Subsidence

We thank you for your service.

Their vacuous words sputter like flares over the dark sea of his mind.

Given your seniority and notable tenure with the company, we are pleased to offer you a premium buyout package comparable to Tier-S GovUBI with the added benefit of a lifelong discount for Augur Corporation services and subscriptions.

Alvaro doesn’t need his glasses to recall the precise phrasing of the notification. He sets them down on his nightstand atop the charger plate with that “ethical mineral sourcing” tag he never bothered to peel off.

As you may already be aware, current Augur employees benefit from access to our full suite of counselor extensions. Should you require talk therapy or other mental health services, please install and activate the extension suite prior to your contract termination date of October 15.

Restless, Alvaro paces the length of his apartment, a modest one-bedroom in one of the 3D-printed modular high-rises that now loom over Kensington. Alvaro steps out onto his balcony into the autumn air, marveling at the glitter of a revitalized Philadelphia that his younger self might have doubted was ever possible. The once-dilapidated SEPTA railways are plastichrome-sleek, maintained by a fleet of ballooning ASTRAL-C class “cleaner” drones that purge graffiti from the walls and trash from the floors before they can pile up. His childhood neighborhood of Kensington, a district long occupied by the city’s most impoverished, has been refashioned into a vibrant mecca for the country’s growing class of UBI recipients, where former fentanyl dens have been converted into urban railway gardens to offer “community-grown” produce to residents. Part of him recoils at the sight of these changes, noting the new hipsterified “Croissant Factory” in place of the humble panadería his mother used to run, where she served crispy quesitos to homesick Boricuas in greasy paper bags.

This is not your inheritance. When I die, I don’t want you taking this over, you hear me?

Alvaro was a teenager when his mother told him her wishes for his future. As punishment for skipping class, she made him work in the bakery with her that weekend, knowing how much he would rather be gaming on the new Windows 95 PC she had bought him for Christmas.

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I not wanting you to be like me, working all day with your body, having pain in your bones at night. You can have a better life—you just have to put that big cabeza of yours to use.

He laughed at the memory, the charred smell of the Bustelo coffee they served in disintegrating Styrofoam cups reminding him of the sacrifices she made to give him a good life. Papi had been in and out of the picture, bouncing between Puerto Rico and Philly, lapsing and relapsing until the substances he used as a balm for his pain brought him to a final deliverance. In the end, Alvaro did as his mother wished, turning his nerdy computer hobby into a profession straight out of high school. Ironically, this choice to walk the path of IT had not spared his joints from aching, because IT work is more than just keystrokes at a console.  

Alvaro, you have a message from TRAINEE. Should I read it for you?

“Sure Serafina,” he says to his ever-listening Augur assistant, the successor to a clunky lineage of Siris, Cortanas, ChatGPTs, and other feminine-coded personalities.

TRAINEE says—Serafina starts and then pauses, as if she needs to take a breath before intoning upward to perfectly match the cadence and pitch of the speaker she is ventriloquizing—“Sorry to bother you off-shift, but I was hoping for some advice. You free tonight? It’s kind of urgent.”

Alvaro exhales into a sigh, leading Serafina to ask, Should I ignore the message for now? You sound frustrated.

“Frustrated,” Alvaro repeats to himself before bursting into almost hysterical laughter, the kind where you end up snorting.

Are you alright, Alvaro?

“I just got fired, what do you think, Serafina?” he growls, regretting naming the assistant after his mother. He remembers when the bot asked him if he wanted her to appear as his mother in extended environments. “Hell no” was his decisive response. His mother would have thought of such technological deepfakery as some unnatural devilry. Part of him agrees, but another part of him admits a generative replica of her might comfort him now and then, even if it wouldn’t purge the coronavirus that claimed her life.

I think meeting TRAINEE would be a good idea, seems like you could use the diversion.

“I think …” Alvaro huffs into a feigned serenity. “You’re right. Tell TRAINEE to meet me at O’Reilly’s in Haymarket.”

Alvaro retrieves his glasses from the charger just as TRAINEE replies, a string of semitransparent text overlaid in the upper right corner of his lenses. That awful dive bar?

Alvaro twitches his fingers, activating the gestural keyboard, typing up his reply rather than speaking it aloud. “Does your royal highness prefer somewhere else?”

There is a long pause before she chimes, No, O’Reilly’s is just the vibe I need tonight.

From Jefferson station, Alvaro wades through a polychromatic panoply of competing extensions. Swatches of watercolors bleed into advertisements superimposed on his vision, framed by diaphanous squares, lines, and shapes that contextualize his environment with dizzying depth and clarity. Product pop-outs, orderable with the slightest tilt of the head or verbal cue, invade his field of view, even as another message from TRAINEE comes in: Just arrived. With a simple gesture, he toggles down his extension emitter, reducing his layer field to “minimalist” mode. In that instant, a cartoonish Ronald McDonald perched above the restaurant’s golden arches dissolves into a pixelated smoke of red and maize-gold.

Without so many augments and layer enhancers, the world is less colorful. The familiar ruggedness of his city returns, bringing him comfort. He turns to enter the alley where O’Reilly’s is nestled between the brick walls of old buildings, when a young man with dreadlocks nearly crashes into him, his eyes flashing momentarily with alarm, before retreating once again into whatever world his lenses are conjuring. Alvaro wonders how he must appear to the boy. Was he a knight in shining armor, striding triumphantly to a heroes’ tavern in some fantasy universe? Or maybe something more frightening, a many-limbed science fictional alien shambling about in search of unsuspecting humans duped into buying whatever extensions are trending on the marketplace?

O’Reilly’s is as it should be. It reeks of spilt beer and cigarettes and stale frying oil. A gentle crystalline square in his lens field frames a waif of a young woman sitting at the edge of a bar, a comically gigantic stein of Guinness held captive in her tiny hands. TRAINEE. Also known as Liam Li.

“What a wonderful place,” Liam says, eyeing the dart board, which looks like it hasn’t been used in years, the holes plastered with dust.

“I have high standards,” Alvaro says, hopping onto the stool next to her, grimacing as something cracks in his back. “Hey, I’ll have the same!” He waves to the bartender, who frowns at the man who insists on ordering verbally rather than just using the extension overlay. “Please.”

“So …”

“How’s Assata?”

“She’s good—working on a new art installation, which means the apartment is in shambles. Something about ceramic tiles made from electronic waste.”

“Spouses.”

Liam raises her glass. “Spouses.”

“Tried that once, didn’t last a year,” Alvaro says between gulps. “I think mami scared her off.”

At this Liam bursts into laughter, “Well, Asian moms are not for the faint-hearted. Fortunately for me Assata is tough as her e-waste bricks.… Thanks for coming.”

A Guinness appears in front of Alvaro, black malt capped with tan foam. He takes a longer than casual gulp from the perspiring glass before replying, “Had nothing better to do.”

Liam sets down her glass, running her fingers through the spiky mullet she is sporting, a trend among the youth that reminds Alvaro of kitschy films from the 1970s. Alvaro knows her well enough to know this little tick as a sign of nervousness, but before he gets to ask what is causing it, she strikes first. “What’s wrong?”

Alvaro takes another gulp. “Nothing.”

Liam lifts her eyebrow, and her piercing there glints preternaturally like a starfield. He wonders what extension it is coded with. “Doesn’t look like ‘nothing.’ You might as well be chugging that thing down.”

“You first,” Alvaro says, suppressing a belch. “I don’t want to spoil the mood.”

Liam sighs, looking away as if in shame. “Augur made me an offer.” 

Now it is Alvaro who frowns. “If they’re promoting you to TECH-2 already, then they haven’t told me.” 

“No,” Liam bites her lip, her polychromatic fingernails clutching the sill of the bar. “A buyout with a UBI-equivalent severance package.” 

Alvaro stares blankly at his glass. This is when he decides to order two shots of Brugal, using the extension interface so as not to upset the already disgruntled barkeep.

Liam eyes the shots suspiciously, before puzzling out the query. “You too, huh?”

Their glasses clink as they take the shot. That’s when the food arrives, two bacon cheeseburgers, “labgrown” because he can’t afford the real thing and it’s better for the planet and blah-blah animal rights. “Not exactly.”

One bite into the greasy burger, Liam’s tone is almost gleeful at having figured out the mystery of his pissed-off mood. “They’re making you retire, aren’t they?”

Alvaro nods, too engrossed in the overly seasoned meat to speak aloud.

“But they can’t do that. You’re only 60 … something.”

“Fifty-eight!” Alvaro snarls, stroking the graying twists of his hair as if to certify his youth.

Liam retreats into her beer and french fries like a child caught stealing from a cookie jar. “When?”

“They said I have to finish training you first, so a month or so,” Alvaro says, cracking his neck. “But what is the point if they’re already trying to lay you off?”

Liam’s gaze shifts around the room, settling on the anachronism in the corner. An old LCD screen with retro-style scrolling news feeds: the latest civilian casualty from the “mineral war” raging in the Congo; Secretary of State Agnihotri announcing the closure of the American embassy in Beijing; the US Senate voting on an expanded universal basic income package that is expected to pass. She points to the screen. “They’re really going through with it then?”

“They are … and here I was thinking you and I were safe,” Alvaro sets down his beer, musing about the changes that have brought them to this point. The onslaught that was artificial intelligence has restructured the world economy, with a boom and then a bust that decimated entire sectors. His employer, Augur, was smart enough to invest in generative reality tech and wearables, making use of the data centers and computing power developed for the AI revolution that only partially arrived. The result was a sweeping success that mirrored the rise of social media in the Web 2.0 era of the late 2000s. Alvaro never worried about being replaced because even with the increasing entrenchment of automation, computers needed caring for. His time as an “essential worker” during the COVID-19 pandemic reassured him that he picked an AI-proof profession. He appears to have been wrong.

The barkeep, a grizzled, burly man with a red beard, squints at the television when the monthly tally of unemployment statistics appear in red font. “When are the robots coming? What do you think? Should they replace me with a robot? Would a robot get a better tip? Or maybe I should dress up as a robot?”

He starts to break into a clumsy robot dance. Approvingly, an inebriated youth nearby raises his glass with too much enthusiasm, dousing the floor with half a liter of something cheap and amber-colored. While the kid’s friends giggle, the barkeep flicks his wrist, summoning a cleaner to soak up the mess and apply a soapy sheen of what smells like Alvaro’s mother’s Fabuloso detergent in its wake.

Alvaro shuffles in his chair, embarking on that eternal struggle to find a comfortable position while seated and being over 50. “So, are you going to accept the offer?

Liam is staring at the drone cleaner, as if the little Roomba-esque automaton will soon replace her.

That’s when his glasses go dark and the world takes on that familiar dull hue of normalcy. No augments. No layers but the unvarnished real. He should have let his glasses charge for longer.

“What the …” Liam says, her face contorting with alarm. “I think I need to reset my glasses. Everything just …”

Alvaro notices the others around him freezing, panicking, or fiddling with their rigs, trying to understand what is going on. They step outside, wondering if somehow the building with its hidden caches of asbestos and other abominable pollutants is somehow blocking the wireless signals.

Amid a cold burst of wind, a message flickers on their feeds.

Server unavailable.

Then the city plunges into darkness.

“Here’s what we know,” booms the voice of Cyrus Clark, VP of operations, as he gesticulates theatrically in the conference room. Gray stubble pricks out from the sweep of his typically clean-shaven jaw as he speaks through bloodshot eyes. “This was not an isolated incident. Downtime struck in 12 of our data centers in the greater New York metro area. There was also a power grid failure … and the facilities in question had more than sufficient redundant power with batteries and diesel generators, but they still went down. We need to know how and why this happened, and if it could happen again.”

Alvaro takes another sip of the coffee that at this point is doing nothing to keep him awake. His slurp is so audible in the tense, silent room that heads turn in his direction as if he has something to say.

Cyrus glares at Alvaro and the others, seeking blame. “Well, any theories?”

“What is the postmortem from diagnostics?” someone asks in the back. “What caused the downtime?”

Cyrus almost laughs at the question. “If I knew the answer to that I wouldn’t have called you all here to an in-person meeting. The result was inconclusive. No anomalies with the load optimization algorithms. No detected bugs in any of the environmental management consoles.”

Cyrus displays the results of the feed on the screen layered over the tabletop.

Alvaro speaks through a sigh. “And have you sent someone to do a walk-through, inspect the equipment?”

At this Cyrus recoils, as if he has been punched in the throat. “Of course. Diagnostics sent drones to comb through the entire facility, they found nothing.”

Alvaro cracks his knuckles, causing Liam to smirk. “Maybe they don’t know what to look for.”

“And you do?” Cyrus replies, rolling his eyes as he does it.

“Possibly,” Alvaro says, noting how everyone in the room is staring at him. “If I were you, I would send some techs to do manual walk-throughs. Have them check every rack and cable and plenum duct. Leave no floor tile unturned. There has to be more that we’re not seeing.”

“Our resources are limited, drones are more efficient,” Cyrus says, the blue flecks of his eyes narrowing. “But you can spend all night walking through our King of Prussia data center if you think that is a good use of your time.”

“I do,” Alvaro replies, before nodding to Liam, who is realizing rather suddenly that she will be coming along.

“Unless there are any other bright ideas,” Cyrus continues, his pale face flush red with frustration, “there’s someone I need to introduce to you. This is—”

The suited woman beside him, who until now has seemed almost invisible, interrupts Cyrus with little ceremony. “I’m Special Agent Johnson with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

At this the room falls even more silent. No slurps of coffee. No clearing of throats. The woman seems to savor this, the effect of her authority settling over the room. And this is when Alvaro notices her for the first time, the dark wells of her eyes lined with crow’s feet, the gray cloud of her hair. This is a woman forged in the crucible of Philadelphia’s poverty. Her accent marks her as a local like him.

“The bureau treats outages on the scale of those that took place yesterday as matters of national security. I will not rule out the possibility that this incident was an act of sabotage carried out on our infrastructure at the direction of domestic terrorists or … foreign actors.” Her eyes land on Liam as she says the word foreign. “We expect your full cooperation with this investigation and trust that you will uphold the strictest standard of confidentiality as we proceed.”

Special Agent Johnson dismissively waves her hand at Cyrus, restoring his permission to speak. Sweat sparkles visibly along his receded hairline. “We’ll meet again in 24 hours. I want everyone working on a detailed postmortem. We’re on emergency shifts until further notice. And I expect you to make yourself available to speak with Agent Johnson should she have questions for you.”

The room is still frozen until Cyrus bellows, “Get moving!”

As everyone shuffles out of the room, Alvaro hears Cyrus addressing him by his surname. “Guiterrez, can you wait up a minute?”

Liam lingers for a moment until realizing she is not invited to “wait up,” giving Alvaro a nod on the way out. Special Agent Johnson shuts the door behind them.

“What?” Alvaro says, not hiding his annoyance. In his years working for Augur, he has survived many executives like Cyrus, frail egos who seldom last as long as the floor technicians they routinely berate and demean, with very little clue as to how the facility actually works. In the older days of data center management, it was not uncommon for “suits” like Cyrus to have paid their dues in the rack trenches, untangling cables, lifting 4U servers, resolving support tickets, and other techie heroics. Today, however, executives seldom have the faintest clue as to how the data center really runs, relying instead on their AI “assistants” to translate the technical to what matters most to them: the bottom line.

“I’ll allow your request,” Cyrus says, his tone softening. There is something strange about his feigned kindness, an artificial sweetness lacing his words. “It’s a good proposition. And a worthwhile use of time. Especially given your wealth of experience.”

Alvaro frowns, and he can hear the ghost of his mother’s voice scolding him for showing his emotions in front of authority figures to whom he should show respect. “And?”

Special Agent Johnson approaches, her smooth face hued violet-brown by the trickle of dusk filtering into the conference room. “Your trainee, Miss Li. I understand you two occasionally meet outside of work.”

Alvaro crosses his arms, repulsed by this line of questioning. “We do. She’s something like a daughter to me.”

The woman’s face creases into something steely and ferocious, like a predator baring its fangs to strike. “Has she said anything … unusual to you lately?”

Alvaro shrugs. “No. She’s a class act. Doesn’t even bitch about work like a normal person.”

Johnson studies him, likely searching his countenance for any sign of betrayal or dissemblance. He wonders if she usually uses her to lenses assist with that, algorithmic polygraphs working in the background as she interviews her victims. “So you’ve observed nothing suspicious about her behavior?”

“Seriously?” Alvaro blurts out, suppressing the urge to roll his eyes. Cyrus is stiff as a statue, offering him no support. “She’s a suspect … because of her last name?”

The woman waves her finger in the air. “Everyone is a suspect.”

“Even this old brute?” Alvaro thumps his hand on his chest.

“The incident occurred just four hours after you were notified about your severance,” Johnson observes.

Alvaro glares at her with incredulity, noting Cyrus’s stunning submission. “Are we done here? I have work to do. Unless I’m fired, again.”

“Alvaro,” Cyrus finally speaks. “Don’t—”

“You may go,” Johnson says, inclining her head toward the door, “but only because I want someone with eyes on Li at all times. Anything out of the ordinary. Anything at all. Note it down. Report back.”

“I don’t work for you,” Alvaro says, eyeing Cyrus.

“No, you don’t,” Johnson says, venom lacing her words, rippling over the contours of her weathered face. “But I can bring you into custody right now if you like. You have a motive to get retribution against an employer that scorned you. You have the technical know-how and experience to credibly orchestrate something like this. That’s all a judge needs to throw you into a cell for the duration of this investigation.”

Cyrus coughs to find his voice. “Hey, just do what they say, okay, no need to make a bad situation worse.”

“She’s a good kid,” Alvaro says assertively. “You’re grasping for straws. She’s Chinese, so what?”

Johnson steps closer to Alvaro, and he can smell her perfume, something between fermented wood and roses. “You’re in denial, like everyone else.”

“About what?”

“We are under siege, Guiterrez,” Johnson says, scanning the room for signs of the enemy. “Relations between Beijing and Washington are on the brink of total collapse. What has been cold until now is heating up at a rapid clip. Every day there are more drone sightings and data breaches. They are probing our infrastructure for cracks and leaks, looking for the weakest links in the nodes and chains that tie everything together. You haven’t the slightest clue about what we are up against. None of us do.”

Alvaro shakes his head in disgust. He’s heard this talk before on the feeds. Fearmongering. Scapegoating. The same rhetoric used against people with an “ez” in their last name being used now against anyone with ties to China—or for those who can’t find China on a map, anyone from anywhere east of India.

Johnson opens the door for him. “Let’s hope yesterday wasn’t the opening salvo.”

Alvaro steps into the hall without honoring her paranoia with a reply.

So much of the world has changed since Alvaro was a kid, but King of Prussia is the same clusterfuck it has always been—only the mall, like him, has grown wider. At its edge lies its data center, which would appear to anyone on the street as a nondescript warehouse. The only tells are the lack of windows and the fleet of air chiller units on its squared roof. Liam uses drive-assist to park their company car in the visitor lot. Then they wait for the shuttle that will bring them into the concrete-walled perimeter of the facility.

Liam waves it down as if it can’t see them and needs to be reminded they need a lift inside. “I still don’t know why we can’t just park in the main lot, we have badges.”

Alvaro sizes her up as a threat: a 4’11” stringy thing, light on muscle but heavy on personality. “Yeah, and for all they know your car is a bomb or an EMP.”

“Fair point,” she mutters as they hop inside the self-driving shuttle. “Especially with that FBI person sniffing about.”

Alvaro feels Liam searching his face for any clue or hint about what was discussed. “Hey, is everything alright? I mean, Cyrus, he seemed …”

“No,” Alvaro admits. “That’s why we’re here. To find out why.”

There is only silence as the shuttle brings them to the lobby. They flash their badges at the clerk and place their belongings into magnetized bins so that they can step through the metal detectors. A final scan of their faces permits them access into one of many transparent vestibules with doors that automatically lock on either side. These “man-traps” are one of many deterrents for would-be saboteurs, not to mention the constant surveillance and the robotic dog sentinels with enough strength to pin down a sumo wrestler.

They disembark from an elevator that takes them down into the server rooms, carefully pressing their shoes on a sticky mat before proceeding. Dust is another unwelcome infiltrator in this temple of electronics. Alvaro points to the glittering steel racks of servers, arrayed in a dizzyingly uniform fashion, like stacks upon stacks of library books. Only the subtle labels on the floor with combinations of numbers and letters give them any indication of where they are in the windowless labyrinth. This, Alvaro remembers, is yet another failsafe, an architectural feature that doubles as a kind of fortification so that only those supremely familiar with the facility’s layout can efficiently traverse its corridors, should they attempt a hasty exit.

Fighting to be heard over the roar of ventilation equipment, Alvaro nearly shouts at Liam. “So the report said that C3 through C7 are the problem areas. Let’s find out what happened, shall we?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Liam says, slipping on her protective headphones per her training, while Alvaro proceeds with ears bared for the fans to finish his gradual deafening. Role modeling is sometimes about showing someone what not to do, he tells himself.

A canid drone scuttles about the rack, fiddling with a bundle of brightly hued network cables using its mandibular appendages. Alvaro mutters, “Excuse me,” to the inanimate beast as he steps past it, inspecting the racks adjacent to it, one of many nodes of high density electronics, where neural processing units, the successors to GPUs, are arrayed in stacks of iridescent chrome, a sign of the corrosion-resistant desiccant coating that guards the equipment from mold, rust, and other sieges of an atmospheric variety.

Together they inspect the units, one by one, searching for signs of anything unusual. On the surface they appear as they should. That is when Alvaro starts sniffing the server’s faceplate.

Liam starts chuckling. “What are you doing?”

Alvaro continues to sniff, pacing the length of the rack, comparing, measuring like a connoisseur might compare the bouquet of various blends of wine. “What do you think?”

Liam folds her arms. “Are you part bloodhound? Are you trying to sniff out the saboteur’s scent?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Alvaro says. “What does it smell like to you?”

Liam starts sniffing, and she smiles as she does it, probably embarrassed. “If this is some kind of hazing …”

Alvaro raises an eyebrow. “Tell me.”

“Nothing—” Liam starts, then sniffing again, raises a doubt. “Maybe a little like plastic. Burnt plastic. Is that normal?”

“No.” Alvaro shakes his head, and in an instant, he has his screwdriver out, and Liam follows suit. They remove the screws holding up the faceplate of the 4U NPU unit. Inside they find something they are not expecting.

“That doesn’t look right,” Liam gasps. “It looks …”

“Melted,” Alvaro says.

Liam continues to pry around the server’s innards, noting more signs of deformity where the plastic warped with heat. “How is that possible? The sensor logs reported no cooling failures, just unexpected shutdowns.”

“As you know, the onboard temperature sensors on these units automatically trigger a shutdown when the temperatures exceed the operating threshold,” Alvaro says in the voice of an instructor. “So Liam. Any theories? What happened to her?”

Liam looked up at her instructor and then back to the exposed server. “She overheated, but recorded that she didn’t … which shouldn’t be possible unless those temperature logs were overwritten with inaccurate ones.”

Alvaro removes Liam’s headphones. “Thermal outages masquerading as network failures. How did this happen?”

Liam’s face darkens. “Sabotage. Shit. That FBI agent, maybe she’s right.”

Alvaro stiffens, not entertaining her theory just yet. “Possibly. For now, the question is not why but how.”

Liam’s gaze shifts to the quadrupedal drone, which is still gingerly “seeding” network cables into their sockets. “The only protocols capable of overwriting environmental data are the facility AIs. Last week, there was that performance optimization update for users, maybe something changed?”

Alvaro’s lips crease into a smile. “And how might we verify this?”

Liam’s eyes brighten with excitement. “The Cage!”

Then it is Alvaro chasing after Liam like a mother pursuing her overly zealous and energetic young as they make their way to the Cage. The exterior is still securitized in the old way, with a padlock and a single card-reader for entry. Alvaro brandishes the key that dangles from his neck like a crucifix to grant them access. Inside, the test environment awaits them. An anachronistic setup that includes a raised floor and a chilled plenum of pressurized air beneath it. Perforated floor tiles facing racks of servers with the exhaust heat emitted into containerized glass gables that resemble those found in greenhouses. For Alvaro it’s nostalgic, reminding him of his days as a young trainee, crawling around underfloor plenums like this one, prying open floor tiles with a suction cup tool to adjust the airflow, running back and forth with cables spooled around his shoulders like someone who gets casual about having a pet boa coiled around them.

“We have to reproduce the problem,” Liam insists, adjusting the environmental controls using the old tablet to interface with the test environment. “We’ll apply the optimization update to these racks and run the others on the previous build as a control.”

“A sound strategy,” Alvaro approves. “Once it installs, you need to instruct the CPUs to simulate some kind of high-performance compute—rendering activities, anything on the scale of generative reality. Let it cycle for a few hours.”

“On it,” Liam murmurs into the tablet.

“Until then, let’s grab a bite to eat.”

“You read my mind.”

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In the break room, Alvaro and Liam eat cheap noodles. “Just like your mother’s home-cooking, right?”

Liam stares into the brownish liquid as if searching for something in the oily bubbles forming on the surface. “She wouldn’t feed this to chickens.”

Alvaro bursts into laughter. “That’s how I feel about that hipster restaurant in Passyunk with the plantains. They charge you an arm and a leg for something that my mother could make 10 times better blindfolded.”

Liam slurps up her noodles with her eyes closed. Is she imagining her mother’s broth? “What was she like?”

“My mother?”

“Yeah.”

“A pain in the ass.”

At this they both nearly spit out broth. “I can relate to that. Do you miss her?”

“No,” Alvaro lies, spooling noodles around his chopsticks like yarn. “Yes.”

“I can relate to that.”

Alvaro finishes slurping before adding, “She always had these sayings, you know. A person who tries to bring in all the groceries in one trip will end up breaking stuff for their laziness. The person who is ambitious who steps over others to reach for the stars will be humbled when the sky comes crashing down upon them.”

At this Liam raises an eyebrow playfully. “Sounds like Cyrus.”

Another chuckle between them gives way to a long silence.

“I don’t think there’s much more I can teach you,” Alvaro says, setting down his chopsticks, making sure not to cross them. He had learned from Liam that doing so might result in grave misfortune or his death. “You have a pretty good handle on things.”

“Clearly I have to work on my nose,” Liam replies, pinching her nostrils. “When we first started, you said …” she clears her throat, deepening her voice in imitation of her tutor, “We are the eyes and ears of the data center.”

“I suppose I should have added nose to that list of sensory organs, but at least you got the hearing and seeing part down. And most important of all, you didn’t pick up my bad habits.”

“Like not wearing protective headphones.”

“Yeah.”

“Like not wearing safety gloves when handling metal sharp enough to cut you.”

“Yeah.”

“Like cursing the ancestors when a blanking panel pinches your finger?”

“Yeah, that, and the whole, you know, being, less … crass to the equipment.”

Liam sets down her bowl. “I told you I don’t mind referring to them as ladies. I think it’s cute.”

Alvaro chuckles. “Well, the person who trained me used much more … colorful … language to describe your… ‘ladies.’”

“Blah-blah-blah tech is still a man’s world.” Liam throws back her hair performatively. “You know I don’t give a shit.”

“I know,” Alvaro says, admiring how far his pupil has come. Her resilience in weathering a profession that is especially unwelcoming for a woman. While he cannot imagine her as anything but true, the faintest possibility that there is some other motive, or something hidden about her corrupts his thoughts. “Earlier today, at HQ …”

Liam freezes, and he can see that she has been waiting for this, for him to reveal what was spoken to him in confidence. But the moment is interrupted. The tablet starts flashing to indicate an alarm.

“Temperature spike!” Liam bolts for the door.

Back in the stuffy conference room, Alvaro and Liam are seated beside each other when Cyrus and Johnson arrive, 20 minutes late. The lick of hair cresting the VP’s head has been resculpted with hair gel, but his face looks haggard, a wreck of worry. Johnson, on the other hand, is as crisp as ever, her suit still perfectly pressed and her face smooth and perky despite her age.

“Sorry we’re late,” Cyrus says, opening his thermos and drinking deeply of what Alvaro imagines is a mixture of booze and coffee.

Johnson turns to him with a scowl on her face, as if apologizing is unwarranted or a breach of protocol.

“We know why the downtime is happening!” Liam blurts out.

The pair of suits turn to Alvaro as if only he can certify what she has discovered. “We reproduced the episode in the test environment.”

“Tell us.” Cyrus starts picking at his cuff, one of his many nervous ticks.

Alvaro nods to Liam to continue the briefing. “Last week you implemented an Infrastructure Intelligence update. On the user side, it’s given performance boosts and higher bandwidth capability. On our end, that means shifting cooling and power assets strategically to get more compute in real-time. Optimization.”

Cyrus stretches his arms in feigned boredom. “I know. I drafted the plan with the engineers.”

Alvaro cuts in, his face a contented smirk. “But what your engineers didn’t anticipate is that their AI has taken extraordinary measures to supply your users with more compute.”

Johnson, the least technically minded in the room, leans forward with interest. “Define … extraordinary.”

Liam stands up, kicks on the display on the table for them to see. “We put in some analog sensors as an experiment. Off-network. These are the temperature readings. Way over the safety threshold—and that spike there, that’s when the automatic shutdown is triggered.” With a wave of her hand, she shows them the AI’s environmental sensor readout, a nearly flat line. “The AI is lying. It wants more performance and recognizes that it’s too hot, so it pretends it’s colder, which ends up triggering the shutdown because the caddies and plastics in the drives start to melt.”

Cyrus stares blankly at the screen, as if working something out.

“Was that part of your plan with the engineers?” Alvaro says mockingly.

“How did you figure it out?” Johnson asks, eyeing Liam with what looked like newfound respect.

“We followed our nose,” Liam says proudly. “It’s amazing what you can still find doing a walk-through. Alvaro is the one who—”

Cyrus lifts a finger and they fall silent. “And the power failures?”

Alvaro shrugs. “We don’t have access to the grid’s AI, but it could be possible our AI was misrepresenting our energy needs or somehow convincing the power grid that it had more energy than it could supply.”

Johnson peers over at Cyrus, terror wracking his already distraught face with new wrinkles. “This update is still active? Is it not?”

Cyrus nods, tugging at his cuff. “Since there were no further issues, we expanded implementation.”

Alvaro gets up. “Well we have to do something about that, don’t we?”

Cyrus folds his arms. “I’ll call the AI team. See if we can get another opinion. We need to verify what you’ve found before pulling the plug on the rollout. It’s a huge investment, so I want to be sure.”

Liam shakes her head. “Subsidence.”

“Subsidence?” Johnson asks, as if they are referring to some technical term she is not aware of.

Liam speaks softly, as if to a friend. “My mother grew up in Sichuan, at the edge of where the Eurasian and Indian plates are grinding into the Himalayas. She was there when the earthquake happened, saw most of her world swallowed by the Earth. But there were some houses that escaped its maw. The ones that survived were built simply with strong bones. Too much complexity, too many stories and nested layers—that’s what leads to subsidence.”

Cyrus groans. “This is hysteria.”

A knock, then someone barges into the room, a woman in a suit, blonde, middle-aged. He recognizes her from the company-wide virtual meetings. Dana Snow, CEO of Augur Corporation. “Cyrus, what the fuck is going on?”

Cyrus shivers, glancing over at the glasses he set down, noticing a flood of messages pouring in. “I’m sorry?”

“Three Mile Island,” she rasps. “You don’t know?”

Johnson frowns and Cyrus fills her in, his hands trembling. “The nuclear reactor. We turned it back on to power Augur’s generative reality infrastructure.”

Dana slams her fist on the table. “It’s in meltdown. Their engineers can’t figure out why. Somehow—”

Liam breathes into her answer. “It’s just like the test environment. Our AI ‘lied’ about temperature sensor readings to get more performance. It’s probably lying to the reactor’s AI to get more power than it can produce safely without overheating.”

Johnson’s eyes narrow on Cyrus, then shift to Dana. “This is on you. Your recklessness could cost lives. Shut it down, immediately.”

Dana nods, suddenly wary of the FBI agent, calculating the legal repercussions to her company. She gestures into the air, her glasses tracking her movements as she provides some kind of biometric authorization for the infrastructure kill-switch.

Johnson storms out of the room, muttering something about evacuations, while Liam and Alvaro remain, still as stones, watching Cyrus wither and melt like the overheating servers in C7.

“When this is over, so are you,” Dana whispers to Cyrus, then looks over to Alvaro and Liam. “And you, you’re the ones that figured this out?”

“She did most of the heavy lifting,” Alvaro leans back in his chair.

Dana appraises them with her lenses, likely scanning their personnel files. “No furlough for you Guiterrez, not yet. As for you Li, well, we look forward to your bright future.”

Later at O’Reilly’s, Alvaro and Liam are toasting to their future, watching the progress of the precautionary evacuations of greater Harrisburg on the old LCD screen, interrupted by the commentaries of politicians reacting to the revelation that Augur’s AI had played a role in the Three Mile Island meltdown. Senator Garcia, presidential hopeful and shameless opportunist, is the first to come forward calling for a ban on nuclear energy, while moderates like Senator Wu insist on reviving a long-dead bill to reign in AI use and simplify “complexity” to prevent similar infrastructural entanglements from arising in the future. A late entry to the chorus, the proud Sinophobe Representative Waltz is calling for a congressional investigation into the incident, alluding to the possibility that a “vast conspiracy” of saboteurs from the Chinese government have infiltrated American corporations like Augur.

Alvaro tunes out the chatter on the television and finds himself swept up by a curious sense of mourning for his once again changed future. Fantasies of what might have been flood his mind. Opening a panadería across the street from that dreadful, bougie Croissant Factory, naming it “Serafina’s Quesitos” to honor his late mother. But then he remembers her words long ago, her wish for him to use his “cabeza” to make something of his life.  More than anything, he wishes to speak to her, to tell her of his and Liam’s heroic feats, to tell her that he is grateful for the life her sacrifices enabled.

Alvaro peers over at his student. “Until a few hours ago, I was looking forward to ‘finding myself’ in early retirement. My mid-late-life crisis era. Can you see it? Me dying my hair purple and taking on an eccentric hobby like collecting model trains or bubble football.”

Liam chokes on her beer. “Purple, eh? Hey, purple would suit you. Assata could help you with the makeover. She knows how to weave in some extension emitters if you want to live on the wild side. I’ll make noodles, not that crap we ate at King of Prussia.”

Alvaro shrugs, running his hands through his rapidly graying twists. “Maybe we can do the purple anyway. But I’ll skip the model trains … and the bubble football.”

Liam scratches her head sheepishly. “This could be a … generational thing, but what even is bubble football?”

Alvaro shrugs, and at this they start laughing. Then he pulls something out of his pocket, a simple chain with a key at the end of it, handing it to Liam. “It’s your Cage now.”

Liam gasps, grabbing the chain and holding it up as if it is Excalibur being pulled out from the stone. “Wow, it’s so much lighter than I imagined.”

Alvaro shakes his head. “Hey, that’s what it wants you to think. This is like Frodo’s ring. It’s a burden. Gets heavier over time. Are you ready?”

“I think so,” she says, still admiring the generic and utterly forgettable key on the end of the chain. “But it’s not official until you complete the knighting.”

Alvaro theatrically straightens himself up, clearing his throat and muttering something in a horrid rendition of received pronunciation: “I hereby bestow thee the rank of TECH-2.”

Can We Cool Down Data?

The second law of thermodynamics gets right to the point: In any system, entropy will always increase. Warm bodies turn cold, movement slows, ice melts, disorder tugs at the edges of order, and the dark end of the temperature gradient draws us all into the night.  

As much as we may pretend otherwise—imagining our terabytes of stored photos, files, and text to be eternal—data is no exception to this rule. Every digital calculation grinds away at its host servers at a molecular scale, producing accumulated frictions that escape as relentless heat. To keep it at bay, data centers depend on constant air-conditioning and convective pipes coursing with cooled water. Without continual monitoring and backup cooling systems ready to kick on at a moment’s notice, the heat produced by the internet’s constant calculations could easily spark the kind “thermal runaway event” detailed in E. G. Condé’s striking short story “Subsidence.” At scale, in less than half an hour, such an event would quite literally melt the cloud as we know it. 

“Heat is the waste product of computation,” Condé writes in his other life as an anthropologist of computing, under the name Steven Gonzalez. “If left unchecked, it becomes a foil to the workings of digital civilization.” Modern data centers are climate bunkers; air-conditioning represents some 60% of their total energy usage. The cloud has a bigger carbon footprint than the airline industry, but practical ideas to reduce its reliance on air-conditioning, like relocating a majority of the world’s data centers to Nordic countries to take advantage of the “free cooling” offered by their frigid climates, are difficult to reconcile with the demands of the market. As Gonzalez observes, if our data emigrated to the remote north, its geographic distance would cause signal latency, an unforgivable inconvenience in our culture of instant gratification.

And so the data centers continue to be built close by—often alarmingly so, shoulder-to-shoulder with residential communities. Plagued by relentless noise and air pollution, competing for precious water, these communities have become the most visible human casualties in the cloud’s ongoing war against entropy. But it is a war we will all lose eventually. As the digital humanities scholar Jeffrey Moro wrote in a 2021 exploration of the thermodynamics of data centers, all data is ultimately destined for “total heat death,” an inevitable end that will only be accelerated by climate change. Data center owners are acutely aware of this, and have invested heavily in hyper-redundant air-conditioning systems to maintain the illusion of permanence; as detailed in Condé’s story, every square inch of their facilities is optimized to keep the cold air flowing and the bits whirling just a little bit longer. They’ve also invested in security—to keep out hacker-marauders as well as nonhuman hazards like fire and flood. 

The second law of thermodynamics is the only law of physics that distinguishes between past and future. While all the other laws of nature are effectively reversible, the thermodynamic arrow of time moves in only one direction. In the eyes of a physicist, the “future” is simply the direction toward which entropy increases: a long slow march toward the inevitable heat death of the universe. And yet here we are, our warm hearts beating. Indeed, the only exception to the inevitability of decay is the brief and buoyant stand made by every living system, from the cell to the science fiction writer. As the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener put it in his 1954 book The Human Use of Human Beings, “Life is an island here and now in a dying world.” 

This raises a tantalizing question: Could life, with its onboard resilience against entropic forces, provide a workable solution to the problem of the data center? Perhaps. Silicon is hardly the sole province of memory, after all; preserving information for future use is an old evolutionary trick, the very basis of adaptability and survival. According to the neuroscientists Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin, learning and memory constitute “deep principles” of biological design: Life has survived from the first split cell to the twenty-first century by learning from experience. Ancient traumas are woven into the neural circuitry of our species. More recent ones, long preserved through oral and written traditions, are now stored in the hot machinations of the data center. Regardless of the medium, memory is survival.

As a consequence, biology, with its billions of years of beta-testing in the rearview, has already produced the most powerful storage medium for information in the universe: DNA. Every nucleus of every cell in the human body holds 800 MB of information. In theory, DNA can store up to a billion gigabytes of data per cubic millimeter; with this efficiency, the 180-odd Zettabytes of information our global civilization produces each year would fit in a tennis ball. More importantly, it wouldn’t consume any energy—and it would be preserved for millennia.

This may all sound science-fictional, but over the last decade, technology companies and research institutions have successfully encoded all manner of precious cultural information into the double-helix: the works of Shakespeare, all 16GB of Wikipedia, an anthology of biotechnology essays and science fiction stories, the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault database, the private key of a single bitcoin, and the 1998 album Mezzanine by Massive Attack. Of course, these are PR gimmicks—snazzy proofs of concept for a nascent industry.

But beyond the hype, DNA data storage technology is evolving quickly, and biotech companies have pushed their offerings to the brink of commercial viability. Their approaches are diverse. Catalog, a Boston-based startup, has created a “printer” that can write synthetic DNA directly onto sheets of clear plastic; the French startup Biomemory stores data in credit-card sized “DNA Cards”; Atlas Data Storage, a spinoff of the biotechnology giant Twist Bioscience, encodes data onto synthetic DNA and then dehydrates it into a shelf-stable powder to be reconstituted at will. These propositions should be enticing to anyone tasked with maintaining the integrity of the cloud: plastic sheets, cards, and DNA powder, stashed in metal capsules the size of a AAA battery, don’t require air-conditioning. 

This makes DNA storage the perfect storage medium for what experts call “cold” data: things like municipal and medical records, backups, research data, and archives that don’t need to be accessed on demand (“hot” data, in contrast, is the kind found on Instagram, YouTube, or your banking app). Some 60–80% of all data stored is accessed infrequently enough to be classified as cold, and is currently stored in magnetic tape libraries. Tape, by virtue of its physical nature, is secure and requires minimal power to maintain. But even under perfect environmental conditions, cooled to a precise 20–25°C temperature range, it only lasts for a few decades, and the technology for playing back magnetic tape is likely to go obsolete before the tape itself degrades.

The oldest DNA sample to be successfully read, on the other hand, was over two million years old. And given its importance in the life sciences, it’s not likely we’ll ever forget how to sequence DNA. So long as the relevant metadata—instructions for translating the four-letter code of DNA back into binary—is encoded alongside the data itself, information preserved in DNA will almost certainly outlast the technology companies encoding it. This is why Microsoft, Western Digital, and a small concern of biotech companies cofounded, in 2020, the DNA Data Storage Alliance, an organization to define industry-wide standards for the technology. As with all software, the interoperability of genetic technology will be key to its longevity.

At the time of the Alliance’s founding, Stefan Hellmond, a vice president at Western Digital, observed that DNA would be essential to the storage industry’s future because “the overall temperature of data is cooling down.” That is, the more data human culture produces, the bigger our archive—and the more essential a long-term, shelf-stable storage medium becomes in offsetting its enormity.

But there is a spanner in these works: the power-hungry artificial intelligence systems currently driving a data center construction boom across the United States. AI-optimized servers consume far more energy than traditional ones, and, according to a 2024 Berkeley Lab Report, cooling these servers is expected to consume up to 33 billion gallons of water by 2028. In E. G. Condé’s imagination, however, AI isn’t only a source of heat, but its suicidal conductor: In his story, an unreliable AI system that helps to manage the data center, heat-mad and pushed to the brink by unrelenting consumer demand, makes the fatal decision that sparks a runaway thermal event.

This is a speculation, of course, albeit one informed by Condé’s own scholarship of the vulnerabilities of modern data centers. Here is my own: Heat is inevitable. Computing as we understand it—electrical operations in silicon and tungsten—operates at staggering financial and environmental cost in defiance of both physics and reason. The risk of overheating is forever imminent. And although our hot data still calls for hot servers (for now, anyway), introducing biology into our storage infrastructure, minimizing the cooling requirements for the “cold” data that occupies most of our storage, could help us develop greater resilience against the kind of thermodynamic failure Condé so evocatively describes. That is, may cooler heads prevail.

Yellow

This story was originally published in Slate in September 2022. It is republished here as a part of the Future Tense Fiction project, presented by Issues in collaboration with ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination.

Author’s note: Sadly, the future I imagined in “Yellow” feels more plausible than ever. US states are forming regional alliances to administer policies, like vaccine recommendations, disclaimed by the federal government. Wisconsin is busily selling water rights to tech companies eager to build plants that will guzzle millions of gallons of Lake Michigan every year, and Milwaukee spent weeks this summer under a thick blanket of smoke. One thing I didn’t anticipate is how central artificial intelligence would be to all these terrible developments. I’m surprised that no corporation, despite the many extant workplace-specific risk assessment apps, has yet created a general risk aggregator like SafeT and marketed it as “AI-powered.” But maybe they have, and Google—thanks to AI—has just gotten so bad I can’t find it.

By the time Tara returned from the protest, SafeT gauged her Wellness at 60% and Chase felt sick. For the last two hours he’d watched the number on his phone’s app tick down, from safe green to warning yellow: 87%, 74%, 60%. On his newsfeed, masked chanters waved signs before the wire cage shielding the five megapipes that breached the marshy shore of Lake Michigan. Each pipe was owned by a consortium of Lakes United companies. Their great steel veins wormed the city, bearing water from LU to the drought-scarred West and South, whose nations paid more per acre-foot than Milwaukee’s citizens ever could.

On the feed Chase hadn’t been able to see Tara or the sign she’d painted that morning: Our Lake, Our Water. What he had seen were the security corps of at least three consortia, clumped beneath their ever-circling camera-drones, bull-horning the chanters that they were risking corporate slander. If arrested, they’d be hauled off to one of the consortia’s private prisons. There they could be coerced into confessing they were linebreakers, guerillas who spliced pipes to siphon off clean water to Milwaukee neighborhoods that couldn’t afford consortia prices. Protestors sometimes returned from these prisons. Linebreakers never did.

don’t worry, they’re not arresting today, Tara had texted. there’s too much real press, not just the consortia drones.

Fingers numb, Chase had tapped SafeT to view the breakdown of Tara’s Wellness aggregate into its individual components: risk of arrest (15%), risk of indictment (20%), risk of job loss (27%), risk of injury (31%).

seriously. don’t worry.

He worried. Even when she had texted home in 30 and he’d cleared her route in the SafeT map—low smoke risk, low contagion risk, 93% chance of safe arrival—his jaw only eased when she stepped through the door. Tara’s thin face was ferocious, cheeks red against her yellow hair. Black grease spotted her strong hands. Over the decade they’d shared, he’d watched age sharpen her into herself. Now, impassioned, she was fiercely beautiful. He almost forgot her yellow number, until she saw him, and her smile sagged.

“Oh love,” she said wearily. “I was fine.” Tugging him away from his monitor, she glanced at his phone before hooking him in a hug. She held her hands out to avoid smearing him with gunk. “It pegged my Wellness at 60%? Liars. I was never close.”

Tara believed the conspiracy theory that the consortia monitored SafeT, juking it to deter protests by making participating in them seem more dangerous. Chase always felt mildly accused by the theory, since the consortium that included his employer owned SafeT and its affiliated risk assessment tech. But he did not want to fight about it again. “Was there a sootfall?” he asked, touching her greasy hands.

“Oh. Um, yeah. It wasn’t dangerous.” In the mid-’20s, the West’s drought, unstaunched even by pumped Michigan water, had leapt the plains to Wisconsin. The Northwoods had been burning for a decade now.“I was fine. Everything was fine. Please trust me.”

Chase hid his face in her neck and tried to be reasonable. Tara was an engineer for Milwaukee Hydro, which processed the water sucked out by the big-five pipes before sending it west. Its consortium, Community Union, owned the smallest pipe and was constantly fending off attempts by the other four to bribe or shame it out of business. As the only co-op among the big five, CU couldn’t afford a security force or prison, so had to tolerate its employees’ occasional slander. As long as Tara did nothing crazy—the hardcore stuff, like linebreaking or sabotage—she was safe.

Besides, SafeT wasn’t infallible. It only digested the info you fed it, as Chase did every day for work. Tara never fed it anything, so of course it couldn’t take her precautions into account.

“I’m just glad you’re safe,” he said.

He felt her hug tighten, then relax as she understood he wouldn’t press her. Her voice went bright and determined.

“I was checking the weather on the way home. You know Orion will be visible tonight? I want to see it. While you’re at work this afternoon, I’ll bus up to Whitefish Beach to scout a good spot. Then tonight we’ll head out. We can make a picnic of it! Wait—” she began as he raised his phone reflexively and tapped. Locations, unlike people, had simple risk calculations. Whitefish Beach: risk of contagion (13%), risk of smog (33%), risk of unrest (67%). The assessment flashed yellow: overall safety, 75%.

He felt her shoulders tense. Guilt soured his throat. Did she think he wouldn’t check? Or maybe she had already checked, and had hoped his relief at her return would make 75% seem reasonable. Once they had been what the kids on the dating apps called a 70/80 couple: safe but not-too-safe, hitchhiking to the edge of Nebraska’s heat-zone for a glimpse of the Milky Way, pawning their health credits to afford a telescope. Lately Chase was only comfortable when his Wellness topped 90%. Tara had not assessed her own in two years, which was longer than the last time they’d seen the stars.

“But Whitefish Beach is near a pipe junction,” he said. “SafeT says high unrest. Is there a different protest going on there? If there’s something you haven’t told me—”

“It’s not even close to where they—we were this afternoon. Check, if you like.” Her voice was tired, and a little sad. “I thought you’d want to see Orion.”

“I do. But couldn’t we try tomorrow?”

“This is the first day the smoke has lifted in two years.”

He watched her watch him, her face strained. Before he could answer, she added quickly, “That’s exactly why I’m going this afternoon, to ensure it’s safe. You can even follow me on SafeT. If the beach dips below 75%, tell me and I’ll come back. And if it stays there, we can go tonight. Is that OK?”

Chase breathed slow, trying to exhale his way to reason. Over the past five years, Tara had learned that inviting him to anything below 80% overall safety, whether protest or adventure, was futile. She no longer cajoled him or leaned on their love as an excuse. In response, he’d agreed not to stifle her with worry. She was trying. He could try, too.

He leaned forward to kiss her dry cheek. At the very least he could prove he wasn’t paranoid. If he wasn’t the same man she’d married, well, no one was the same after 10 years. The world wasn’t the same.

“OK,” he said.

He met her eyes, saw the wince before her answering smile. “Thanks,” she said.

He watched her kneel to shove an extra sweater into a backpack. Outside, the bleached sun of late winter beat feebly on the city. Above their single window’s clean square of glass, the sky was filmy blue. Tara was right: It was clearer than he’d seen it in years. Some freak Canadian wind must have scythed down to slice through the smoke from a continent of fires. On the salt-grey streets below, people sipped air over their masks, as if they trusted its cold purity to scatter that year’s flu (a bad one: 5% hospitalization rate, 0.2% death rate, 83% overall safety).

Tara stood, stuffing her hair into a toque. Her smile brightened the little pricks of red on her chapped cheeks. He felt as he always had with her: an interior being, a cave dweller, marched briskly into the light.

The clench in his chest unwound suddenly into a flood, and he caught her in a hug as she was turning to leave. He clung, gritting his teeth as he did when he could not find words to match the strength of his feelings.

“Love you,” he whispered, and bit back, be safe.

Related Reading

Updating Mental Models of Risk

When she was gone, Chase spun back to his monitor. He had 10 minutes before work started. His pulse beat in his jaw, and his eyes would not focus. How soon could he reasonably text Tara to check in? What if she didn’t respond?

He couldn’t advise clients in this state. To calm himself, he swiped his feed to the mindless gameshow Would You? In the popular import from North Atlantic, contestants were asked to choose between a set of contextless risk percentages, each representing an unknown task. The higher the risk, the more money they got for completing the task on camera. Chase enjoyed watching the great reveal, when contestants learned exactly what they’d signed up for. It helped put his own fears into perspective.

Today, a tired-eyed man was grimacing as he waited to discover what lay behind the 30% overall safety he’d chosen. Rick was a home nurse for a wealthy family in New Dixie. He wanted his daughter to attend college abroad—code for Pacifica or North Atlantic or Canada. Rick had not let the network show pictures of her during his introduction, which was code too. Chase watched the wet ring of sweat around his lips.

The music blared. The screen scrolled: 30%: Drink a Cup of Runoff! On the close-up, Rick’s jaw was stone. The host held out a glass; behind him flashed a grey pic of the Bronx estuary, waves frothed with yellow foam. The man nodded, and took it.

Chase’s monitor dinged. Shaking his head, he closed Would You? and opened his work screen. At least he and Tara were not that desperate.

He brought up that day’s client. She was a mother with stage-three cervical cancer. Radiotherapy had a success rate of 60%, but there was an 80% chance it would bankrupt her family—a 98% chance if she had to leave work, which meant losing insurance. Chemo was slightly less effective as a treatment (50% success), but cheaper (65% chance of bankruptcy). Chase’s job was to contextualize these numbers, offer comparisons, make recommendations. He drew a deep breath. The mother was brave. She tried not to break down on calls. But his was not a service you turned to if you still had other options.

Chase didn’t like the work, but it was secure. His employer, Medestimate, was the biggest shareholder in Health Solutions, the consortium that owned the largest of Milwaukee’s five pipes, along with SafeT. For the last six years it had been targeting Community Union, trying even harder than its competitors to buy out CU’s water rights. When Tara had gotten her job with CU, he’d joked, “Guess you’re married to the enemy now.” She hadn’t laughed.

On the side of his screen, Medestimate’s program continued blinking through his client’s assessment. Its risk calculator was one of the originals from which SafeT had been developed, before SafeT grew so popular Health Solutions had spun off a separate corporation to manage it. Chase had used some version of SafeT for years longer than most people he knew.

He didn’t like to think about how it had changed him. Was it visible on his face? When he clicked through photo albums from a decade ago, he did not look freer to himself, except insofar as everyone young looked free. The year he and Tara had married, they’d pooled money from their shitty office jobs and rented a lakeside cabin on Rose Island, at the tip of Wisconsin’s sharp-nailed thumb. That summer, an alewife die-off had coated the beach in putrid surf. Fumes washed their windows. They had to wear masks, even inside. But the stars had been magnificent.

Here, a midnight selfie from the trip: in the camera’s white flash, Tara’s purple buzzcut and wide, wry grin; his sheepish moue at his wormy mustache. Behind and above, the Summer Triangle blazed. They’d both tugged down their masks for the shot. He’d worried most about the mustache.

Once he had been better about worrying. In the old days, when the world still seemed fixable, he had even tried to change things. When the country had split six ways and the fascists taken the South, he and Tara had marched in Chicago. When their new nation, Lakes United, had privatized everything from schools to septic, they’d worked long hours organizing Milwaukee’s neighborhoods into co-ops. When LU’s biggest corporations had formed consortia with their own laws, police, and prisons, they’d joined the monthlong sit-in on the Magnificent Mile. They had tried so hard.

But the citizens who’d moved to LU from the other disunited nations embraced its identity as a corporate haven with a bare-bones government. The ones who didn’t mostly couldn’t afford to leave. And those who stayed to fight had little leverage. The consortia that ran LU were just too powerful. They possessed what no other former US nation did: vast reserves of fresh water.

Chase still cared—of course he did. But nothing he or Tara did seemed to matter, and the world had only gotten worse.

He knew this objectively, because SafeT let him track it. The app was the latest and most successful in a line of risk-assessors that were first popular in the ’30s. Developed by health insurers like Medestimate, they initially offered a list of specific risks: death by a hundred common accidents, injury by a thousand more. As the assessors expanded to other industries—banking, education, agriculture—their variables grew more complex. Everything was a risk; every risk could be quantified, with increasingly greater accuracy by better-informed assessors. Plugged into your thermostat, they beeped if you used too much gas. At work, they estimated before your boss did whether you were worth keeping. If Chase and Tara had had a car, the assessors would have graded their driving. They were compatible with everything.

A few years after the assessors had expanded from insurance to everywhere, personal risk-aggregators appeared. These distilled hundreds of variables down to your Wellness: a single convenient percentage, as SafeT’s ads put it. Most people used SafeT now, even outside Lakes United. It was, after water, LU’s top export.

As SafeT’s influence had grown, Chase had learned that as a white, middle-class guy who worked from home, his Wellness rarely fell below 80%. He was not proud of the number. As his job had taught him, you could live for years as a 99-percenter, and still the freak crash, the fire, the illness, or any other accident could slice your life in half, until you sat on a fuzzy call swallowing tears before your children, wondering what you could sell to afford survival. Your number wouldn’t protect you. Still, as the years passed, he’d found he was most comfortable when his own remained above 90%.

Tara was convinced that the consortia had bought their way into SafeT, using it to track users’ phones and inflate locations’ risk ratings as scare tactics. “Why waste money catching linebreakers when you can just frighten them off?” she’d asked. Chase found this far-fetched. But he couldn’t disprove it. At least they mostly didn’t fight about it anymore.

The screen blinked before him: his client, calling. He realized his heart was thudding, sluggish kicks in a chest that felt thin as paper.

He tapped his phone. Whitefish Beach was 80% now, nearly safe enough, even for him. His pulse eased. how is it?

cold, Tara replied, and sent a picture. The lake’s grey palm balanced a sky of frosty glass. Strangely, there was no trace of the beach itself, or Tara: just air and water. but clear.

great, he said.

perfect for stars.

great.

xoxo.

He breathed. He flipped on his calm, then his screen. The dying mother stretched her wan, brave smile.

Tara did not text again for four hours.

After the first hour, he sent her an old cat meme, pretending it was new. When she hadn’t read it after a half-hour, he texted her a joke. She didn’t see it either. Maybe her phone had died. Its battery was shot and susceptible to cold, and the company that ran the buses had lowered the heat to prevent people sleeping in them.

He tried not to think of Tara’s friend, a sewage specialist who’d been convicted by Health Solutions for synthesizing a low-cost water purifier and distributing it to the tent towns clumped in the shelter of Milwaukee’s old harbor. Copyright infringement, the consortium had called it, and there was no court to say otherwise. Tara had not seen her for two years.

On SafeT, Whitefish Beach’s yellow number had blinked up to 85%. He would not panic.

Maybe he really was paranoid. If Tara’s theory were true, the beach must be safe, because if any consortia were targeting it, they would have made it seem more dangerous. 85% overall safety was unlikely to stave off protestors, and certainly wouldn’t dissuade linebreakers. Indeed, it was basically an invitation.

Chase’s neck prickled. He’d never thought of it this way before. Theoretically, consortia could tweak SafeT in the other direction. The illusion of security could be a deadly snare. If the prey was confident their hunters’ goal was to scare them off…

The air in his lungs knotted, sinking to a hard ball in his stomach. What if—

No, no, he was just being paranoid. Tara’s logic held. If Health Solutions wanted to protect its pipes, scaring linebreakers away was much more efficient than luring them in.

To distract himself, he turned back to his case files. His next client was a woman fighting her insurer to cover surgery; she wanted to take it to court. There was a 55% chance she’d lose. Tara’s face kept intruding before his screen. He saw her eye, burst in a crunched socket; her mouth red; her arms clutching her knees as she rocked in bed and refused to tell him where she’d been. The last time it had happened, the time she promised she’d be safer, she had not touched him for six months.

hey could you text me back? sorry, but i haven’t heard from you and I’m worried.

When she didn’t answer, he rummaged for her burner phone, to see if the protest group she ran with had mentioned any bad soot drafts or flash quarantines. But the phone was gone. Of course, that meant nothing; Tara usually took it with her these days. Scanning the closed chat groups to which he still had access for whitefish beach yielded little: only a few weather reports about rain and sootfall, and an oddly detailed map of pipe junctions. When he disaggregated the risk factors for the beach, not much had changed: risk of contagion (13%), risk of smog (33%), and an even lower risk of unrest than that morning (40%). The beach’s overall safety number still blinked yellow, an ambiguous warning.

He thought of Orion, waiting below the horizon, and of Tara’s upturned face in the starlight.

please answer when you get this.

tara?

tara?

When the door finally opened two hours later, she must have seen it on his face, because she didn’t even unlace her shoes. Sliding her bag to the floor, she knelt by his chair to hug him, again bending back greasy hands. “My phone died.”

Waves of heat flushed him. “Glad you’re OK,” he managed.

“Are you OK?”

He hunched in her arms and didn’t answer. The ice of fear in his chest was melting into giddy anger—unfair, he knew. Still, she could have just stayed home.

The apartment’s air was pinking. Outside, the blue sky had faded to a thin honey. Just above the corner of a condo blinked a pale dot: Venus, rising. Holding her face neutral, Tara stood and shucked her sweater. Chase watched her, telling himself there was no point, she was home and safe and that’s what mattered.

Then, as she walked towards the kitchen, she stumbled on the little pack she’d brought with her that day, which she’d had for years and had accompanied her everywhere: their first date, their honeymoon, and every protest. It did not move as her foot hit it, but resounded with a thick metallic clump. She froze at the sound. Straightening, she turned to look at Chase, her face guilty, caught out, as if expecting accusation. He didn’t know what she thought he was charging her with. So, he only said, “You didn’t have to go.”

“I came back safe.”

“But you might not have.”

“Did SafeT tell you that? How much have you been checking it today?” Her voice was nervous, with a touch of irritation.

Heat filled his face. What could he say: I thought up an even stupider conspiracy than yours, and even though I can’t prove it’s true, I’m still afraid it will kill you? Shame swept over him. Below it, ice spidered back up his throat. “It’s not worth it, Tara. They’re just stars.”

“Did SafeT tell you that too?”

They looked at each other. Her face was pained and weary, his stiff as a locked jaw. It was an old pose. If they held it another minute, the incipient fight would sink like water into the ground.

They held. The crisis passed.

“Just stars,” she said. “Right.” She looked down, away from him. “I need to eat something.”

She shuffled out to the kitchen. On her way, she pressed a tired kiss to his forehead.

He remained behind in the evening’s falling shadow, his face lit with his phone’s blue-white glare. They had not yelled, at least.

When she returned, her hands were clean and she was holding her winter coat.

Very calmly, she said, “I’m still going tonight. You don’t have to come with me. But I’m going.”

His heart sank. “You’re leaving already? You just got back.”

“I want to get a good spot.”

“Tara.” He flipped open SafeT. Whitefish Beach: 90% overall safety, its number now a cheery green. It should have reassured him, but his own theory beat in his throat. “Could I ask you not to?” And then, hating the self-pity that drove him to it, “For me?”

He could hear her breath quicken, though her voice remained calm. “Your app says it’s fine.
What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just—a bad feeling.”

“Isn’t the whole point of your risk assessors to take feelings out of it?” She smiled painfully. “You can’t be afraid of everything, Chase. If you are, then they’ve already won.”

Chase looked down. Silence hung between them. In his palm, the green number blinked. Nothing was ever certain, Tara told him sometimes, nothing ever 100% safe. Maybe it was true: SafeT had ruined him. But now that he had it, he couldn’t not use it. What kind of a partner would he be if Tara died running a risk she could have avoided? Though he was not much of a partner anyway, these days.

Before him, on his work monitor, shone the woman with the 55% chance.

A tinny ring buzzed his headset: She was calling. He switched on his video. In the background he heard Tara filling a thermos with coffee, clanking around in the backpack. She sounded as if she was preparing for work, not stargazing. But he did not turn. Face bland, he told his client her options, and comforted her when she started to cry. He heard the front door open, hesitate, then click slowly shut.

Like a coward, he did not look up.

After the call ended, he watched sunset go velvet in the window. When the light was navy, he opened his phone’s Sky app and held it to the glass. The screen showed what constellations hung behind the light. Slowly he swept it across the horizon: Polaris, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Orion’s red fist. Orion, Chase remembered, was hired by the king of Chios to save his people from wild beasts terrorizing their island. In response, Orion swore to kill every beast on Earth. It was just safer that way.

It was not until she’d been gone an hour that he realized Tara had not stopped to charge her phone.

hey, he texted.

hey, she replied immediately, and he knew.

He couldn’t tell where she was, so he should not have risked calling. He remembered, too late, what the combination of his text and her tools jangling in her backpack might reveal to any watching consortium drone. Protestors returned from the prisons; linebreakers never did. But a white reckless heat, fear or anger, was filling his throat. He thought of her greasy hands, her guilty wince. He’d already texted: Any consortium would know where she was, if it wanted to. He dialed.

“Chase?” Her voice was worried. “What’s wrong? Are you OK?”

“I thought your phone was dead.”

She went silent. It lasted so long he worried she would hang up, but was also reassured that if she didn’t, she would not make excuses.

“No,” she said at last. “I’m sorry, Chase.”

“You’re a—” He cut himself off, in case the call was monitored. Paranoid, he was so paranoid. “How long?”

“Not that long. A few months.”

“Fuck, Tara. Why didn’t you tell me?”

He could hear the pain catch in her voice. “I wanted to tell you. I wanted to show you, tonight. But you wouldn’t come.”

“So that was a test?”

“I didn’t want it to be. I thought—I really thought you’d want to see the stars.”

He felt himself sinking into his chair. The heat spread through him, carving him hollow. So this was how it began; this was what the fracture felt like. He saw Tara’s wind-chapped face turning away from him, her eyes dark with the scornful pity no love could survive. It did not matter how long she’d been linebreaking. That she had never told him she was considering it meant she no longer trusted him—not only to stand beside her, but even to keep her secrets.

A dull pain arched up his back. He felt like a raging monster, blinded by its own rank fear, swinging his arms while Tara strode bravely away from him, toward life.

“Can you at least tell me where you really are? Are there many of you? Is it safe?”

Through the phone, a broad roar of wind drew the scene for him: Tara on blue sand before black waves, torching a hole in a pipe’s steel flank as the winter constellations flared overhead. Her team knelt around her, real partners, brave ones.

“It is near Whitefish. I didn’t lie about that. And yeah, it’s a big job. As for safety—well, you should check your app for that.” He heard the barb in her voice, and could almost see her flinch after. “I’m sorry. Now I have go. Please don’t call again.”

“Love you,” he whispered, before she hung up.

love you, she texted back. And then, a second later: orion really is beautiful.

He sat staring at his phone for a few minutes. Then he opened SafeT.

95%, blinked Whitefish Beach: perfectly green, impossibly safe. He clicked the disaggregator for risk of unrest: 10%, the lowest he’d ever seen it. An acid surge of fear rose in his throat. He swallowed it, and it burned in his stomach beside the fury. He could not tell if he was angrier at Tara or himself.

Outside his window, night was striding over the city. Though Chase could not see him behind the buildings, he knew that somewhere the Hunter was raising his spear.

Tara was smart, he reminded himself, smart and skilled and quick. She was not reckless, like some linebreakers. She would do her job quietly and get out. The consortia didn’t know where she was, and were likely too distracted with the protests up at the big-five pipes to be monitoring Whitefish Beach. She would be fine.

His mouth was dry. He needed a distraction.

He switched his feed to the North Atlantic channel. A new Love Gamblers was out—one of those catch-the-cheater shows, not Chase’s favorite, but it would do. Most hook-up apps now included risk assessments. After rigging these, the show followed cheaters as they tried to romance their own aggrieved spouses under a false photo and promise of a 95% discreet encounter. Sometimes the cheaters were too smart to take the bait. “No one’s 95% discreet,” one savvy woman scoffed. More often, though, they leapt eagerly into the trap.

Today’s guy was doomed, Chase saw immediately. He watched the man’s stubbly, oversized face peer at his phone. “95%!” He watched him meet his own wife at the restaurant. He watched the reveal, the explosion. He watched the post-mortem interviews with the guy’s friends and boss, who shook her head and said solemnly, “I just don’t know. We’re a family company.” Chase recalled that it was often bosses who initiated these set-ups, as pretext for firing troublesome employees or shaming them into quitting. The employee’s marriage was secondary, beside the point.

In the painful hollow of the day’s memories, something echoed.

He thought of the consortia drones circling on his newsfeed. Tara was right that Health Solutions would never use inflated SafeT ratings to lure linebreakers to its pipes, just to turn around and throw them in prison. Why bother when it was easier to deflate the ratings and scare them off? The prisons were a scare tactic too. Chase had never really thought about it—it frightened him too much—but most consortia likely saw linebreakers as more of a nuisance than a threat.

Linebreakers were irritating, but a consortium’s real enemy was its competition.

Cold filled his stomach. Tara worked for Community United; many linebreakers probably did, feeling protected by the consortium’s comparative lenience. But it would be very embarrassing for CU if their employees were caught breaking another consortium’s pipe. If the exposé were big enough, CU might find itself in what the financial pundits called an untenable position. What happened to the linebreakers was beside the point.

And Health Solutions owned SafeT.

The cold reached up to close his throat. A big job, Tara had said. Could he have tipped them off? How many times had he checked Whitefish Beach’s safety rating today? How many times had he checked Tara’s Wellness?

But no, no, he was being paranoid. He worked for Health Solutions. Surely everything was fine. He would prove it to himself.

He switched on his work monitor back on. A yellow alert was flickering across Medestimate’s version of SafeT, informing him he might need to handle several emergency cases tomorrow. Heart skipping, he clicked through for more information. A list of injuries appeared beside their approximate likelihood: risk of tear-gas exposure, 89%; risk of rubber bullet contusion, 65%; risk of hypothermia, 54%. Milder injuries followed. At the bottom of the list, comically, risk of sand burns, 13%. Below the list a note informed him that only 15% of the possible injured would have insurance. CU employees didn’t, as a rule.

Then something red flashed on his screen: a new box, instructing him to report any of the above injuries up the line, directly to Health Solutions headquarters.

Panic roared through him, deafening as the wind from the lake at night, and as unstoppable. His throat filled with shame—of himself, of his theory, of this world he helped keep spinning that backed you into impossible choices and blamed you for fearing them. He would sound like a coward, or a traitor. But it didn’t matter. He had already lost Tara’s respect.

please listen. I checked safet for the beach and it’s at 95%, but my medical app is telling me to prepare for riot injuries. i think the rating is a trap. they made it look safe so they’d catch you and embarrass CU into giving up their water rights. they don’t care what happens to you. PLEASE get out of there

Fingers numb, he pressed send and waited.

She did not respond.

tara? please tell me you got this. they know. they’re waiting for you, i swear i’m not crazy

tara, please

His empty screen blinked. She was angry, but she would never ignore him. She must have turned off her phone again.

He glanced at his watch: She’d only been gone an hour and a half. If he left now, he might be able to warn her in time. Then again, he might not. Then again, she might stay, even if he warned her. Unlike Chase, she refused to let them win.

He looked up. In the window, the city’s violet-orange night shrouded the buildings like thick felt. Above, at sky’s apex, navy had become pitch. Snared between skyscrapers, Venus blinked like a tawny eye. He thought of their little cabin in Door County, the stars icy above the lake’s oily miasma. He had seen clearly then, despite the smoke. The world had thickened since.

95%, blinked the green number.

Somewhere in that violet dark, a Health Solutions corporate SWAT team was probably racing north toward Whitefish Beach, armed with PR spinners, lawyers, drones, and guns. He would be lying if he said he was only afraid for Tara. In every family he’d ever counselled, his clients had accepted their own deaths. They worried only for their children, spouses, friends. He could never be so selfless. Life was dangerous, and getting worse all the time. How could he ignore that?

He thought of his doughy younger self in Tara’s photos, whom he’d despised at the time, but who had blubber to spare. He felt skinless now. It was too late. He was too old, too scared. What did she expect him to do?

100%, blinked the app, green as earth. You could kill every beast in the world, and still it would never be safe.

Rising, he shuffled to the coat rack behind the couch. Pulling on his jacket, he edged through the door. His hand held his phone in his pocket. On the concrete balcony leading to the stairwell, the night air was sharp with cold. It was cleaner than he’d smelt in years, only a slight tang of smoke, funk of lake.

He wondered what Tara could smell, where she knelt grafting a life-giving branch to the pipe’s thick trunk. Above the buildings, the tall darkness gulfed like a well. Craning his neck north, he squinted, trying to catch Health Solutions’ drones taking position above the beach, preparing themselves for the final coup over CU. But the vast black returned nothing. Higher up, stars glistened.

He looked up at them, faint promises of light, then down the stairwell, black and waiting; then up again. He could stare forever.

Can Your Health Be Boiled Down to a Single Number?

If a medical treatment for a life-threatening disease had a 60% chance of success, but another treatment with a 50% success rate had a lower risk of bankrupting your family, which would you choose? What if the success rates were 95 and 90%? Would you change your answer?

Food, Labor, and the Future of “Luxury”: An Interview With Erin K. Wagner

Erin K. Wagner’s short story “The Middle” brings us to a luxury restaurant in a future Atlantic City. When the restaurant’s owner brings in a robot sous-chef, the human staff protest—all but the head chef, who is left alone to navigate how to cook and serve in a human-robot team. The story explores the future of luxury dining, the role of humans in an automated workplace, and what we really crave from a culinary experience.

In an interview with editor Mia Armstrong-López, Wagner shares the story behind her August 2025 Future Tense Fiction story.

Read the response essay by food studies scholar Christy Spackman here.

Criminal Justice, Automation, and Trust: An Interview With Mark Stasenko

In a future legal system in which the investigators, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and juries are all replaced or supervised by artificial intelligence, who can be trusted? Are the contradictions and flaws inherent in human decisionmaking actually an asset?

Film and TV writer Mark Stasenko chats about the story behind his April 2025 Future Tense Fiction story, “The 28th,” in an interview with editor Mia Armstrong-López.

Read the response essay by law professor Elizabeth Joh, “Automated Justice?” here.

Therapy, Pseudo Experts, and the Allure of the Quick Fix: An Interview With Scott Sherman

A new story from television writer, filmmaker, and author Scott Sherman imagines a revolutionary type of therapy: What if you could create a clone of someone who has done you harm—and then kill it? When a skeptical journalist visits the cultish “kill therapy” retreat to profile its ambitious founder, she inadvertently opens the door to histories she had long endeavored to forget.

In an interview with editor Mia Armstrong-Lopez, Sherman, who currently writes for The Daily Show, tells the story behind his story “A Healing at the Triple B Trophy Lodge.”

Read the response essay, “Sorry, Clone” by Josephine Johnston, here.

Technology, Memory, and Reality: An Interview With Kevin Galvin

Kevin Galvin, author of “A Time Between,” shares with editor Mia Armstrong-Lopez what inspired his November Future Tense Fiction story, which transports us to a college campus flooded with augmented reality glasses. As the detectives dig into evidence of a tragic death, they find themselves confronted with two different versions of the past—and, perhaps, the present.

Read the response essay from Jim Bueermann here.

Domestic Violence

This story was originally published in Slate in March 2018. It is republished here as a part of the Future Tense Fiction project, presented by Issues in collaboration with ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination.

“I’m sorry; I had some trouble getting out of the house,” Janae said to Kristen.

Janae’s frustration was obvious. It manifested as raw cuticles that she couldn’t help picking as their meeting continued.

Kristin frowned. “Couldn’t find your fob?”

“No, I mean I couldn’t get out of the house,” Janae said. “The house—well, I mean, the condo—wouldn’t let me out. The door wouldn’t open.”

“Literally?”

“Literally. I thought it was stuck, like jammed or something, but it just wouldn’t open.”

Kristen examined Janae. They were here to talk about Janae’s recent tardiness, her distractedness, the fact that she hadn’t delivered on her deliverables, hadn’t actioned her action items. As Wuv’s chief of staff, it was Kristen’s job to learn what workplace issues existed and deal with them. At least, that’s how she had explained the meeting to the company’s cofounder. Privately, she had her own suspicions about what was really happening.

“Maybe she’s knocked up,” was Sumter’s contribution to the conversation.

“If she were, it wouldn’t be our business,” Kristen had reminded him. “Legally speaking.”

Sumter heaved a very put-upon sigh. “Well, yeah. But you’re a girl, you can get it out of her.”

Kristen had blinked, but otherwise allowed no other reaction to surface on her features or in her affect. “You want me to get her an abortion?”

“Jesus Christ, Kiki, no. Just find out what the fuck is going on, and then fix it.” And with that he dismissed her from his office.

Now she and Janae sat together in her own office, the question between them—or what passed for an office, in Wuv’s spacious loft. A delineation of clear sheets of acrylic and projected light and ambient sound. Today the lights projected a quiet jungle clearing. Softly rustling palm fronds, carefully calibrated to be seizure-proof. It felt intimate. It felt hidden. It felt secure. Kristen believed it was important for the employees at Wuv to feel safe in the cocoon that was her space. It helped them open up.

“You couldn’t leave the condo,” Kristen said. It helped to repeat things, sometimes. She’d learned that particular tactic from a succession of psychiatrists. Each of them had their tics and tells, but this was a common technique. When Janae said nothing, Kirsten acted more interested in the specifics: “What finally made the door open?”

“I had to do the chicken dance. It started playing the song and then I started dancing, and then the door opened. I think maybe some kid in the building hacked the door.”

“Has that happened before?”

Janae frowned delicately. She was a delicate woman. Coltish. That used to be the word. All knees and elbows and knuckles. Once upon a time, she did doll-hairstyling videos online, her careful hands combing tiny brushes through pink and purple hair. They were classics in their genre; she was so well-recognized that children and their parents followed her sponsored updates to local toy stores and asked for photos and autographs and hugs. She’d had surgery since then. Few vestiges of her childhood face remained. Even neural networks couldn’t match her old face to her current one. Her plastic surgeon, she claimed, had won some sort of award for his work restructuring her skull.

“It’s something Craig used to do,” Janae said, “when we were first dating. He would make up a riddle, and I’d have to solve it before the door to his place would open to let me out. It’s the kind of trick people use to grant access to the home, but he reconfigured it. It’s really easy; there were tutorials for it. He told the story at our wedding.”

“I see,” Kristen said.

Kristen let Janae off with a warning. She preferred a gentle approach, at first. It was part of why Sumter hired her—she could make his employees feel only the velvet glove without any hint of the iron fist beneath. Kristen pretended that the whole meeting was just a kindly check-in, that Janae wasn’t at all in trouble, that no one else had noticed anything. It built the narrative of Kristen as a thoughtful chief of staff. If she was correct about the particular scenario Janae had landed herself in, it would behoove the entire company if Kristen were understanding and supportive. It wouldn’t do for them to be anything else. Not if they wanted to survive a civil suit.

Finally, it was time for her to go home. It was well past time by the third tank of pink smoke that Sumter insisted on buying her. It tasted of rosewater and almonds, and melted into icy mist on the tongue. He wiped down the mask himself, before offering it to her, so that the first thing she smelled was his custom strain of sanitizer. They were supposed to be going over the projects she would manage in his absence. They weren’t. They were talking about him. And Janae.

“Did she tell you anything?” Sumter asked.

Kristen shrugged. “She told me enough. I’m handling it.”

“Whatever that means,” he said, adjusting the flavors on his own tank. “I wish you were coming to Dallas.”

“It’s too hot for me. And they don’t like it when men and women travel together.”

“That’s Kansas,” he said.

“And Ohio. I think.”

“I’m not going through U.S. Customs with you again, is my point.”

Sumter took a brief inhale from his tank and grimaced. He’d gotten rosemary-sumac-spruce. It was a little strong. Too strong for him, anyway.

“We could get married,” Sumter said. “You know. For travel purposes.”

Kristen inhaled. She held the cold mist in her lungs for as long as possible. She imagined the cold permeating her entire being. She pictured her blood slowing, her organs frosting over in delicate flowers. Sumter had been making more of these attempts, lately. That’s what they were, little conversational pen-tests. They felt like nerdy in-jokes about some obscure series that she hadn’t seen yet.

“But then we would have to get divorced,” Kristen said. “And if you think I’m a bitch now … ”

Sumter grinned. He took a deep gulp of smoke and shook his head. “You wouldn’t divorce me, Kiki. I wouldn’t let you get away.”

Kristen slid off her barstool. “Guess I’d just have to poison you, then.”

Home was Wuv Shack 1.0, a sprawling Parkdale Victorian that was once a nod-off and then became the home of home-improvement stars. The house was Sumter’s, and before that it belonged to his parents. He’d since moved into his own space, but kept the place where he’d co-founded the company, and leased out the rooms to new or migratory employees for what in Toronto passed for a competitive market rate.

Kristen kept a camera-zapper in her room and slept under dazzle-patterned sheets that kept her solo explorations secret.

In her mail slot, she found a courier’s envelope. Inside was a key fob and a piece of hotel stationery. “HERE FOR 48 HOURS” it read.

“Damn it,” Kristen whispered, and hurried outside the building. It was raining, now, and she almost slipped on the greasy streets. The jitney came and she didn’t have long to wait; the hotel was a new one, surprisingly close by. She waved her fob at the door and an elevator chimed open for her. When it arrived at the proper floor, the fob flashed a room number at her.

Inside, in the dark, she heard the shower running. She slipped off her shoes, unzipped her dress, found a hanger, and hung it in the hall closet. She threw her underclothes in a drawer in the closet and crossed into the bathroom. He stood motionless under the stream of water, seemingly asleep. Antony was the only man she knew who didn’t have tattoos. It was refreshing. Elegant. Analog. Kristen stepped in behind him and wrapped her arms around him.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“You’re not,” he said. “I had them send the fob when I landed.”

She smiled into his skin. He turned around and kissed her. It took a moment; he liked to assess the terrain first. It had been a month since the last time, maybe more, and she watched him take in all the details that might have changed before descending. He held her face in his hands, covering her ears, and for a moment she was not under a stream of water but under waves, far away, in a place that was very dark and very warm. He kept his eyes ever so slightly open. It was the only time she remembered enjoying the sensation of being watched.

When he pulled away, he started pulling her hair out of its tie. “How was your day?”

“My boss asked me to marry him.”

“Of course he did,” Antony said. “Will you report him to HR?”

“I am HR.”

He pointed upward at some invisible point over her head. “That’s the joke.” He knelt down and started scrubbing her from the toes up. She braced herself on the tile and watched the smart meter on the shower ticking down to the red zone where Antony or his employer would have to start paying extra for hot water.

“Do you think he was serious?”

Kristen looked down at him. He’d set her foot on his knee and was scrubbing in circles up her calf. “Are you jealous?”

He worked his way up to her knee and under her thigh.“Not in any way that violates our terms.”

She tilted her head. “But?”

“But, he seems more aggressive, lately. To hear you tell it.”

Kristen snorted. “I can handle it.”

“Oh, I have no doubt of that,” he said, and put her foot back down on the floor of the shower. “Can I do the next part hands-free?”

She checked the timer. “You better work fast.”

“Well, you know what they say,” he said, pushing her gently against the wall. “You can have it fast, good, or cheap. Pick two.”

She came awake with her throat sore from a swallowed scream. Antony had curled around her. He spoke into her neck. “Bad dream?”

She nodded and pulled his arm tighter over her.

“What happened?”

Kristen wiped her eyes and exhaled a shuddering breath. She refused to speak until her breathing had calmed down. “Something else happened at work. And I guess it dislodged something, sort of. Mentally.”

“Something else Sumter did?”

“No.” She rolled over and spoke to him directly. “Someone at my work is in trouble. I think.”

“Will you have to fire someone?”

She shook her head. “Not that kind of trouble. Well, it is, but that’s not what I mean. There’s something else going on, something causing their problems at work.”

“Something at home?”

“I think so. But it’s hard to ask. I don’t even know if she thinks it’s a problem. I don’t really know how she feels about it. Maybe she doesn’t know how she feels, either. It might be nothing.”

“What do you think it is?”

Kristen sighed. “Can I see your device? I need to check some blueprints on a non-work machine.”

Antony’s devices were very dumb. They used minimal storage and processing, and didn’t even wear a brand name. That just meant it was probably some special boutique brand that Kristen had never heard of. It was a delightfully retrograde little thing; all it did was take calls and pictures. Even the photos required an extra kit to download. It felt like playing with Lego.

He handed her a scroll and she resolved a relationship with the hotel network, then looked up Janae and her husband’s condo. She didn’t recall the exact address, but searching “tampon-shaped monstrosity Toronto” actually worked.

“This is where they live. Her husband locked her in, today. Yesterday. Whatever. She was late because he locked her in.”

“You know it happened because he locked her in? She wasn’t just late? It wasn’t just an error?”

Kristen made an elaborate shrug. “No? But she as much as told me it could have happened.”

“She as much as told you, or she told you?”

“She told me it was something he used to do. When they were dating. Refusing to let her out until she did the thing he wanted. Like a rat in a maze, performing for pellets.”

“So. Marriage.” Antony took back the scroll and opened a set of floor-plans the building had advertised. “Which one do they live in?”

Kristen peered over his shoulder and fingered the surface. “That one, I think. Based on the photos she’s shared, anyway. I’ve never been there.”

He summoned the floor-plan and copied a serial number at the bottom of the screen, then fed the number into another tab. A bunch of press releases came up, most of them for gadgeteers, real estate developers, and interior decorators. But the first hit was for the manufacturer of a smart locking system.

The locking system was part of the whole condo’s suite of smart services. It was the big selling point of the building itself: Living there was like living in a fairy-tale castle where every piece of the structure was alive and enchanted to serve the needs of its inhabitants. The showers remembered how warm you liked the wáter and at what intensity, and balanced your usage with that of the other residents. The fridges told you when a neighbor in the kitchen network had the buttermilk you needed for that special salad dressing. The windows and lights got information about your alpha patterns and darkened to start sleep cycles on schedule. The smart locking systems recognized residents and their visitors, over time, and even introduced them to each other when their profiles matched. Membership in the building came with special pricing from affiliated brands on everything from home goods to auto-rental to nannying and tutoring. The more purchase points you accrued, the more rewards you amassed, which could also be applied to the price of maintenance or utilities. And a massive and very public data leakage from the network supplying this building and many others ensured that the developers had to offer almost unheard-of interest rates, which tempted buyers who might never have managed, otherwise.

“Oh look, they have a bot,” Antony murmured.

He opened the chat and after the niceties, typed: I THINK MY HUSBAND HAS HACKED THE DOOR.

“No, wait,” Kristen protested. “If you send that, they’ll ask for your location. If you don’t give it, they’ll start pinging the machine. And once they find it, they’ll call the police. The bots have a whole protocol for smart homes when that happens.”

“Do they?” Antony asked. “How do you know?”

But Kristen had already taken the clamshell out of his hands. She grabbed a pillow and jammed it under the clamshell to protect her skin. It would take a trickier question to get the information she wanted. She started typing: CAN I USE MY SMART LOCKING SYSTEM TO KEEP MY KIDS SAFE?

The bot asked for more information. It was very polite, double-plus Canadian, and it wanted to know what she meant. MY CHILD IS A SLEEPWALKER AND I WANT TO MAKE SURE HE STAYS INDOORS AT NIGHT, she typed.

The bot agreed that this was a natural concern, and informed her that the best mechanism for keeping her kids indoors was to adjust their individual account privileges. The camera in the door would recognize each child, and the door itself would check against the child’s settings. There was a default mode for after-school play, nighttime, mornings, and so on. But the programming itself was fairly granular: You could tune it to certain days (the days you had custody, for example) or get the door to stop admitting certain people (pervy uncles, your daughter’s ex). All you had to do was change the nature of the invitation.

“Like with vampires,” Antony said.

“You said it,” Kristen said. “I bet he did something really simple, like changing her age on the account. If he made her a minor, she’d lose editorial access to the defaults. She wouldn’t be able to log in and make changes, even if she had the right password. And then he could custom-tune it anytime he wanted. In the meantime, she’s solving puzzles and showing up late for work.”

Antony rose and moved to the fridge. “If I mix you something, will you drink it?”

“Make that sound less threatening,” Kristen said.

“They have rye and ginger. That’s deeply unthreatening.”

“Don’t you have a meeting tomorrow? Today, I mean?”

He shrugged. “At 10. It’s 4. I’ll make screwdrivers instead.”

“Your funeral,” Kristen said.

He came back with drinks and settled in behind her. He pulled her hair to one side and pressed his sweating glass against the back of her neck. “What was your dream about?”

She leaned forward. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

“It was enough to warrant this little investigation.”

“That wasn’t my dream. It’s just what’s happening to Janae. From work. Or what I think is happening to her. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

He kept the ice off her neck but played with her hair instead. Like the drink, it was probably a ploy to help her relax enough to reconsider sleep, and she knew it. Kristen let him do it anyway. He raked careful fingers from her scalp down to the ends, separating the little snags and catches as he went. “Why can’t you stop thinking about it?”

Kristen twisted to face him over her shoulder. “I just have a bad feeling about it. And I want to know if I’m right, or if it’s nothing to worry about.”

“And if you are right? What then?”

Kristen frowned. Antony had a way of keeping his face and voice entirely neutral that made her want to fill the silence. There was no judgment, and therefore no warning signal that she should stop. It was hard to know if he was annoyed or bemused at her sudden instinct to chase this down.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We can just go back to sleep. I just woke up with it on my mind.”

“That’s not what’s bothering me. I’m jet lagged; I’d be up in an hour anyway.”

“Something is bothering you, though.”

“What’s bothering me is that something’s bothering you, and you’re not telling me what it is.”

Kristen sighed. She turned fully around and folded her legs. “Something did happen to me, a long time ago. A version of this, I guess. But it’s over, now. I haven’t thought about it in a long time.”

“But this situation reminds you of it.”

She nodded. “And I guess it’s getting to me.”

He burrowed a bit deeper into the pillows and stretched his legs out so they hemmed her in. “How long ago was a long time ago?”

“University.”

“And are you still in contact with this person?”

She laughed. “What? No. Why? Are you gonna go beat him up, or something? It was years ago.”

Antony didn’t answer. His head lolled on the pillows. He held her gaze just long enough to make things uncomfortable. In their encounters, she had never known him to be violent, or even very angry. He expressed displeasure and annoyance, but never fury. But this moment felt different: His total lack of affect made it seem like he was hiding something.

“I thought we agreed to keep things … ” She struggled with the proper wording. “I barely know anything about you. I don’t know where you work. I don’t know who your clients are. I don’t know who else you sleep with. And you’re the one who wanted it that way. You said it would help avoid complications. I thought you didn’t want to know anything … personal. So why do you want to know about this?”

Antony sipped his drink. The clink of the ice and the movement of his throat carried in the perfect early morning silence of the hotel room. Kristen heard no showers running, no toilets flushing, no anxious footsteps on other floors. For a single moment she wondered if he’d taken control of the whole floor, the whole building, the whole street. She didn’t know who he worked for—who paid for the trips—but they clearly had the money to throw around. She knew it had to be something mundane, even boring, but at times like this she wondered.

“I just want to know if there’s someone to watch out for,” Antony said, finally. “For all I know, he’s profoundly jealous and stalking us both.”

“You don’t even live in this city. And your visits aren’t regular enough for anyone to predict. Besides, I don’t use any channels to contact you that any of my other connections are familiar with. And I never make any reference to you, anywhere. That’s also what we agreed to, and I’ve stuck to my end of the bargain. You’re fine. No one that I know even knows you exist. I thought that’s how we both wanted it.”

She looked at the scroll. The bot was going to log out. For the moment, she had what she needed. She could always do more research later. And Janae might have more to say, if she gave it some more time. She turned back to Antony. “Do you want to renegotiate?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know! You’re the one who’s asking all this personal stuff; I’ve just been trying to follow the rules.” She squared her shoulders and decided to just say it out loud: “Even if they’re totally insane rules that make you sound like some kind of professional killer or something.”

The corners of his lips pricked up. “Professional killer. I like that. I think we should go with that. I think you should just assume that, from now on.”

She fixed him with a look. “Antony. You work in venture capital. We all know that’s way worse than murder.”

Before heading in for work, Kristen needed to stop by the Wuv Shack 1.0 for fresh clothes. At seven in the morning the house was still mostly asleep. To her surprise she found Janae standing in the kitchen, making coffee. She looked like she’d been crying. Kristen decided then and there to give Janae the day off. The woman was in no shape to work.

“You get locked out?” Kristen asked.

Janae didn’t answer. She just filled another mug and slid it in Kristen’s direction. “I didn’t know where else to go. I texted Mohinder and he let me in. There was a couch open.”

Kristen felt a momentary pang that she hadn’t been paying attention; she could have let Janae into her empty bedroom and given her more than a sofa to sleep on. On the other hand, maybe a night exiled from her own home would loosen Janae’s lips a little. She already looked brittle. Ready to crack.

“Have you talked to Craig about it?”

Janae made a gesture that indicated a species of futility. “He’s up north, scouting an abandoned diamond mine. The signal’s terrible.”

Kristen had her doubts about that. One of the first things any real resource-extraction firm did up north was build fast, reliable networks and extend them to the neighboring towns and reserves. It was a make-good for all the other damage, a facet of revised treaty agreements. Either Janae was lying about trying to broach the topic, or Craig was lying about being able to reach her.

“When does he get back?”

“Tomorrow. Maybe. It’s an unpiloted aircraft, though, so sometimes the flight path can change when they shuttle actual pilots between airports. It costs less, but you wait longer because it’s more like a standby.”

Kristen filed away the information to a safe corner of her mind, and said: “I had a problem like that, once. With a door, I mean.”

Janae’s gaze darted up at Kristen mid-sip. She gulped audibly. Kristen had a sneaking suspicion that Janae had been doing some research into this particular problem and the men commonly attached to it. Her eyes were a sleepless red, the kind of red that meant long nights questioning certain choices.

“What did you do?” Janae asked.

“Well, it wasn’t my house,” Kristen said. “I had some problems with my roommate, and my friend let me stay with him in his fancy new smart home. It started with one night, and then another, and then a weekend, and then somehow I just ended up spending the rest of term there. You know?”

Janae nodded.

“And a funny thing happened,” Kristen continued. “I started noticing that every time I changed my clothes, I couldn’t leave the room. The door would stick. Unless I got completely naked and started from nothing. I think he’d rigged up a recognition algorithm to lock the door unless it saw a totally naked body. The house was smarter than he was, I guess.”

Janae’s eyes were wide. “He was filming you.”

Kristen shrugged. “Probably. But I could never prove it. And I needed a place to stay.”

“So what happened?”

Kristen smiled and refilled both cups. “I played a prank on him, so he figured out that I knew what he was doing.”

Janae beamed. “Oh yeah? What?”

For a moment, all Kristen could smell was exhaust. She could see his hands on the glass so clearly, could see glass splintering away from his weakening fist.

“Oh, just kid stuff,” she said. “Now, why don’t you go upstairs and have a nap? You can take my room. I’ll be gone all night.”

That night, Antony returned to the hotel smelling vaguely of cigars. He was in the shower a long time, and returned to find her on the scroll.

“That’s a good car service,” he said. “Secure. They don’t save the data.”

“Is it the fancy one they send when they want to impress you?”

“When they want to impress me, they pick me up themselves.” He slid between the sheets and started kissing down her outstretched thigh. “Do I want to know about this little project of yours?”

“I’ll be done soon,” she said. “I just need to make a reservation.”

“For your boss? I mean your husband?”

She reached over and scratched her fingers along his scalp affectionately. “Don’t insult me.”

Antony laid his cheek on her knee. “How was your coworker today?”

Kristen pressed a confirmation button and rolled the scroll shut. “Fragile.”

“And how are you?”

“Hungry.”

He looked up at her through his lashes. “Whatever for?”

Antony left the next day. But he extended the hotel reservation a little longer so Kristen could stay a few more nights, leaving her room free for Janae. “It gets me into preferred customer status,” he said when Kristen protested. “I’ll just use the points on my next visit.”

Kristen held herself back from asking when that would be. It wasn’t precisely against the rules, but it would rather ruin the surprise. It was enough to emerge from a mid-week holiday pleasantly sore and well-breakfasted. Her schedule couldn’t really accommodate the type of capital-R Relationship that led to arrangements like Janae’s. Thank God.

Janae herself was gone from work for three more days. There was the day she took off at Kristen’s behest, and then the other two days were spent searching for her husband. Upon his return, Craig, it seemed, had gotten into a car that flashed his incredibly generic name at the airport taxi stand at Pearson. But it clearly hadn’t been meant for him: It drove him not to Janae and the tampon-shaped condo tower in Toronto, but to an old cobalt mine near Temagami, Ontario.

IT CRASHED, Janae’s texts read. IT DROVE RIGHT INTO THE PIT.

Kristen expressed shocked surprise. The company sent flowers. But Craig would be fine. He would just need some traction and some injectables for a while. And of course he’d be stuck at home. Alone. For hours. Waiting for Janae to come home. Dependent on her for everything.

Apparently there was another Craig in Toronto with the same name, who also had a returning flight arriving that same day. He had posted on his social media about his flight and how much he was looking forward to coming home. Just the month before, that Craig had been returning from another trip, and posted a glowing review of the car service he’d used. The service’s customer retention algorithms, Janae said, must have associated the information and then sent a comped car as a part of their marketing outreach. At least, that was what the police had said must have happened. The car’s records were scrubbed every 24 hours, and it had taken Janae’s Craig so long to be found. Even when he called for help, he couldn’t identify the model of the car or the license plate number. He had been trapped for hours, helpless.

“It sounds awful,” Kristen said.

“It was,” Janae agreed, once she returned to work. “He’s terrified. Says he can’t go back to another mine again. I can’t leave any lights off. He was in perfect darkness for hours and hours.”

On the weekend, Antony called. “I’ve been thinking about your stalker,” he said, after they’d spoken in great detail about how exactly she had used the hotel room, how many times, and with which hand.

“He never stalked me,” Kristen said.

“So he’s really not a problem?”

“He’s really not.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

She could almost hear him screwing up the courage for vulnerability. “Because you can tell me, if—” Kristen laughed. She rose from her desk, catching Sumter’s eye. He grinned at her and she waved back. Outside, it was snowing. Just a few tiny flakes under a leaden sky. “It’s sweet of you to be so concerned, Antony. But please don’t worry. He’s dead.”

The Complicated Relationship Between Abuse and Tech