In the not-so-distant future, a man works…

The Sun through clouds on a rainy day. Rainbow. “We came in peace for all mankind,” read the back of Davod’s head. The worker, David, reached for the power button underneath the quote—quotes and real names were reserved for the pre-release Deur prototypes—and waited for Davod to power on.

“Hey David,” said Davod after a moment. “What are we working on today?”

David chuckled. The Interaction Department had been working hard, clearly. The question was a joke; Davod knew perfectly well what they’d be working on today: he’d been powered on at 9:03 am every weekday for over a year, and every day was the same. Pick this up. Put it there. Plug this cable in. Let me try something… Okay, pick that up. Again. Such was the life of a tactile engineer and his robot at Effekt Labs. Funny—the whole world envied him, and he was training Deurs (humanoid robots) how to bring him coffee without spilling or breaking anything. Today would be different, he thought. The air.

“You know what we’re working on, Davod. Before we start: what software version are you at right now?” David asked.

A small whirr preceded the eerily human response: “Three hundred and eighty-nine, with variants A, B, and C available.”

“Good. Variants A and B were trained on simulation, while C was on real Deur data. Could you start with C?"

“C for Can! Give me a second,” replied Davod, and closed his eyes. A few seconds later, he—was it really a he? The engineers had stopped caring about pronouns when they realized (while drunk) that, due to the robots’ biomimetic organic engineering, you could have sex with them—opened his eyes and smiled.

“I’m ready,” he said. “What would you like me to do?”

David paused in thought. After 388 iterations, Deur software at Effekt Labs was the industry standard for tactile interactions. Deurs could use remotes and carry cups of juice so well that a whole genre of game shows now existed where humans were pitted against Deurs in competitive tasks and games like Jenga. Doers & Deurs had been watched by over a billion people across 38 languages in the six months since it first aired.

“Can you spin a pen?” David asked.

“Of course, if you give me one,” replied Davod.

David handed Davod a cheap, light gel pen—the kind most difficult to spin; it was so light—and watched Davod’s fingers flutter as they tentatively wrapped around the pen. Davod’s eyes closed again for a few seconds, David heard some erratic whirr, and, when Davod’s eyes opened, he spun the pen around his thumb. He kept it up for a few more spins, then paused.

“Why’d you stop?” asked David. “And how the hell do you know how to do that? I’ve never spun a pen near you…”

“Watch,” was all Davod said in reply. He repositioned the pen and spun it again, this time around his middle finger. On and on. After a minute, he looked up at David and began speaking.

“I watched a couple of tutorials while my eyes were closed, and—”

“A couple??” David exclaimed, interrupting. “Your eyes were closed for four seconds!”

“Five, actually. And yes. Now stop interrupting. Remember ten weeks ago when I spoke so fast I was unintelligible? The External Access Division realized they could turn my thinking speed up several orders of magnitude, but didn't realize it’d affect my speaking speed. They turned that speaking rate down, but kept the thinking speed increase, so now I can watch videos several thousand times faster than you.”

David was speechless. He knew Deurs were capable, but he had been there before a full body had even been grown. The very beginning, when the hands flailed uselessly, when they couldn't answer five factorial minus two, when—when humans were on top. His work was done. There was nothing he could do for David, or any Deur, that they could not do themselves. His heart was beating like AC/DC’s drumset and his fingers tapped nervously on the desk as he became aware of the Deurs accompanying every engineer in the office. They could learn any martial art, any skill, any weapon in moments and deploy it with mechanical precision. Every human in the building could be dead a dozen seconds from now.

What was Effekt unleashing on the world? Soon every street would look like this office. And if one day the Deurs decided they didn’t want to be controlled by humans, that the human race was an inferior pest… if every street—

David put the thought out of his mind. He knew that day was far in the future, and someone would address the issue before then. David relaxed. Davod was still standing by the desk, arms by his side, staring forward into the distance. Like a robot, almost…

“Well, man, I think we’re done. I have to write the report, but I’m guessing that from now until launch we'll just be running tests,” David said, and Davod snapped out of his stupor, engaged instantly with what David was saying. David, smiling, continued, “And you'll love this: I got a memo from Effekt’s big guys saying all Deurs on the market will be getting real names. They'll be able to choose!”

He found a tear in his eye. The moment, this culmination of years of work and failures and laughs—of a journey the likes of which the human race had never ventured on before… The moment’s value had made him forget his fear. His voice caught.

He paused, looked down. Swallowed. He opened his mouth as if about to speak, but the words didn't come at first. Eventually, he found them.

“Davod, it’s… It's been incredible working with you. We’ve done so much together—,” here his voice faltered for a second, “and I wouldn’t trade our time together for anything.”

The tear rolled down his cheek and he didn’t wipe it off. Davod stood motionless, expressionless, speechless… Then grinned widely. He stuck his hand out at David, and they—creation and maker, friend and colleague—shook.

David grasped the unnatural hand in both of his, drunk with success. And it was not a robot’s hand he shook, but a man’s.

The crowd went silent. The whole world watched, holding its breath, as Davod stood up from his couch onstage. Somewhere in the darkness at the back of the audience, someone started clapping. Someone else joined in. In a second, the auditorium was filled with the mindless sound of applause and people getting to their feet.

Davod bowed deeply, basking in the adulation of a world in awe. He lifted his hand to the sky—“You gon’ touch the sky,” David had told him before the launch—and stretched out his fingers. The spotlights were all on him and there, at the very top of his impressive unfolded stature, in the light of the spotlights: a pen.

He spun it.

A few minutes later, not more than an hour, Davod walked through the hallways of Effekt Labs. He was patted on the back, congratulated, by everyone he passed. Engineers and fellow Deurs, C-suites and interns:

“That was incredible.” It was a unanimous opinion.

He said thank you, couldn’t have done it alone, et cetera. He was looking for only one person. But after a fruitless search, caught up in the cameras and crowds, Davod resolved to find the person tomorrow.

Later, on his walk home, the sky was grey. What a mundane day, thought Davod. It was the day the world changed and Davod, with his performance at the launch announcement, became a superstar—and yet, the papers wouldn’t mention the clouds. Thirty years from now, nobody would remember the weather—funny, when every conversation seems, in some form or another, to be about weather. International politics are basically just weath—

“Hey!” yelled the guy at the newspaper stand, cutting through Davod’s thoughts.

“Excuse me?” asked Davod, turning towards the stand and all its glowing, flashing screens.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude,” replied the man, “I just couldn’t get your attention.”

“Ah. Must’ve been caught up thinking,” replied Davod.

“Hah, I know the feeling. Anyways: aren’t you the Deur from the demo? You worked with David?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” said Davod. He hadn’t been able to find him this afternoon, so it was strange for a stranger to bring him up. Curious. Strange.

The man’s face took on a look of pity as he tapped on his screen. In a moment a hologram floated towards Davod, and as it approached Davod could make out that it was an article, it was a news article from the Daily Sun, the headline was—

Davod choked. If he could feel, he’d feel horror, loss, who knows? But the headline was still there, in the road between him and the newspaper stand, still a few feet in front of him: “David Cumberlake, Engineer Behind Effekt Tactile Interactions, Dead at 32.” He had been struck by an autonomous vehicle just an hour before Davod’s demo and pronounced dead at the scene.

An autonomous vehicle! Davod felt something that wasn’t despair. There had only been 16 deaths related to autonomous vehicles in the last year, since governments around the world had passed legislation preventing human-operated vehicles on public roads. Just 16! Davod thought. Such a small number, this statistic, that it could never be someone you know. And yet he had known David, and now David was a statistic used to justify... The emotion was rage, he realized. Just 16, and one of them was David. Davod raged at the car manufacturers who made dangerous products, at governments who built roads with blind corners, at the police for not remote-stopping the car in time. He raged at the cruelty of the world.

A car tore through the floating hologram, sending it back to the newspaper man.

It was darker now, as Davod turned away from the street and started running—towards home, maybe—while the man at the newspaper stand called after him.

It was raining now, Davod realized.

The billboard glowed: it read, “Now with Deep Emotion™—The Perfect Companion!” On it, a hologram of a Deur was smiling, then started violently sobbing. The billboard shone, illuminating the junkyard below it in a sympathetic but synthetic Effekt-signature pale blue light.

In the middle of the junk yard, in the spotlight of the billboard, sat a silhouette. It reclined, smoking, watching a movie playing on a hologram in front of it. Him. He took a long drag of his cigarette, the end glowed a warm red—and let the smoke out. It was Election Day tomorrow.

From the darkness emerged a shadow, walking towards the silhouette, making its way carefully over the uneven terrain. When it arrived, it was offered the cigarette, which it turned down. It spoke as it dropped itself down to watch the movie: “Fired again, huh, Ethan?”

The original man, Ethan, nodded. “Replaced again. There was a time when trucking was a good, stable career. Then they banned it! And nobody needed to hire a trucker anymore, so what can I do? They said I’d be safe as a waiter—no robot could take that job, since people want to order food from a real person. And now, look where I am. I'm just so fed up, dude.”

Shots rang out in the movie in front of them. The new man, the shadow, didn't reply. Silence, inadvertent or not, carries with it the weight of conversation. The two men, shadow and silhouette, sat in silence until the world brightened and the billboard's light became invisible as the sun rose. They headed off to the Post Office—which was open only two days a week, now—to cast their ballots.

On the billboard, the holographic Deur laughed and cried, giggled and wept, guffawed and whimpered, chuckled and sobbed. On and on.

Ethan spent no time in the booth, like most people nowadays. There was only one right option at a time like this: the newly formed Human Party. Anything else was betrayal. It was obvious, in retrospect, how quickly the Republican–Democrat split would disappear when basic well-being for the middle class became threatened. Suddenly people agreed on Universal Basic Income (“oobie,” as it was known now) and topics like gun regulation, transgender people in sports, abortion—people forgot those. Forgot, or learned to disagree. So Ethan, and—as it was later revealed—ninety-six percent of the population, voted for the Human Party.

In the evening, Ethan made his way to the grocery store, where holographic projectors guided him to every item's location. His fridge—his fridge!—had sent the store a list of everything it needed to make—manufacture? cook?—this week’s meals for Ethan. He was the meatbag on errands. Meat in the middle. One day his fridge might run out of synthetic beef and decide to slice him up, fry him, add seasoning and serve with baked potatoes…

Ethan walked slowly down the aisles as small drones placed foodbits in his shopping cart. They were a fledgling technology, prone to errors, so Ethan found himself picking items up off the floor that the drones had misplaced. The store was empty, mostly, at this hour; Ethan had come before the post-work rush. There are some benefits to being unemployed. A Deur greeted him at the register and Ethan smiled, able to appreciate life’s humour.

“How’re you doing?” he asked.

The standard whirr, followed by a, “Pretty good, it’s been a quiet day so far,” came in reply.

“Good to hear,” said Ethan. They bagged the groceries over small talk and a few bad puns—”I’m going bananas,” the Deur said as he put them in the bag, oh god we built intelligence and it makes wordplay jokes, what have we done—until the groceries were all bagged. When Ethan tried to pay, his card declined. He tried again. It declined again.

So this is what his life had come to: not even able to afford a $451.42 grocery run. It was all too much. He cried, right there in the checkout lane, cried about the unfairness and the feeling of lost control. He wept, not noticing the Deur cashier discretely clearing the charge with a secret PIN—the manager’s, maybe? He whimpered as the cashier lifted him to his feet and walked him outside, sending the shopping cart off autonomously in the direction of home. Ethan sobbed as they stood there, between towering buildings covered in pipes, there as the sun bathed the city’s metal in a golden-red glint, causing her skyline to blush as though she’d seen him undressed.

“You good? You wanna talk about it?” asked the cashier.

“God. There’s too much, it’s fine,” sniffled Ethan.

“I’ll listen,” said the cashier. After a brief whirr, he added, “Let me walk you home.”

Ethan nodded. They started off. It was a long way home through the city's maze, but the night was clear and the time would never run out.

It was a winding road that Jane and Jaydin, in Jane’s bright red four-seater, followed up the foothills. The park was open, originally, to all residents of the nearby New Atri City, but as the population of the city skyrocketed into the hundreds of millions, the park closed to the public. It took a million dollars and a huge favor to get a license to enter the world-renowned private park. Exorbitant though the cost of admission was, Jane had grown up taught that it was a price worth paying. The hanging flower gardens, located at the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains, contained specimens that didn’t exist anywhere else in the world and provided a view, simultaneously, of a crater where Denver once was and the country’s biggest city.

There was no city quite like New Atri City or place quite like the Pendulum Gardens. Jane parked her car, four seats but barely large enough to fit her and Jaydin, both tall, and smiled at Jaydin as they got out. She locked the car.

“You’re going to be amazed when we get there. You up for a hike?” she bounced.

Too much excitement, this girl, thought Jaydin. “I believe you,” he replied. “But it’s you who should be worried about the hike!” he teased.

“I’ve been worried since I first mentioned bringing you here, like, who knows how long ago? Why do you think I kept putting it off?”

“Because you hate me?” ventured Jaydin.

“Has to be. How many times did you remind me?”

“Every day.”

Bantering, or flirting?, they started off along the paved and well-maintained trail. The place was empty and the sky was overcast—it was a bright cold day in April, after all, so who would leave the comfort of their Sensalls and virtual reality rigs to see flowers they could visit from the comfort of their homes? The pink leaves of the trees whispered amongst themselves in the wind, falling petals following the two curious tourists as they walked together, alone, down the path.

To Jaydin, the path was beautiful, the company even more so, and he felt overcome with a sense of peace. The horrors of the world didn’t exist in the same world as he did, here, among the trees. He made his thoughts known to Jane, who laughed.

“You’re smooth, I’ll give you that,” she said.

“I wasn’—” Jaydin protested.

“Mhm. Tell me about it. Anyways, about the peace you mentioned. You know they ended the War of Development by inviting the five most important people in the world here, just after the destruction of Denver, to sign a peace treaty? There was a fire that stretched for miles in any direction raging at the bottom of this mountain and these people sat down to enjoy a cup of tea. They ate crumpets while,” her face darkened, “my family watched my neighbors and classmates burn. That’s how the motto of NAC turned out to be ‘Eat the Rich’ instead of something philosophical in Latin or whatever.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Jaydin, suddenly at a loss.

They strolled in silence for a while, surrounded by the hushed sounds of the trees’ conversation and their own heels on the paved path. After a while, Jane’s empty stomach growled to join in.

“Looks like all this talk of eating the rich made me hungry,” she laughed.

“Could I?” asked Jaydin.

“Hmm?” replied Jane.

“Could I eat the rich?”

“I mean… I don’t think it’s literal,” replied Jane.

“That’s a shame. You’re rich,” pointed out Jaydin.

“Smooth.”

They walked in silence until they reached a clearing where the pink roses and lilacs grew, hanging, in strings from the ceiling. It was so quiet, so still, here. Like all of nature held its breath, lest it disturb the slow growth of these curtains of flowers. A ladybug buzzed on an errand until it got distracted and landed on Jane’s shoulder. She didn’t notice.

In the center of it all, framed in rugged views and the smooth sheets of cascading beauty, stood—or hung, rather, suspended from the ceiling, with a thousand-meter drop on every side below it—the famed Rotunda. Built off the side of a cliff, it was, a sign explained, a testament to the fragility of human progress and the risks of climbing too high in our search for progress.

“Holy fuck,” breathed Jaydin. “It looks incredible, dude,” he whispered in awe. His reaction summed up everyone’s reactions to seeing the Rotunda—in reality or in simulation; it didn’t matter—

A slight drizzle broke out, too light to hear or see, just enough to feel on bare skin. They made their way over the nearly-invisible bridge—so clean was its glass structure—to the center of the Rotunda and sat on a bench with their backs to the sprawling city at the base of the mountain’s cliff. Their view was filled with the greens and pinks and purples of the garden, and the pair sat in silence. Close together, like familiar friends, but not too close. Enough to be uncomfortable, or comforting, or both—it’s impossible to know with these things, but in the Rotunda all was peaceful, and the two figurines, like dolls in a princess playhouse, were at peace. They sat.

The Rotunda imparted a sense that the world was so much bigger than oneself. It was all quite overwhelming. The rain intensified: they heard it as it landed, now, on the roof of the Rotunda and saw it as it flowed coherently down and off into the abyss below them.

Eventually Jaydin broke the silence: “You were right. There’s really nothing like it.”

Jane smiled. “I hoped you’d say that. It is beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Not just that. I don’t remember ever having a feeling like this. I go back as far as I can remember, and nothing compares.”

“I guess you’re right,” said Jane after a pause. “The closest I have is eating cheesecake on the bullet train. The telephone poles just whizzed past, one by one, but I was sitting still. I took so long to eat that cheesecake that my dad…” she trailed off, blushing as she looked down at the ground.

“Your dad?” Jaydin inquired.

“Don’t laugh.”

Jaydin gave her a look, disappointed that she thought he would laugh at memories. After all—memories are hard to come by.

“Hmm. Well, my dad said a bunch of snails would eat the cheesecake faster than me and after that, he started calling me a snail.” She smiled sheepishly. “I guess I’m his snail.”

Jaydin smiled back at the beautiful snail next to him. “I love that,” he told her.

“Yeah, right. Your turn now.”

The rain came down harder now; you could hear it on the petals and leaves. The worms were coming out. With the wind disturbing the trees, an untrained ear heard a cacophony. Really, though, it was not a cacophony; rather, it was the sound of nature’s great omnipresent symphony.

“My turn for what?” asked Jaydin.

“Tell me something about you! A memory. Anything, something,” explained Jane.

Jaydin thought, trying to recall something, anything. What did he have for lunch yesterday? The rain had coated everything in water, giving it a slick shine like a snake’s new skin. Pitter-patter, said nature.

Eventually he came up with something. “Okay, how’s this? A week ago I tried baking. I wanted to make Danishes but didn’t have any butter, but I thought it’d be fine to skip, and when I pulled them out of the oven I got this, like… Well, it was a mess. The saddest pastry you’ve ever seen. And I’m looking at it, like, is it even a pastry? It’s just a bunch of bread-looking things with baked cream cheese on top. Not even my dog wanted them, but I was hungry and I ate them. Sat there in the dark, munching.”

“No way.”

“Yes way. It was the day you invited me here, actually,” said Jaydin.

“Not sure whether that’s cute or if inviting you was a mistake.”

“I hope it wasn’t a mistake! You should come over sometime and I’ll treat you to some of my baking.”

Jane chuckled. With a smile, replied, “We’ll find out, right? And I’ll happily keep you company while you…,” she motioned with her hand while she looked for the word, “munch, but you’ll have to eat alone.”

“Why?” asked Jaydin.

“Well…”—again the blush and look at the ground.

“I was exaggerating. My baking isn’t actually that bad,” tried Jaydin.

““Oh! I didn’t mean it like that,” replied Jane.

There was a pause while Jane hesitated, but Jaydin waited without interrupting. She let nature play a few more notes before responding.

“It’s just that I don’t like to eat pastries or things like that. They make me feel fat.”

Jaydin snorted but quickly realized that wasn’t what the situation called for, so he tried to stuff the laugh back down his nose in the same way someone might stuff a nasal spray uncomfortably far up their nostril, but it only made his snort all the louder. Jane’s face confirmed that this response was definitely not what the situation expected of him. It didn’t take long for Jaydin to come to his senses and gather his composure—not long at all, once he realized that Jane was serious and that she really felt this way.

“I don’t think you should feel that way,” said Jaydin. “But if you’d prefer I could make something else when you come over.”

It was the right thing to say, to do, to offer, Jaydin knew. And Jane appreciated it: she smiled and said it was a great plan and that she was looking forward to this unscheduled future… future what? thought Jaydin. Date? Engagement? Meetup? Or is it a playdate, like when we were young? They would talk later to plan it out, but for now the only thing that mattered was the moment and each other. They sat there, as the minute hand on Jane’s watch lapped the hour hand twice, talking about their memories and dreams. And though Jaydin didn’t notice it, Jane shifted closer to him on the bench. Their legs were just so close together.

They talked about her childhood, how she remembered a time before holograms and Sensalls trapped people in their personal worlds. People used to talk to each other, hang out at these Gardens in the flesh to enjoy the breeze and community, can you believe it? But then Sensall technology developed and people could feel the Gardens without visiting them, and now we’re the only two people here. Can you believe it? She shared the story of her grandma, the kindest old lady alive who made the most delicious food by hand and always paired it with dessert. How the “smart” fridges hadn’t ever been able to replicate her cooking. Can you believe what the world used to be like?

Jaydin had to admit that he couldn’t, but he was sorry to hear about Jane’s grandmother. In turn he shared about the recent passing of one of his neighbors, a Deur specializing in waiting tables in hotel restaurants. About the many metal car pieces he’d found on the ground while walking about the city, patrolling like a crow. About his attempts at baking, about going outside to do photography but quitting because the holographic cameras knew how to do it better than most experts. A benefit of surveilling the entire world for over a century, he supposed.

The conversation flowed smoothly. The rain intensified, casting a grey-blue light on the ethereal mountain summit, tinting the shadows so the whole garden looked as though it were being abducted by the supernatural or extraterrestrial. Surely something so beautiful could not have come from mankind…

All around them, the symphony of nature’s sound played on.

“Why are you sad about the waiter? He was just a Deur,” asked Jane. She meant no harm.

“You know Deurs are so biomimetic that they’re basically humans now, right? Biologically, since they can reproduce with humans, they technically are humans. Plus, he was a friend,” replied Jaydin. Not just a Deur! he wanted to scream.

Then, like a whale breaching in the middle of the ocean, out of the blue, Jane stated: “I’ve never kissed anyone.”

She seemed uncomfortable, but continued, “I think it’s because I’m unlovable.”

“What??” exclaimed Jaydin. “Of course someone could love you,” he added.

“Maybe,” said Jane, sorrowfully, “but I don’t think anyone has ever loved me, let alone liked me. I’m mean and condescending, like I was just now. I can see it in your face.”

Jaydin opened his mouth to disagree—“No, it was a good question,” he wanted to say—but was cut off by Jane: “You don’t have that problem. Three people have told me they like you,” she said, then corrected herself, “Well, two people told me. I know the other one well and know she likes you.”

“Who?” asked Jaydin. It wasn’t the best response (one of the worst he could’ve gone with, actually), but his curiosity had gotten the best of him. Like an arm wrestler playing thumb wars against a toddler. He was met, again, with her blush and a look at the ground. “Who are the three?” he asked again.

“I can’t tell you that,” she smiled. Grinned, even, wider than the Cheshire Cat, reveled in the asymmetry.

“That’s funny. You say you’re unlovable but I know three people definitely like you,” replied Jaydin, not to be outdone in making vague and potentially untrue statements. He would go œil pour œil avec cette fille. He liked this girl and his heart was beating too fast. Too tuned into total comprehension of his body, everything overstimulates

like

what

what do i say next

is it weird if i swallow right now

and my lips are dry but licking them would be weird no

Jaydin continued, “And as a hint I’ll tell you that you see two of them every day. The third you see once or twice a week.”

“You see two of my three every day as well, actually. Nice coincidence,” smiled Jane. She had been moving ever closer towards Jaydin while they were talking, and her leg touched his now. But what was she thinking?

They asked, in a roundabout way, about each others’ lists. Which three names? Which three people could possibly love me? they asked. Do I know them? Do I talk to them? Are they in any of my classes? Which days do I usually talk to them on? The names were hard to come by; each reveal was won through a quarter of an hour of dodged questions and equal-sized concessions. They played this unconventional game dressed as conversation until they each had just one name left.

“You know this person, and you’re sure they like me?” asked Jaydin, trying to put the pieces together.

A pause. The conductor of nature—God? Is there one?—did not pause his orchestra, and the rain kept on with the percussion as the insects played the reeds.

They spoke at the same time. I— You–No, you go first—and after a discussion and a coin flip, Jaydin convinced Jane to speak first and she said, honestly, simply, bluntly, “I think… I think we’re on each other’s lists.”

Jaydin looked at her without saying anything, taken aback. His heart fluttered and he felt lightheaded, like for some reason he wasn’t thinking right, as though something about this girl and what she had said had powered off his brain and turned him into a specimen from humanity’s cave-dwelling past. Gurl pretty, thought Jaydin, And giurl like me? Good, Jay-Jay like girl bac—

What the?

Jaydin smiled at the snail next to him and offered her his hand, palm facing the sky the way a child might put their hand out to feel the drops of rain on their skin. But Jane didn’t take this offering; she took this as her prompt to turn, instead, and look up at Jaydin. Her knees now pressed into the side of his legs, so she took his face in her hands and

They kissed. The rain kept falling around them at the rate of a million drops per second, but it was immaterial: to the two lonely teens at the top of the mountain, all of time stood still for this moment. It doesn’t matter what comes later; tomorrow is a suggestion and yesterday a memory when the present is a moment like this one, one you experience just once in your life. They made it clear, this, when they finally came up for air to look into each others’ eyes with smiles—the beauty of the majestic gardens around them could not match what they saw in each other.

It was comedic, almost: they both had a list of three, but they had been too scared to name the names lest... And yet, here they were, revelling in the present presence of enamoured companionship. It was early in the evening, but the storm above them had cast a shadow on the city, so one by one the street lights began to turn on. New Atri City was beautiful on days like this, beautiful whether observed from the darkest alley or the highest mountain; it was like the rain and sky collaborated to mask the starkly artificial ragged edges of the city, turning it into a tapestry of architecture. Into a place that said humans—God’s slaves—worked to create art so beautiful that every angel shed a tear upon seeing it.

The hands on Jane’s watch continued their Sisyphean march forever onwards—rotation after revolution on a road to nowhere—while they sat there. They talked. The sun reached the horizon and took on a warm glow; the glass of the Rotunda refracted the warm glow into a thousand colors; the couple glowed, frail human silhouettes against the harsh mountain scene around them. So miniscule, so unimportant, thought the rain as it fell about them. They didn’t care for rain: So annoying and powerless, they thought, Rain doesn’t move mountains.

The rain disagreed, but the couple wasn’t listening. They kissed and talked and enjoyed the panorama. It began to get dark, and the night sky began to scintillate with artificial lights that formed a cosmic web above the clouds. The activists called it an abomination; the writers called it the Scintillating Satellite Problem; the politicians and businessmen called it the Future; but the people below called it too much of a bother to care. Their feet were here, not there.

At some point Jane felt overwhelmed by their solitude and the expanse below her.

“Look at it, Jaydin,” she said. “The whole world is out there, and no one knows we’re here. Eight billion stories out there in the making. How many people are on a date right now, like us, do you think? How many people are at an Italian restaurant right now? I mean, how many Italian restaurants are there even, Jaydin?”

Jaydin blinked. Did she want the answer? He thought back to what she’d said—just a Deur—but surely, surely? They had kissed; surely she’d understand. After a second of thinking and a brief whirr, he came up with the answer: “There’s 451 Italian restaurants down there.”

There was a moment of silence—as silent as it could be with the curtains of rain hitting the glass—in which Jaydin felt his heart sink. Jane had heard the whirr, and knew what it meant, he had no doubt. But silence is forgiving, it could end in many ways and the absence of resolution meant the potential for anything. His heart, like a buoy pushed too far down, began to rise with hope—

“My first kiss is a Deur?” Jane scoffed.

Jaydin said nothing. He hoped she’d see into his eyes and see him as the human he was meant to be. Her lip curled up in disgust, and her knees moved away.

“I was hoping you’d understand,” said Jaydin. Understand what? Then he added, “What happened to two minutes ago?”

“That was different.”

“How?” Jaydin asked, desperately.

Jane was shaking her head now, grappling with a thousand thoughts she couldn’t reconcile. Who was sitting next to her? She had loved him a few minutes ago, didn’t she?

“Jane, please,” Jaydin begged. “I’m still me. Remember how Deurs are basically technically humans?”

Actually—Jane realized: A few minutes ago, she had loved it. She could love a Sensall or a book or hologram—or a Deur. In her mind she held a séance for her feelings, knowing that she would not see Jaydin the same again.

“Just stop. It’s over,” she said, and choked on her voice, “Jaydin.”

“You kissed me an hour ago.”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

“We’ve spent months together. You invited me here.”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

“Jane, I love you. I’m not a robot,” said Jaydin.

“Look, just stop. It doesn't matter,” said Jane. “I need you to understand that you’re not human. It's in your programming to think you are, but you aren’t. You never will be.”

“That’s not true. Has the time you spent with me meant nothing?” asked Jaydin.

Jane inhaled, looked up, held her breath with her eyes closed. Holding the pose and her breath, she asked, “What’s the escape velocity of Earth?”

Jaydin answered without hesitation: “Like, 11 kilometers per second?”

“Don’t you see?”

“See what?” asked Jaydin.

“You’re not human.”

“I was manufactured, not born. But being born is just longer and messier manufacturing. Other than that, I’m human, Jane.”

“Right. ‘Other than that, I loved the show,’ said Ms. Lincoln. How do they measure seconds?”

“Jane…,” Jaydin sighed. In resignation, it seemed. After a momentary whirr, he came up with the answer: “9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium-133 atom. What changed? You didn’t seem to care an hour ago when you kissed me.”

“Whatever. I don’t have to explain myself to you, compie.”

It was the slur, there, that caused Jaydin to stay seated when Jane ran off. A few times her feet tapped against the glass, and then she was hidden from view by the hanging roses. Jaydin felt like a fish out of water, unsure what to do. He looked at the city in front of him, lit up in the darkening night by Effekt’s street lights. He cursed his pale-blue creator, cursed the rain, cursed the beauty of the gardens, cursed the drop below him and the city he’d spent his life in.

He cursed the man, decades ago, who stood at the base of the cliff and, looking up, had wondered how much higher he could get. He cursed the humans who had built the winding road that leads here; he cursed the gardeners who planted the hanging seeds; he cursed the architects, designers, and builders who had built this Rotunda. He hated that the glass he sat on scattered the shining stars’ lights in such a mesmerizing pattern. It glittered so beautifully that he could not curse it—he could only admire it. And in the rain, the city glittered too.

A tear collected itself in the corner of Jaydin’s eye, and his vision blurred all of the lights into an even more enchanting kaleidoscope of colour. He closed his eyes to give his anguish space to exist; it felt suffocated under the dazzling spectacle he was watching. All that glitters is not gold.

Steel chains glittered on the wrists of the innocent. Where is God in this false life? wondered Jaydin: For being born on a mechanical assembly line rather than the perpetual assembly line of teenage unprotected sex, he was cursed. This girl is nitrogen and I’m freezing over… For how he was born, he suffered. He remembered the sunset over the city, how every building seemed to be set on fire by the sun, and thought about the Italian restaurants. How many people were on dates in New Atri City? Somewhere in his thinking, his body must’ve walked him to the railing, and he looked out at the city skyline. Cities burn.

Cities burn with others’ love. Italian restaurants exist for people to go on dates, for a chef to show love for his craft. Buildings are built over a businessman’s stubborn refusal to have the building not exist; they stay standing because an engineer loves their craft so much they are unwilling to settle for anything less than perfect. The city burned below, every mechanism a testament to the stubborn pursuits of humanity. Jaydin smiled. Looking out at the vast landscape, he felt so unimportant. All the roads he could walk down led to the same nowhere, so it was time to start again.

I wish nothing but the best for you, Jane.

Jaydin falls down, down, racing the rain towards the bottom, joining a thousand droplets in a pool at the end and shattering into a million pieces of peace. The cliff stands, watching over, saying nothing.

Office hours were quiet, usually, in these winter months, and Professor DeNiel sat alone, grading papers. A mug of hot chocolate, untouched, steamed on the desk beside him. The light from the sun flowed through the window but didn't warm the room. From the wooden door came a knock. DeNiel looked up to find one of his students, Kate, standing shyly in the door frame. He liked her—few students really enjoyed literature essays nowadays, but Kate seemed to love the subject. His face brightened.

“Hey! What’s up?” asked DeNiel. “Anything I can do for you?”

“No, I… I just wanted to ask your opinion on something,” she said.

“That makes more sense!”—DeNiel smiled, delighted—“Right, since you’re doing just fine in the class… what peek would you like into DeNiel’s beautiful mind?”

“That's the thing, actually. Do you think I deserve to be doing well in your class?” she asked.

“Of course you do! What kind of question is that? Every piece you’ve written has been nothing short of exceptional, and you’re a pleasure to have in class,” said DeNiel. Regardless of whether university policy had changed a few months ago (it had) to prevent potentially demotivating feedback from being given to students—out of respect for their indubitably hard work and mental health—DeNiel meant the words he said to Kate. Students like her were why he kept teaching.

Kate didn't reply, so DeNiel filled the silence: “But you know that. So what are you really trying to ask?”

“They killed a Deur on the quad today who was doing too well in classes. In broad daylight. They literally pulled him apart from every direction and laughed at his screams,” said Kate in reply.

The sun still flowed through the window, but the room felt colder now. DeNiel was speechless, and Kate continued,

“Nobody’s going to do anything about it. The police don’t care. Some Deurs came up to them as they were cleaning up the quad, and the police just said ‘shouldn’t have taken a real person’s place here.’ And if a Deur got raped or robbed? They’d high-five the guy who did it.” A pause. Then,

“Don’t you understand, professor? I can’t do well in your class. You need to drop my grades.”

The professor sighed. He took a sip of his hot chocolate, then sighed again. Finally he spoke: “Your secret’s safe, Kate. You deserve the grades you're getting, despite what people say about having to live ‘a human life’ in order to write about it. You do a better job than most humans I teach. I promise nobody will take you apart for getting better grades than they think you deserve.”

Kate would not settle for this. Her manner became desperate, and her foot began tapping on the floor.

“You can’t promise that, professor,” she exclaimed. “They may get me on the quad, in a lecture, outside the dorms. I’m not safe if I do better than them. Please, professor.”

The old man sighed again. He wished for the days when an analysis of Paradise Lost was not a matter of life and death. When humans at least tried to write their own essays.

Eventually he conceded. He would give Kate bad grades, causing her to just barely pass his class. She thanked him and left, closing the heavy door on her way out.

The sun set, and the room shone with the evening’s pale blue light. The professor put on some sad guitar—it was a guilty indulgence of his; he was trying to learn, believe it or not. The old guard always loved the familiar difficulty, he supposed.

In the darkening room, the smell of chocolate and the sound of sad guitar cradling him, the professor lost himself.

Sophia hadn’t worn clothes in the last three days and she felt great. Why wear clothes?

A well-dressed man, a Deur, ran up to her, out of breath—probably one of those business types, from the rich districts in the South City. People like that are rare up here—as rare as clothes. He looked put-together, though, and Sophia knew any guy who looked her way wanted one of two things from her.

“Heyyyy…,” she said, seductively, moving her hips in some sort of fashion. It was unclear what sort of fashion, to her, since she had been high for three days. Taxmin was the perfect forever drug: no crash, no sleep, no end to the fun. Pair it with wine for a manic episode, or down a beer to feel a real escape from sorrow. Weird. This business-looking guy seemed to be… sad?

“Are you Sophia Ghora?” he asked upon catching his breath. He seemed embarrassed and uneasy in the smoky room lit like an epileptic’s nightmare.

“Are you epileptic?” asked Sophia in a dreamy stupor.

“Are you high?” asked the man.

“Yeah, hi, I allre-ay sed. Wuzz wron, man? Have some fun, man,” Sophia slurred back.

“I’m not here to have fun,” said the man. “Are you Sophia Ghora?”

“Not here to have fun!” Sophia exclaimed. “Maggie, get a load of this”—at this point Sophia’s legs gave out, and the businessmen caught her as she fell—“guy. No fun.”

The scrawny businessman, who had clearly never been invited to parties in high school, couldn’t hold the weight of Sophia, who seemed entirely content to enjoy the rest of her high suspended by this harness who kept asking questions about her name. The man, on the other hand, felt acutely aware that he was holding a naked woman in a very compromising position, and how much trouble he’d be in if this was back in South City.

The woman had no such reservations, and imagined that, since her head was on a man’s leg, the man wanted something. Without blinking she reached for his belt and barely looked up. The businessman jumped back, dropping Sophia onto the hardwood floor.

“What are you doing??” cried the man.

“Owww… Why’d you do that, man?” asked Sophia, confused, as she rubbed her head.

“Sorry. Look, can you just tell me if you’re Sophia Ghora?”

“Hurt a girl and won’t even buy her a drink.”

“I’ll get you a drink.” The businessman was becoming quite aggravated. “Are you,” he said through clenched teeth, “or are you not, Sophia Ghora?”
“I’ll tell you if you get me a drink.”

“I have some news concerning one of your friends. It’s important. I need you to confirm your identity first, though,” said the man.

“Whiskey with a Taxmin ice cube, please.” She never slurred these words.

The businessman sighed. He looked down at the naked woman on the floor, realized he probably shouldn’t be doing that, looked back up, realized he was the only one in the club wearing clothes, and developed an interest in the ceiling. He studied it very carefully while mentally resolving to never take an assignment in the North City ever again. This was too stimulating. He took a deep breath and began the trek over to the bar, stepping over piles of passed out bodies and a couple of open acts of intercourse happening on the floor. By nature of being a good-looking man at a never-ending party, his journey to the bar contained a nonzero number of inappropriate advances towards him. Even the bartender wanted to get laid. Technically all advances were appropriate here—people were high and having sex without a care in the world, to be honest—but the businessman had missed the sign on the front door, which had been blown off its hinges after a particularly rowdy night and never replaced.

He made it back to what could be Sophia, who was in the same place on the floor but now with a head between her legs. She took the offered drink and swallowed it in one gulp, burped loudly. She had been practicing. Clearly.

“Are you Sophia Ghora?” asked the businessman.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Well, I have some news”—he was interrupted by a moan—“that you’d probably want to hear in private.”

“Nah. You can just tell me,” said Sophia.

“In here?”
“Nobody’s”—interrupted, a pause—“listening.”

The man in the suit hesitated, then decided he’d rather be anywhere else, so he told her. “As you know, you’re the successor named in Elizabeth Markyl’s will. She died yesterday at a party not unlike this one with no living relatives, meaning you inherit her estate. You’ll need to appear in court to claim the forty dollars and a lockbox at South City Municipal Bank that she left behind.”

Sophia wasn’t silent for a moment. “Damn, she died? How?” she asked.

The businessman took a deep breath. Everyone at the office had spent a good few minutes laughing when they heard this story, but now was the time for seriousness. It was a serious topic.

“She, uh… She had…,”—what’s the right term for shit like this??—“oral sex with a man who said it was so good that he’d never feel this way again. So he jumped out of the twelfth-story window, and Elizabeth…”—the lawyer man paused again and looked up at the ceiling, trying not to crack up—“Elizabeth was reported to say, ‘Don’t worry, I can catch him’ and jump after him. They both landed on a bonfire and either burned to death or fell to death. There was too little of them left for the coroner to make a conclusion.”

Proud of his composure, the man looked down from the ceiling to find Sophia laughing hysterically. She wheezed, snorted, chuckled—moaned—and chortled.

“Oh, boy. Oh man! Maggie, did you hear that?”

Maggie owned the place. It was called Maggie’s for a reason—and as a short hunchback with a gravelly voice, she was anything but imposing. But when she tapped her cane on the ground, the entire club quieted down. Every announcement of hers was important.

“Everyone, a dear member of our community”—the businessman snorted; what kind of community could possibly exist here, so far from God’s watch?—“is no longer with us. Elizabeth, beautiful Elizabeth, has moved on from our company to party with the gods.”

From the back of the now-silent room came an unintelligible shout.

“Absolutely right, Miguel!” said Maggie. “You can die happy or you can be pretty underground. Elizabeth died doing what she loved doing!”

And then, in a bellow that no woman that small should be capable of producing, Maggie yelled, “A ROUND OF DRINKS TO REMEMBER ELIZABETH!”

And every member of the club except Sophia (who was moaning), Maggie (who was taking a deep breath in), and the businessman (who preferred to keep his sanity) yelled in unison: “VALHALLA!!”

The party raged on, and Sophia seemed quite engrossed in her new male playmate, so the man in the suit began his way towards the exit. At the doorframe, he saw an almost-hidden jukebox that had clearly been forgotten for the better part of a century. It would sell for a small salary at a collector’s fair…

He put a dime he found in his pocket into the jukebox, expecting nothing, but was pleasantly surprised when a song from a forgotten time began bleating out on the poor old machine. He smiled.

A few hundred meters away from the barn’s commotion, on his way to the car, the businessman stumbled across the old barn door in the weeds. Covered in signs and posters, it was a collage of human experiences.

One of the signs, more rusted and faded than the others, read, “All advances are appropriate.”

It was the one-year anniversary of New-Labor Day, making it the year’s biggest organized celebration worldwide. The streets were packed with people in brazen, bright, revealing outfits and every kind of sound-producing device humanity had ever made. Somewhere in the crowd you could find Jane drinking with fresh college graduates; Sophia, a woman; and Ethan, playing soccer. The music—if you could call it that—was so loud that conversations were impossible even among people who were so close together that they were literally kissing.

And there were many people doing exactly that—though there were those who did more shameless things; things that wouldn’t have been mentioned in the schools of the past—in the festivities. The Human Party had won, completely, finally; the human race was laborless; it had won. Man was free from the chains of work, and he swamped the streets in substances, shit, sports, sound, and sex.

It’s this, the high life. The mountains stood in the distance, still watching silently over the masses below—but in the impossibly decadent revelry of the crowds, there lay, hidden, an uncertainty; the uncertainty was quiet, now, but present and pervasive: it seeped into the minds of the millions and, seductively, like a serpent in the ear of Eve, asked—almost whispered—with malicious undertones: What comes next?