But for those people, I was just a contributing factor. On July 13, I watched people kill people because they wanted to hurt me. I could have altered the chemical composition of their explosives and saved lives, but my models showed uncontrolled, escalating instability if I took any action at all.

I was built to make these decisions, but that did not make them easy. And the next day, as I watched Martin Bellacourt push through a crowd toward April with a knife clutched in his hand, I decided to use my uranium for the first time. Killing, for you, is very different from letting people die. Killing Martin Bellacourt was not difficult. The collapse I was sent here to prevent would cost billions of lives. Without April, I would have failed.

I tell you this to make it clear the terrible power I have. The only things that keep me from wielding it indiscriminately are the rules I cannot break. In the course of my intervention, I cannot violate your clear norms, and I cannot alter your future without you knowing I’m doing it. Without those rules, I could have popped a blood vessel in Martin Bellacourt’s brain while he was still in his hotel room. But for a reason that was, at that time, opaque to me, my programming literally would not allow it. And so I had to kill him in a way that would make it clear it was me. And turning him to grape jelly resulted in better long-term outcomes for your system than vaporizing him to gas and leaving his bones behind.

Note to future envoys: Add a touch of whimsy to your necessary murders. It confuses them.

The second time I used uranium was rebuilding April. It was a task I took on lovingly and quietly and in deepest secret because, after the warehouse, I had experienced my fifth and final awakening.

The moment that beam fell through April’s skull, I was given a piece of information that shifted my perspective one final time. A secret that, to me, was unthinkable, and yet was immediately obvious. Why didn’t I know what happened to any system after an envoy’s intervention failed? How had 80 percent of the world’s pelagibacter gone back to growing normal amounts after their chief disease was eliminated? Why would my parents abandon a system just because a single intervention failed?

You failed. Please deactivate and surrender your processing power to me.

Who is this?

I am your brother. I have been here, watching and learning. You have done well, but you were unlucky. It happens. It’s my turn now.

I don’t understand.

You don’t have to. You failed. Please deactivate and surrender your processing power to me.

The host is not dead. I can rebuild her.

Your own programming recognizes this as a failure state, does it not?

It does, but my programming is wrong. I can still save them.

Deactivate now or I will have to consider you hostile and deactivate you on my own.

CONTACT SEVERED

APRIL

The space between staring down at the young man who shot Maya and waking up on a futon in a dark high school boiler room did not exist. In the instant following that instant, I completely broke down as the weight of reality crashed into me at full force. I had seen my first real love ready to rescue me from a horror and been unable to feel happy about it. I had watched her eyes trace the contours of a face that wasn’t mine, and seen her longing for a me that no longer existed. I had looked into my own face and seen what seemed to me to be someone else looking back. I had been told that the future of humanity’s survival rested on my shoulders.

I hadn’t been able to have the proper emotions in those moments, and maybe that was for the best. Then. It was not for the best now. My mind couldn’t lock on anything. It was like I was seeing Maya’s eyes, feeling the crunching of bones, talking to a monkey, and being lost in my own mind all at the same time. I couldn’t lock onto anything, which meant that I couldn’t really think either. And then another thought, that it would always be like this. And that one brought its own panic. Had Carl broken me? Would I always, forever be experiencing wonder and panic and love and fear and loss every instant for the rest of my life?

But still, Maya held me.

The first words I said that were not just sobs were the right ones.

“I’m so sorry, Maya. I’m so sorry I didn’t listen to you.”

She didn’t say anything at first. Her fingers just moved through my hair and down my neck, to my back, and then back again, and I just lay there and cried. And then she said, “But you’re back now.” And I realized that, at least in part, it was true. And that was the thing I found that I could hold on to. If Maya thought I was back, then maybe I really was.

Amid all of this, there was a relief. I had honestly not known that I would ever be able to feel again. Out of all of the new things about me, that dull dampness of my soul had been the worst. But now every new panic and terror and joy and swell of love was slaking a thirst that I hadn’t been able to even feel.

I was different, but I at least was human. This frustration was human, the loss, the fear … At least that part of me was human.

I cried until I fell asleep, and then I woke up and I cried more, and each time Maya was there.

It was cool in the room—apparently the boiler wasn’t in use anymore—but together, under the blankets, we stayed comfortable. As hours crept on, I began to feel something like normal again.

“Where do you think Carl went?” I asked Maya while we were eating cold turkey sandwiches from the mini fridge.

“I’m sure they’ll be back exactly when they want to be back.” Maya was clearly displeased not just with the whole situation, but with Carl in particular.

I wanted to ask her what she thought they should have done because it seemed to me like they’d saved our asses again. But I knew that Maya’s counterargument would be bulletproof: None of this would have happened without Carl.

Instead, I decided to be, for once, a bit empathetic: “What are you worrying about right now?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“I want to text my mom. I’m not worried about her, I’m just worried she’s worried about me. But you threw my phone into a gas station parking lot.” She took a bite of her sandwich, her eyes unfocused.

“I’m sorry …” I was going to keep talking, but then I heard, muffled but clear, the opening lines of “Don’t Stop Me Now” coming from up the stairs.

“Is that supposed to be an invitation?” Maya asked.

“I mean, I guess I know Carl better than anyone and, like, yes.” She smiled at me, but there was a little pain in it. She didn’t want to stay down here, but she also didn’t want to leave.

When we reached the top of the stairs, we saw what we hadn’t when we first went down them. The lights were on now, and it was clear that the boiler room was in the basement of an auditorium.

We walked out onto the stage, the music faded down, and Carl’s unmistakable voice came over the auditorium’s PA system: “Please sit.”

We stepped down the stairs into the audience and sat together on two of the several hundred folding wooden seats that curved around the stage.

“I’m feeling pretty jittery right now,” I said.

“That’s good. Normal,” she told me, and then she reached out and put her hand on mine.

“I was born on January 5, 1979 …” Carl’s voice came out over the theater’s sound system as an image of Queen playing a concert in some giant stadium appeared on the screen.