“We’re going to come get you,” Levi said softly, in the same voice he said those words every week. The promise that was a promise and a prayer and the only thing he could offer that wasn’t flowers. “Me and Asher. We’re going to figure it out, we’re going to go back in, and the first person I’m coming for is you. I’m going to walk into whatever scenario the system puts us in and I’m going to find you and tell you it’s time to come home.”
He squeezed Jasper’s hand.
“I’m sorry it won’t be today.”
Levi loosened his grip and set Jasper’s hand back on the blanket.
“See you next Thursday, Jasper.”
He stood up as he wiped his face. He looked around the room at the six lives he was helping maintain the way he would maintain a garden — with regularity, with attention, with the belief that the seeds were still alive under the soil even though nothing had broken the surface yet.
He turned off the overhead light. He’d installed a dimmer three months ago — the fluorescents were too harsh and clinical, but he left the bedside lamps on. They had a warm light that saidsomeone is coming back.
He walked out of the c-suite, closed the door behind him, and stood in the hallway for a moment, his forehead against the wall, breathing.
Every week. Every week he did this and every week it hurt. Every week the hurting was worth it, because the hurting meant he hadn’t stopped caring.
Asher’s office door was open. It was always open — Asher didn’t close doors when Levi was in the building. Asher was at his desk, two monitors running, his reading glasses on. The glasses were new; Levi had noticed him squinting at screens and made him get an eye exam. The glasses made Asher look like a professor who moonlighted as a serial killer, which Levi told him, and Asher had saidI would never moonlight, I’d be full-time.
He was on a call, using his weird phone voice. Corporate Asher, discussing contract specifications with someone from the Department of Defense. Virtual Vice was pivoting — the technology was too valuable to die in a locked building with six comatose employees. The military wanted the immersive training system. The neural interface. The adaptive AI. They wanted it with modifications — a remote shutoff switch, a hard disconnect protocol, the safety features Asher never built because Asher had never cared about safety.
Asher cared about safety now. Or rather — Asher cared about funding the c-suite, and the c-suite required money, the money required contracts, and the contracts required safety features. The care was logistical. The result was the same. The people upstairs would be maintained. The medical staff would be paid. The machines would breathe.
Because Levi had asked, and Asher never said no to Levi when it came to the c-suite.
Asher saw him in the doorway. The phone-voice continued for another sentence and then: “I’ll call you back.” He hung up and the corporate posture dissolved. He smiled the way he always did when Levi entered the room—with his whole face.
“How are they?” Asher asked.
“The same. Owen’s IV site looked a little red — I flagged it for the nursing staff.”
“I’ll follow up.”
He would. He always did. Whatever Levi flagged, Asher followed up. Not because he cared about Owen’s IV site, but because Levi cared, and Levi’s caring was Asher’s operating system now, the way Asher’s wanting had been Levi’s operating system in the early weeks. They ran each other now. Two pieces of badly written code, compiled together, the only language each of them could still parse.
Levi stepped into the office. Asher started to stand and Levi waved him back down —not yet— because something against the side of the desk had caught his eye on the way in.
A large frame was leaning against the desk’s flank with the image side turned to the wood. The back of it was matte black, and Levi wasn’t sure which piece of art had come down from which wall.
“What’s that?” Levi asked.
Asher’s face did something Levi rarely saw on it these days—it became uncertain. He furrowed his brown, his lower lip sucked between his teeth.
“Don’t —” Asher started, then cleared his throat. “Look at it if you want. I just hadn’t — I wasn’t sure when I was going to show it to you.”
Levi crouched. The frame was heavy; he tilted it carefully away from the desk, eased it around, and rested it against the desk’s other side so the image faced into the room.
He looked at it.
For a second, he couldn’t figure out what he was looking at. Not because the image was abstract — because the image wasfamiliar, deeply familiar, in a way that took him a beat to locate. Seven figures, small in the frame, sitting and laying in the grass of a clearing, all looking up. Above them, a sky that was the kind of dark-blue-into-black that happened on a night with just moonlight and no clouds, and across the sky — streaking, soft,the kind of streaks that looked drawn instead of photographed — a meteor shower.
The forest. The first loop.
Levi had loved that night. He had thought, at the time — quietly, into his own chest because there was nobody to say it to yet —this is the best moment in any game I’ve ever played.He hadn’t told anyone. All seven of them. Together. Looking up at the meteor shower, when things were still good.
Except the picture wasn’t just a picture. He was three inches from the print now and the grass wascharacters. Black, repeating, dense and uniform. He squinted.Ones and zeros.
The grass was binary.