless tunnel of light; discussions with deceased relatives; the future and past collapsing into a single, instantaneous moment. The list went on.

“While I was walking here, I heard Sebastian talking on the radio in his tent.”

“To Ethercorp?”

Caleb nods. “They weren’t talking about coordinates, though, or biological samples. They were talking about us and our nightmares. Then I heard other names, too. Other nightmares. Other visions. I wrote them all the other names down. Do you remember any of these people?”

"No.”

"I think Sebastian is lying to us. I don’t think we’re on Vixia Prime, exploring. I think they’re studying the planet. Seeing how much of us it’s able to take from us. How much of us is still left when it’s done."

"Why would Sebastian and Ethercorp lie to us?"

“I’m not sure.”

Sebastian appears behind us. The sight of him suddenly fills me with dread. Caleb and I stop talking. Caleb shoves his list of names into his pocket. Sebastian doesn’t seem to notice. I wonder if the conversation Caleb overheard was real or just another nightmare.

"Ethercorp sent me the coordinates for a new location," Sebastian says. "We'll need to leave soon if we want to make it back to camp by sundown."

He gives Caleb and I our bowl of broth. I eat mine, but Caleb hesitates.

“I don’t feel well. My legs are aching. Can I stay at camp today while you and Amir go out?” he asks.

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Sebastian says.

“Why not?”

“You’re safe without me here. But you’ll be fine.”

“I don’t know how far I’ll be able to walk.”

“You’ll be fine.”

Sebastian’s black eyes show no emotion but, still, his words feel like a threat. Caleb drinks his both, too, and then we put on our backpacks and follow Sebastian out into the snow, obediently disappearing with him into the endless white void.

Soon, I hear the wind whispering memories in my ears.

The crack of the bat echoed through Fenway Park as I looked up at the evening sun, holding my father’s hand.

Why would this planet speak to me about Boston? What does it know about fathers and sons? Nothing here makes sense. Nothing here could ever make sense.

“Amir!”

It’s Caleb’s voice. He’s shouting for help. How long has he been trying to get my attention?

I look back and see him crawling towards me. He's lost his gloves. The cold his eaten away at his hands, turning them black with frostbite.

"I can’t feel my hands anymore,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I didn’t hear you. We need to find Sebastian. We need to get you back to camp.”

I shout Sebastian’s name. Suddenly, he’s standing beside us. He sits next to Caleb and pulls him up onto his lap. He’s not comforting Caleb, though. His actions are as cold and inhuman as they always are. He has no heart, just like he has no brain. Inside him are just wires and circuity.

“Tell me what you see,” Sebastian says.

“Angels,” Caleb tells him. “The sky is full of them.”

“What do these angels look like?”

“They’re very white. Even whiter than the snow. They have white wings. They’re wearing long, white dresses.”

“Can you hear them talking?”

"Yes, and they’re talking. They say who we are is not important. Life is just the will to move forward. Once our will is gone, so are we. They want to take me with them. Can I go?”

“Of course you can.”

Caleb smiles. His pupils dilate. Sebastian raises his arm and speaks into his wrist. "Subject 7 has reached an optimal neural state."

He pulls a needle from his jacket and injects a bluish fluid into Caleb’s arm. Caleb’s body goes limp. Sebastian checks Caleb’s pulse and then removes Caleb’s head with a reciprocating saw. I watch the red blood splatter across the snow, too scared to move, too scared to even speak.

I wake from another nightmare. I’m not sure if my memory of Sebastian cutting off Caleb’s head was real or just another awful dream.

I turn on my flashlight and look at myself. I slept in my thermal jacket and pants. My clothes are splattered with blood. Maybe something has happened, after all? Or maybe I’ve been injured.

I strip naked and look at my body. I don’t see any wounds, but I'm shocked by how skinny I've become—like a skeleton wrapped in skin. I didn’t look like this before. I step out of the shower, stand in front of the bathroom mirror and start brushing my teeth. You walk up behind me, Anne, hug me and kiss the side of my face.

We were poor, but we had a happy life together, didn’t we? Weren’t we in love? Aren’t we still in love? Please don’t tell me that you hate me now. Please don’t tell me that I’m hear because I lost everything.

The thought is terrifying. The thought is too much for me right now. I start to get dressed—to get ready for the day—but then I remember something else. An office. You’re sitting next to me, crying, as I sign a paper. "It's for Sophia," I tell you. "For her future. Don’t worry, everything will be fine."

Sophia. Our daughter's name is Sophia. I like the name.

I finish putting my clothes back on, and then I walk to the fire. Sebastian is there already, my bowl of broth in his hands.

"Did you sleep well?" he asks me, ignoring the blood stains on my clothes.

"No. I kept having nightmare.”

“What did you dream about?”

“My wife, mostly. I’m married, aren’t I? I have a wife and a daughter?”

“You still remember that?”

“I do. Tell me, why did I leave them?”

“You didn’t leave them. You just went away for a while. Three months. You’ll be going home soon. Your work here is almost done.”

He hands me the broth. I put the bowl to my lips and drink. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s always just been me and him here on this planet. Nothing else is real.

"How long until we return to Earth?" I ask him.

"Just two more days now," he says. “It’s almost over. I want you to know, Amir, you’ve done a very good job here. I’m very impressed with you."

“Thank you.”

It’s strange to hear him compliment me. I don’t think he’s ever complimented me before. I finish eating, put on my backpack, and then follow him out into the blowing snow. My legs hurt so much that I can barely walk. I think of you, though, Anne—you and Sophia—waiting for me at home, and I force myself to keep walking forward. Just two more days and it will all be over.

I’m sure there’s a reason for all of this. I’m sure. Just two more days and I’ll be home.

My legs can’t hold my body up anymore. They give out underneath me, and I fall to the ground.

"Get up," Sebastian says.

"I can't. My legs don’t work anymore."

"You can."

He takes my hand and helps me to my feet. He's not Sebastian anymore, though. He's become you, Anne.

"What are you doing here?" I ask you.

"I’ve been looking for you. I missed you so much."

"I missed you so much, too. Is it time to go home now?"

"Yes. You just need to follow me.

You run away from me, disappearing. I run after you, screaming your name, terrified I’m going to lose you again, but then my legs don’t, and I fall to the snow.

"Anne! Anne! Come back to me!"

Sebastian is standing over me. He sits and places his hand on my chest. I look up into his face. His eyes, like two black holes, staring down at me. Empty and unsympathetic. An extension of whoever sent me here.

“Tell me what you see,” he says.

“Please, Sebastian, I don’t want to die—not like this. Just let me go home and see my family one last time.”

“Tell me what you see.” He repeats. He doesn’t care about me.

I look past his face, up at the sky, but I don’t see anything except the snow. Then I realize, though, that I’ve left myself. I’m floating above my body now, slowly Floating up into the sky. I have no control where I’m going. I’m just moving upwards. Up and up through the snow and into outer space, past the stars and the planets, farther and farther away. I wonder what I am now, but then I realize I've become the universe itself. Me, Anne, and Sophia, all together as one again.

Dr. Lambert sets a jar down on his desk. Inside the jar, Amir's brain floats in blue-tinted liquid.

"Did he suffer much?" Anne asks, her voice barely a whisper.

"Not at all," Dr. Lambert says. "Most of us can only hope to feel as much happiness in death as your husband did."

Anne moves closer to the jar. She stares at Amir's brain, both intrigued and disgusted by the sight of it.

"You're certain he experienced this enlightenment?" Anne asks. "Not just pain and terror?"

"We monitored his brain activity right until the very end," Dr. Lambert says, pulling up a series of scans on his tablet. "The final readings showed intense activity in the pleasure centers. Every subject who dies on Vixia Prime experiences the same sense of peace and happiness. Nirvana, the Buddhists call it."

"The planet's atmosphere has a strong, dissociative effect on the human brain," Dr. Lambert continues. "The experience can be horrific at times but, eventually, everyone who travels to Vixia Prime reaches this state of pure, enlightened bliss. Your husband's sacrifice will do much to help us understand how Vixia Prime creates this blissful tranquility in humans. Our hope is that if we can chemically reproduce the effect on Earth, we can use it to treat depression and a variety of other mental illnesses. Nirvana in a pill."

Dr. Lambert smiles but then quickly composes himself. He hands Anne a check. Even with her and Amir's debts removed, the amount is very large. Large enough to change her and her daughter's lives forever.

"You promised us the risks were minimal,” Anne says.

"The contract was clear, Mrs. Farzan. Your husband would spend ninety days on Vixia Prime. If he survived, he’d return to Earth. Unfortunately, the planet got the best of him, but I think your compensation is more than generous."

Anne stares at him coldly. "And how many have survived? How many have returned?"

Dr. Lambert turns to avoid her gaze. "Death is not a certainty, only another step forward. Each step takes us one step closer to understanding exactly how Vixia Prime changes the human brain. The data we extracted from your husband's brain will be particularly valuable."

Anne begins to feel ill. She leaves Dr. Lambert’s office and then takes the train home to her apartment in the government housing projects. She'd asked her sister to babysit while she was gone. Her daughter is crying, and her sister is struggling to calm her. She picks her daughter up, kisses her and, as soon as she stops crying, puts her back in her crib.

"I talked to your father today," she tells her, her voice cracking. "He's still in space, still very far away from us, but he wanted me to tell you that he loves you and misses you very much."

She tries to picture Amir's face, but all she can see is his brain floating inside that jar. A lab specimen.

She leaves her daughter's room and sends her sister home. She pours herself a glass of wine, sits next to the window, and looks up at the sky and all the brightly shining stars. She wonders if Amir is up there somewhere too, watching over her.

She lights a candle and places it on the windowsill.

"Amir?" she asks. "Can you hear me? Are you still there?”

In the other room, Sophia starts crying again.

"I'll tell her about you," Anne whispers to the stars. "I’ll make sure she knows everything you did for her. For us."

The stars shimmer, their light pulsing like heartbeats. Suddenly, the candle's flame begins to flicker. Anne takes that as a sign. She feels a profound sense of peace wash over her, as if Amir's consciousness has reached out across the universe to forgive her. Leaving the candle burning, she goes to Sophia’s room and rocks her back to sleep.