“I just hang out on the Som,” Maya said to me when I brought it up.

“Yeah, I know.”

She smiled at me. “It’s not the same, of course. People use it to work on reality games or indulge in conspiracy theories. There are a lot of people there looking for you. They actually put me onto your trail.” I could tell that was a long story. “Anyway, you shouldn’t go on Twitter.”

“I’m going to have to eventually, right? It’s one of our assets.”

“I know, I just don’t want you to,” she said while handing me the laptop. “I guess this is what life is.” You would think that literally dying would make it so that you don’t care about how many followers you have on Twitter, but, like, just between you and me, I did. I spent the next hour looking through the hundreds of people who had sent me @replies just in the last day, trying to get a feel for how I was being imagined.

Holly

@accioawesome

OMG look at this adorable picture I found of @AprilMaybeNot and @AndySkampt chowing on In-N-Out. I miss her.

1 reply 3 retweets 6 likes

Chris in Hell

@edens_halo

It’s legit gross that @realDonaldTrump has a Hollywood walk of fame star when legend and literal angel @AprilMaybeNot doesn’t.

3 retweets 12 likes

Saskia

@saskiab

Going for an @AprilMaybeNot look this AM. That girl had style.

2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes

Dan Burdick

@RenoDan203854

President Ashby is so clearly talking at the regular with @AprilMaybeNot. Every word that comes out of her mouth is so fake. We all know who is actually in charge.

5 replies 24 retweets 49 likes

Cat

@Catriffic

Sometimes you have a real shit day at work, and then you remember, hey, at least you don’t have to hear @AprilMaybeNot’s voice every fucking day anymore.

0 replies 2 retweets 10 likes

Here I was, a reconstructed humanlike thing with literal superpowers, still getting my feelings hurt by randos.

“I looked up that sofa.” Maya had walked into the room, and I hadn’t noticed. “It’s a Fendi.”

“Fendi, like the fashion label? They make couches?”

“They do.”

“Do I want to know how much it costs?”

“Probably not. How is the internet?” she asked me, still standing.

“Oh, y’know, things are apparently pretty bad,” I said, making a show of closing the laptop.

“They’re just calling it ‘the Crisis.’ Not ‘the Financial Crisis’ because it’s bigger than finances. I think we all just forgot what life is supposed to be for. People haven’t adjusted.”

“Can we talk?”

“Yeah.” She sat down on the couch next to me. “So, I got shot.”

“You got shot.” We hadn’t talked about it. The boiler room had been too strange, like another world where we didn’t have to think about reality, but now we were in the world again. “Are you OK?”

“Physically, yeah, I think so.” She lifted her shirt to show me, and there, just under her bra, was an irregular, pearly-white spot in her dark skin. Around it was a bloom of purple and red bruise. I felt sick looking at it. Not because it looked gross—it honestly didn’t—but because of what it meant. And what it had almost meant.

She pulled her shirt back down, wincing a little with the movement. Then she dug into her pocket and brought out a milky-white stone with flecks and veins of iridescence flashing through it. “I think you should have this,” she said.

I took it in my right hand; it felt hollow and cool. Then I looked down at my left hand, still smaller than it had been, still with only four fingers. I put the stone in my left hand and … it vanished. It slid into my hand like dropping water into water. And then, the hand rippled and, as we watched, my pinky finger grew back.

“Where the hell did you get that?!” I nearly shouted, staring at my re-formed hand.

“At a flea market in New Jersey,” she said.

I stared at her. And then she told me her whole story. Brooding for months, storming out of her parents’ house, chasing dead dolphins and bad internet, lugging around a potato plant, and running from crazed reality gamers. It was proper adventure! “Well, thank you,” I said when she was finally done. “For coming to get me. I don’t know what I would have done if I had opened that door and no one was there.” I shuddered. “Or worse, if someone else was.”

Before Andy left the apartment to go back to his work getting into the Altus Premium Space, we had concocted a very rough plan.

 1. Always have our ringers on in case Miranda texts again.

 2. Always be ready to move at a moment’s notice. Bags packed and ready to go.

 3. Begin a whisper campaign against Altus. Right now, they were a big, shiny new thing. Everyone either loved them or didn’t understand them, so there was no pushback. If public relations was going to be any part of taking them down, that work was going to need time to spread.

The only thing that was clear was that Carl couldn’t just destroy Altus. Even if it was something their programming would allow, which I don’t think it was, they were not physically powerful enough to work against the desires of their brother. Indeed, Carl was in a kind of hiding. Their brother wanted Carl gone as much as he wanted me gone. I remember the exact words Carl said to me one night in that apartment, because I can do that now: “He doesn’t care about what the outcome is, he only cares about the level of certainty. He wants control, and you and I both represent challenges to that control. He wants me dead even more than he wants you dead. He is the god I was told to never be.”

The problem with starting a communications campaign against Altus was that I had to communicate.

Since we were now in a four-bedroom apartment, Maya and I, without discussing it, chose our separate rooms. So did Carl. They were sleeping in the smallest room, which was staged as a little boy’s room for potential buyers.

On the second night, after we had gone to bed, I got up and softly knocked on Maya’s door.

“Yeah?” she said. I opened the door, seeing the bed in the dark, silhouetted against the view, which from this side of the apartment was clear all the way down to the Financial District.

“Hey,” I said at the door.

“Hey,” she said, rolling over in bed.

“You know, there are blinds on that window.”

“I’m never going to have this view again.” And that was true. Maya was wealthy, but not this wealthy. “It feels like you can see everything from up here,” she said, “but really you can’t see anything.”

Things were falling apart. Tent cities were popping up in Central Park. Shelter space had filled up years ago, but now the homeless population was exploding. But from here, everything was perfect and beautiful. The world felt immortal and inevitable, but it was actually brittle and breaking.

I sat down on the bed. “A few days ago, I said I was sorry for not listening to you. You were right. You tried to stop me. I fucked everything up. But …” I had prepared what I was going to say while lying in bed by myself, but that didn’t make it easy. “But that’s not the thing I’m sorry for, really. That was just another piece of the same mistake that I’ve made over and over again. I’m sorry I put you last. You were the most important person, and I put you at the bottom of my list.”