Eden’s mom said, “Thanks for being honest with me, Anjali”—Nice dig, Mom!—and turned her back to them while putting her mug in the sink.

Eden followed Anjali to the door and unlocked it to let her out.

“Talk later?” Eden tried.

Anjali stepped past her. “You can lie to your mother all you want, but why are you lying to me?”

Eden couldn’t find words to explain and had already made too many excuses. Anjali shook her head and walked out the door and up the driveway.

Back inside, Eden’s mom had Eden’s phone in her hand.

“Mom?” Panic rose. “What are you doing?”

“Who’s Ilanka?” Her mother looked up at her with panicked eyes. “And what’s the ‘device’?”

Eli

ELI

Eli sent Eliot to the Willow Creek library when the option “go to library and research/read” popped up, then thought maybe that was a good idea for him IRL. His initial googling hadn’t helped.

He discovered his phone was dead, so he left it home, and maybe that was for the best anyway? He grabbed his wallet and the notebook where he’d taken his notes on Aizel, and walked the fifteen minutes to the library. He hated being disconnected like this. It was true that nothing much ever happened to him, but he always felt that something was sure to happen when he was phoneless and least able to handle it.

The library was busy but not overcrowded. He approached the librarian at the desk. “I’m interested in books about artificial intelligence,” he said, and she turned to a computer and typed for a few minutes, then said, “We don’t have much here. There are a few at other branches I can request for you if it’s not urgent.”

He said, “It’s sort of urgent.”

“Follow me,” she said, and she came out through a gate and led him to the back of the library where she ran a hand along a shelf, then slowed, then stopped and pulled out a hardcover with a plastic cover on it. “This is from 1974 so it’s going to be really out of date, is my guess.”

“I’ll flip through it anyway,” Eli said, and she held it out to him. “Thanks.”

Everything about the book was old and wrong. The fonts, the language. Eli couldn’t find an entry point that made any sense. It was too technical, not at all what he needed, even though he wasn’t even sure what he needed. Staring at the table of contents he saw a chapter about the Turing test, but he already knew the basic idea of that from the movies. The Turing test was this bar that artificial intelligence developers were trying to reach, where the AI could convince a human it was also human.