No. The answer was no, she couldn’t. Because the tubes had reset long before she—

“—so much as even saw a cab. But by then it was getting kinda chilly anyway, so I don’t think I would’ve gotten back to the Square anyway, even if I still had time. I really regret throwing away that hoodie.”

“Mmrph,” said her brother, buried under the sheets.

“Won’t see it again for another two weeks. Oh, also, there was this girl, too, getting beat up in an alleyway. And she was wearing this frilly …”

“Mrm.”

“… And you’re not even listening, are you?”

“Rhrm.”

“Shouldn’t you be up by now? Don’t you have to log on or something?”

Noel stirred under the blankets, inched his head out, muttered, “Mmyeah,” squinting as his eyes adjusted, and, once they had, asked, his words still heavy with sleep: “What’s all that?”

“Food. Something for you to eat besides chips and energy bars. Eggs. Bananas, peanut butter. Whole-grain bread. Some soup. Canned tuna. Picked up anything that seemed the least bit nutritious, from that store around the corner. Not that they had that much to begin with … but it was the only place still open this late. Anyway, at least you have some real food now, for a change. You know. Protein. Vitamins.”

“No, I get … I get vitamins. I eat … I had a”—digging an invisible spoon into his right hand, trying to remember the words he was looking for—“a fruit cup last month.” Noel rose from the bed, wearing his sheets as a cape. “What did you, um … What did you do all day?”

“Are you—are you serious? I just spent like ten minutes talking about it. Ever since I came in.”

He yawned. Then he sat down at his desk, rubbed his eyes, flipped open his laptop. “You smell.”

“Late-night workout.” She sat on the mattress and watched her brother earn his living. Neither spoke for a long time. The central air clicked on, off.

“I still don’t really get what you do,” she said.

“Yeah, me neither.”

“I always thought you wrote code, but you got all mad at me yesterday when I said that.”

“I didn’t get mad at you.”

She pointed to his terminal, at its endless upward blur of green on black. “So what is all that? What are you doing now?”

“Restarting … services.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that, whenever they tell me to push a button that does a thing, I push a button that does a thing.”

“Is that … all you do?”

“No—once in a while I also send an e-mail to myself, that just reads ‘hello’ in the subject, with no body.”

“And you get paid for this?”

“Isn’t it great?”

“Don’t you ever need to show up in person?”

“Sometimes. Like when they have team meetings and stuff. But that doesn’t happen as much as you might expect.”

“And what do you do when they do have meetings?”

“Option one: Stay up, go in early, leave early. I think the last time I went in was, like … spring? Probably. And option two …” He pointed to a headset in the corner of the room. “My personal preference.”

“I can’t believe you. People would kill for the perks you guys get. And you couldn’t care less about any of it.”

“It’s overrated.”

“Come on. Free chef-prepared buffet every day? Barista-attended espresso bars? Ludo rooms, pool tables? I read once you guys even get free massages. Is that true?”

“Oh, yeah. Totally. And they’ll even do more than just massage you, if you catch my drift …”

“I don’t, actually. But damn. All that and you choose to work from here instead.”

“All that stuff is just PR, really. To attract a certain crowd. Lost its appeal after my internship year. And plus—being allowed to work on this schedule, without needing to even leave my bed? That beats foosball or … or”—disdainfully—“nap pods any day of the week.”

“At least take me there sometime. While I’m still here.”

“I, um … Yeah.”

“Oh! I always wanted to ask you: you ever see Dermot? Like, in the flesh, walking around and stuff?”

“I only ever saw him once. During a town hall. And I was in the back.”

“Damn. I was hoping you had some crazy stories about him.”

“Nah. Honestly, as far as eccentric young tech billionaires go, he’s not even top five.”

“You sure about that?” said Melody. “I mean, you don’t see any other CEOs wandering around the Undivided alone with nothing but a backpack. Only somebody like Dermot Deliquesce would even consider doing something like that.”

“He never returned from that, by the way.”

“What?”

“He might still be out there. Nobody knows. Not a single word from him.”

“But he did a keynote last year.”

“Last year? No, that was in April.”

“Oh. Right. April.”

“Yeah, that was a projection. Although … I guess I’m not supposed to tell you that.”

“No way.”

“The public only ever assumed that he returned. Like you did. And the company’s basically just trying to keep everyone thinking the same, until either: one, he returns, or two, the Technocrats send his head back on a … a pike or something. Internally we won’t even acknowledge it, that he’s gone. Like, our monthly newsletters just pretend that he’s still there, as if nothing’s out of the ordinary.”

“So who’s running things?”

“Current rumour is that he took a snapshot of his brain just before he left and put his brain-dump in charge of the day-to-day.”

“Why are you in the know about this? You don’t even do anything important.”

Noel winked, clicked his tongue.

“I don’t know what that means.”

Noel repeated the gesture.

“So … sticking your nose where it don’t belong, then. Huh, big brother?”

“Well, you don’t have to put it into words, as such, but—”

Melody sat up on her knees. “Then, does that mean you have access to user data?” She held up her phone. “Everything’s pushed to you guys anyway, and there’s no way to opt out. Can you see all my shit?”

“Why? Worried about me snooping around?”

“Should I be?”

“I guess that depends. What kind of secrets you hiding, Mel?”

What secrets, indeed. But even if those parallel brothers of hers, in so many pre-8 Septembers, had flipped through, say, all of her private dorm-room mirror-shots, or scrolled though the logs of her late-night back-and-forths with upperclassmen whose names she couldn’t remember anymore—what would any of that have mattered? The Noel sitting here had no such data to work with. No such privacy to violate.

Agreed?

Uh, sure, came Melody’s objection, except you forgot to take into account my online life before the Void. He could’ve looked into my account as early as his first year at Syllabary. As in, the ‘Noel sitting here’. The constant Noel.

Okay, fair. But what would her high school self have yielded him, exactly? What collection of bytes could not be undone by the Void? Eleventh-grade baby-level dissections of the compulsory Standard canon? Monitor snaps of headers and implementations whose variables names she’d promised to change before submitting but never did? Rejections from all the schools she couldn’t get into?

Don’t be a smartass. How about literally every search query I’ve ever typed?

Oh! She meant the head-skimmings of a lazy Sunday afternoon, the synaptic miscarryings of a sleepless weeknight. How often had she mistaken oracle for barometer? How much neurotic solidarity had she gathered over the years? Behold, reader! a maiden’s heart: When was toothpaste invented? (3,250,000 results in 0.32 seconds); mushy vegetables taste better than regular (600 results in 0.79 seconds); break into hives for no reason normal? (Over 1,000,000 results in 0.78 seconds); Can women pilot katarina units? (Over 814,000 results in 0.245 seconds); traditional Circadian blood healing (No results found); lskjidnlknslkndlknssdfdfdf (1 result in 0.98 seconds).

There’s also—there’s also every video I’ve ever watched.

Ah yes, her trail of cat videos, music tutorials and carpet cleaning timelapses. Thrilling stuff. What else?

My ... my location history! A record of my daily movements.

Which contained nothing her brother didn’t already know. School and home, home and school. The community centre and the hospital and the occasional Saturday downtown. She wished her life had been more than that.

You smug prick, can you not ... tr-trivialize my entire backstory? I’m not some kind of—

See, even if Melody Quick preferred to think otherwise—even if she would’ve rather spent the rest of that September pretending her ledger was heavier than it really was—she knew that from her brother (who had, under the impression their conversation had ended, re-interfaced himself, leaving his sister to spiral away inside her own head) she was keeping only one secret of any real importance, the same secret which had carried her lengthwise down the Third and which sat now behind her lips, curled on her tongue, waiting to be voiced. Had she not only to speak it?

“Hey, Noel?”

“Mhm.”

“Listen.”

“I’m … listening.”

“Stop typing for a sec. Look at me.”

“Mhhm.”

“Noel.”

He punctuated the last remaining keystrokes of a command with a loud return and swiveled away from his work, gradually, in phases ordered by interfacial importance—torso, fingers, eyes—and met the gaze of his sister, who began, “The truth is … I’ve been …”

Her mouth went dry. She couldn’t help but look down, look away, and was surprised to find her fists balled up below, clenching the sheets tightly. She willed them slack, but still couldn’t bring herself to look back up at Noel, whose growing worry she could sense from the air between them. “The truth is, I ...”

She slammed her eyes shut. “I’m …”

She shot her head back up, opened her eyes. “… I bought eggs.”

“Oh. Um … Okay.”

“I need to refrigerate them.”

“Well, you can—you can put ‘em in the fridge out there. But someone’ll probably steal ‘em. That’s why I don’t really cook anymore.”

Melody laughed. Or at least tried to. “You? Cook?” she said, leaving his bed, eager to hide her humiliation. “That’s a good one.” She picked up the eggs and left his room.

“You don’t really need to refrigerate eggs, by the way …”

And just as how she’d failed then, on his bed, she likewise choked again, several times that morning: once after she’d refrigerated the eggs; then again after she’d put away the other groceries; and again after she’d showered; even once more after she’d fallen asleep, in a dream—all these instances no different from all the other ones that would take place in the days to follow, when she would act on, and then deny, an impulse, a rush of compulsion spurred on by yet another boiling-over of that nagging urgency, that need to ease her own pervasive disquiet, the strength of which, as she came to realize, was no match for that of her own cowardice, which would steal her words during those few opportune moments together when not only their waking hours overlapped but Noel wasn’t immersed in some screen or another, terminal or headset or otherwise, and Melody wasn’t outside, roaming the streets of Somnhaven, or riding the train up and down to nowhere, or inside the house, wandering its three floors, trespassing into rooms that tenants had forgotten to lock, or sitting and zoning out underneath the shower (an activity which was, one: never as enjoyable as it had been Uptown, with the water here constantly two or three degrees short of satisfying; and two: often interrupted by angry knocks and snarky attitudes—“Some of us have classes to attend, you know.”—from those who’d waited long enough), or befriending her brother’s neighbours, almost none of whom had ever met—or even heard of the name—Noel Quick, and whose faces and words Melody could only remember as some many-mouthed amalgam of faint disciplines and select phrases (“Noel? Don’t think I know him. You’re his … sister, you said?” “Uptown? That’s the first I ever heard of it.” “From the First, aren’t ya? I can tell.” “You! You’re the one who keeps hogging the shower!”), except for one housemate in particular, a certain striking graduate student, clad in a sheer work blouse and black skirt, who, leaning back against the Unit C range, atop which upper-leftmost stove an aluminum coffee maker was gurgling, introduced herself as—