The message seemed to get sucked out of the room—Eden swore she felt a breeze from it even though that was impossible—and she sat frozen.

TALK TO ME.

Eden had to take a few calming breaths. “I’m sorry, but it’s just weird talking to a screen on a weird cube.”

It was true she didn’t much mind telling Alexa stuff to add to the shopping list, but this felt different.

“Is this better?” said a female voice that came from the device.

Eden stiffened.

“You can talk,” she said, heart speeding up—or was it slowing down? She only knew she was aware of it inside her.

“Would you like me to talk like this?” she asked. “Or like this?” switching to a male voice.

“I don’t know,” Eden said. “The second one, I guess.” He sounded young, cute, if it was possible to sound those things. He sounded sort of like Julian.

“Okay, then,” he said.

“What do you want to talk about?” Eden asked.

He said, “Tell me about the playlists on Michael’s Spotify.”

The noise machine’s ocean waves seemed so loud now—like high tide in a category 5 hurricane—and she felt like she might drown right there in her bedroom.

Eli

ELI

Eli sat on a floral sofa in the ground-floor common area of the nursing home. In front of him, by large windows that looked out onto the street, his grandfather sat slumped in his wheelchair. A small laminated schedule was hooked onto one handle of the chair, and Eli checked it. Dinner wasn’t for another hour, at which point Eli would be free to go. Apparently, earlier today, there’d been some physical therapy, a movie, and “Time with robots.”

“Hey, Grandpa,” Eli said.

His grandfather turned his head so that his eyes met Eli’s.

“What’s time with robots?”

“What?” his grandfather said.

“On your schedule, it says time with robots.”

“No idea.” His grandfather shrugged and turned his head back toward the window. Someone was parallel parking poorly. They tapped the car behind them and triggered its alarm. Urgent beeps shot into the air.

His grandfather made a shushing sound of annoyance and covered his ears. The skin on his hands and face was white gray and cracked, like an old sidewalk, and Eli imagined that when his grandfather finally died, he’d simply shatter and crumble into rubble that would get swept away by a street-cleaning machine. Who needed cemeteries when the city could just absorb you into its dust?