FTB took over her life, and she let it. Sometimes even when she was offline it was as if FTB was running by itself in her head—her brain had spent so much time with these invisible personalities that they’d calved off little clones of themselves in her brain, pirate software versions of Asmo and Pouncy and Failstaff and all the others, that ran on Julia’s hardware. She wasn’t demented—she wasn’t!—it was just a game she played with herself. It was a little insane, but hey, whatever got you through, right? And everything else was going fine. She’d gained weight, stopped scratching herself, barely even bit her cuticles anymore. She hadn’t done the rainbow spell in ages. She knew she was obsessed, but it was turning out that she was the kind of person who needed to be obsessed with something, and she could have done a lot worse. God knows she had before.

She figured, let the fever run its course. It would break, and the patient would wake up clammy but clearheaded, and the fever dreams would fade. She’d head off to Stanford in the fall, get a new life, get some real-world, visible, analog friends. Wipe the slate clean.

But first she’d give it its head, let it run a little. Which is how Julia found herself late on a weekend afternoon in March wandering through Prospect Heights toward Bed-Stuy. She’d become a prodigious walker of late, because she needed some kind of exercise, and exposure to sunlight improved her mood. And she could take the Free Traders with her, not only in their capacity as spectral presences in her brain but as actual presences on her smartphone, for which Failstaff had ginned up a clever little app. (No iPhones, natch, Android only. The Free Traders were huge open-source snobs.) She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.

Julia typed as she walked; she had developed a great facility in doing this, using her peripheral vision to weave around fire hydrants and dogshit land mines and other pedestrians. A key part of successfully being Julia, it seemed, was not giving a shit if you looked weird. Today she halflistened via the app’s text-to-speech feature while Pouncy and Asmodeus went back and forth on the validity of Hofstadter’s strange-loop theory of consciousness as derived from Gödel numbers, or something like that.