She never cracked once during the whole interview, even when the anchors grilled her. Why the secrecy, they asked? All about safety, she said, all about looking out for everyone. She felt confident that she and her team could release this sensitive information about the device now after years of multinational cooperation and testing in a secure facility, where each day they learned more about this tremendous gift.

“Well, that and the leak,” Kameelah added.

Kaori laughed off the jab. “Sure—the leak. Let’s go there. Look, of course, ideally we would’ve controlled that initial release of information. But the wheels were already in motion. We certainly envisioned—no pun intended—a future where everyone has equal access to the Envisioner and its technology. There were a lot of hard conversations the last several weeks, including before the photos hit the media. We knew we had to balance our need for caution with a sense of transparency with the public.”

“And why’s that?” Reggie asked.

“Because this is not JAXA’s discovery, or mine, or my team’s,” she said, leaning in slightly. “This is ours. This is our shared human heritage—spanning universes. Think about that. This future belongs to all of us.”

“Stunning,” Kameelah said.

“So stunning,” Reggie agreed.

Jesus, some deep part of me sank with how unrecognizable she was, all her hard angles powdered, her lips glossed, her playful voice. Which was the character, the pantsuit or the white lab coat? Her act was all about control. How she even sent us more research staff and a beefed-up security team to patrol the white lab-rat halls, all to prove that she was still pulling the strings even while she was away.

Control, control—the tightening of some vice. Figueiredo’s voice followed me from the Theater to my room, late at night. Isn’t this what you wanted? Sometimes Kaori chimed in. You don’t make something out of steel and then complain when it’s too hard.

I visited the Envisioner alone at night, the first couple of days that Kaori was gone, until a night-shift research team swooped in and kicked me out. Yusuf was swamped with work and I had nothing else to do but press my hands on the gunmetal facets of the machine and try to look for some roadmap. What should I do? I asked the thing. What’s going to happen? It answered with charts or equations. Or “Invalid query. Critical variable limit.” Which—fair enough—I couldn’t even shape my swirling thoughts into real questions, so how could I expect the box to know what I meant?