Yusuf hung back a few steps while I walked into the lunar landscape of the Theater, with its white-tiled floors glossy like they were slick with rain, and walls of polished steel dotted with huge screens. A security feed played on one of the screens above and I watched myself creeping into the room like I was walking barefoot over hot coals. Towards the hulking spider of a machine in the center, under a latticed greenhouse-like roof.

A dozen or so techs puttered around with glass tablets by two steel workstations, with Kaori nearby. They all froze when I walked toward the machine. Yusuf joined the flock, so no chance he was offering me backup.

The roof must’ve been one giant FantiSee screen because a flock of seagulls flew across the panes, even though we were underground. A watercolor sky, the vivid blue of Genesis’s eyeshadow. Normally, I’d be itching to call her. We had a habit of rescuing each other, her bailing me out of jail that time a guy at a bar had called her a rug-sucking bitchbot and I’d slugged him. Me bailing her out of jail after another one of her protests had stopped traffic in the middle of the city. As I paid her bail after hocking one of my cameras, an officer yakked something about how she was lucky she lived here or she’d be in the fucking scrapheap.

I’d met her around eight years back, just when I’d started thinking, you should probably quit giving yourself a pass for being a mess all the time and actually—you know—try. When she heard about my past, she was basically the first person not to treat me not like some damaged thing made out of glass.

“Excuses are so unbelievably boring,” she’d told me. “What really grinds my gears—pardon the pun, babe—is that you people run on excuses.”

I could have used some of her no-nonsense while I stared at the Envisioner. The machine was the size of a small electric two-door car, held up on six dull metal legs that were jointed at wide angles. Its matte gunmetal gray surface had hundreds of facets, like some giant semi-precious stone worked at for decades by a manic jeweler. The surface barely reflected the fake sunlight from the FantiSee screen above.

I stepped over a snake of black cable that led from the machine to the workstations. My eyes were locked on the machine, and it yanked me closer—some horizontal free-fall like I was bungee jumping while attached to a piano. Four screens, slightly domed and with a greenish tint, were set into its surface, its panels etched with what looked like cave drawings. Oversized dials and switches glowed the color of hard candies.