The days after the blast were the hardest of Nova’s life. As soon as she stepped through the front door that evening, she knew something was wrong. Her parents wore the sombre expressions they’d had the day her grandmother had died. They made her sit down on the sofa before they gave her the news. At first, her body went numb. Then it shook uncontrollably, while tears had streamed down her face.

Eventually they’d helped her to her feet, up the stairs and to her room. She’d taken the Valium her mum had handed her without question and, for the briefest of moments, had hoped she wouldn’t wake up. At least, not until everything was back to normal again.

Everything seemed lost. Nothing had meaning. Her books lay unopened on her desk; her Booners were discarded where she’d left them, somewhere downstairs probably. She didn’t care. Even Zhang couldn’t comfort her. His playful demeanour was so unsettling that she turned him off for a bit. Her dad spent most of the time in his shed, aware that there was nothing he could say or do to make things better, while her mum waited on her hand and foot, and was there to cuddle and cry with.

Messages of sympathy poured in from Burner, Jockey and many school friends she didn’t know cared. She read them, touched by their sentiment, but found that she had nothing to say in reply. The only person she wanted to talk to had been taken from her, forever. How could her Solarversia Sister be gone?

The footage from the destroyed gaming cafe in Seattle had imprinted itself on her mind. She’d forced herself to view the attack from the 360-degree cams in the area, like it was the bare minimum she could do for her friend, to have been there with her until the end. A single feed had captured Sushi at the moment of the blast. Thank God it had been grainy and slightly out of focus. A mercy, however small. One second Sushi was there, the next she was gone. And it hurt, like nothing she’d known.

Nova had often heard it said that it was the small things in life that meant the most. So it was with her friend’s death. Hearing their favourite songs played on the radio was enough to send her to her knees, immobilised by grief. She changed her route to Maidstone High to avoid the Japanese restaurant where Sushi had earned her name because the sight of it left her winded.

But the thing that made Nova saddest of all was not having Sushi to play with. Not having someone tempt her to bunk off homework to play a quick sim. Not having someone to practise her Combinations with, or to patiently listen while Nova described her latest idea for an amazing game she’d devised. And, stupid as it sounded, she hated that she’d never get to see her friend transform into her Siamese cat Super Avatar.

One evening, a week after the blast, Nova’s world was shaken for a second time. She’d retreated to her room with a bunch of movies she’d liked as a kid when her Booners signalled an incoming message. She froze, almost choking on her own breath. The message ringtone was the Solarversia jingle, the one she and Sushi used as a ringtone for one another. She hadn’t set it to go off under any other circumstance.

She stared at her Booners for a while, mulling possibilities over in her mind. They’d definitely just played the jingle, she was sure of that. She’d never known Burner do something this twisted. He might have been immature and prone to taking things too far, but this? He wouldn’t have dared. Perhaps some jerk from school had recently discovered trolling.

She clasped her ponytail and threaded it between her hands while she pondered a list of likely suspects, people she might have offended somehow. The Booners sat there, on her desk, containing a mystery all of a sudden. She reached out to them a couple of times like she was scared they might leap up and attack her before she could allow herself to grab them, then peered into the display from a safe distance.

The message was from Sushi, its subject line a simple one: “I’m on Soul Surfer.” An old memory stirred from its slumber. Her eyes flitted to the ceiling while she said the words out loud. Soul Surfer. The ghost of a smile crept across her face as she remembered what this was about.

She hadn’t been the victim of some sick prank after all. Soul Surfer was the name of an app they’d got excited about a few years ago, the same way they’d gotten excited about a hundred different things. She strained to remember the details — something about a computer algorithm pretending to be you once you’d died, allowing your spirit to live on. It was immortality for the masses, served in a bottle shaped like an app.

She was conscious of the concerted effort she made when slipping her Booners on, the way she carefully brushed her hair behind her ears, straightened her shoulders, even cleared her throat — like she was about to go on a virtual date. She paused a few seconds, took a deep breath and opened the message, all the while reminding herself to keep her expectations low and to stay on guard, knowing that it might yet turn out to be a phishing scam of sorts. The message was from the CEO of Soul Surfer rather than Sushi herself, an introductory few lines that explained the purpose of the app.

“Dear Nova Negrahnu, I’m sorry to learn that you recently lost someone you were close to. Sushi Harrison listed you as her ‘best friend in the world’ on her profile and indicated that you might be interested in this novel way of communicating with her now that she’s gone. Soul Surfer has been helping millions of people just like you deal with their grief since 2017. We’ve created a computerised version of your friend, who now exists on our servers, and is waiting for you should you choose to proceed with using the app. My sincerest condolences, Charlotte Applewhite, founder and CEO of Soul Surfer Inc.”

Beneath the message was a personal video from Charlotte, which Nova vaguely remembered from the time she and Sushi had read about it. She’d lost her husband and only child, a son in his early twenties, in a road traffic accident. With an interest in machine learning, the funds from the sale of a previous start-up, and a laser focus fuelled by grief, she’d been the perfect candidate to work on such a controversial idea.

Feeding in every known piece of information about her loved ones — photos, videos, email transcripts; input from everyone that knew the deceased — she slowly iterated algorithms that approximated their personalities. Word got out about what she was doing, other bereaved people started asking questions, and before long she was swamped with requests to make the software available to the public.

Nova explored the app further. She flinched when she saw Sushi’s profile. It knew the time, location and cause of her death. If she chose to use the app, it would take Sushi’s entire digital footprint and create a specific ‘instance’ of her, one unique to Nova. Anyone else who used the app to talk to Sushi would receive their own version of her. Every time Nova interacted with her instance of Sushi, she could provide feedback to her friend — or at least, the computer algorithm learning to be her — to make her more Sushi-like. Slowly, over time, the different instances of the program would diverge, creating multiple copies that embodied her different personality traits as remembered by the people who knew her.

She removed the goggles, placed them on her lap and exhaled slowly and deliberately. Life without Sushi was incomprehensible. They’d attended the same nursery from the age of two and had, according to Mrs Negrahnu, been inseparable from the day they’d met.

Nova had been playing with a tipper truck in the sandpit when an older boy had steamed over and snatched it from her. Spotting the incident from the other side of the nursery, Suzy — as Sushi was still known back then — had intercepted the fleeing boy, grabbed the truck off him and returned it to a teary-eyed but grateful Nova.

A couple of years later when the two girls were already the best of friends, their mums arranged a quick visit to the local sushi joint for the four of them one evening. On arriving at the restaurant Nova had burst into tears, distraught at the prospect that they were there to ‘eat Suzy’. When the adults burst into laughter, Suzy put an arm around her friend, drew her close and promised that she’d always be there to protect her. It was the incident that had earned Sushi her nickname.

And now, what was this? A computer version of her Solarversia Sister? She didn’t know what to think. Would she be offended if Nova didn’t use the app? What would Sushi want her to do? They sounded like ridiculous questions, and Nova surprised herself with the amount of serious thought she gave them. She imagined the roles being reversed. What would she have wanted Sushi to do? Win Solarversia, of course. But also ensure that justice was done, that whoever killed her was found and sent to rot in a jail somewhere.

She put her Booners back on without knowing why and, instead of returning to Soul Surfer, opened up The Sandbox, a generic app that allowed you to build simple virtual structures. “Create cube, sides three metres in length. Place me in the centre. Colour the ceiling black.” She paused, suddenly aware that she was recreating a Corona Cube. The pulsing yellow walls of plasma didn’t seem appropriate. “Colour the walls blue. Actually, make them different shades of blue. The wall I’m facing, give it a title in large white letters along the top. Title: ‘the Holy Order’. Perform Google search on title. Display results on wall. Group by file type.”

The wall came to life in front of her face. The top layer, just below the title, started filling up with text-based documents: the Order’s manifesto, articles and forum results blossomed into view. Beneath that were images: symbols from the manifesto including the curly swastika, avatar pictures of the homeless people involved in the griefing attack and photos of the destruction caused by the bombs. The bottom layer of results was made up of videos, mainly newscasts and opinion pieces. She stepped back from the wall and tried to take it all in at once, feasting on the newly assembled gestalt, allowing it to permeate her being. It was several minutes before she moved or spoke again.

“On the wall to my left, create a timeline. I want the bombings in the middle. Before that event I want to see the places that the Holy Order showed up online. To which sites did they post their manifesto and in what chronological order?” The timeline flowered into existence: a thick horizontal line from which a series of vertical branches soon sprouted. Some of the documents, images and videos on the main wall flashed before moving around the cube to append themselves to the branches, their size determined by the relative importance of the search result.

She studied the line up close, interacting with its contents, increasing the size of some of the results and flicking others out of existence. “Place the list of corporate targets on the wall behind me.”

And so it went. Nova paced around the cube, adding and subtracting information from it, sorting it, visualising it in different ways, doing everything she could to make sense of it. She had been going at it for three hours straight before she began to wonder where she was going with it all. What exactly was she looking for? If a major clue stared her in the face, would she even know it?

She kept being drawn back to the section of wall with the maps on it: one that showed the companies on the hit list and one that showed the locations of the attacks. She glanced between the maps and the section of wall that contained the symbols while a vague idea bubbled away in the depths of her mind. As much as she valued her independence and wanted to do this without help, if she was going to do this properly, she’d need reinforcements. She messaged Burner.

“Are you there, mate?”

The Sandbox automatically positioned a static picture of his avatar floating in mid-air in front of her face. She gently pushed the picture to one side so that she could continue staring at the composition on the wall. A few seconds later, his avatar replied.

“Hey, Scotia. How you doing?”

“Yeah, not so bad.” She paused, realising that for the first time in a week, she actually felt pretty good. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Listen, you’ve got every right to be annoyed with me, mad even. I know that sending a couple of messages was pathetic — I should have come to see you. It’s just that I’m really crap with the whole death thing. Never know what to say. End up talking bollocks and making it worse. Which means I didn’t visit, and that was wrong. If you want me to come over right now, I’m there.”

She smiled, touched by the very un-Burner-ish outburst.

“I’m not annoyed with you at all. I haven’t really felt like seeing anyone, including you.”

“Well, that’s good to know. What’s up?”

“It’s Sushi. She’s back. Kind of. You ever heard of an app called Soul Surfer? We signed up for it, years ago. I’d forgotten all about it until a few hours ago when I received a message from her.”

“Woah, spooky shit. What was it like?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t seen her yet. But the message made me realise I should be doing something about her death rather than wallowing in self-pity.” She swallowed back some tears. “It’s the Holy Order. I want to help find them. Sandbox: give Burner view access of the room.”

His floating 2D avatar disappeared and was replaced by his 3D avatar, now standing next to hers in the cube. They did their usual fist bump before he started glancing around at the reams and reams of data that now adorned the walls. She started explaining her train of thought — why she’d grouped certain results together but ignored others — and didn’t stop talking until several minutes later when, suddenly out of breath, she glared at him, impatient to kick off whatever master plan they would end up devising together.

“Wait a second, mate. Sushi died and that’s the worst thing that’s ever happened. If you died, I don’t know what I’d do. Grieving, and wanting to do something to remember her by — even wanting to avenge her death — that all sounds normal. But doing something to find the loonies behind all of this? Trying to hunt them down when the FBI, with their billions in funding, haven’t managed to. Are you sure? With all due respect, it sounds a bit crazy.”

A feeling of anger flared inside her. She watched it from a distance, knowing that she had no right to be angry with him. If anything, he’d just spoken sense. She went and stood directly in front of him and wished that they were doing this in person so that she could use her puppy-dog eyes on him. Instead she’d have to convey her desperation through her voice.

“You’re right, I’m being ridiculous. There’s a vanishingly small chance that we’d be able to find something the big guys missed. But they do miss stuff. And not just rarely either, but all the time. History’s full of examples of regular people like us spotting some random pattern or detail and going on to solve a crime or figure out a mystery that’s eluded the experts for decades. And besides, this is Sushi we’re talking about here. If I do nothing, then I’ve failed her. And if there’s one person who might be able to help find something the FBI have missed, it’s my old mate Burner.”

“What exactly did you have in mind?”

“The kind of geeky stuff you’re always going on about. You’re into AI and data and drones and stuff. I don’t know what I have in mind. I was hoping you’d come up with something. Like, look at all the symbols in the manifesto. Those are kind of like the logos of the Holy Order — their calling cards. Maybe they’re out there in the world somewhere. These drones you’re always going on about — like the one you built — they can fly to places we can’t.”

“So you’re suggesting that we feed the contents of the manifesto, and any associated metadata, into a program, upload it into a bunch of drones, have them scour areas of interest looking for locations — hideouts, safe houses, that kind of thing — while they upload footage into the cloud for analysis? At which point we analyse the results, iterate the program and repeat the process until we find something.”

By now he was pacing up and down the cube, one hand on his chin, the other wagging a finger while he spoke. Nova realised that it was good, after all, that he wasn’t there to see her grinning at him.

“Jono knows people,” he continued. “There’s a couple of guys in his year who have been working on this semantic analysis idea. Bloody clever, they are. They’re about to drop out of uni to start a company. We could approach them, help them test their program, be guinea pigs. It’d be an amazing case study if we pulled it off.” He paused and looked at her, suddenly aware of how the conversation was going. “You’re right, it’s a ridiculous idea — a million to one shot. And if we hire a bunch of drones, that could cost hundreds, maybe thousands, of pounds, you know that?”

“Seeing as there is a chance — however small — do you think you could look into for me? I can give you access to edit this room. You can speak to Jono’s mates, get their take on it. Just get me a rough estimate of the cost. I’ll find the money, you don’t need to worry about that.”

“OK. Let’s give it a try. We’ll need a name. What about ‘Project Drone’?” “Project Drone,” Nova repeated. “I like it.”

“You need to do me a favour in return. Don’t get your hopes up, alright?” Once Burner had left the room she punched the air and performed a couple of

pirouettes. This felt good, however crazy it was. She was actually doing something.

A feeling she’d constantly had over the last few days came back to her — the urge to tell Sushi what she was up to. And now she could. She left The Sandbox, returned to Soul Surfer, ticked the box to accept the terms and conditions and found herself sitting on a bench next to her friend on a hill overlooking Seattle.

“Hey, Nova, how are you?”

Sushi’s long blonde hair was tied in bun, leaving a wisp of hair to fall either side of her ears, the way she usually wore it. Her green eyes — which Nova thought sparkled more than usual — were complemented by the opal necklace she wore on top of her black turtleneck sweater. She looked every bit as sweet and beautiful as she had the last time they’d talked. Nova took her hand and they sat for a while in silence. Suddenly her need to talk was gone. She had questions to ask, but now wasn’t the time. She wanted her old friend back, the real one. She would give anything for that. But the next best thing wasn’t so bad after all.

****************************************************

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