They stood in the hall of Anna’s apartment, with her back against the heavy front door. Graham took some steps into the dark of the living room, moving decisively towards one side, the one with the couch. He cleared the whole space in maybe four or five strides.
“You wanna smoke?”
The only reply Anna got was the sound of her couch sliding across the tile. She didn’t have those fancy blackout curtains delivered yet– right now, it was just barely bright enough to see that his eyes were closed, the light a bit bluer through the Venetians. Tiny glowing dots dappled his chest, marching up in a column, bending slightly with the creases of his polo, illuminating the white of his left eye. He sunk into her couch.
“…Jesus, that’s nice.”
“…are you gonna at least take your jacket off?”
“mmmmI’m good. Not after work.”
“You’re just gonna pass out on my couch?”
“I want to. No, I’m just… recalibrating. Gimme a coffee and I’ll be fine.”
“Hmm.”
Graham ended up napping for three hours. With him on the couch, there was nowhere else to sit, so Anna pushed out her table and sat on the carpet, pirating an anime older than herself on the flatscreen. She tossed a blanket over him and sipped his frigid coffee.
For a few minutes, it was quiet, just she and him. Graham breathed real steady– in and out, that cavernous chest moving slowly. If she couldn’t hear him, Anna could imagine him dead, honestly. Apparently she’d been looking long enough to lose the plot of her show. But then again, to be totally fair, it was hard to keep track of anything with subtitles if you stopped reading– no way Anna had stared for too long, right? She only tore her eyes away when gold glowed subtly at the border of her vision. It was Mel’s warm light painting the walls over her kitchen countertops, illuminating the silhouette of this morning’s cereal bowl, demanding her attention. Anna’s nostrils flared.
The next thing she knew she was looking up at a sequence of pipes, water mains, sewers, and powerlines in the ceiling, admiring how Sabretech protruded into the mess of steel and wires. It was the biggest tower in Moroe— one of the only pillars that remained in a single company’s control after all this time, twenty-something years after this whole place was built, and about ten after everyone had given up on the concept of a megacity. You could still get in the elevator and move up all one hundred and eleven floors, all with one payment. Up five or six floors up, a pair of LED headlights on the I-45 painted a section of the wall, a few sets of golden curtains strongly visible in the windows. That must have been the new guy’s office. Anna could picture it strongly– the sound of a car bumping industrial through a paper-thin wall, how the floors must have vibrated when a pickup truck on stilts passed too close. She chuckled to herself. Her phone buzzed on her thigh.
“Anna. It’s four.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah. Where are you?”
She turned her elbow along with her head, finding a parking lot and Sabre’s entryway, just behind her. Her car was holding her up, elbows pressed against the window. “Uhh. I’m at work?”
“Well, the guy you brought here is still on the couch. You left him. Remember?”
“Yeah.” She must’ve– after all, she was standing right next to her car, and the keys were right in her pocket. Something justled around on the other side of the screen. Judging by the sound of a keyboard and the occasional click of a mouse, Anna surmised that she was on a desk right now, likely on speakerphone.
“Are you at the usual lot?”
“I… yes. Yes.”
Keys mashed behind the phone. Anna shifted it to the other ear, glancing around to make sure she wasn’t lying. She cocked her head to read a yellow number 061 painted on the adjacent park. Hopefully she wasn't parked illegally… designation meant that Sabre had probably built this lot to be for the office workers… and it wasn’t like Anna came here enough to have one reserved just for her… although they’d probably assign one, if she asked nice enough. But she was lazy.
“Found you. You want the route?”
“Mm. Yeah. Please.”
“Alright. Hurry back.”
She opened the door to her car, moving her phone off her ear so she could connect it to the soundsystem.
In most spots of the city, it was hard to tell when you had your headlights off. Moroe was never really dark, at least not enough for it to matter, not even at four in the morning. Anna’s wheels wooshed beneath the floor as they weaved around potholes. Only one of her hands gripped the wheel, the other drumming on her thigh, her eyes straight ahead.
“Mel?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s still asleep?”
“Oh, totally. Are you okay?”
“I… think I’m just tired.”
“Don’t crash.”
For the remaining five minutes, Anna drove in silence, drumming all five fingers in sequence on the center console. She pulled into the parking garage and took her reserved spot, all the way up on the roof, and got out towards one of four apartment complexes stacked haphazardly around it. Her gaze scaled the floors. The windows housed all kinds of colors, neon green, red, blue, pink... Anna had this lingering feeling that eyes were on her, as if she might see Graham leaning against one of the glass panes up there, but the visibility didn't even get that high. The ceiling separated each complex into two segments. Her den was all the way up in the tallest tower– up some ten or twenty flights of stairs, high enough up to get some kind of natural light, if someone ever decided to open up the curtains. But right now the night sky lurked beyond a feet thick layer of concrete. Shivering a little, Anna started to climb up the metal staircase in twos, her hair blown past her shoulders by the wind.
Huh?
Wait. Where was her hat? Slowly, her head turned, looking past the connecting walkway and back down at her car, squinting like her eyes might pierce the steel roof. She couldn’t recall if she’d worn it into Sabre… it was probably still inside.
“Mel?” She had to yell over a passing gust. It smelled like plastic in a campfire. “You got my hat, girl?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s in the kitchen.”
“Whew…”
After leaning into the entry, and clicking the heels of her shoes against the tile long enough to slip them off before she got home, she finally got to take her keys out of her pocket and step in. The lock itself was totally illegal, or at least a hundred and ten percent against the renter’s policy, but Anna flat out refused to leave her entire life under the protection of an electronic lock, no matter how complex or high-tech the firewall was. Her lock was cheap and probably pretty fragile, but house thieves around here didn’t really bother to carry around lockpicks anyway.
The room was as quiet as the first time, but instead of being blanketed in the soft blue of night, Graham was covered in a layer of gold. Mel glowed right besides him, not even a foot away, her face close enough to make his eyelashes cast spiky little shadows beneath his eyes. Her head turned towards Anna.
“What?”
Minding Graham, her voice played in the smart thermometer instead of the TV, hushed so that he didn’t hear. “His eyelids are twitching. I had to make sure he was okay.”
“...huh.” Anna didn’t even have the energy to tell her how weird she was. It was hitting her like a truck now– sore legs, sleepy eyes, this sunken-in feeling in her gut like she’d just seen a car crash. Once she remembered seeing a sudan lodged into an apartment complex, on the news, down on Flint, a road that corkscrewed all the way from upper crust to ground level. He was drunk. No one died except for the driver, but Anna couldn’t get that image out of her head, a car crashing through some poor old man’s window, crushing him into his couch while he was trying to watch Call Saul on his phone or something. She shuddered. Mel was standing up.
“I knew something was wrong with you. Here.”
Mel sounded like nothing when she moved. Her light moved slowly across the hardwood, the subtle glow of her growing in the corner of Anna’s vision. She only realized that her gaze was on the floor once the ghost was at her side.
“Come on.” Her hand lifted towards the small of Anna’s back, and she moved away reflexively like Mel wouldn't just phase right through her. According to the manual, she was supposed to avoid contact at all costs… but neither of them really followed any guidelines. Her eyes seemed gentle. Well, the expression around them was, at least– being so close like this, looking into the hologram’s eyes, it was hard to see anything behind them.
Mel wasn’t photoreal– instead just a little bit simplistic, more like a character in a video game. Plenty of shortcuts were taken with her. She didn’t twitch or tremble like a living thing, but a soft flickering effect made her seem a bit more alive, hiding gaps in the animations and obscuring a low framerate. Her hair had physics, but only kind of. Pinprick freckles decorated her face, though some dots were faded in half at the edges of her cheeks. And, of course, she was totally monochromatic– a choice that was definitely deliberate, since the projector could build an avatar in any specified color, depending on personal taste Maybe that was because it’d be too real that way… but that was just speculation, right? Anna had chosen blue to be Mel’s first color for a day or two, but as she got to ‘know’ her, and hear how she spoke about Sabre, it started to feel like Sabretech's gold was more appropriate.
Either way, right now, the illusion was strong enough to lead her into the kitchen, where she propped her elbows up on the center island and stared into space. Mel’s hologram drifted around behind her. A motor whirred softly.
“Hey. Have some water.”
Her voice was in the smart fridge now. It had its lights on at a low level, forming a slow-pulsing halo around its outer shelf, directing Anna’s eye. Her gaze strayed over to the cabinets which Mel had opened, and then to the glasses, which her hand followed, a few steps forward and up to touch the lower rim of a glass set upside-down. She brought it to the fridge and leaned down to analyze if it had anything stuck on before pushing it against the purifier. The silver fronting of the fridge glowed a little stronger, painted yellow.
“Go away.”
For a moment, Mel’s light dimmed, before flickering out entirely. Anna sipped her water alone.