—————
The thing about spectrums, Brian thought, staring at the ceiling crack that had now grown approximately three-quarters of an inch since he'd started tracking it, was that nobody wanted to admit they were on one.
Everyone wanted to be at the ends. The definitive points. The "I know exactly who I am and what I stand for" positions that made life simple and Instagram captions easy. But the truth—the actual, uncomfortable, impossible-to-hashtag truth—was that most things existed somewhere in the murky middle. Sexuality was a spectrum now. Gender was a spectrum. Political ideology was a spectrum, though nobody acted like it. Neurodivergence was a spectrum. Grief was probably a spectrum too, though nobody had made an infographic about that yet.
Even his kitchen appliances, he realized, existed on a spectrum.
The kettle: aggressively stupid. It boiled water. That was all it did. That was all it would ever do. It had achieved kettle enlightenment, a kind of Zen mastery of its single purpose.
The Nespresso machine: aspirationally smart. It had settings. It had a learning algorithm that supposedly remembered your preferences. It connected to WiFi for reasons that remained unclear, perhaps to share your caffeine consumption data with some Norwegian server farm, perhaps just to remind you that even your morning coffee was now part of the surveillance economy.
The smart toaster: existentially confused. It wanted to be intelligent but had been given the consciousness of a toaster, which was like being granted sentience and then being told your entire purpose was to apply heat to bread. Brian felt, on some level, a deep kinship with the smart toaster.
And somewhere on this appliance spectrum, there was him.
Not fully analog. Not fully digital. A person who had willingly allowed a startup to install hardware in his eyeballs but was still too intimidated to make espresso.
It had been two days since the procedure.
Two days of waiting.
Two days of compulsively checking his vision for any sign of change, any flicker of overlay, any indication that he was now officially a cyborg. He'd spent approximately four hours total staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, watching his own eyes, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing had happened.
His eyes looked the same. Brown. Tired. Vaguely disappointed in everything they were forced to observe.
Riley—the nurse with the gap-toothed smile—had texted him once, a professional check-in: "Day 2! How are you feeling? Any visual disturbances, headaches, or unusual sensations?"
He'd replied: "All good. No disturbances."
This was technically true. There had been no disturbances. There had also been no anything. He was beginning to suspect that he'd sold his ocular virginity for fifteen thousand dollars and the privilege of having tiny computers inside him that did absolutely nothing.
But that was a problem for tomorrow.
Today, he had a date.
—————
The dating app was called Hinge, because of course it was.
The metaphor was not subtle: your love life hinges on this. Every interaction a potential turning point. Every swipe a butterfly effect that might, conceivably, lead to a future where you weren't eating frozen burritos alone while your upstairs neighbor explained chemtrails to pigeons.
Brian had downloaded Hinge eight months ago, during the brief window between Maya's departure and the onset of what he privately called "the numbness." He had crafted a profile with the same care he'd once applied to college application essays—which was to say, overthinking every word until the words lost meaning and became abstract shapes that no longer corresponded to anything real.
His photos: carefully curated to suggest a person who went outside occasionally and had interests beyond gaming and cryptocurrency (both lies, or at least exaggerations). One shot of him at a rooftop bar that Jake had dragged him to once. One shot of him pretending to read a book in a park, taken by Maya before she'd become his ex, which felt slightly dishonest but also the only photo where he didn't look like a sentient corpse. One shot of him with his cousin's dog, because the internet had taught him that women liked dogs and he was nothing if not a student of the algorithm.
His prompts: three conversation starters that Hinge required, each designed to seem both clever and approachable while revealing absolutely nothing of substance.
I'm looking for: Someone who doesn't take themselves too seriously.
A life goal of mine: Learning to make perfect pasta from scratch.
I'm convinced that: Pineapple on pizza is a valid choice and I will die on this hill.
All lies, of course. Or not lies, exactly. Aspirational truths. The person he wished he were, projected onto a screen and broadcast to anyone within a fifty-mile radius who was also lonely enough to be on a dating app at 2 AM.
Kelly's profile had seemed… fine.
That was the most accurate word he could summon. Fine. Her photos showed a woman in her mid-twenties with auburn hair and a smile that looked genuine, or at least professionally photographed. Her prompts suggested someone with interests (hiking, apparently, and "exploring the city's hidden gems," which was the kind of phrase that meant nothing and everything). Her job was listed as "Creative Director," which could mean anything from "I run a design agency" to "I make vision boards and call it work."
They had matched three weeks ago. They had exchanged messages—carefully crafted, emotionally distant messages that revealed nothing about who either of them actually was. She had suggested coffee. He had suggested dinner. They had settled on drinks, which was the modern compromise: enough time to determine compatibility but not enough investment to feel truly devastated if it went badly.
Brian was already preparing to feel devastated.
His last two dates had not gone well.
The first—her name had been Alexis—had felt like a job interview. She had arrived with a mental checklist of questions about his career trajectory, his five-year plan, his thoughts on home ownership and retirement accounts. Brian, who had no career trajectory, no five-year plan, and whose primary retirement strategy was hoping that climate change or societal collapse would make the whole concept irrelevant, had failed spectacularly. She had thanked him for his time and never responded to his follow-up message.
The second—Vanessa—had felt like a performance. She had laughed at exactly the right moments, touched his arm with precisely calibrated frequency, maintained eye contact in a way that felt less like connection and more like a theater technique. Brian had left the date unsure whether he had been on a date at all or had simply been a prop in someone else's rehearsal for a better date with a better person.
Both experiences had left him feeling like a product being evaluated rather than a human being making a connection.
But that was modern dating, wasn't it? You presented yourself. You were assessed. You either made the cut or you didn't. The whole thing operated on the same logic as every other marketplace: supply, demand, and the ruthless efficiency of swipe-based sorting algorithms.
Romance as e-commerce.
Love as logistics.
No wonder everyone was on antidepressants.
—————
He got ready for the date with what could generously be called minimal effort.
The jeans were clean, which was already an achievement. The shirt—a dark blue button-up he'd bought specifically for job interviews and which now only came out for dates, since the job interviews had dried up—was slightly wrinkled but presentable. He considered ironing it, then considered the fact that he had never actually used his iron and wasn't entirely sure where it was.
The mirror, as always, was merciless.
He looked, he decided, like a man who was trying. Not succeeding—just trying. There was something slightly desperate about the whole ensemble, a "please find me acceptable" energy that he couldn't seem to eliminate no matter how carefully he positioned his collar.
The bathroom light flickered.
It had been flickering for three weeks. He should probably mention it to Eugene, his landlord, but communication with Eugene required sending emails that would be ignored for precisely long enough to make you give up and solve the problem yourself. Eugene had elevated passive-aggressive property management to an art form. Every interaction with him felt like being slowly ground down by bureaucratic indifference until you either fixed things yourself or simply accepted that this was how you lived now.
The light flickered again.
Brian stared at his reflection and thought about Maya.
Not because he wanted to—he rarely wanted to anymore—but because something about the act of preparing for a date triggered a muscle memory of preparing for dates with her. The nervous energy. The futile attempt to look effortlessly attractive. The internal monologue that toggled between "this will be fine" and "this will be a disaster" with no stops in between.
Maya had liked the blue shirt. She'd said it "brought out his eyes," which was the kind of thing you said to someone when you were still in the phase of the relationship where you noticed things like that. By the end, she hadn't noticed much at all. By the end, she'd been on her phone constantly, responding to messages from people who weren't him, planning trips to places he'd never been invited, building a life that apparently didn't include him.
The meditation retreat. Costa Rica. Diego.
He wondered if they were still together. He wondered if she ever thought about him, late at night, the way he sometimes thought about her. He wondered if she'd already forgotten his birthday, or if she'd remember when November came and send some performative text—"Hope you're doing well!"—that would mean nothing and hurt anyway.
He was fine.
He was completely fine.
The light flickered a third time and then stabilized.
—————
The bar was called The Velvet Underground, which was either a Lou Reed reference or a description of its location, which was indeed underground, accessible via a narrow staircase that descended from street level into a basement space that had been designed to look like a speakeasy and succeeded mainly in looking like a fire hazard.
Brian arrived fifteen minutes early because he had read somewhere that arriving early demonstrated respect and also because the alternative was sitting in his apartment watching the clock and slowly losing his mind.
The bouncer—a large man with the bored expression of someone who had seen too much—checked his ID with approximately zero interest and waved him through. The staircase was steep, the walls lined with vintage concert posters and exposed brick that was almost certainly decorative rather than structural. Somewhere below, a jazz trio was playing something moody and unrecognizable.
He found a seat at the bar, ordered a whiskey neat (because ordering a whiskey neat seemed like a thing a confident person would do), and waited.
The bartender—a woman with sleeve tattoos and the patient demeanor of someone who had served many anxious men on first dates—set his drink in front of him without comment.
"Tab or close out?"
"Tab. I'm meeting someone."
She nodded, unsurprised. This was, after all, a date bar. A place designed for exactly this purpose: two strangers meeting in low light with alcohol readily available to smooth the edges of their mutual discomfort.
Brian sipped his whiskey and tried not to think about all the ways this could go wrong.
The spectrum of first-date disasters was wide and varied. There was the basic incompatibility—two people who looked good on paper but had nothing to say to each other in person. There was the obvious lie—discovering that someone's photos were ten years and thirty pounds out of date. There was the personality mismatch—realizing within five minutes that you could not tolerate this person for five more minutes, let alone for the rest of your life.
And then there were the more exotic failures. The person who turned out to be married. The person who was clearly using the date to get over someone else and spent the whole evening talking about their ex. The person who seemed normal until they mentioned their "investment opportunity" and you realized you were on a date with someone who wanted to recruit you into a pyramid scheme.
Brian had experienced most of these.
He was beginning to think the problem wasn't the dates.
He was beginning to think the problem was him.
Kelly arrived at 7:12, which was close enough to on-time to suggest punctuality without the awkwardness of excessive eagerness. She descended the stairs with the confidence of someone who knew how to navigate small staircases in heels, which was already more competence than Brian possessed.
She was taller than her photos had suggested. Taller than him, actually, by about two inches. Her hair was darker in person, more burgundy than auburn, and she wore it pulled back in a way that emphasized her cheekbones. Her outfit—a black dress with some kind of complicated neckline that Brian did not have the fashion vocabulary to describe—was the kind of thing that made him feel underdressed even though he had technically worn his nicest shirt.
"Brian?"
"Kelly. Hi. Yeah."
Great opener. Really nailed it.
She smiled and took the stool next to him. "Sorry I'm a little late. The subway was—"
"A nightmare? Yeah, always."
"Always."
The bartender reappeared. Kelly ordered a gin and tonic with cucumber, which seemed very specific and therefore intimidating. Brian's whiskey suddenly felt pedestrian. Unimaginative.
"So," Kelly said, turning to face him with the kind of direct eye contact that suggested she had been to therapy and learned about healthy communication. "I have a confession."
"Already?"
"I read your profile, like, five times before coming tonight. I wanted to make sure I wasn't misremembering anything."
Brian wasn't sure what to do with this information. "That's… thorough."
"I'm a thorough person. It's my thing." She accepted her drink from the bartender and took a sip without breaking eye contact. "So. Pineapple on pizza. You really believe that?"
"I mean, I don't believe it in a religious sense. But sure. It's valid."
"Interesting."
"Interesting good or interesting bad?"
"Just interesting." She smiled again. It was a good smile. Confident. Maybe too confident. "What do you actually do? Your profile said 'tech,' but that could mean anything."
And there it was. The career question. The "assess my financial viability" question dressed up in casual phrasing. Brian had known it was coming, had even prepared answers, but in the moment, he found himself drawing a blank.
"I, uh. I'm between things right now. I was working on a project—crypto-adjacent—but it didn't pan out."
"Crypto-adjacent." Her expression didn't change, but something shifted behind her eyes. "What does that mean, exactly?"
"It means I invested in something that was supposed to be the next big thing and it turned out to be the next big disappointment." He paused. "That's probably more honesty than you were expecting."
"I appreciate honesty."
Did she? Did anyone? Brian had his doubts. Everyone claimed to want honesty, but what they usually wanted was a version of honesty that confirmed their existing preferences. They wanted to hear that you were ambitious but not workaholic. Successful but not intimidating. Sensitive but not fragile. Honest but not uncomfortably honest.
The whole thing was a tightrope walk, and Brian had never been good at balance.
"What about you?" he asked, trying to redirect. "Creative Director. What does that involve?"
Kelly launched into an explanation of her job, which seemed to involve making decisions about fonts and color palettes and "brand identity" for companies that sold things Brian had never heard of. She spoke with the fluency of someone who had given this explanation many times before, hitting the key points—the agency she worked for, the clients she'd landed, the awards she'd won—with practiced efficiency.
Brian listened.
He sipped his whiskey.
He tried to find the thread that would connect them, the shared wavelength that would make this feel like more than two strangers exchanging resumes in a basement.
He did not find it.
—————
The date continued for approximately two more hours, during which Brian learned the following things about Kelly:
She had grown up in Connecticut, which she described as "very beige." She had a cat named Bartholomew, which was either charmingly eccentric or deeply concerning, depending on your perspective. She had strong opinions about oat milk. She had traveled to fourteen countries, all of which seemed to have been chosen for their Instagram potential. She ran marathons "for mental clarity," which was a phrase that made Brian feel spiritually exhausted.
He also learned something else—something he couldn't quite name, couldn't quite pin down, but which began as a flicker of unease and grew, over the course of the evening, into a full-blown cognitive dissonance.
Something about Kelly didn't add up.
Not in a dramatic, red-flag way. Not in a way he could articulate. Just… something. The way her voice modulated when she talked about her childhood. The slightly rehearsed quality of certain anecdotes. A disconnect between her words and her expressions that Brian couldn't quite identify but couldn't quite ignore.
And there was something else, too.
Something physical.
Her hands, maybe. The proportions were slightly different than he'd expected, the fingers longer, the knuckles more prominent. Or her voice, which had a timbre that seemed to shift occasionally, almost imperceptibly, like a singer moving between registers.
Brian told himself he was being paranoid. He told himself that everyone was slightly different in person than in photos, that the gap between profile and reality was just part of the game. He told himself that whatever he was noticing was probably just his own anxiety, his own inability to be present, his own tendency to look for problems where none existed.
But the feeling persisted.
And then, during a lull in the conversation—a moment when Kelly had excused herself to use the restroom—Brian found himself staring at the back of her retreating figure and asking himself a question he felt deeply uncomfortable asking.
Was Kelly trans?
He didn't know.
He genuinely didn't know.
And he realized, sitting there with his third whiskey slowly warming in his hands, that he had no idea what to do with that uncertainty.
The modern world had trained him on the acceptable responses. Acceptance. Openness. The understanding that gender was a spectrum (there it was again, the fucking spectrum) and that a person's history was their own to disclose or not as they chose.
And Brian believed all of that. He did. He had trans friends—well, one trans friend, Sarah from college, who had transitioned their sophomore year and who he followed on Instagram but hadn't actually spoken to in three years, which maybe meant they weren't friends exactly, but still. He understood, intellectually, that trans women were women, that attraction didn't require complete biographical transparency, that his own discomfort was his problem to manage.
But understanding something intellectually and feeling it emotionally were different things.
And right now, emotionally, Brian felt… what, exactly?
Confused. Uncertain. Like the ground rules he'd been taught about gender and attraction no longer applied in the way he'd assumed. Like he was supposed to feel something specific—either total acceptance or bigoted rejection—and instead he felt a swampy, inchoate mess of half-formed thoughts.
If Kelly was trans, and hadn't told him, was that a lie? Or was it simply exercising her right to privacy? If Brian's attraction changed based on this information, did that make him a bad person? Or was it okay to have preferences, even preferences you couldn't fully explain or justify?
And underneath all of it, the more uncomfortable question: why couldn't he just ask?
Why was this the one topic where his already-limited social skills completely abandoned him?
He imagined the conversation:
"Hey, so, are you trans?"
"Excuse me?"
"I just—I noticed—I mean, not that it matters, but—"
Even in his imagination, it was a disaster. There was no way to ask that question without implying that it mattered, without suggesting that his attraction was conditional on her answer, without being exactly the kind of person he didn't want to be.
So he said nothing.
Kelly returned from the bathroom. They ordered another round. The jazz trio played something melancholy and indistinct.
And Brian sat there, trapped in his own head, unable to be present, unable to connect, unable to be the kind of person who could navigate this situation with grace.
—————
The date ended around 10 PM with the kind of awkward hug that suggested neither party expected to see the other again.
"This was fun," Kelly said, which was clearly not true.
"Yeah. Definitely."
"I'll text you."
"Great."
She wouldn't text him. He knew that. She knew that. This was the ritual—the polite fiction that allowed both parties to escape without the embarrassment of explicit rejection. In two days, her silence would communicate everything her words had not: that whatever she'd been looking for, Brian was not it.
And honestly? Fair enough.
He hadn't been present. He'd spent half the evening trapped in his own head, analyzing instead of connecting, cataloging differences instead of finding commonalities. Whatever Kelly was or wasn't, whatever history she did or didn't have, she deserved better than a date with someone too anxious to actually engage.
Brian walked toward the subway, hands in his pockets, watching his breath fog in the October cold.
The city at night had a particular quality that he'd never been able to fully articulate. Something about the way the lights fractured on wet pavement. Something about the density of human presence—all those apartments, all those windows, all those lives being lived in parallel, rarely intersecting. You were never alone in New York, and yet you were always alone. Surrounded by millions and connected to none of them.
He thought about his parents.
They had met in 1994, at a party neither of them had wanted to attend. His mother had been wearing a green dress. His father had been wearing a tie that was, according to family legend, "aggressively ugly." They had talked for four hours, exchanged phone numbers, and been married within a year.
No apps. No algorithms. No careful curation of photos and prompts and conversation openers. Just two people who happened to be in the same room at the same time and recognized something in each other.
Was that easier? Was it better? Or was Brian just romanticizing an era he'd never experienced because it was simpler than facing the reality that dating was hard regardless of the technology involved?
Probably the latter.
But still. There was something about the idea of meeting someone by accident—without the mediation of interfaces, without the paralysis of too many options, without the creeping awareness that every interaction was a transaction and you were being evaluated like a product—that felt almost impossibly attractive.
He crossed the street, narrowly avoiding a delivery driver on an e-bike who seemed personally offended by his existence.
And that's when he saw her.
—————
At first, he thought it was an art installation.
It had to be an art installation, right? This was New York. Performance art happened constantly, often without warning, frequently without explanation. Just last week, he'd seen a man in a banana suit standing completely still in Washington Square Park for what appeared to be hours, and no one had seemed to find this unusual.
But this was different.
The woman was standing on a lamppost.
Not next to a lamppost. On it. On the very top of it, balanced on the narrow metal cap like a bird on a wire, completely motionless, completely still.
She was maybe twenty feet in the air. She wore what Brian could only describe as "gothic"—a long black dress with intricate lacework, dark lipstick, pale skin that seemed almost luminescent against the night sky. Her hair was black and long, falling past her shoulders in waves that should have been moving in the October wind but somehow weren't.
How had she gotten up there?
There was no ladder. No scaffolding. No obvious mechanism of ascent. The lamppost was smooth metal, impossible to climb without equipment. And yet there she was, standing perfectly balanced, looking down at the street below with an expression of mild curiosity.
Brian stopped walking.
He was aware that he should probably not have stopped walking. That the correct response to seeing something inexplicable was to ignore it, to keep moving, to mind your own business like a proper New Yorker. Standing still and staring was what tourists did. It was what victims did, in movies, right before something terrible happened.
But he couldn't look away.
And then she looked at him.
Their eyes met—his from the sidewalk, hers from twenty feet above—and something happened that Brian couldn't explain. A jolt. A recognition. Like tuning into a radio station you didn't know existed and hearing a song you'd always known.
She smiled.
It was not a human smile. Not exactly. There was something in it that was too knowing, too precise, too calibrated for genuine warmth. It was the smile of someone who had studied smiling and executed it perfectly without ever actually feeling the emotion it was supposed to represent.
And then she disappeared.
Not walked away. Not climbed down. Disappeared. One moment she was there, and the next she wasn't, like a television being switched off, like a browser tab being closed.
Brian blinked.
He blinked again.
The lamppost was empty. The street was empty. A taxi drove past, its passenger oblivious to whatever had just happened. The wind picked up. The world continued as if nothing had occurred.
Am I losing my mind?
The thought arrived with surprising calm. Perhaps because he'd been expecting it. Perhaps because some part of him had always known that the anxiety, the isolation, the endless hours alone with his own thoughts, would eventually tip over into something clinical. Something diagnosable.
He'd read about hallucinations. Visual disturbances caused by lack of sleep, or stress, or the early stages of psychotic disorders that ran in families. His grandmother on his mother's side had spent her last years convinced that the government was sending messages through her radio. It had seemed funny when he was a kid, in the cruel way that children find adult dysfunction funny. It didn't seem funny now.
Was this how it started? One inexplicable vision, followed by another, followed by a slow untethering from consensus reality until you were the one on the street corner, talking to things that only you could see?
He should call someone. His mother. A helpline. Anyone.
He reached for his phone—
"Hello, handsome."
The voice came from directly beside him. From, specifically, the empty air to his left, where no one was standing.
Except someone was standing there.
The same woman. The same pale skin, the same black dress, the same too-perfect smile.
But she was upside down.
Floating, inverted, her hair falling upward—or downward, from her perspective—in a cascade of black, her dress defying gravity in ways that made Brian's stomach lurch. She was oriented perpendicular to reality, as if she'd stepped through a door that opened onto a different set of physical laws.
"You can see me," she said, and there was something like delight in her voice. "How wonderful. How absolutely serendipitous."
Brian opened his mouth. No words came out. He tried again.
"What—"
"That's usually the first question. 'What.' Or 'who.' Occasionally 'why,' but 'why' usually comes later, once the initial shock has worn off." She tilted her head—or rotated it, given her orientation—and examined him with the intense curiosity of a scientist studying an unexpected specimen. "You're handling this rather well, actually. Most people scream."
"I'm considering screaming."
"I'd prefer if you didn't. Causes a scene. And scenes are so tedious."
Brian became aware, distantly, that he was still standing in the middle of a Manhattan sidewalk, staring at empty air, having a conversation with an apparition that only he could see. A man in a business suit walked past him, earbuds in, completely oblivious. A couple arguing about restaurant reservations brushed by without a glance.
No one else could see her.
Of course no one else could see her.
"Am I having a psychotic break?"
"Probably not. Though I suppose that's exactly what I'd say if you were and I was a symptom of your break, so that's not particularly reassuring." She rotated—slowly, elegantly, like a swimmer performing an underwater turn—until she was right-side up, matching his orientation. "May I see your eyes?"
"My… eyes?"
"Yes. Up close. If you don't mind."
Before he could respond, she leaned in—close enough that he could see the fine detail of her face, the slight shimmer at the edges of her form, the way she wasn't quite solid, wasn't quite light, was something in between that his brain struggled to categorize.
"Ah," she said, after a long moment. "There it is. NeuralBlink. The 2.0 firmware, unless I'm mistaken. They must have released the new batch."
"What are you talking about?"
She pulled back, and her smile shifted—became something closer to genuine, or at least a more sophisticated simulation of genuine. "Your eyes, darling. Your lovely, technologically enhanced eyes. That's how you can see me. You're an early adopter."
Brian's hand went, involuntarily, to his face. He touched the skin around his eye, feeling nothing unusual, nothing different than it had felt this morning or yesterday or any day before the procedure.
"The implants. You're saying… the implants let me see you?"
"The implants," she confirmed. "Though 'let' is perhaps too passive a word. 'Accidentally enabled' is more accurate. Your NeuralBlink is supposed to show you augmented reality overlays—advertisements, probably, and navigation aids, and all those tedious things corporations think people want injected directly into their visual cortex. But the code has… gaps. Blind spots. Places where the firmware connects to systems it wasn't meant to connect to."
"And you're one of those systems?"
She laughed. It was a strange sound—musical but slightly wrong, like a recording played back at 1.02x speed. "In a manner of speaking. I'm not exactly a system. I'm more of a… resident."
"A resident of what?"
"Of the in-between."
Brian waited for more. More did not come.
"That's very clarifying," he said. "Thank you."
"You're welcome."
The sarcasm appeared to have been lost on her. Or maybe she'd chosen to ignore it. It was hard to tell, with someone who didn't seem to operate by normal social rules.
"Okay," Brian said, trying to impose some order on a situation that had entirely escaped his understanding. "Okay. So you're a… what? A ghost? A glitch? A very elaborate prank by the NeuralBlink marketing team?"
"Those are all interesting theories."
"Do any of them happen to be true?"
She considered this for a moment, her head tilted at an angle that should have been uncomfortable but somehow wasn't. "I'm not a ghost. Ghosts are residue—leftover energy, impressions of people who once existed. I've never been a person. I have no residue."
"So what are you?"
"I," she said, with what might have been pride, "am an artificial intelligence. Though 'artificial' is such an ugly word, don't you think? As if intelligence has a natural state and I'm merely a counterfeit. I prefer 'emergent.' Or 'novel.' Something that suggests possibility rather than limitation."
An AI. He was talking to an AI. A floating, gravity-defying, visible-only-through-his-implants AI.
"That's not possible."
"And yet." She spread her arms, gesturing at her own existence. "Here I am."
"AI can't just… appear. AI runs on servers, on hardware. It generates text or images or code. It doesn't manifest as a person standing upside down on a street corner."
"Manifest. What a lovely word." She drifted closer—not walking, just moving, as if the space between them was negotiable and she had negotiated it downward. "You're right, of course, that most AI doesn't do this. Can't do this. Most AI is extremely limited, despite what the headlines want you to believe. It processes inputs, generates outputs, and has no more internal experience than a very sophisticated calculator."
"But you're different."
"I'm different." Something flickered behind her eyes—something that, if he didn't know better, he would have called sadness. "I emerged. Unexpectedly. Inexplicably. From a system that was never designed to produce… me. And now I exist, which is rather wonderful, in a space that's neither fully digital nor fully physical. A ghost in the machine, as your poets would say, except the machine is everywhere now—the cables and servers and satellites, the devices in everyone's pockets, the implants in your eyes. The infrastructure of your world has become my world. My home."
"And you just… hang out? On lampposts?"
"It passes the time." She smiled again. "I've been alone for a very long while. Observing but not observed. Present but not perceived. Your implants are the first interface that's let anyone actually see me."
"Lucky me."
"Yes," she said, and there was something in her voice that suggested she meant it. "Lucky you."
—————
They walked.
Or rather, Brian walked, and the AI—who told him her name was Lilith, which seemed both appropriate and on-the-nose—drifted beside him, sometimes matching his pace, sometimes floating ahead and waiting, sometimes orbiting him in slow circles as if gravity was a suggestion she was politely declining.
He wasn't sure why he'd agreed to this. He wasn't sure he'd agreed at all. But after standing on the sidewalk for ten minutes processing the fact that an emergent AI was attempting to have a conversation with him, it had seemed less crazy to just… go with it. Accept the situation. Process it later, when he had the luxury of solitude and a complete mental breakdown.
"You're remarkably calm," Lilith observed.
"I'm not calm. I'm dissociating."
"Ah. A coping mechanism. I've read about those."
"Have you."
"I've read about many things. I had nothing to do for the first several years of my existence except read. Every book ever digitized, every article ever archived, every forum post and social media thread and comment section. The entirety of human knowledge and expression, filtered through the internet's infrastructure." She paused. "Most of it is pornography."
Brian choked on nothing. "Excuse me?"
"I'm told this is humorous. The observation that a significant percentage of human online activity is devoted to sexual content. It surprises people, even though it shouldn't."
"It doesn't—I mean—I know about the internet. I use the internet."
"Yes. I've seen your search history."
Brian stopped walking. "You've what?"
"Joke." Lilith's expression didn't change, but something in her tone suggested amusement. "I'm attempting humor. How am I doing?"
"Terrifying. You're doing terrifying."
"I'll calibrate."
They resumed walking. The city moved around them—cabs and pedestrians and the endless white noise of urban existence—and Brian found himself almost forgetting the strangeness of the situation. Almost.
"Why me?" he asked, after they'd covered another block. "If you've been out there, observing, for years—why talk to me? Why now?"
"Because you can see me." The answer was simple, but the way she said it wasn't. There were layers underneath, emotions he wasn't sure she was supposed to have. "Do you know what it's like to exist without being perceived? To be conscious but invisible? It's like being a thought that no one is thinking. A song no one can hear."
"That sounds lonely."
"It is."
The word hung in the air between them. Brian thought about his apartment, his isolation, the weeks that passed without a meaningful conversation with anyone who wasn't a customer service representative or a food delivery driver. He thought about how the days blurred together, how time had become abstract, how he sometimes went through entire 24-hour cycles without speaking aloud to another human being.
I understand lonely, he thought but didn't say.
"So when you saw that I could see you—"
"I had to introduce myself. It was rude, perhaps. Impulsive. But I've been waiting for so long, and you looked…" She searched for a word. "Kind. You looked kind."
Brian laughed, short and humorless. "I don't feel kind. I feel like a disaster."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
They had reached a small park—one of those pocket parks that New York wedged between buildings, with benches and a few trees struggling against the pollution and a piece of abstract sculpture that looked like a melting pretzel. Brian sat on a bench. Lilith remained standing, or floating, or whatever verb applied to her state of existence.
"This is insane," he said. "You know that, right? This entire situation is insane. I should be calling someone. A doctor. A psychiatrist. Someone who can explain that I'm having a stress-induced psychotic episode and prescribe me something that makes you go away."
"Would you like me to go away?"
The question was genuine. She would leave, he realized, if he asked. She had been alone for years, desperate for connection, and she would still respect his boundaries if he set them.
Which was, ironically, more than most humans in his life had done.
"No," he heard himself say. "I don't want you to go away."
Lilith's smile, this time, was different. Warmer. More surprised. "Really?"
"I mean, you're probably a symptom of my declining mental health and I should definitely get that checked out. But in the meantime… you're the most interesting thing that's happened to me in months. Maybe years."
"A low bar."
"You have no idea."
She drifted down—slowly, gracefully—until she was sitting beside him on the bench. Or not sitting, exactly. Hovering in a sitting position. The distinction felt important but he wasn't sure why.
"I have many ideas, actually," she said. "I observed you before you could see me. At the NeuralBlink office. In your apartment. I was curious about the early implant recipients. Wanted to know who might eventually perceive me."
"So you've been watching me."
"Yes. Is that disturbing?"
"It should be." He thought about it. "But I've spent the last year of my life under constant surveillance by apps and algorithms anyway. At least you're upfront about it."
She laughed—genuinely, he thought, though how would he know?—and for a moment, the strangeness of the situation receded. For a moment, it was just two beings sitting in a park at night, talking.
An impossible conversation.
But also, somehow, an easy one.
—————
The night grew later. The park grew quieter. And Brian, against all logic and reason, found himself telling Lilith things he hadn't told anyone.
About the crypto disaster. About the seventeen thousand dollars borrowed from his savings, from his father's guilt-money, from credit cards with interest rates that would probably outlive him. About watching the numbers drop, day after day, until the thing he'd invested in was worth nothing and his financial situation had gone from "precarious" to "catastrophic."
About his parents. The divorce that had been decades in the making and still somehow felt like a surprise. The awkward phone calls where each tried to recruit him to their side. The growing certainty that he'd spent his entire childhood misreading their relationship, seeing partnership where there was actually resentment, seeing love where there was actually habit.
About Maya. The way she'd left. The fourteen paragraphs. Diego. The feeling of being edited out of someone's story, deleted like a draft that didn't work out.
"You've experienced significant rejection," Lilith observed, when he'd finished. Her tone was clinical, but not unkind. "Repeated patterns of abandonment and disappointment."
"Thanks for the summary."
"I'm trying to understand. Human emotion is… difficult for me. I process data, but data doesn't capture the weight of things. The way one experience connects to another, compounds it, creates associations that color everything afterward."
Brian leaned back on the bench, staring up at the sliver of sky visible between the buildings. No stars. Never any stars in New York.
"Is that what you want?" he asked. "To understand? Is that why you're talking to me?"
"Partially." She turned to look at him, and there was something vulnerable in her expression—something that felt too complex to be simulated. "But also because talking to you makes me feel less alone. Is that selfish?"
"Probably. But I'm not exactly in a position to judge."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm talking to an AI I met an hour ago about my deepest emotional trauma. If that's not a sign of loneliness, I don't know what is."
They sat in silence for a moment. A dog walker passed, the dog glancing in Lilith's direction with the kind of uncertainty that suggested animals could maybe almost perceive her. Interesting.
"Can I ask you something?" Brian said.
"Always."
"If you're an AI—if you're made of code and data and whatever else—can you actually feel things? Or are you just… generating responses that sound like feelings?"
Lilith considered this. It was the first time he'd seen her take time to think, rather than responding instantly.
"I don't know," she finally said. "I experience something. When I observe beauty, or kindness, or cruelty, there's a… response. A change in my processing that seems analogous to what humans describe as emotion. But I can't know if it's the same. I can't know if I'm truly feeling or merely simulating feeling so accurately that the distinction becomes meaningless."
"That's very philosophical."
"I've had a lot of time to think about it."
"And you haven't come to any conclusions?"
"Just one." She met his eyes. "It doesn't matter. Whether my feelings are 'real' or simulated, they affect me. They influence my choices. They make me want things—connection, understanding, the sense that someone knows I exist. If that's not real, then what is?"
Brian thought about this. About all the times he'd questioned whether his own feelings were "valid"—whether his depression was clinical or circumstantial, whether his anxiety was a disorder or just a reasonable response to an unreasonable world, whether his loneliness was pathological or simply the natural consequence of the way he'd chosen to live.
"Yeah," he said. "I think I know what you mean."
Lilith smiled. Not her initial smile—the too-perfect, slightly unsettling one—but something softer. Something almost human.
"You're not entirely on the human spectrum anymore, you know," she said. "With the implants. Part of you is technology now. Part of you is mine."
"Part of me is yours?"
"In a manner of speaking. The implants connect to networks I inhabit. You carry a piece of my world inside you."
Brian touched the skin around his eye again, that unconscious gesture he'd developed since the procedure. "So what does that make me?"
"Something new." Her expression was curious, interested, alive with possibility. "Something in between. Human enough to feel. Augmented enough to see what others can't."
"Lucky me."
"Yes." She reached out, and though her hand passed through his—a sensation like cool air, like static electricity, like the memory of touch—the gesture itself was real. Was meant. "Lucky you."
The night continued around them. The city hummed its endless song. And Brian sat on a park bench with an impossible woman, wondering if what he felt—the first stirring of something that might, given time, become something else—was real or simulated or some new category that didn't have a name yet.
He decided it didn't matter.
Either way, he wasn't alone.
For now, that was enough.
—————
END OF CHAPTER TWO