To escape his questions, she had asked him about his work. She wasn’t interested—not really. She’d been thinking about how she wanted them to walk faster. She wanted to get to her apartment and go to bed with him.

It was better to ask questions than to struggle for answers. She felt stupid. She wasn’t stupid—she was just not the kind of person who thought all the time. When she was working, there was no theory—just the knowing that came with having done the work for years. Like the knowing that came with speaking or listening in your native language. That was what made her sought-after. Her fluency in the work. Not a schoolbook theory learned in those dull virtual lectures, with slides of painting sequences blipping across her terminal.

So she had said: “What about you? You work on neural networks. What’s that like?”

And then, before he could answer, they had arrived at the entryway to her place, and other things had taken over.

Now, two hours later, he was answering her question.

Well, at least she didn’t have to talk. She could simply enjoy the sharpened feeling of the drug-hit in her brain, combined with the natural postcoital rush of grateful hormones, and the mix of moon and the ambient light from the street coming into the room. She was named for moonlight—Aynur—and ever since she was a child, she had associated it with herself: cool and pale and of the night. It was like one of those subcutaneous underlays you could buy, flow it through your veins, and bliss out for months. One of those: A Walk in the Rain or Summer Evening. If she could figure out how to chiptune this subtle, rich feeling she sometimes sank into of being moonlight she could sell it for a fortune.

“That’s the question a philosopher named Thomas Nagel asked, so many decades ago. ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ He was trying to make a point about how impossible it is to imagine oneself having a sensory apparatus as different from ours as a bat’s. That even to conceive of what it’s like to navigate the world with sonar, you would have to take up the bat’s point of view. But you can’t—you might be able to take up a different point of view a little, but the more distant you are from it—let’s say the more alien it is to you—the harder it is to answer the question.”

“Makes sense, I suppose.”

“Sort of,” Rustem said, staring out her bedroom window.

There were plenty of real bats out there. She would see them sometimes when she was walking home in the dark, twisting patterns in the black space above the streetlamps. You could throw a pebble, and one of them would swoop to chase it.