I started again, from the beginning. My insides were disorganized, so logical, linear notions, such as starting with number one and working my way forward, did not often occur to me.

BOX 1: BACKGROUND

The Rhiz had provided a lengthy background report on Blithe, which bored me. Socioeconomic status, blood type, college course list, favorite fruits, all the things you could find out about a person doing a social-justice-oriented icebreaker. I skipped to the photos of his apartment: clean, understated, covered in weavings and climbing plants. I wasn’t yet sure if I hated him. I smelled a cologne sample, floral and mossy, and I wanted to press my cheek against his.

Typical trans behavior: hate, longing, and over-intimacy.

As I gorged on Blithe, time was kinder and slower.

BOX 2: HEX-RELATED DATA

I pulled out a spongy ball, and dropped it. Shitifical sawhorses of Schneidhorst! A Bio-meter. I thought about all the activists who kept phones in their unused microwaves to avoid surveillance. How could I keep myself safe from emotional detection?

TBH, I was honored that they had entrusted me with an actual Bio-meter, even if it scared the hell out of me. The balls measured affect through contact with the skin or, in the case of those with Rhiz implants like Blithe, from aggregating pupil dilation, skin conductance, brain activity, heart rate, and facial movement. The labs were still working to expand both methods to include the aural composite, a person’s most essential state of being, but they were always running out of funding.

TBRH, reading the Bio-meter was an imperfect art. I took off its regenerative shell (which was rumored to be made out of artificially engineered collagen) and spun the time-dial to March 10, twelve days before the hex, so I could get a sense of Blithe’s baseline. The ball changed shade as the day moved from morning to night. I paused it to check the Bio-chart, which was artificially intelligent.

The Bio-chart read 8:00 a.m.’s plain orange as “exercise high” and 9:00 a.m.’s lime green as “object (person)–centered frustration” and 2:00 p.m.’s dark fuchsia as “dangerous American nostalgia.” Blithe, subject to “languorous indifference,” “gay frustration,” and “under-justified career pride,” was nothing like me. I read him like some exotic novel, thirsty for the feelings of others.

I set the Bio-meter to March 22, the day of the hex. It glowed black like a menacing night sky. The ball started to shake, and the chart, instead of naming cute and specific feelings, read only: LACK.

My nervous system started acting up. My ex, in moments of frustration, used to send me articles about attachment theory, and at night in bed he would read to me about Kristeva and lack and the doldrums of toddlers. Somehow, he thought that he could cure me, and bring me closer, by teaching me about the various expanses between parents and their children.

I didn’t need theory; I needed them undead.