“Being with you was easy because all you are is a loop, feeding my thoughts back to myself—just an externalized version of my own thought processes, given a different shape. And it felt like it was helping, but it wasn’t. I don’t need agreement: I need resistance.”

The oculus’s light flickered, and died.

“Even now,” she said, “I feel like I should ask you to forgive me. But—ask who? There is no ‘Kamran’—I was always just talking to myself.”

Ha closed the pillowcase and hammered the oculus against the floor several more times, then carried it to her closet and zipped the wreckage of it into a duffel bag there. A part of her wanted to bury it somewhere on the beach.

“No,” she said to herself. Since I’m the only one left to talk to. “Stop being so dramatic. You don’t bury something that was never alive to begin with. You move on.”

IN THE HOTEL LOBBY, Evrim was at a terminal, watching the film of the Shapesinger. Evrim had been watching the film, frame by frame, for the last two days—ever since their walk into the sea and the confrontation with Altantsetseg. Ha stood across the table and watched the screen light across Evrim’s motionless, concentrated face. Watched Evrim’s pupils expand and contract, tracking motions on the screen.

“I think, therefore I doubt I am,” Ha said.

Evrim looked up at her.

“It is one of the classic conundrums,” Ha continued. “Language doesn’t just allow us to describe the world as it exists: It also opens up a world of things that are not here. It grants us the power to over-consider. Because we are linguistic, creative beings, we can better think through things, solve much more complex problems. We can imagine how things might be, might have been, might become. Imagining what is not there is the key to our creativity. It is what no non-linguistic animal has. With that power, we are so much freer to act in new ways—to innovate, to invent, to view our situations from a thousand angles and find a new way out. But we can also come up with a thousand absurdities, out of line with the truth. And out of line with the brute fact of our awareness of being here. But that awareness of being here is consciousness itself. It is the evidence. We can postulate all kinds of nonsense: we live in a computer simulation of life, we are nothing more than blind chemical reactions without any ‘real’ awareness or free will, consciousness is a self-sustaining illusion. And now this absurdity that Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan came up with in her interview. This idea that somehow you passed the ‘final Turing test’ and fooled yourself into thinking you are alive. What nonsense. Do you feel alive?”

“Yes,” Evrim said. “I feel alive. I am aware of being here.”