The domed screen of the machine winked to life, with numbers scrawling across the display. Reply hazy. Try again. I knew the should was a sticking point. The machine wasn’t some friend I could dial up for advice. I needed to ask concrete questions to get real answers. I had to start making my own decisions instead of looking for help from everyone else, never mind a machine. But we’d already communed or whatever, so I figured we were bonding.

“Does Yusuf really have to die for the plague or asteroid or whatever to go away in our universe?”

Yes.

“Why?”

Invalid query.

“So whatever disaster happens is my fault?”

I could almost feel the machine hesitate under my hands. Invalid query. Yes and no. Entanglement through many threads.

It sounds dumb for me to even say, but I swear it felt like I was talking with the thing. Like, it was trying to understand what to say back, some translation that maybe I would understand.

“Did saving him kill Figueiredo’s husband?”

Yes and no. Entanglement through many threads.

“Why?”

Adjacent realities seek a zero sum.

“Hey!” someone called from the catwalks above.

I tipped my head up from the machine to where a security guard called from the balcony of the second floor.

“Good evening!” I chirped back, waving. I banked on cheery confidence and Hassan’s coat to help me look like I belonged there.

The guard started towards the stairs at the end of the catwalk and I broke off from the machine to hoof it through the courtyard—no big deal, just passing through—down a hallway and out a side door. Over the carpet of the grass again, my head a tangle of threads and adjacent realities.

Before my feet hit his porch, I saw Hassan in the shadows, teetering slowly on a rocking chair by the front door. Like my mom catching me sneaking in. Are you high? Look at me.

“Did you find whatever you need?” he asked.

“I’m not sure yet.”

His rocking chain creaked in the night air that was threaded with chirps from swooping bats above. It was too dark to see his eyes.

“You know, you’re nothing like him.”

“I’d like to think that’s why he likes me.”

“I mean Rui.”

Sure, how am I going to compete with a dead saint? As much as I wanted to say this—as much as I probably would have before I met Yusuf and he’d sanded down my mean edges that would want to hurt Hassan for being a jerk when he clearly was hurting—I kept my mouth shut.

“Do you want me to say sorry?”

“No. Just an observation.”