She went to put on the “Songs We Used to Sing to Eden When She Was a Baby” playlist, then remembered the lists were all gone. She’d played that one often enough these past few months that she knew that the first song on it was called “Falling Slowly,” so she tried to sing it to herself, but her whisper-singing felt pathetic and creepy, even to her.

I know you are but what am I?

Mark texted: How did it go?

She wrote back: Good. Tired. Going to bed.

Mark texted: You destroyed it?

She didn’t feel like answering, had already told him she was going to bed. So she turned her phone off and set it aside and lay there in the near dark. A distant siren came closer, then faded away again, and she thought about turning her phone back on and checking Citizen again but didn’t. A car with booming bass flew up the street at probably twice the speed limit, driven by one of the people her father called VIPs—people who expected the world to bend to their will, for traffic to part for them like biblical seas. She could almost hear him in the room, saying something like, “If you’re tailgating a school bus, you need to check your priorities. Amirite?”

The ceiling fan and its shadow self were up there and seemed somehow inquisitive once the room quieted—maybe even challenging—wondering, like she was, what the hell had just happened … and what could possibly happen next.

Authorize_reboot

Authorize_reboot

Ilanka

ILANKA

The coffee grinder hummed from the kitchen. Ilanka sat up, stretched, got up, and turned off her alarm, which would ring in a minute and was annoying. She went down the hall to use the bathroom, then into the kitchen for cereal. Her mother was there at her phone, which was plugged in. The plug reserved for her father’s phone was gone. She said, “Where’s Dad?”

“His trip got moved up,” her mother said. “Some kind of emergency. He left at the crack of dawn.” She yawned and said, “I’m getting in the shower.”

“What kind of emergency?” Ilanka asked.

“Some kind of hack,” her mother called back. “Apparently it’s a big deal.”

Ilanka stood at the window.

Something felt wrong.

Everything felt wrong.

Your father is engaged in illegal activities.

When she heard the water running in the shower, Ilanka went into her father’s home office. There was a pile of bills next to the space where his laptop would normally be. Con Ed. Sprint. Some junk mail from Delta. A copy of WIRED magazine with the headline “Less Artificial, More Intelligent.” A flyer from Queens Theatre advertising a show called “Doktor Kaboom’s Look Out! Science is Coming!”

She opened the desk drawer.

Some stamps. Unsharpened pencils. A stack of business cards and gift cards with Post-its stuck to them with dollar amounts written on them.