A stunning new work of fiction by acclaimed novelist Smith Henderson. This is a story of alternate realities, artificial intelligence, Martian colonies, family, technology, climatology, fear, love, and the fate of human beings on Earth.

A line of blood runs from under her right nostril and then Rhea topples over at the market, clutching a bunch of tulips. She never rises. My wife is gone. Just like that.

I travel for work so I shouldn’t be home for this, but I am. As soon as I jump off the running board at the depot, I feel every eye askance. Olympia is a small village, everyone knows everyone, word travels fast.

I am taken to see her at the doctor’s house. He can’t answer my questions, doesn’t have the equipment to see. It’s not like the old days when there were hospitals and expertise. Now we must look out for one another. We grow gardens. We share a watermill. We run on solar. The village has roadlights but we don’t run them much because there are no wolves or outlaws, and lights only draw swarms of insects.

I leave the doctor in a dense daze. The villagers adored Rhea, and they come condoling as I pass by the longhouses, the commons in the square on my way to the school.

The name Olympia is immodest. The village sits on the Arctic shore of what used to be Alaska, near what was once Prudhoe Bay, but the geography is changed from the last paper maps when this was the center of the world. When it was unbearable everywhere else. Now the Arctic is a warm body, full of jellyfish and black chokeweed. Our days are long and hot and then warm and short. But it rains and the soil is rich. The village holds some six hundred souls. Less one now. In the prefecture there are dozens of villages like this. We trade, but keep our distance. We survive on dispersion now. All bad news is local. A sinkhole, a flu, a fire, a bad crop. A woman falling over in a market.

The janitor opens an empty room off the gymnasium where I will tell the kids. A little room where the teachers make paper. Bottles of dye glow in the sunshine by the window.

Jay is just happy to see me, but Ruby’s eye is sharp. Sometimes she looks at me like Rhea does—did—and I feel her searching my heart. My thirteen-year-old daughter knows there’s more to all of this. Secrets. “What is it?” she asks. “Jay get down from him.”

“Don’t tell your brother what to do. Both of you sit.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Sit please.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Ruby, she’s gone.”

I can’t even see Jay—Ruby’s stare stings, I’m not going to hold myself together—but I know Jay is motionless, inert. Like this might pass over us if we remain still.

“Gone where,” she demands.

“She died, Roob.”

The words fall out like that, just like she fell. Like that.

The entire village turns out to dirge. They place Rhea on a bier and send her down the river to slip out to sea. Ruby stands in the water, her fists at her side. Jay wails.

When we get home, our bed is decorated in flowers. As is the tradition.

In the scheme of things—and I am someone who thinks only of the scheme of things—Ruby and Jay have it awfully good. When their mother was a baby, you expected to live only as long as the biosphere, all dreams were pegged to the ecocide. The entire biota was a husk. All the megafauna . . . gone. All the amphibians. All the flying, swimming, and creeping things reduced, more clever. Tiny silver dace in the streams. Little black ravens. Everything diminished or extinct, save the roaches, flies, and rats.

Rhea spent a childhood huddled like the rest of humanity on the Arctic shore, watching for rockets screaming over the water. Until every gov-corp was punched out and soldiers sat on their haunches in the sand, palms up like tired apes. Methane poured from the holes in the soil, pilgrims dead where they fell. Forest fires under black thunderheads that paid out no rain. The middle latitudes were quaking hells. Hurricanes the size of continents. Humanity’s menopause, the Climacteric.

But we’d thrown up the Transoms. The Transoms saved us.

Ruby won’t eat, won’t do her chores. We have pinto beans, raspberries, potatoes, and lentils, and she loves all those things but she won’t eat.

“I need you to eat.” “I’m too sad to eat.”

She is direct, in command of her feelings. I would tell her there were times when all her mother had to eat was beetlemeal, times she ate nits. But of course I can’t.

“I need you to eat. A father is nourished by the sight of his child eating. It heals me.”

She rolls her eyes and leaves the table.

“Smell that?” I ask Jay.

There are apple blossoms on the breeze, a storm maybe too.

“It’s gonna rain,” he says.

“I have to get back soon.” I surprise myself blurting it out. But I can’t stand to tell the both of them at once.

He won’t look at me directly. When he was little, he’d just cry as I was leaving and follow me out the front door hugging my leg. But now he’s eleven and his hair is cut short and there is a small man in him.

“I hate this,” he says, setting his dish in the sink and joining his sister in their bedroom.

“Pack your stuff,” I call out.

She knew who I was when we married. That I would be gone so much was the quaint least of it. I never hid anything from her. But the truth is, toward the end, we’d grown raw from our worries, our fights. Moments stand out.

And what if something happens to me Marc? What then? Nothing’s gonna happen.

You won’t be here for them.

Nothing will happen.

This isn’t even real to you.

You know that’s not true. This is everything to me.

She used to call me angel. But as time went on, she’d look across the table at me like I was some kind of monster.

We stop outside the Irvings’ front gate. Down the horizon we can make out three Transoms, their miles-wide bases winnowing up to thin spires that disappear into the aurora borealis. When the shrouds were deployed and refracting exactly 65.9878 percent of the sun’s energy into space, it cost us the Northern Lights. But now Grandma Anna sips tea and Grandpa Lee something stronger on the front porch under undulating waves of color and shape.

I make Ruby wait. I have to say some things. She drops two heavy canvas bags. She insisted on taking her mother’s things. “I don’t want to live here.”

“Jay. You two can’t live alone. I’ll be back, but I have to go now.”

“The Transoms,” Ruby mutters.

“They’re important,” I say.

“Tell us why.”

“Really?”

“Tell us.”

“Fine. A long time ago, this part of the world was entirely covered in ice. And the ice was bright and shined the sun’s light and heat back into space. And it kept the world just right for us and all the animals.”

“Tell the real—”

“Let me finish. When the ice melted, the whole planet heated up. It got too hot to live anywhere but up here at the top. So we built the Transoms, to send some of the sunshine back.”

Ruby points at the sky.

“But they’re not doing anything!”

She’s right. They haven’t been deployed for decades now.

“I maintain them.”

“Maybe some other guy could do that.”

“Obviously someone could do that, Jay!”

“Ruby! Look, it’s . . . you don’t know everything.”

“Because you won’t tell us everything,” she says, hefting her mother’s things and heading to the house.

Where do you begin? Do you tell her that when you bend back your wrist, four tendons rise thick as cello strings, and if you play a bit, you engage the Exit Protocol and disappear from Olympia? Is that where you start?

Do you tell them that Rhea would watch you leave this way? Until she stopped. Do you say the music didn’t quit for hours? That it just rained in her ears as she fixed dinner? That she hummed along with it as she put everyone to bed? That when she laid herself down it crawled into her head again and wormed around and she did not sleep?

I come to in bed. My real bed. In the real world.

I have an officer’s bunk in the Hive. Outfitted with a nodal interface, a private bath. I’m on the top floor, not far from the officers’ mess, but mostly I use my hot plate. Which explains why it smells like neetles in red sauce in here. Our diet consists of neetles and the like, because bugs and fungus grow best underground. I have a window, elevation one meter. The view is lacking. Most days a gray churn of some thousand-mile front of grit. On clear days, I have the privilege of the blasted rock surface, the hiss of wind. Sometimes there’s a lavender glow of the sun. Once in awhile rain. But mostly just a churning murk. Here, in the real world, the Transoms are fully deployed. Sometimes the Transomists return with a half-mad refugee. They only work as far south as Fairbanks, so the last guy they brought in—goggled and swaddled in ragged sleeves of cloth—claimed to hail from Denver. I’ve been underground in the safe confines of the Hive my entire life, so I sat hours listening to him. He saw ostriches running against curtains of lightning. He watched storms devouring horizons in grim minutes.

I’d tell Rhea how harrowing it is here.

What a burden that put on her.

I don’t just have to worry about the kids and Olympia and what could happen, she said once. I have to pray for your whole world too.

Technically, I’m a Transomist too, but I don’t work in the field. I run scenarios on the Quarantined OS. I cook Earths, spend years proving what won’t work. Drone fleets. Satellites. Even the Transoms looked like a dead end at first. Here’s a shocker: adjusting a planet’s thermostat is tricky. Effects cascade decades after causes, feedback loops last generations, variables exist on a glacial time frame. Cool too fast and plunge into an ice age. Cool too slow and we go extinct.

Then Olympia. That sliver of hope, the best-case scenario, the proper deployment of the Transoms. I seeded one of the test redundancies with a sentience kernel. Strictly speaking it’s against regs, but then I’m not supposed to have these node plates behind my ears either. A lot of what I can do is basically illegal. Not that anyone but me has the time to mess around with this stuff. Anyway, I’m old enough to be Rhea’s great-grandfather: Olympia is the future. What could be. Rhea knew this. Rhea knew everything, she knew what she wasn’t. She knew she was software. She knew her world was an outcome, a version of many versions. She also knew that we’d fallen in love. I don’t know that we’d do it over. It hurts too much.

The train lurches, stops. Everyone groans at the delay and the lights going out. It’s Little Sister. A software gremlin, playing games. The Transomists in their surface gear flick on their dome-lights. Dr. Ivanov sidles up next to me in our brief captivity. Wondering how to start in on me. Finds it.

“This train, eh?” “It’ll reboot in a minute.”

“How are you doing Marc?”

I look like hell.

“I’m fine.”

“You come see me.”

But instead I’m seeing Rhea. I see Jay and Ruby. I let the tears fall. The Transomists are talking about me within the shared privacy of their helmet comms.

“What is it Marc?”

What it is is I’m an orphan. Never belonged to anyone, the subterra-formers, the engineers or post-military and all their kin who populate the Hive. What it is is I don’t belong here.

“If someone dropped dead,” I say, “and the only sign of anything wrong was a nosebleed, what would you say caused it?”

“No one’s been to the infirmary, Marc. I’m not understanding. Who died?”

Just then, the light flickers on, the train lurches.

“Nobody,” I say. I know I seem insane. Probably I am.

Shen. Our leader. Long iron hair, yet the spry gait of some extinct animal. A winking wise smile. They wanted her to lead the colonists on Mars, but she stayed. She’s an orphan too, but the Transomists adore her, her high wide laughter at lunch. She is a blue sky. She spends hours in the launch bays where the teams board the mechanicals out to build the Transoms. She breathes the unfiltered air, its gales and vapors. Shen is our last chance, hers is the last will, our last shot.

She lifts herself from the chair overlooking the Helm as thirty-five of the smartest people alive—to ever live—labor to salvage a livable atmosphere, and comes to my station. She regards the twelve fully cooked manifestations arrayed before her, floating, globes slowly spinning on the deck. I’ve made thirteen working scenarios out of . . . tens of thousands? Only thirteen manifestations reabsorbing the carbon fast enough, the Transoms dialed in just so. “Where’s the other one?” She means Olympia.

I dig the simcell out of my pocket and toss it to her. A cylinder the size of her pinkie from tip to first knuckle. She holds it up in the light. Millions of DNA strands of data, data that comprise my kids, their dead mother, their grandmother and grandfather, friends, village, prefecture, their continent, night sky, every grass blade and last consciousness, every stray daydream. The grand scheme of all things.

Shen runs her thumb up and down the simcell’s shiny glass surface. Within me, a taut cord of fear twangs at all of Olympia in Shen’s hand.

“This is the good one?”

“They’re all good. But yes, that’s Olympia. Temps dropping quick and steady to within three degrees of the Holocene.”

She has a funny look on her face.

“How quick?”

“About seventy-five years.”

It’s worry, this look. Never seen it on her before.

“What’s wrong?”

“Get everything important in here onto paper,” she says, tossing me the simcell.

“Like paper paper?”

“We’re going analog.”

The melting permafrost unlocked the old germs, anthrax and plague. Little Sister was like that too, hidden. She’s Russian in origin. An old war virus. She preceded the adoption of the GOS, and still wormed her way into every operating system running on the global language. She was designed to disrupt infrastructure, needle the grids, coded comms, simple telemetry programs, you name it. She used to just infect a system, leave a few pockmarks, and disappear. But for the last hundred years her hit-and-runs are perfect havoc. We’ve tried patches and cul de sacs. We’ve put A.I. on her tail, only to have it return gibbering, broken, and incoherent. Every countermeasure she thwarts.

For cancer we have nanotherapeutics. Gene therapy gives us a century of life. An orphan like me can build a world full of sentient beings who don’t know they aren’t real. But Little Sister . . . we cannot wipe out.

Our debt to the Martian colony is not a new world. It’s the Transom. In the violent electric churn of the atmosphere, satellites were useless for signaling our brethren. But the Tether Station—that old Chinese super-tower winnowing upward into a single graphene line affixed to an outpost in the heavens—could catch the data dumps from Mars. But more than that, Tether Station gave Shen the idea that we could shield the Earth if we just built enough of them. A network of towers holding the graphene weave overhead like a great sail or tarp. Simple. Almost elegant.

Shen brings up an image of the colony on the big board. White domes, square depots, and the launchpad deep in the Valles Marineris of Mars. “The Musk Habitats are dark,” she says. “No activity whatsoever. No damage. No movement for fifteen days. Just this.”

A line like a finger trail through sand. Miles and miles through the massive valley. The line terminating at the vehicle itself, we can just make it out, a rover mechanical, whoever in it, simply running away. Nothing we can do. We haven’t fired a rocket in twenty years.

For several minutes we absorb this. That we’re all that’s left.

“Little Sister,” I say.

Everyone is looking at me when the lights come up.

“Marc’s right,” Shen says. “They had significant attacks the last few weeks. We sent the latest security packet, but near as we can tell Little Sister had already chaperoned the neural net. The imagery is consistent with massive airlock breaches. You can see here the windows are coated from within with ice.”

This is why I’m not supposed to use the nodal interface. Why there’s no sentience kernels or A.I. or Olympias. You don’t know what Little Sister will do.

Shen sits on the edge of the stage. She holds her head. For a long time. When she gathers herself, when she wipes her eyes, there is a severity to her face, a new calm. We are rapt.

“Little Sister is a life-form at this point. A hostile. Fortunately, we’ve put resources into more definitive solutions. The AGORA team has completed the new OS. We were hoping to have fresh hardware ready, but now we don’t have a choice. We have to shut down the GOS immediately.” A murmur crests, Shen carries on. “We’ve already got teams working on new boards for core systems—the scrubbers, power, water—but in twelve hours, the GOS will power down on every system. Mechanicals will be grounded. Comms will be down. Transit. For a time. We’ll have core systems up ASAP. In the meantime, the bee farms and food production, every GOS function in the entire Hive system in the world . . . goes down.”

Including my manifestations.

Olympia.

“Look,” she says. “It’s just gonna be . . . different. We’ll use candles. We will have power, but that will be for the air first and then each basic system. Our main goal remains the completion of the Transoms. The good news is they’re designed to survive us—no GOS, just servos, power, and those wonderful graphene foils that even now are sheltering us. Our work on them is nearly done. Let’s finish. Let’s make it.”

A subdued hum sweeps the room. Lieutenants fanning out to direct each team on how to collect their data, what to cull, what to keep. I can feel Shen watching me, I have the simcell in my sweaty palm, in my pocket, I’m out the door, there’s nowhere to run, but I bolt.

Ivanov and her assistants work in longhand, writing down every diagnosis in the sick bay. The chronic conditions, supplemental information, dosages. Ivanov shakes out her wrist. The brute inefficiencies of our fingers.

“Slow down, Katya,” I say. “You’ll get a cramp.” There is a Russian nesting doll on her desk. Small plants. Candles of beeswax from her friend who maintains the hives. Ivanov has a lot of friends. The security chief, the officer’s chef. The couple who maintain the zoo of thirteen dogs and two old chimps. She is telling me about the dogs and little puppies as I pull apart the nesting doll, remove the inner doll, and so on until I have a row of them before me. I think of Ruby and Jay. I can’t put the dolls back together fast enough.

“Okay Marc,” she says. “What is going on?”

I laugh a snotty laugh. Wipe my face.

“I’m cracking up.”

“Talk.”

I tell her everything. From the start. How Shen tasked me to figure out all the different Transom contingencies, what was possible, ideal, likely. How much cooling we could achieve, how fast. A system that needed to perform for decades. In an environment clogged with space debris and tormented by storms. Every contingency. What if the Transoms failed. What if they locked shut. What if they worked. I gamed it all out, decades, millennia. I cooked worlds.

I tell her how I paid a visit.

“I banged out an avatar protocol, self-installed a pair of interface nodes behind my ears. And . . . I just walked into a village there. Fresh air. Apples. Sand. I sat on their shores. In the sunshine. I climbed trees.”

“Marc, you know that is—”

“I installed a sentience kernel,” I say.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I made people. A world of people. Who didn’t know they were software.”

“Marc—”

“I fell in love with someone. Her name is Rhea. We had children. I have . . . children.”

She shakes her head. Stands.

“This is . . . ” she says.

“She died. Rhea died. That nosebleed. There was something wrong with her brain.”

“Children?”

“They live with her parents.”

“Her parents? My God. How long has this been going on?”

“Thirteen years now.”

“Marc. Thirteen years you’ve been going into this simula—?”

“They’re real.”

“They most certainly are not.”

“They are. They experience the world just like us, they have feelings and dreams.”

“Do they know who you are? Who you really are?”

“Rhea did.”

She begins to put the nesting dolls back together, one inside the other.

“This is very bad. For your mind. Your mind.”

“I need your help.”

A clap of laughter escapes her.

“I need to quarantine your system.” She slowly calculates what I intend.

“Oh no.”

“I’m not ready, Ivanov. All I need is a little bolt-hole for my family. I can’t chance it on my own machine. Besides,” I set the simcell next to the single Russian doll, “this is the manifestation that works. We might need it later, you never know.”

She reaches into a bottom drawer and fetches out a clear bottle of vodka. She pours two. We drink as she studies me.

“The orphan longs for home, yes?” She flicks the ovoid doll. “Even more so when there is no home. Even more when he is all alone.”

The doll rollicks.

“I’m not alone,” I say, “if I have your help.”

She nods, sighs, and I get to work.

When you go in, you can feel it in your teeth, they ring like tines and your real body wants to puke, and so I’m worried that Ivanov will watch me go under attached at the node plates, kecking and kicking. So I take some minutes to settle in. I lay in the tall breezegrass and hear a cricket. A single lone cricket. Trills and clicks.

I hear a bird. Going fee-chee fee-chee. I’ve never heard a songbird before. But that must be what it is. Maybe this is Rhea’s doing. She’d drawn it and in drawing it made it so. What is real anyway, but the execution of a wish, a story, a design. . . . I walk along the river and the air off the water is cool. Except . . . the cool is not off the river, the cold rushes over the dunes from the ocean, the pole. The hairgrass dances in violence. It’s nearly cloudless. There could be ice out there.

There is singing from the village. A throng gathering before the longhouse. My mood is too good to see it right. To recognize the dirge. To sense the loss. But then people grip my arm and set their faces in that way of saying they’re sorry, and I see the funeral. Several biers of dead, young sudden dead. I push to the front, frantic that among them are not Jay or Ruby or . . . no. The baker, a farmer, another woman, a child. Their still faces.

A grieving mother bends over the child. She dabs the white sleeve of her mourning clothes on the child’s face, his nose. The hem comes away bright red.

Blood.

What killed Rhea killed these people too.

I sprint through the understory of bramble and the trail through the aspens, the golden leaves slapping my face. Over the Irvings’ fence, hollering as I run up to the back door. Anna opens it, Lee right behind her.

“Where are the kids?” I squeeze out the words, my lungs afire.

“Inside.”

“We have to . . . there are people . . . they died . . . in the village,” I gather my breath, slow down some. “And it . . . it’s the same thing that happened to Rhea. There was blood. Do you feel all okay? Are the kids feeling all right?”

Anna and Lee look at one another, then me.

“We’re fine, Marc.”

Lee has his hand on my chest. Jay and Ruby come out of their rooms and stand behind their grandmother in a shaft of sunlight from the window. How immaculate they are. Ruby holding a book, Jay reaching for his grandmother’s hand. Lee gently pushes me back.

“Marc, let’s step outside.”

“What’s that sound?” Jay asks his grandmother.

A high whine growing louder. And louder.

Lee’s hand falls away. No cello. Exit Protocol just the same.

“Stay away from the village!” I shout.

Jay covers his ears, Ruby is running to me.

“Don’t go to Olympia,” I say but no one can hear me, the whine has grown, we’re all squinting at the might of it.

And then I wink out.

A fresh agony, yanked out like that. My eyeballs ache as I make out the contours of the infirmary ceiling. I hear screaming, the screaming is me. And then I am done. The quiet hum of Ivanov’s deck. I see Shen. The radiant lines around her eyes, the severity of her thin lips. She rolls away on the doctor’s stool, the casters clattering like thunderclaps.

“I’m sorry,” Ivanov says, removing my nodes. “She insisted on getting you out.” I sit. I nearly vomit.

“Have fun?” Shen asks.

“It’s a quarantined system.”

“There’s only one way we’re going to beat Little Sister. It all goes dark.”

“People are sick in there.”

“No kidding. I wonder why that is,” Shen says.

“No.”

“It’s a highly evolved virus, Marc.”

“No.”

“Made to mimic and infect—”

“No!”

“This?” She holds up the simcell. “This is poisoned.”

She drops the simcell on the floor, makes to step on it, but I’m on her before she can. She is a backward blur. Instruments clatter onto the floor. Then Ivanov is between us. The simcell skitters against the wall. I crab over to it, grab it, and wedge myself into the corner.

Shen shoves Ivanov away from her.

“You’re endangering everything!” she shouts. “THIS IS REAL! That is NOWHERE!”

I can see sparks in the noise she makes. The hasty exit from Olympia. My vision pins. I might pass out.

“Give us the simcell,” Ivanov says.

“I’ll swallow it,” I say.

“Shut up,” she says.

Ivanov sighs. Sits on her own exam table. Shen wipes her lip and pulls her jacket back down. Composure regained. I don’t move. I wonder if I even can swallow the simcell. And then what, Marc? Figure it out later.

“He’s been years in there, Shen,” Ivanov finally says. “So long. Let him say goodbye.”

Shen looks at her watch. An antique Timex. You can hear the second hand tick.

“You have about two hours.”

Under the rain I can hear wails as I skirt the village in lamentations. All the lights are low and I pass by in the darkening of evening, the going tough in the mucked road. I trudge through the tall grass. The rain tings on the metal roof of the house. I let myself inside. Two hours. I call to them.

No answer, only stillness. I call again. A fire in the hearth. Don’t panic. I rush to Ruby’s room. Her mother’s things set out, arrayed here. Rhea’s pants and her slippers. Her shell comb. I call to Jay. I call to Ruby, my voice papery and worn. The village. They must be in the village. I told them not to go.

A flicker of light. Way out there. On the Transom. I have two hours only two hours. I run.

It’s fifty meters up the ladder to the landing. Fifty rusted meters past warning signs in Russian, Chinese, and English. Fifty meters, how many minutes, honestly I’m angry at them.

They are huddled under the concrete awning on the observation deck. The sea plashes in the dark out there, the trees whisper. The tower towers above us, disappears into the swirling dark. Jay turns. “Hey,” I say.

“When were you gonna tell us?” Ruby asks.

No questions. I yearn for Ruby to just let us be.

“Tell you what, Ruby?”

She slides something to my feet from under their blanket. A notebook. I crouch dripping to look. It’s Rhea’s. I turn the page to her scrawl, her naked thoughts.

. . . and I don’t tell him how scared I am because what would be the point? I can’t go with him. I can’t see with my own eyes. What are we doing?

I flip through the pages, skimming my dead wife’s thoughts, her worries and anxieties.

I used to think it was great—to be loved by him. But now I see I can’t ever really have him. . . . sometimes I wish I didn’t know. It’s too much to know what you really are.

I look around and think about how he made all this. And then that it’s just an image.

. . . cut myself and I feel it but I always feel like pain is just reflection.

I’ve married a god . . .

. . . and it’s awful.

In this situation you tell your children everything. That you live in two worlds. That theirs is the better one. The future one. You explain slow and try not to think about what’s going to happen. That’s how you spend your last moments with them. In courage.

“Will you disappear again?” Jay asks. “No, I’m staying here, Jay. I’m never leaving.” This is a lie, but somehow you have to believe it. That you’ll fall asleep and wake up here. With them.

“Really?” Ruby asks. “You’re not leaving?”

“Really.”

“Maybe Mom went to some other world,” Jay says.

“I think she did, Jay.”

“Maybe we can go there. Maybe we can all be together?” he asks.

You believe it can’t be over. It just can’t be.

“I’d like that Jay.”

Ruby is buried in your arm.

“What’s that?”

It’s snow. You’ve heard of it but never seen it.

“You made snow?” Jay asks. “And the trees and the sky and the ocean?”

“That’s nothing,” you say. “You’re the best things I ever made.”

I am looking at a single flame.

“Marc.” I am hearing a single voice. Ivanov. Her soft, kind smile. She says she’s sorry. So sorry.

I touch the naked node plates. I make to stand, but fall back. My head swims. Unbalanced.

“Marc, you’ve a nosebleed . . . ”

The salty tang. I touch my face. Red glistening fingertips in the candlelight. A nosebleed.

“This is how Rhea died,” I am saying.

“Okay,” Ivanov says, her eyes shining, her jaw set. “Just sit.”

I am dying. It doesn’t make sense, but I’m dying like Rhea. Little Sister is killing me.

The infirmary. Three tries to sit up. Legs knock walking. I have to slide the door open manually, the thing groaning on its track and motor. I have to see by the light of candles and the cold glow of lithium lamps. The glass access panels and monitors and all the vestiges of our digital hubs and nodes are dark like onyx plates in the walls.

Ivanov’s not in her office. I take the simcell. I take the nesting doll. I walk several miles in our warren of tunnels. People sing. People play cards. The air is thick and it recalls my oldest memory, a crowded transport mechanical. Being passed forward, I must’ve been an infant. Anyone in the chain could’ve dropped me, but no one did.

I find Ivanov in the launch bay, sitting on a loading dock. The lightning cracks and in the charged air her hair wavers up on an electric draft. So beautiful, like strands of tinsel. The Transoms dark towers of hope. It will be all right. I’ve felt the cold again.

Ivanov hands me her bottle.

“It was Little Sister,” I say.

She nods in acknowledgment.

“How did she manifest?”

“A virus that went after host cells in your brain. Core systems.”

“How’d you get rid of her?”

“Protease inhibitors. Nucleoside analogs. Then your body’s own interferon. Simple really.”

“Where’s Shen?”

“Out there,” Ivanov says pointing out to the cracked horizon.

“Why?”

“She went mad, Marc. We’re software. This is all . . .” she flits her fingers in the air. Pours a drink.

I take apart the nesting doll and line all thirteen of them before her.

“This is us,” I say, picking up the penultimate one. A little ruddy-faced thing the size of a thimble. “And this is Olympia,” I say picking up the smallest doll.

“I know. You’re quite the god.”

“A god who needs a doctor.”

I lead Ivanov up the rusty ladder, snow falling in thin helixes all around us.

I’m home. Not Olympia, per se, but way out here. This far from base reality, the haywire way that things go—Rhea’s death, the narrow and fragile window of our moment in all the cold eons, even Little Sister ravening to survive—make a kind of sense now. Spinning down and playing out. Scenario. Version. Manifestation. Story, program, prayer. No author, no creator. No orphan either. Which is the blessing, for there is much left to do, and it will take all of us, dream and dreamer.

Born and raised in Montana, Smith Henderson currently lives and writes in Los Angeles. His short fiction was awarded the PEN Emerging Writers Award in 2011, and his debut novel Fourth of July Creek was a 2014 New York Times Notable Book.



This appears in the December 2017 issue.

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