By the time we split cheese-coated nachos at the Mexican restaurant, I didn’t have to play therapist. They divided the Compound, with Yusuf and his team taking the day shift, Kaori and her team the night shift after a few hours of calibration and testing between. She always was a night owl, anyway. This whole treaty was so easy that they felt silly about getting so worked up and protective, when their work wasn’t about egos—it was about knowledge. Now that their kingdom was divided and treaties signed, we all cheersed with our cactus-shaped margarita glasses, and the band was back together.

*   *   *

I missed a lot of warning signs as the gears cranked tighter around us, because—surprise, surprise—I was focused on myself.

Protests erupted across Florida after Kaori alerted the government that they should evacuate the Keys before a monster hurricane knocked the islands into the sea. I watched an old woman crying to a field reporter on the TV in our break room. Just because some machine tells me to leave, why should I listen? I’ve lived here for forty years. Behind her, the winds were already kicking up sea spray. I have no idea what happened to her when the hurricane hit like the machine said it would.

Kaori converted a conference room into a customer service call center for her n-Viz program. The wrist device hadn’t officially rolled out yet, though the customers were already calling and screaming about when they could ask the box their questions. I visited the place once and found four people sitting by phones and computer workstations in tiny pools of light cast by desk lamps, their eyes all flashing me varying looks of help. I knew the look from my summers washing dishes at a chain restaurant in Southie, the humid days by the industrial dishwasher that belched clouds of mystery-meat-smelling mist into my face. I’d picked up a couple of lunch shifts here and there, and there was always some asshole wailing to me about a world-ending injustice. A tomato in his burger, and then I’d be in front of a firing squad of nobody in this goddamn place has ever done a day of hard work in their lives and why don’t you cut your hair and get a real job.

Some patron paid a shit-ton of money—Kaori was cagey about just how much—to come by the Compound and ask the Envisioner a question. I marooned myself in the Footage Farm late the night he came by and peered down at the Theater where he, Kaori, and a few of her aides floated by the Envisioner. He asked the machine whatever he bankrolled Kaori to ask and was soon flapping his arms wildly at the machine, then to Kaori, then to the whole world around him, it looked, until he stormed out.