Kaori and her team had no idea how the Envisioner worked. Nothing—MRI, lasers, infrared cameras—could peer through the machine’s gunmetal casing. They stopped just short of bringing in a psychic and having them gaze through their third eye at the spidery box. Kaori was also not someone used to being stumped. Yusuf had never seen a mind like hers, even with all the institutes he studied at, the conferences he attended, the papers he co-authored. She took him under her wing at Oxford, where he’d been her research assistant for years before he rose to full professor once she left for Japan. It was basically the honor of his life that she asked him to help her research here. She, more than anyone else, would figure out the true nature of the machine. Just a matter of time.

Best they could tell, the machine’s outer temperature raised a tiny fraction of a degree when it was asked a question, meaning there had to be some sort of energy manipulation inside. Maybe it was a particle collider? Maybe it was a fancy birdcage for a miniature black hole, or a wormhole that led to a web of alternate Earths that the Envisioner peeked at? Proof of at least one alternate dimension had already fucked up their current understanding of the singularity that kick-started this universe, so why not throw most of physics out the window? I had to reel Yusuf back in or he would’ve rattled off theories for hours.

“And we know the thing is safe?” I asked between wheezes.

“From our best estimates so far.”

“You know I’m going to say that’s a cue for a huge explosion, or a giant fucking black hole that sucks in the Earth, or something.”

“Humanity will probably nuke itself long before the Envisioner does anything close to dangerous.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“Sorry?”

We had to walk for a bit for me to catch my breath. As crazy as all of this was, I loved that Yusuf wasn’t holding anything back, like I was an equal here. As much as Kaori barely tolerated me.

“Alright,” I said. “Keep going.”

Kaori mentioned that the Envisioner recorded video footage and they were able to access some of it, Yusuf said, but she didn’t tell me just how much footage. The tech leads on her team had been able to retrofit some twenty-year-old laptops to connect to the machine’s storage banks. Which was when they found thousands and thousands of hours of recordings all in scrambled order—north of sixteen years’ worth at best guess—that would take forever to sift through.