Rustem laughed. “Yeah—something like that. So recently I reread it, and I found this section where Nagel talks about how blind people are able to detect objects near them using sonar as well—about how they can use vocal clicks or taps of a cane to ‘hear’ where things are. And then he goes on to say perhaps that is the key to these kinds of communication. Perhaps if you were a blind person, and you knew what that was like—what it felt like in the mind to do that—then by extension you could start to imagine what it was like to have a bat’s sonar. You wouldn’t know what it was like to be a bat, exactly. But you could build an analogy in your head. And this made me think maybe that is my talent.”

“What?” She hadn’t meant to make it sound irritated, but it did.

“Imagining my way into other minds. When I was a kid, my parents were too poor to buy me anything like a terminal that could use VR or even 3D models. We didn’t even have a terminal at home.”

“You didn’t have a terminal?”

“No. I grew up in this town called Yelabuga. It’s in the Ural Commonwealth, now. Used to be the Republic of Tatarstan. And because I didn’t have a terminal of my own at home, I would go to this computer center in a basement. And I would wire together these crappy old terminals and hack from that. I was thinking—maybe that’s where this ability came from. It’s as if, because I didn’t have the tech in the early days, when I started out I was like a blind person. I had to use other senses, had to compensate, and over time those other senses grew sharper and sharper. I had to imagine things that a kid with access to better systems would have had laid out before them, and that led to me being able to imagine my way into more and more sophisticated patterns. To see them, in my head—the way a blind person can sometimes know a piece of furniture has been moved in a room, just by the sound and the feeling of the air. So I don’t know what it’s like to be a bat—not exactly. But I can approximate it.”

He went quiet. “Sorry. I’m talking way too much. I don’t usually talk this much. It’s just that I’ve got this tough problem I’m cracking right now, so all of this is on my mind.”

“Yeah,” Aynur said, “I was lying here thinking I haven’t talked this much to a person in a long time. Usually if I have a long talk like this, it’s with my point-five.”

“Sorry?”

“My point-five, Altyn.”

“What’s a point-five?”

She sat up. “You don’t know what a point-five is?”