There was another option, the one Prof. Logan had offered me. It would solve all my problems. Staying home, making money, working on the kinds of coding projects I love. And yet I’ve never been less sure about EMBRS. Prof. Logan recently shared some of the investors’ emails. They are enthusiastic about the potential. He was deep in talks about the business model. He wasn’t worried that we’d lose our access to all the social media posts because of our status as an academic project. The journal entries were data gold, he explained, and though I wondered what he meant by that, I didn’t press.

It was too easy to just keep working, so that’s what I did.

Grandmother told me she was confident I could now Reforge Meng’s pencil, and that it would help me sort through some of these feelings.

“Whenever you are ready,” grandmother had said.

I planned to do it the very next day, since I had off from work.

I had my usual chat with Louise that night. Our conversations since my Reforging had been chaste, easy, comfortable. We recounted what was 😞 and 😄 about our days. And then I went to bed.

I woke up when my whole room shook. My eyes opened, my body would not move. Something had fallen, something much larger than a picture frame. My room was next to the stairs.

It was a pure Schrödinger’s cat problem. As I lay there in bed, there was a chance that once I got up and looked, my life would never be the same, and I would think back to this moment, with my head buried against the pillow, my heart pounding, when everything was still okay. I squeezed my eyes shut, then threw off the blanket.

I peered out my door, still the dead of the night, and I could just make out her body, crumpled at the base of the stairs. When I knelt beside her, she made no sound. Her neck was bent forward at an alarming angle.

I have trouble remembering what happened after that. I probably stammered something, gathered that she was alive if unable to speak. Somewhere along the way I woke grandfather, who creaked out of bed so slowly yet as fast as he could, and then we were at the hospital, grandmother carted off while we waited in the lobby.

I was shaking badly. I had forgotten to grab a jacket, and winter was descending. Grandfather looked sharp in his overcoat, even in his pajama pants, sitting stately while I trembled in the chair next to his, trying to warm up.

“Are you scared?” I asked when I could no longer stand the silence.

He gave only a small nod. “But we have been through worse.”