Luis was gone when Nithya woke up. He left a message saying that he had an off-site emergency repair gig where the bid was tied to availability. As she brushed out the tangles in Carma’s hair, she wondered if this pregnancy might be a boy. She resisted the urge to check. For two people of different ethnicities, Luis and she had the same dark, curly hair, and Carma had inherited it. Nithya tamed it into two long braids as Carma cried about her aunt.

“Amma, why can’t I visit Aunty Welga, too?”

They had blocked Carma’s access to public feeds, but a friend had sent her clips from the attacks. Why couldn’t other parents be more vigilant and conscientious?

“They’ve put her to sleep,” Nithya replied. “She’ll be in a lot of pain. You won’t be able to talk to her, and it might be scary for you to see her. Anyway, Papa is going mostly because Grandpa will feel better if someone visits Aunty Welga.”

“Can’t we send her some messages?”

“Of course. You can record and send anything, but she might not answer for some time.”

Then, in a near whisper, “Amma, will they come here? I don’t want to get blown up.”

Nithya put an arm around her child. She kissed the top of Carma’s head and guided her to her alcove. “No, darling, we’re safe here. Don’t worry. They weren’t attacking your aunty. They were after a funder, a wealthy pill designer.”

“Roopa says we should turn everything off. She says the Machinehood will take over all our WAIs and bots, and they’ll kill us.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Nithya said reflexively.

But was it? The morning had shed no light on who or what the Machinehood was, adding credibility to the theory of a purely electronic entity. A creature of ones and zeros that didn’t inhabit the real world… could it take over every system? No personal WAI or bot worked without access to the global networks and centralized computing, but modern quantum encryption was impossible to break, or so the experts claimed. Let it go, she told herself firmly. Don’t fall for the bogeyman of sentient AI. Worry about your own work first.

After getting Carma settled, Nithya had the kitchen make her pills and drugs for the day and said a quick prayer before sitting down with her morning coffee. Since she couldn’t dose up on flow until Luis returned, she looked through Sita’s search results for Welga’s tremors. The generic forms of zips worked by sitting on either end of sensory and motor nerves, bypassing the travel of an electrical signal along an axon. Unlike drugs, which acted passively, pill formulations were tiny machines. They could improve biochemical mechanisms without using the underlying structures.