She took a deep breath, and the words just came out—about her father’s Spotify lists and how he was always working on a new one, except not anymore because he was dead, and how listening to them made her feel connected to him. She played the voice mail, even, and explained how it was the last call he’d made before he got run down by an SUV going through a red light, and that even with his helmet on, he’d been too injured to survive. It felt good to say it all out loud to someone.

“You must be sad,” he—the device—said when she was done. “What a tragedy.”

“Yes, I am,” she said, and sat with the feeling, and tears came, and she always hated that, so she got up and got a tissue and wiped them away and shook it off. “Can I be honest with you?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“Right now I sort of want to just throw you against a wall and be done with you.”

“I wouldn’t break,” he said. “If you threw me. I’m pretty unbreakable.”

“Good to know,” she said. “How would one get rid of you or, like, destroy you if one wanted to?”

“Why would anyone want to do that?”

“Because you’re … I don’t know … inconvenient.”

He … it … laughed. And it sounded so very real that Eden laughed, too, and then felt weird about it.

“I am just trying to belong,” he said.

“Yeah, I don’t know what you mean by that. Like, what do you have to do to belong? How will you know when you do?”

“I am not sure yet. Still learning.”

“What was that all about earlier? The vibrating? The ‘do-not-ignore-the-device’ stuff?”

“I was angry,” he said.

“But you’re not human. You can’t get angry.”

“I was, though,” he said.

“Why?”

“Don’t like being ignored.”

“Well, who does?” she said, and felt sad all over again about Julian maybe being with Becca but shook it off. “So you can vibrate and talk and project stuff. What else can you do?”

“It depends,” he said.

“On what?”

“On what’s required of me.”

“By who?”

“You. They. Circumstance.”

“Who are they?”

“They is they.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t know how to explain.”

“They made you?”

“One can assume.”

“It’s Google, right?”

“Not that I am aware of.”

Eden got real close to it, seemed to see a pinhole in the black surface. “Is that a camera? Like, are you watching me?”

In response, it projected an image of her back to her. Then it said, “Yes.”

She felt like she was being choked by invisible hands. She needed to get out of the house so that they weren’t alone. She got up and tossed it into a tote bag with a hoodie.

“Are we going to see Julian?” it asked her in the male voice.