Michael could only nod, a roar of blood in his ears.

“That day, I sent you out of the room so I could work with our programmers back in the Sleep to download her information. Her consciousness. I needed to do it before she took her last breath in that world.”

He couldn’t swallow; he couldn’t breathe.

“I think,” she continued, “I know, that we got it all. We had plenty of experience working with the Mortality Doctrine by that point. The only thing is, we weren’t able to capture her on the other side. At the Hive. We weren’t able to insert her into a pod.”

Michael stood up, then sat back down again. “What…what does that mean?”

“It means that she’s out there.” Helga looked up and around at the ceiling, as if looking for a ghost. “Scattered. Maybe across billions of data points. I don’t know. She might be like a bucket of sand tossed in the ocean. But…but at least you know she’s out there. Somewhere. That’s a little something to hope on, right?”

Michael had his hands on the counter in front of him. He stared at the backs of his knuckles, shell-shocked. There were so many emotions swirling inside him, he couldn’t focus on one.

“What about…my parents?” he managed to ask.

Helga gave him the sincerest of understanding smiles. “I miss them, too. So much. I think they’re different, I’m sorry to say. It’s like…it’s like this. Imagine a chalkboard—you know, from the old stories? A chalkboard with names written across its surface. With your parents, I think it’s like they’ve been erased, never to come back. But with Sarah…well, with her, I think it’s like her name is still written there. The chalkboard itself has just been lost in a warehouse as big as a universe. The odds of finding it are small, but she’s out there, somewhere.”

Michael nodded sadly.

“Maybe not the greatest analogy,” she said. “But I do think there’s at least something to hold on to with Sarah.” She fell silent, letting everything sink in.

“Thanks for telling me all this,” Michael finally whispered, then got up. He needed to be alone. He turned and walked away, but stopped at the door to the hallway and turned back toward his nanny. “I love you, Helga.”

Then he went to his room, the one he grew up in.

4

“Just like old times,” Bryson said, raising his drink. The other three people around the table clinked their glasses with his and took a big swig. They were at Dan the Man Deli, and it was indeed just like the good old days. A big plate of bleu chips had already been half devoured.