They’d talked a lot about family, then, about support and togetherness and blah, which Kaori had found both irritating and hilarious. Like, we lived in the same house when I was a kid, right? You don’t make something out of steel and then complain when it’s too hard.

She hadn’t given a crap about dating. She still didn’t have feelings of attraction or interest in anyone else of any gender. She wasn’t big on pets and killed the single plant in her office at Oxford. She had friends and colleagues, yeah, but zero interest in romance. And sex—fluids, and sliding all up on each other, and mewling weepy love poetry mid-climax—gross. Nah, she’d pass.

She’d tried to tell her parents this and she could see the guilt welling behind their eyes. The nootropics they gave her as a kid, they’d started to say, must’ve done something to her. Kaori had dead-ended that before the inevitable we were just doing what was best, blah. Her disinterest wasn’t a flaw. Side-effect of the drugs or not, she liked herself. She felt like her weak spots had been lacquered in gold, making her already stronger than the ones who’d made her.

That had been the last time they’d spoken, before the waves hit.

“You miss them?” I asked.

Her sigh was long and rustling, and on anyone else it would’ve been theatrical.

“I’m supposed to say yes.”

“Please,” I snorted.

I looked down at my mug, where the tea bag had ripped open, spilling murky leaves out into the water.

13

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

The FantiSee screen in the Theater was a cast-iron sky filled with cathedrals of clouds that blotted out the fake sun. Blunt shapes roiled in the wind. I’d heard the AI in the screens were able to pick up emotional cues from homeowners based on their body temperature and micro-movements and displayed scenes to fit their moods. I don’t know if that was bullshit or not and who the screen was tuned to—probably Kaori. I didn’t want to be around when a tornado funnel dropped from the ceiling and ripped this place to ribbons.

I could almost taste the energy of the air that morning—the burnt ozone smell between lightning strikes—after my dreams of drowning cities and raining fish. Kaori had called everyone over the PA system and told them to meet in the Theater. The thirty or so members of her research staff must’ve known what was happening, with their smiles like someone had lit a firecracker fuse and they were waiting for the sparks. The rest of us Footage Farmers were in the dark.