She is seeing the look on my face, and I am not knowing what face I am making, but it is causing her to crouch down and touch my face. “Oh,” she is saying like mother or elder sister. Then she says, “Oof,” and opens bottle of painkillers in her hand, dumps a few out onto her palm, then swallows them. She makes a move to put the pill bottle back where she found it, but then puts it in her vest pocket instead. “Cramps,” she tells me, and I am knowing she is talking about a thing that is happening with her body that is never happening with mine.

“May I ask you a question?” I say in small small voice.

Binye raises an eyebrow, then slides down the wall until she’s sitting like I’m sitting but with her legs spread out and not hugging them to her chest. “Go ahead.”

“When you are first cyberizing, what is it feeling like? Do you remember?”

Binye is considering the ceiling before she answers. “In the beginning? I felt . . . new. Like I’d been born a second time. There’s darkness, then for a few moments, I see myself. My body. I’m lying in a hospital bed, not moving. My eyes are closed, and I think I’m asleep. Or dead. Then I wake up. But not like waking up from a dream. It’s like waking up into the world for the very first time. And the lights are so bright it hurts. And the blankets are rough, and the noise makes my head feel like it’s going to explode. And all I smell is antiseptic. It was as though I were a child experiencing all of this for the first time.”

What she is saying is reminding me of thing, but the remembering is like sand that is running through my fingers. I am trying to make the remembering come, to be pulling it from Binye’s words, but when I grab a piece of it—the smell of rain-wet soil, the sound of water lapping against shoreline—it is vanishing.

“Why do you ask?” Binye’s voice is taking me out of my thoughts. Then she is squinting at me and saying, “Oh. You’re a synth. I am not insulting you. I am just realizing why you must be wanting to know.” She moves closer to me. “I see the way you all are. Like children. And you’re different. If you were all the same child, it would be easier to think you’re all machines, but . . .” She does not finish.

I am smiling, and then I am waking up on recliner chair that is also lowering itself to being bed or table. Cushion beneath me is blue and plastic and torn. Wall is hissing around me, fans whirring, spraying mist on me, cleaning radioactive dust from everywhere in here.