As I shuffled, I looked down at my tattoo for strength. I have YOU ARE HERE tattooed down my left thumb, a reminder that I’m always where my feet are, even when my brain bounces me to a million different presents. Even when I build a character around myself to slip into a community for a doc. Words to steady myself, even when the memory of Narek dismissing my work wants to paralyze me.

“Enough!” Genesis chirped. “Cut the deck. Pull a card and hand it over. No peeking.”

I did. She didn’t tell me the card I’d pulled. She just made a smooch noise and told me, “You’re gonna be a star.”

YOU ARE HERE.

Back in the Compound, where my feet actually were, I was too tired to crack jokes as Yusuf led me away from my failure in the Theater, down hallways that looked too much like a hospice wing. Into the cafeteria where off-duty white coats poked at wilted salads. If my sour, deflated mood existed as food, it was the sad heat-lamp pizza slices we picked at.

“Why do I feel like I fucked up?” I asked.

Yusuf shrugged. “That’s just how she treats everyone.”

“What’s her deal? Synth?”

I only wanted to know because she was so brisk and disinterested, which Genesis and my other synth friends were accused of being. In their case, most current-model synths flowed around a neural network, linking each individual to the millions of other synths across the planet so they could share data. Plus, they were busy running economies, pulling 72-hour shifts as hospital nurses and janitors, or serving as rent-a-uteruses who had zero say in whether their wetware bio-linked synthetic wombs baked the kids of rich customers, so their patience for human bullshit ran thin sometimes. I know we’re limiting your personal freedoms and all, but do you have to be rude?

People thought Genesis was radical when she just wanted synths to be treated as more than a robo-vac. As more than a few holes for someone to take out their rape fetishes on, or as playthings for the rich who got their rocks off with some casual amputation play.

“You know, they made us feel pain,” Genesis had said on stage, once. “That was their decision.”

Genesis had been an early model synth, with her gray polymer flesh making her look like one of the mannequins in shop windows down Newbury Street in Boston. One time I’d been with her on the Red Line to South Station when one of the younger model synths, the types you couldn’t clock as non-biological unless you noticed that they weren’t breathing, had tried to give up his subway seat for her. Please, gran, take a seat, he’d said, thinking he was hilarious.

I hadn’t spotted any early-models in the Compound yet, but it wasn’t impossible that Kaori could be a human-passing synth.