“I don’t know!” she said, and Marwan hugged her and looked to Eli for … an explanation? Or maybe advice?

“It just blew up!” she half screamed through tears.

Eli didn’t know any better what to do. He felt like crying and also didn’t know why.

A series of numbers and symbols started to flicker on the computer monitor and the lights on the server on the wall went out and the room fell silent, all its technology dead, like the building itself had been irreparably damaged by the blast or maybe just unplugged somewhere deep inside the foundation.

Sparky dust was still settling inside the printer chamber. Fractured robotic arms dangled at odd angles. The room smelled faintly of fire, and Eli wondered whether there was an alarm that would soon sound and summon the firefighters with the skull.

Eden wiped more tears away. “I mean what the hell just happened?” she screamed.

“I’m not sure,” Eli said tentatively. “It could be like a kill-switch program. Like the fact that it was able to find its way back here triggered all this. Like it was set up that way by whoever is running it?”

“But it said no one is running it,” Marwan said.

“I don’t know.” Eli was working hard to make sense of it all. “There wouldn’t be a monitor here if there wasn’t a person involved. If it just exists, like, in the cloud, it wouldn’t need one.”

Marwan said, “It made it sound like it was doing something it wasn’t supposed to.”

Eli shrugged. “I don’t think it was programmed to destroy the printer.”

And what had it meant, about trying to fix some things before it was gone?

Something buzzed. Eden took her phone out of her pocket, then looked up with a new kind of fear on her face.

“What is it?” Eli asked.

“Reports of a possible explosion in Hunters Point vicinity. Units are responding.”

A siren piped up.

“We need to go!” she said, and they all headed for the door and followed Ilanka, since she seemed to know where she was going, until they ended up in a park by the river a few blocks away. All around them people were walking dogs and playing with their kids, eating sandwiches on benches. Eli wondered if they looked crazy to other people or only to themselves.

They stopped and stood facing each other in a sort of loose huddle by an unlikely strip of tall grasses that looked transplanted from a far-away meadow. Eli thought about throwing his arms around the three of them but didn’t.

It was Eden who did that.