They called the machine the Envisioner, he said, speaking in more complete sentences than I’d heard from him so far. They weren’t sure what it was called in the other universe—the staff in the video footage used a word that sounded like a noise a blender would make if it had a mouth, which maybe had a connection to the Proto-Indo-Iranian word for “eye.” Russia wanted unilateral power on all Envisioner-related decisions if they housed the facility, while China offered to keep the device on their lunar base. No other nation held a candle to their space force—I’d heard rumors from some nut-bags that the global superpower had been testing time-dilation devices on the moon that would crank up the passage of time within a certain field, in hopes of terraforming Mars so they could peace out of Earth within the next decade. When it came down to equal access for all the project’s member states, the thing had to stay on Earth. Japan had the tech and the money but not the space, with its ballooning population crammed onto every last bit of the archipelago.

Remember me! screamed scrappy little America. Remember when I meant something, before the economy imploded and the brain-drain to the Union of Pacific States? Once they got a green light to host, the American government rented a parcel of land for a few billion dollars from the Commonwealth of Great Basin Nations—so long as we’re clear on the rental part and you guys don’t fuck us over, again was the general feel.

Kaori thought that the machine was a gift sent to us—somehow—by the Envisioner team from the other Earth, who likely had multiple machines helping them avert natural disasters or apocalyptic events. Why not do their alternate selves a solid and help them clean up the dumpster fire of their planet? Sure, JAXA had stumbled on the machine ninety-thousand miles away, but astronomically speaking, that’s like a package accidentally sent to your next-door neighbor instead of you.