I have a home-care training that I can reschedule, he sent. Other than that, it’s only the three community management gigs, and I can do those anytime.

She hadn’t realized his queue was so empty. With her work being flow-dependent, the law mandated that another—pill-free—adult be home with Carma during her school hours. Stupid bureaucracy can’t keep up with technology. Barely a year before, her father had been alive to help with Carma. Her mother had passed away three years prior to that, succumbing to a particularly vicious hacked rotavirus. It took the world seventy-two hours to design and test an antidote, but that had been too slow for many, especially the elderly or the very young.

Having her parents’ help had left her and Luis free to work more. Luis could go out for supervisory gigs, which paid better than remote jobs. He had a good botside manner, and home-bound customers rated him especially well. She shouldn’t fault him for his lack of remote tasks.

What should we tell Carma? she sent. She’ll ask why Welga isn’t coming for dinner.

I’ll handle it, he replied. I’ll say that Welga is hurt badly, but she will recover, which is the truth.

Simple and to the point. Nithya tended to overexplain and get into more detail than Carma wanted. She got herself a drink of water from the kitchen, which was in the last stages of reconfiguring from full automation to accommodate a manual stove. Carma had hand-selected the rainbow-striped color scheme for the structure in anticipation of her aunt Welga’s arrival. Welga loved to cook from scratch, and Carma enjoyed the novelty of helping. All for naught.

Nithya cleared away the news feeds and set her visual to opaque. She had two hours left on this round of flow, and she couldn’t afford any more distractions.

After dinner, Nithya placed their dishes in the recycler. Carma sat on the sofa, her eyes and ears occupied by an alternate reality. The world’s agitation hadn’t spent itself in spite of hours of silence from the Machinehood.

“How can a protest group disappear so thoroughly?” Nithya asked Luis. She kept her voice low so Carma wouldn’t hear. “And why? They don’t even have a public tip jar! What use is getting all this attention if they can’t earn coin from it?”

“Maybe the rumors are correct.” Luis moved back from the table as it began to dissolve into blox. “Maybe a generalized, sentient artificial intelligence—or more than one—is behind this. That would explain a lot, right? Why nobody can find a trace of this Machinehood group. Why they don’t need tips. A creature of pure software exists where no camera would capture it.”

“But why cut off pills?”