“I hope that’s what it means, anyway. Or, Welcome. I hoped it would be something that communicates invitation, or a lack of fear. The reverse, I hoped, of Get out. I took a guess.”

“And it worked,” Evrim said.

“Yes. In a sense. We got an answer within hours. We got proof. Proof of the first true symbolic sign usage by an animal besides the human. Proof that we contacted another species, here on earth. That someone besides us is communicating in the way we do. I left it a message, and it wrote back.”

“Yes,” Altantsetseg said. She was looking out the window, into the dark, leaning close to the glass to see past the glare of reflection. “And what it write to you is simple. Direct. It write it with human things it bring back from its house. Bring back special. Make effort. Machine it smashed, diving tank and mask it stole. Speargun—man weapon it hate. Maybe head bone of human it killed. It write, Get out. And show what happen if we are deaf to words.”

“Yes,” Ha said. “That’s the problem.”

Chapter 22

Death is a part of us. It shapes our bodies from the very beginning. You might think your fingers are formed by the division of cells in the womb—but that is not the case. Fingers are chiseled out of a paddle of flesh by the death of cells, the same way David was chiseled by his sculptor from a block of marble. Without death, life would have no shape at all.

—Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, Building Minds

22

THE REPUBLIC OF ASTRAKHAN was having electricity outages. Rustem was lucky: His building was disconnected from the city grid. Looking out his window, he could see the lit-up islands of other buildings, here and there, that also had their own power sources. Outcroppings of light in the black reef of the city. Somewhere out there in the blackout dark was Aynur’s building, which was linked to the unreliable city power grid. It was lucky that this time, on their second date, they had not gone there.

Aynur stood next to him, watching a vapor ring she had blown wobble across the moon.

“So, it’s like a map,” she said.

“Sort of. Like a map of a place you’ve never seen before. Except you also don’t know what the symbols or shapes of the map represent. You have to figure out what they mean according to their relationships with one another.”

“And most people do this with VR tech.”

“Yes. And AI: they have programs that basically model the network for them—like assistants that start mapping the relationships and building a sort of environment they can operate inside. Building out both the map itself and the key.”

“A simulation.”