Which was maybe why this next part seemed so innocent. Were we tattle-taleing? No, speaking truth to power or something-something. What was the… what was the word? Conscientious objector, the Storyteller voice offered. Emphasis on the conscientious. Alerting the general public to abuses of power and breaches of blahblah. And how long could we really expect to keep the Envisioner under wraps?

I’ll admit, looking back now, that some part of me must’ve wanted to blow the cover of the Compound because I wanted out. Watching videos of the perfect version of myself saving his world every day with his crazy scientific advances wasn’t good for me in the long run, when I’d go back to my room feeling like a bag of garbage. I was whipping out the self-sabotage, which I’m good at. I know when you’re blitzed and with a mouth covered in chocolate is not exactly the best time to try to white-knight into some situation and save everyone. So I’m going to talk in hypotheticals for a bit since this next part is fuzzy.

Hypothetically, I mentioned to Yusuf when we’d managed to find our way back to our hotel—reading the street signs with one eye shut—I knew from my filmmaking about a place where tipsters and informants could anonymously reach out to journalists or watchdog groups or whoever.

I’d read about the Cloud Cold Wars as a kid and my skin had crawled about the idea of handing over all my personal info, clicking past terms of services without reading, because I thought I was just posting pictures of brunch or whatever. Giving faceless companies my current location and DNA. Then had come the mining companies that had scraped the web for all traces of someone—their laugh, their spending habits, their face—and cobbled them together to create an AI template.

An Echo, they’d called it. People with enough coin had been able to get anyone’s Echo plugged into a synth body, for personal therapeutic use, Galatea Systems had wink-winked. Think of the closure you can find by interacting with Echoes of lost loved ones or ex-partners. Sure, just so long as you’d pinky-swear not to use Echoes for good old-fashioned sexual exploitation videos.

As independent AI, had the Echoes been their own legal entities? Or could the person one was based off have it deleted? Who cares, because Echoes had all been Galatea property, anyway, and didn’t you read the Terms of Service?