I’ll call her Kaori soon enough, after I wheedle past her soft voice and stiff back that she rules her staff with, like a doctor bombing cancer diagnoses onto her patients with all the warmth of a bleach colonic. Back then she was cold and mistrusting, with her bored eyes and undercurrent of I can’t believe you’re involved in this. But I like to think I cracked open her armor with my charm, or something.

In the small white room, she didn’t move a muscle while I had to venture a hand to one wall to keep from keeling over. The potato chips I’d eaten on the plane wanted to splatter onto her white sneakers. I swept my dizzy eyes up at the screen behind her, where some version of myself in a long sage-green lab coat leaned over the nightmare machine on its angled silver legs. He twisted a few dials with his tattoo-less hands.

“How?” I managed to sputter.

“You’re telling me you have no idea where this footage is from or how this device got here?”

It’s a trap, Kaori’s cool voice broadcasted to me. She knew everything already, she was just waiting for me to goof. One half of her hair swooped and curved past her chin, the other half a blunt shelf that stopped just past the middle of her cheeks.

“You mean how you have video of some guy with my face? Abso-fucking-lutely not.”

The cocktail shaker inside my head was crammed with ice and plot points: long-lost twins, cloning, imaging software—banned by governments across the world—that could spin a scene of anybody doing anything, and only forensic analysts could spot the smoke and mirrors.

“We were pretty thorough with the background checks.” She shrugged. “But had to be sure.”

“Could you please turn that off. It’s fucking with me. I’m gonna be sick.”

She fiddled with her tablet and—thank god—the video winked off.

“Hold up,” I said. “Did you say background checks? Have you been following me?”

“Researching.”

“Spying?”

“Please,” she snorted, barely looking up from her tablet. “Spare me the Data Rights crusade. Every government is listening to every phone on this planet and that crumbling warehouse you live in has paper-thin walls.” She eyed me like she caught me peeking through a hole drilled into the football team’s locker room, one hand pumping down the front of my shorts. “Also, you should consider investing in curtains.”