They confirmed what I already suspected and wouldn’t let myself really consider. The plan to make EMBRS profitable was simple. It followed every other tech product model. Offer the tool for free. Let users experience the wondrous connections it could make. Then sell the journal data, the richest kind of data there is—stories of how we perceive ourselves, perfect for targeting ads, for language models, for letting us think we’ve automated something as important as human connection.

Since grandmother’s fall, Prof. Logan messaged a few times, telling me to take it easy, to only log back on once everything had settled down. He even sent flowers. In so many ways, he and EMBRS saved me this past semester. Not only the money, or the mentorship, or even having something productive to work on, to keep my mind busy. But all the journaling he so wholeheartedly recommended is finally making things clear. It became too obvious what I had to do.

It took me the whole afternoon to devise what I wanted to say in the first and only journal entry I would submit to EMBRS. I wrote that I was an EMBRS engineer, the one with the grandmother. I wrote the truth about how Louise and I had connected, how it had all been through social media data and quite a bit of luck, how there hadn’t been a journaling component at all. How that data was technically private and not something EMBRS would have access to after it went for-profit. How Prof. Logan’s pitch was built on a lie. How my father had found Meng years ago without using any new-age technology.

I submitted the entry, then hard-coded other branches to ensure EMBRS matched my entry to all the investors who were testing the product. I had to commit the code to deploy it. My commit message: I’m sorry.

I only had to wait eight minutes before he called me.

“Monica.” His voice was strained, the complete opposite from his smooth presenter voice. “What have you done?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. It was not his fault, really, not entirely. I had gone along for so long. “I know you and the team mean well. But I don’t believe in it anymore.”

“So you’d burn us to the ground?” he asked in a way that made me flinch.

“EMBRS was only ever supposed to share between two people. Not data brokers and, and—”

He made a strangled sound. “Don’t you see data selling is the only kind of business model that works these days? A critical mass of people will only use EMBRS if it’s free. Otherwise, there aren’t enough nodes to make meaningful connections, like you’re paying for a telephone that no one else uses. But someone needs to pay. The server costs alone are huge. This was the trade-off. The connections formed are priceless. I thought you understood.”