“I just saw some crazy footage,” I said. “A riot or something against Figueiredo in the other universe. I couldn’t stop watching it.”

“This thing gets into you.” She nodded toward the machine, the blunt ends of her hair bobbing. “What happened?”

“I’m still not really sure.” Jitters twitched in my voice. “Someone got shot, but I couldn’t tell who because of the angle of the footage.”

“Show me tomorrow. And tell Arjun—everyone will keep a lookout in the footage.”

“Yeah. Did you know there’s another Yusuf in that universe? And I think he and Figueiredo are together.”

“Interesting.” She pinched her eyes just slightly.

“What’re you doing here this late?”

She sighed, pale as the stack of papers in her hands. She looked human, finally, not some synth who was sculpted out of ice and ran on self-importance. “I’m still trying to calibrate the Envisioner so I can extract some decent information.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m testing the machine’s accuracy with repeated queries. I start with simple things. Coin flips. Dice throws. If it spits out a wrong prediction, I scale back the complexity of the questions. Say, nine dice to six. When it notches a number of correct predictions, I move to more complex questions with more variables. So I can feel comfortable that it will eventually predict large-scale and worldwide events. Much like training a dog.”

“Really? I pictured you more of a cat person.”

“Dogs are reliable. Their behavior reflects the work you put in. Humans are the ones that don’t deserve them.”

“I hear that. What’ve you been asking?”

She handed me her stack of ripped-off printouts from the machine. I leafed through the first half, each page punctuated with the same sentence. Embolism, age 68.

“Jesus,” I sputtered. “You’re asking it how you’re going to die?”

“Don’t ask it anything you don’t really want to know.”

Her tea-colored eyes softened, maybe the late hour let her shrug off some of her armor. She was small, shorter than me, and almost tiny compared to the machine in this huge room with its starred screens on the ceiling.

“How long away is that?” I asked.

“Twenty-six years.”

“Do you know the date?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Yeah. I get it. You scared?”

She shrugged. “Ask when I’m sixty-seven. I’d hoped to see the next century, but what can you do.”

“I don’t think I’d want to know. I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed. I’d just picture some big hourglass with skulls hovering over my head until it ran out. I mean, I know everyone’s already running on a timer, or something…”

“Is there something you do want to know?”

A hard knot tightened in my gut. In the beat of silence, the clanking of one of the vents high above us echoed with the gunshot in the other universe.