Yusuf was off for a walk to get supplies, he said, though I suspected he needed a break from me, wandering off in the bright, humid morning. Which I understood. I carved tracks in the sand around the half-buried Envisioner for a while. I’d talk to the thing when I was alone, partly out of boredom and partly out of stress relief after all we’d seen. I ran my hands over the facets like I’d seen Figueiredo do—like I’d done a million times by then—and coddled the machine like it was a tantrum-throwing dog. Gentle, girl. The swirling mind of the thing calmed a little at my touch, and at the same time, a sense of flow washed over me like I was hours into a doc-editing session.

I felt the other Envisioners and all their histories spread out across the multiverse, that same way you can walk into a dark room where someone is hiding and just know you’re not alone. The spider webs stretched out and out, and I was getting closer to the center.

Show me how we got here, I asked the machine.

I didn’t really know what I was looking for or expecting, but the Envisioner did. Its screen blinked to life.

*   *   *

In her office, Kaori pressed her hand against one cold glass wall, smudging the equations she’d scrawled in green marker. She was so close to something that it hurt, and her thoughts swirled around in my own head. Something jabbed at her brain. The good kind of hurt—the hurt of picking a scab, of biting the inside of your cheek.

She’d already combed through most of the footage after copying and dumping a decade’s worth onto her private server. The facial recognition algorithm she’d written allowed her to single out footage of just Figueiredo, trimming away everything else, so she’d seen him alone in his facility at night. Both the footage from the Envisioner and his various portable recording devices. The hours and hours and hours—his obsessive narcissism and self-grandeur so clear, even though she couldn’t understand all his language yet, though she was learning fast. The years he’d spent recording himself at his desk in his closet-sized university office and his garage lab. How his university had hired that universe’s version of Yusuf—either as another professor or as Figueiredo’s assistant, she couldn’t tell—and then he’d made his breakthrough and built his prototype only a few weeks later.