“We learned about it in software engineering class,” Eden said as Eli typed it in. “It’s, like, the first program you learn to write when you’re learning a new programming language. All the program does is generate the message ‘hello world.’ ”

“Well, it worked,” Eli said, bending to look at the home screen. “Seriously, there’s not a single chair in this place?” He looked around with irritation, but still no chair materialized.

Ilanka spotted something in a far corner. It appeared, at first, to be a dead animal, but, no, the shape was all wrong and the color—a dusty lavender—wasn’t right.

“You guys?” she said as she walked toward it and stopped maybe five feet away. “What’s that?”

Eden came to her side and said, “Oh my god.” She bent to pick it up. “It’s Eliza!”

Ilanka said, “Who’s Eliza?” But even as she said it, she felt a swell of nostalgia, her memory barely an outline of a long-ago moment.

Had she … had one?

Eden said, “It was an interactive toy with all these security issues that got pulled before it even went on sale.”

So Ilanka couldn’t have had one?

“It creeped people out during user testing because it learned all this stuff about kids and the data it was collecting wasn’t secure at all. It was made by a company called I Know You Are But What Am I Toys, which were the device’s last words before Marwan destroyed it. This one”—Eden held up the toy—“appears to be missing its display monitor and computer element or whatever.”

She pointed at a cube-shaped void in its stomach, and Ilanka felt a similar hollow in her gut. It didn’t look especially like any known animal, more like something from a Japanese comic, but it was familiar anyway. She saw herself, as if from above, as a child in her grandfather’s office in Saint Petersburg, sitting on an uncomfortable rug—the kind you’d only ever have in an office, coarse and rust colored. She saw herself with the toy—its fur a pale lime green in her memory—on her lap. She could almost hear its tiny childlike voice, saying …

The words wouldn’t come.

“But what does that”—Ilanka pointed at it—“have to do with that?” She pointed over toward Eli and the device.

“You guys?” Marwan called out, sounding far away, and when Ilanka turned she didn’t see him.

“Where are you?” Eden asked, and his head appeared through a doorway. Ilanka and Eden walked over.

The shelved walk-in closet held maybe twenty more of the toys in dusty packaging: Meet Eliza! the windowed boxes all said. Your New Best Friend!

A small bit of cardboard in front of the cube device in its belly read: I Belong with You! And a small bubble with an arrow pointing at the screen said: “Interactive screen.”