I didn’t expect Kaori to be as open about the Envisioner as she was, holding press conferences and calling on reporters with her clipped voice. Answering questions with short sentences and unafraid to dodge and move on, even with all the shouting, especially at first. It’s a modeling device. We have yet to understand the language of its inventors, but they appear to be from an alternate version of Earth.

There was only one mass suicide I saw on the news, of a cult in the highlands of Scotland who thought they could get to the alternate universe by swallowing a few mouthfuls of barbiturates.

“Fucking idiots,” one of the white coats whose name I hadn’t bothered to learn grumbled at the screen when the news broke.

My microwaved noodles scalded my insides. I thought of my mom telling me about the Titan riots, and how weird it was that people seemed personally victimized by the existence of alien life and not so much about how they learned about it. I knew there’d be a big reaction to the news that I leaked. But honestly, I didn’t feel responsible for anyone else’s actions or emotions. They all deserved to know, and it was up to them to hop into their grownup pants and decide what they did with that knowledge.

Kaori seemed to agree. She was the chilly stepmother during her press conferences. Where she really sang were news segments, with her pinned-back hair and the jeweled pins of the flags of Japan and the Commonwealth of Great Basin Nations on the collar of her senator’s-wife pantsuit.

I watched her on some late-night news show after I spent hours Envisioner-dipping. Captions on the bottom of the screen called her “Dr. Kaori Nakamori, Director of The Envisioner Initiative.” I’d never stopped to ask what our whole operation was called, and “The Envisioner Initiative” sounded culty enough. A makeup artist must’ve dabbed concealer over the green shadows beneath her eyes, along with painting her a red vampire mouth. She was a publicist fresh off a beach vacation, not the tired woman who’d peered down at her teacup while she talked with me for hours about her drowned homeland.

She could’ve snapped together some black-ops communications team and sent anyone in her place for this interview—or any one of the other million she did—but that wasn’t her style. She wanted the messages to come from her.

“There are just so many questions,” one of the anchors said, a former football star with a jutting fist-shaped chin.

“So many, Reggie,” his co-anchor, Kameelah, chimed in with her massage therapist voice. “I mean another universe? That’s unreal.”

“And what we’re looking for,” Kaori said smoothly, “are answers to so many of our questions.”