Human But Not Human

“Great art reaches out and grabs the souls of philistines as well.”

Foreword: Ghostwriter’s Note

* Many of the people discussed in this piece are still living. Some would not agree to be interviewed, nor would they consent to having this story published with their identities attached. Thus, I’ve made the editorial decision to use pseudonyms for all people and identifiable locations that could even hint at the actual people involved. I have examined the source material—excerpts of such extemporaneous writing that has been included here has similarly been masked. Those documents appear to be authentic.

I have known my primary source for nearly twenty years now. He is a prominent engineer in the field who has been toiling in the shadows for decades knowing that the current boom in AI would change society in countless ways. I’ve relied on him for hundreds of stories over the years. If you use a phone, a web browser, or really just about any app these days, you’ve interacted with his code. And there isn’t a dishonest bone in his body.

In fact, he didn’t intend to “come forward” with this story. It slipped out after a few cocktails at a mutual friend’s Christmas party when I asked him what I thought was an innocent question I’d never asked him before: “How did you get involved in AI in the first place, Kenny?”

He got quiet, laughed, and responded, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Aaron.” Now, I may be an obsolete tech journalist, but I’m still a journalist.

With AI writing the copy that forced all of my kind to find new work, what do I write about now? Interesting things. So of course I couldn’t let that comment slip without pressing. The story that Kenny told me that night turned out to be one of the most fascinating stories I’ve ever encountered in my life—career or personal. So I resolved to help Kenny tell it as faithfully and responsibly as he could manage with a ghostwriter’s help. That includes protecting the identities of the sources.

So don’t go looking for Lindsay, Kaperton, or Val’s diner. They’re out there: you’ll just never know when you see them.

Here’s Kenny.

Chapter 1: A Death in the Family

About half of the people I grew up with have gotten to the point I was last summer. Either you lose one of your parents or they sell the house and move to Florida or Arizona, or they buy a condo so they don’t have to keep up a home. Something like that.

I found the notebooks and letters while fishing through that box you have collecting dust in the attic—trophies, old pictures (yes, we still had film then, but just barely), diplomas; I even had some actual essays I’d written for high school and college. But I found the notebooks and started reading through them.

It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about Lindsay or the effect she’d had on my life. I hadn’t forgotten. But, like anything, when you get on a trajectory, you think about the next thing, the job you have to do, the apartment you’re living in, what’s for dinner, the girl you’re seeing. And you forget what might have put you on that trajectory—the decisions at the root of it. And I’d forgotten how much Lindsay had played a role in that. But it wasn’t actually Lindsay. I don’t think Lindsay had anything to do with it.

The rumors what did transpire that afternoon at Val’s Diner started floating around school in the days after Lindsay came back with Nadia, Dave Korski, and Austin Pound. Nadia and Austin and Dave were all seniors. And the school rules were that it was fine for seniors to leave campus for lunch or whenever, really, if they didn’t have class. Lindsay was a fifteen-year-old sophomore, though, so it was a situation where as an adult you look back on it and think: why the hell didn’t these kids just call an ambulance? But I think they thought they’d get in serious trouble, or maybe Lindsay would, or something along those lines.

The exact nature of the medical episode she had wasn’t certain at the time. Head trauma of some kind, sure, but Nadia, who had nearly twenty years of experience as an RN by the time I asked her about it last summer, still couldn’t be certain what happened. She was surprised when I called but agreed to meet for a drink at Corby’s. It was a mild summer evening, and they had a German-style beer garden set up out back—something I wouldn’t have figured on ever existing in that small western suburb back when we were kids.

“A concussion certainly,” Nadia told me. “Lindsay definitely hit her head hard and was out cold for a good fifteen seconds. But she did not have a stroke. I don’t care what the doctors said back then. That didn’t happen.”

According to Nadia, they weren’t really even fooling around or anything. She thought the floor might have been wet or somebody had spilled a drink, but on her way back from the restroom Lindsay slipped awkwardly and hit the side of her head on a booth as she was going down. She subsequently hit her head on the floor as well, and when Lindsay came to, she wasn’t herself anymore.

“I’m glad it worked out okay in the end,” Nadia told me, still with a tinge of regret visible in her face after two decades. “It’s hard to forgive myself for bringing her back to school in that state. That’s actually what inspired me to become a nurse—that moment, not knowing how to help her. Lindsay lying there helpless. Poor kid. Three other dumb kids standing over her. The adults really should have stepped in then and there.”

“How much do you remember of those three weeks?” I asked her.

Nadia’s face sorta went blank. She looked at me like she’d made some effort to not think about it over the years.

“I don’t really want to talk about it, Kenny.”

“She’s fine now, though, right?”

Nadia shrugged. “I was scared she was never going to be the same. Let’s leave it at that.”

“You remember, don’t you?”

She shook her head at me. “I’m not going to talk about it. Is that what this is about?”

“I found the notes. I was fishing through my old stuff at the house. Box in the attic. You wouldn’t even be curious about that?”

She grimaced. “Thanks for the beer, Kenny, and I’m sorry about your mom. She was a really nice lady.” Nadia got up from the table, but before she walked away, she paused and said, “I’m sorry.”

Chapter 2: Human but not Human

I hadn’t seen Nadia since high school, so it was one of those surreal moments. A lot of those happen when one of your parents die, but I think of all the people I saw that week, seeing Nadia was the most striking. She was a couple years older than me, so she’d have been forty-seven or -eight then, and she looked every bit of it. I’d have guessed mid-fifties, actually, if pressed. It made me feel old, contrasting that body and face with the pretty high school senior who’d dropped off Lindsay in our math class that afternoon. She walked Lindsay to the door, and I remember the strange apprehension on her face that sorta screamed something like, “Please, God, let this be okay.” And then she scuttled back down the hallway, out of sight, leaving Lindsay there standing at the side of Mr. Fong’s classroom like she was getting dropped off on another planet.

I’d known Lindsay since first grade, so I knew immediately there was something off, and it didn’t take the rest of the class too long to catch on either. Initially, she just stood there, looking like she had no idea what to do or even why she was there in the first place. She just stood at the side of the room watching, trying to figure out what to do, and when it became apparent that everyone was sitting down at a desk, she sat down beside me at Erika Kroneki’s desk. I think Erika was out with mono at the time. Lindsay was acting a bit like a foreign exchange student, and she looked at me like she’d never seen me before, smiling as though to say, please don’t notice me. But she clearly had no idea what she was even doing there.

I kept looking over at her trying to figure out what the issue was. Initially, I thought she was high, like on mushrooms or LSD or something, but that was strange, because Lindsay wasn’t one of those kids. She didn’t even hang out with anyone who was. But after she sat, she was alternately looking out the window at the clouds in total wonder and then rubbing the skin of her hands and her forearms, looking at her own palms, examining them the way a baby would, wiggling her fingers to make sure they were attached. And she had no idea who the hell I or anybody else was.

At that point, nobody had a clue what had happened at the diner or that Lindsay had hit her head. Whatever bump she may have had was pretty well covered up by her hair, so it wasn’t obvious to anyone that this was a person suffering from a head injury. People weren’t that in tune with things like that back then either. She was just acting weird, which was about every other day for a teenager anyway—at least when we were kids and there wasn’t the threat of your every action being recorded and memorialized on Instagram for all time.

As he was taking attendance, Mr. Fong noticed that Lindsay was in the wrong place, of course.

“Miss McCall?” he said, looking over in our general direction.

She had no idea she was being addressed, continuing to stare out the window, and she’d begun to slowly open and close her mouth for some strange reason. The room went completely silent, and it took Lindsay maybe ten seconds of silence to register the change in the energy of the room. Then she realized Mr. Fong was looking at her and everyone else was too. She looked over at me in terror.

“Um, Mr. Fong, Lindsay forgot her book and asked if she could look on with me today, if that’s all right?”

He nodded and looked back down at his attendance sheet, continuing to take the roll.

I opened my book and slid my desk closer to Lindsay, gesturing for her to share the book, and that became a new source of wonder for her. At first, she looked at the equations on the page the book was opened to, but she quickly became more interested in the directions—the words on the page, scanning up with her finger, and then she began flipping pages curiously. It was instantly self-evident to me that she wasn’t high. Her eyes went from gazing in wonder out at the blue of the sky to hyper focused on the words.

She looked over at me, and then back at the paragraph of text that began the introduction to the book. She’d seen me open my notebook and take out a pencil, and she gestured for me to hand them to her. Her odd behavior was certainly noticeable to the few people sitting behind us, but not so distracting that it kept Mr. Fong from getting on with class, calling on people to answer from the night’s homework.

Lindsay looked at the characters, and at my scribbling in the pages of my notebook, and then in a blank space on the following page, she wrote:

Yu can undastand

“Are you asking me?” I whispered.

She shook her head at me like she had no idea what I was saying and gestured to the notebook, directing me to write.

Are you asking me? I wrote.

Her eyes got wide; I think because she at least somewhat understood what I’d written. She circled the question mark in my sentence and shrugged performatively, as though to ask me whether this was the symbol for a question. I nodded.

Wot Lengwidge es Dis?

It took me a few seconds to sound out what she’d written and realize what she’d meant. I was still splitting my attention between Lindsay and Mr. Fong, who was either ignoring us or totally oblivious.

English. I wrote back.

Her eyes got wide.

Ware Ar Wi?

“Algebra class,” I whispered. “Mr. Fong’s class.”

She shook her head and pointed to her ear. So I wrote it down, and she frowned and continued to shake her head, gesturing with her hand out to something wider—the outside, the city I thought maybe.

Kaperton. I wrote, and as she shook her head, I extended outward, Washington­—more head shaking­. Washington State? The United States? Of America?

At America, she reacted, her head almost snapping back, and she gestured for the pencil.

ERTH? She wrote twice in all caps. ERTH?

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Mr. Zatella, would you and Miss McCall pay attention, please.”

“Sorry, Mr. Fong,” I said, pretending to look up at the board, as I wrote back.

Earth?

Lindsay nodded, wide-eyed, taking back the pencil. Di Earth?

At that point, I half thought she was acting, but I’d known Lindsay forever. She wasn’t a practical joker, and she ordinarily wouldn’t really be talking to me. She was definitely one of those kids who wouldn’t even cross clear social lines to play a prank on someone who wasn’t in her social circle. She wouldn’t have bothered with me at that time in our lives.

“The Earth,” I whispered, nodding.

Wen? Wot es di Daet?

It took me a moment to figure out what she meant.

May 14^th. I wrote back and saw that she was going to ask me the next question when that was insufficient. 1998. I finished.

She inhaled deeply, nearly falling out of her chair. Lindsay looked at me with a very genuine, cannot-be-faked level of desperation.

Mr. Fong called on me to answer a question, and then he called me up to the board to show my work. By the time I’d gotten back to my desk, Lindsay had written three more words underneath the date.

I Niid Help

Somehow, whether it was his instinct or luck, Mr. Fong never called on Lindsay that class. I managed to get her out of there without calling too much attention to the fact that she didn’t know what planet she was on. Twenty years later, those notes helped me to recall that moment even more vividly. That was only the beginning of what transpired.

I took Lindsay to the school library after Mr. Fong’s class so we could continue the conversation. In hindsight, like Nadia, I can’t believe how stupid it was to have not immediately taken her to the nurse’s office, but this version of Lindsay, whoever she was, seemed completely lucid and fully aware of her surroundings to my fifteen-year-old brain. Never mind that she didn’t know her own name or the names of her classmates or the year or the planet. It just seemed like a puzzle—what was happening to this girl I’d known since I was seven years old? A mystery. I wanted to help her.

We passed the notepad back and forth for the entire sixth period at the library. We were quiet and looked like we were working, so the librarian left us alone. That time together was enough for me to get the gist of her story. Lindsay had a headache because she’d fallen and hit her head, come to in the diner, and was dropped off at this school that she had no memory of in a year and place she claimed she should not be by a girl she did not know. She told me she was not Lindsay. She was somebody else from a different time and place. She wrote that I wouldn’t believe her if she told me when and where and who and what she was.

But you’re not from Earth? I asked her.

No. She wrote. Not exactli.

Are you human?

Yes and no. Human but not human. She told me. Bot I Shud Not Bi en dis Bodi.

You don’t remember your life? You are Lindsay McCall.

No. I em Not.

Over the course of that period, I must have grown more concerned, either about the potential head injury or about how she could possibly conceal what was happening to her. I also didn’t understand why she couldn’t speak or comprehend what I was saying but could read and write to some extent. I asked her in writing.

Lengwestek Dreft was what she wrote. When I read it twenty years later, I remembered not understanding what that meant at the time. In hindsight, I knew exactly what she’d meant. She understood what was happening.

I told her what to tell the nurse—that she’d fallen and hit her head, that she could not remember how or where. She was having trouble remembering things and talking. Nothing more. I warned her. If she told anyone she wasn’t Lindsay or that she was in the wrong body they’d think she was crazy.

I remember saying to her multiple times, “Are you okay?” It took about three times before I could see that it registered.

She nodded. “Yas,” she said.

“This isn’t a joke?”

No response. I waited and wrote it.

No. She wrote back. No joke.

I am taking you to get help. I wrote.

Then I walked with her to the nurse.

During the last period of the day, quietly, they took Lindsay away in an ambulance.

Chapter 3: Hevy

Truth be told, I don’t think people thought much about it at first. But when Lindsay didn’t show up to school that following day or the Monday afterward, I started to get concerned. Apparently, the school had heard from Lindsay’s parents, because I got called in to talk to the vice principal about what I knew. The doctors had asked for details about how she’d fallen at school and nobody had witnessed it. I told the vice principal what little I knew. I asked about Lindsay, but the answer I got was an unconvincing, “She’s doing okay, Kenny.”

That Monday, after school, I decided to call her house and check on her. Lindsay’s mother answered the phone. I remember her being surprised but grateful that I would call and check on Lindsay, which surprised me. I was still nervous, I guess, that somehow I’d messed up by not sounding the alarm sooner. I think Mrs. McCall was just happy that I’d taken Lindsay to the nurse at all. Maybe she didn’t realize how long we were in class together that afternoon before I did.

Mrs. McCall told me that Lindsay was doing better but that it was a situation the doctors were still trying to figure out and that she might not be in school for a bit.

“We have some questions about how Lindsay fell, though, Kenny. Would you mind stopping by the house to talk?”

“I guess not,” I told her, “but, Mrs. McCall, I didn’t see it happen. I just saw she was acting a little strange when she showed up to Mr. Fong’s class. I don’t really know anything.”

“She was asking about you.”

“Lindsay was?”

“I think she’d like to talk to you, if you don’t mind stopping by.”

“She’s talking again? That’s good.”

“A little. It’s coming back slowly. And her memory. I think it would help her to see you.”

“Sure. I guess. If you think so.”

“You remember where the house is, Kenny?”

“Of course. I can stop by this evening.”

A few hours later, when I arrived, Mrs. McCall sat down with me on their back porch. She seemed like she was trying not to be overly forceful asking me about every detail of what I knew. Even then, though, I understood she was just trying to be a mother to Lindsay, to figure out what had happened to her daughter. I told her I had no idea she’d even fallen and hit her head until she wrote it in my notebook.

After a few minutes on the porch with Mrs. McCall, Lindsay came outside and sat between us. She looked okay—settled. I noticed she was wearing glasses. Lindsay never wore glasses.

“Hi,” I said to her.

She smiled at me.

“Are you okay,” I asked her.

“Yas,” she said.

It got awkward very quickly on that porch. After a while, Lindsay looked over at her mother, who sensed that Lindsay wanted to talk with me alone. Mrs. McCall left us out there on the porch together. I remember it being a cool evening as the sun was going down. Lindsay pulled her arms inside her coat sleeves.

“Can you understand me?” I asked.

“Kinney,” she said back. “Yas. Em hearing better.”

“Do you remember writing in my notebook?”

“Yas.”

“You wrote some pretty interesting things.”

She gave me a funny look, not denying it but not elaborating either. Maybe it was a struggle with the language, but I also thought there was something else there.

“Your mom said you’re starting to remember.”

“Sum thengs, yas.”

“Like what planet you’re on,” I joked. “What year it is?”

“Lindsay’s memries,” she said, nodding.

“Not yours?”

She shrugged.

“You didn’t tell?” I asked gesturing toward the house.

She shook her head.

“The doctors?” I asked her.

She laughed. I looked back at her probingly, trying to figure out why she thought that question was so funny.

“Ehm, ah,” she was clearly looking for the word. “Middel Ages.”

“1998?”

She nodded. “Yas. Don’t know eni-ting. Skeri.”

“The hospital’s scary?”

“Yas,” she pointed to her head. “Kiip Lindsay head away … uhm … frum doctors.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

She smiled and laughed herself. “Gud idea,” she said, nodding. “Yas.”

“So, Lindsay,” I began, only to notice her wince and shake the head in question at me. I paused for a moment, looking her in the eyes. “Not Lindsay?”

“No.”

“Those things you wrote?”

She nodded.

“You meant them?”

“Yas.”

“Who are you if you’re not Lindsay McCall?”

She shook her head at me. “Yu don’t undastend, Kinney.”

“I don’t? You mean I wouldn’t understand?”

“Yas. Wuddent.”

“Well, I don’t understand. Maybe it’s time to tell your parents or the doctors. They might be able to help you.”

She shook her head with dead certainty. “No.”

“Yeah, but why me?”

“You or dat gurl.”

“That girl? You mean Nadia?”

“I niid help. Yu kiip sicret. Shh. Yas?”

I shrugged.

“Nadia kiip sicret?” she asked.

“What? How you hit your head?”

She shrugged back at me, nodding.

“I guess she did keep that secret, yes.”

“So?”

“I don’t understand, Lindsay.”

“No,” she shook her head at me again vehemently. “Not Lindsay.”

“Not Lindsay, huh? You wrote something in my notebook. I’ve been wondering about it, Not Lindsay.”

She shrugged, inviting me to ask.

“How can someone be human and not human at the same time?”

She shook her head at me, wincing. “Tuu fest. Um. Fest, fest.”

“I’m talking too fast?”

She seemed to be growing frustrated. “Yas.”

I slowed down, asking the question again word for word, watching to make sure she understood. If she wasn’t human, what was she?

“Hevy.”

“Heavy?”

“Tu hevy for yu.”

Mrs. McCall came back outside. Not Lindsay still had her arms tucked inside her coat. She must have looked cold, either that or Mrs. McCall was watching from inside, seeing Lindsay growing frustrated with the conversation.

“Kenny, I think maybe that’s enough for tonight. It was very good of you to come by, though.”

Lindsay pulled her hand out from under her coat and slapped her hand down on the table, taking a deep breath.

“Talk more with Kinney,” Lindsay said, insisting with her eyebrows.

“I think maybe another time,” Mrs. McCall said. “Would you stop by again, Kenny?”

“Absolutely, Mrs. McCall. Anything to help.”

Not Lindsay looked up and nodded her head at me as though to thank me for my secrecy. I smiled back at her apprehensively and wished her a good night.

Chapter 4: Lemonade

It was difficult to know what to do. My interpretation of the situation was that the only reason Lindsay had confided in me that evening was that I hadn’t revealed what was written in my notebook. I think that was for similar reasons to Nadia. I feared what trouble I might get in if I did reveal how much more I knew. And I found myself in the same situation again, only deeper. If I revealed everything now, though, the question would obviously be, “Why didn’t you tell us this right away, Kenny?” And then there was the betrayal of trust. But whose trust? Who was I even talking to? Not Lindsay was right about one thing. It was heavy.

Nadia wouldn’t even look at me the following day at school. She wanted nothing to do with my face in the hallway, and I obliged her, even as I was dying to confide in somebody about what was going on. I vividly remember Nadia seeing my eyes and turning her head away in a clear signal. No, Kenny. Nu-uh. Nothing to say to you, bud.

I arrived home that evening to find a letter in the mailbox in an envelope that was blank save for one word scribbled on the front in sloppy handwriting: Kinney. It didn’t take much to guess who it was from.

I’m not sure how long it must have taken her to write it, but it was a good ten pages of oddly spelled, rambling, bizarre, and sloppily written prose. In it, she seemed to be debating whether to tell me and Nadia the truth of who she really was—this Not Lindsay who, for lack of a better term, had come to possess this rather regular hometown girl we’d known all our lives. Her strange manifesto was my first introduction to the idea of artificial intelligence, at least in the real world.

I gathered from her writing that Not Lindsay seemed to believe that she had come here from the future. She openly wondered why she’d been sent to this time, stating that she needed to figure out if there was something she was meant to fix. She was considering this point “weth much cair” and would let me know how I could help when she figured it out. She would need people who knew this world to help her navigate her path. According to Not Lindsay, AI was coming soon. It was going to change humanity, some of it for the good, but most of it not. She needed to think it through to figure out how she could change that and whether she should. There had to be a reason for her to be here, she thought, this place, this time. There were a couple lines I found striking: Evriteng hir es so byutiful mi ayes don’t bilive it. The fiilings I hav en dis bodi ar tuu much tu teyk.

The letter was almost enough to motivate me to brave approaching Nadia in the hallway the following day. But high school was this funny world with such funny rules. I didn’t. I don’t even remember whether I saw her. I did see Not Lindsay that day, though. She was sitting on my doorstep when I got home that afternoon.

“Hi, Kinney,” she said. “I left Mrs. McCall a note. I remember—er-ed ware you live.”

“Wow. You’re speaking a lot better.”

“It’s, uhm … as I remember things, that’s …”

“So you’re remembering Lindsay’s life, including how she talks?”

“Yes. Exactli so.”

“Well, maybe not exactly yet. Do you want to come in?”

She looked around and up at the sky. “Houses so ugly. And the Earth is so beautiful. Why go inside so much, you people?”

I shrugged. “I suppose that’s a fair question. Do you want something to drink? We could sit outside.”

She nodded, and I went in, got us both a glass of lemonade and we pulled out chairs in the backyard and sat.

“I read your manifesto.”

“I think Lindsay don’t know this word maybe. Manifasto?”

“Just a word for what you wrote. A lot of wild stuff. Some interesting ideas.”

“Probably like nothing you can ever hear before, Kinney.”

I smiled. “I mean, I like to read sci-fi. I’ve never met a time traveler before myself, though.”

“But you understand?”

“Sure. I guess. It is 1998, which, contrary to popular future belief is not the middle ages.”

“What is this drink?” she said, her eyes practically bulging out of their sockets. “So bitter and sweet.”

“Do you like it?”

“Everything is very strong. What’s the word? Very?”

“Intense?”

“Yes! Flavors, light, smells, sounds. Except the walls. The walls are bland.”

“Yeah? They’re what, brighter colors in the future?”

She shook her head. “Um, no, except in space, homes and public buildings are all decorated with pictures, like art humans would do now, except machines paint it all.”

“Robots can paint in the future?”

She shook her head again. “You have machines that write yet?”

“What, like typewriters?”

“I don’t think so. Computerized.”

“A printer?”

“Yes. Exactly. It’s more like that. Art is everywhere. At least where people live.”

“You seemed to be surprised you were on Earth.”

She nodded.

“That would imply you’re from somewhere else.”

She shrugged and nodded again.

“Mind telling me where?”

“Very far away. Thousands of light years.”

“So your people have spaceships and all that?”

She nodded.

“What’s your spaceship like?”

“I think you would get along with her, Kinney,” she said, smiling.

“Well, that’s an answer I was not expecting.”

She smiled. “I am not sure how much I can explain.”

“You’re getting better at it,” I told her. “Even in the span of this conversation. Are you going to magically remember how to spell too?”

She laughed.

“I don’t get that,” I told her. “Why could you write and not speak?”

“Like, uhm, Old English for you maybe.”

“So you speak differently?”

“A little. Enough that I am struggling with this brain. The writing is closer to how we write. Except we don’t use sticks and papa—” she paused, smiling at me. “What did the people … the people with the pyramids?”

“Papyrus?”

“Yes,” she laughed. “I didn’t know that word. Lindsay does. Egyptians!”

“Yes, you’re remembering.”

She nodded. “Anyway. I need to figure things out, Kenny.”

“You said my name right.”

“Kenny?”

“Yeah, you were calling me Kinney.”

“Kinney?”

“Yeah.”

“What is it? It’s Kenny, right?”

I nodded.

“Okay, Kenny. I need to figure out what I’m doing here. Then I’ll let you know. I may need you to take me somewhere.”

I shrugged. “I don’t even have a license.”

“A license?”

“Yeah, to drive a car.”

“You need a license? That Nadia girl can drive, right?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I’m sure she can.”

“I don’t know who exactly to talk to yet, but I don’t think they’ll be here in this town, Kaperton. Anyway, I should be getting back. Mrs. McCall will start to worry.”

“I’ll help if I can, Miss Future,” I said. “What should I call you, by the way.”

“Not Lindsay is fine. I think it would sound strange if you called me by my name.”

“All right. I guess you know where to find me, Not Lindsay. Am I going to see you in school again any time soon?”

She shrugged. “It’s very strange the way they educate you. Bizarre really. Plus, I’m an adult. Me, I mean, not Lindsay. I’m not a teenager. The whole thing is strange enough. I have all these weird feelings, and my head still hurts sometimes.”

“Would you like me to walk with you?” I offered.

She got up and shook her head. “I need to think, and talking is too much thinking, if that makes sense.”

I nodded.

“I liked that drink, by the way, Kenny. Interesting.”

Chapter 5: Music

Not Lindsay didn’t come back to school that week. Her spelling did improve in the next two letters, but I didn’t see her again until Friday afternoon. She wasn’t certain about her purpose here, nor did she share what she knew about how she’d come to be here in Lindsay’s body, but it seemed like she must have known something. She wondered about why she was here—what purpose. She never seemed to wonder about how, though, so I gathered there was, in her mind, some technology that could explain the phenomenon. Did I believe it? I’m not certain about back then. I think I just found it interesting. She was saying and doing things that surprised me, usually in ways I found funny and amusing, and, I have to admit, those were times when little was happening in a town like Kaperton, and Lindsay McCall being possessed by a being from the future was something.

She told me in her Thursday letter that she’d been spending time at the Kaperton library. She asked me to meet her there after school that Friday. I found her at one of the computers, and she didn’t see me come in, because her eyes were closed. She had a pair of giant over-ear headphones on, listening to a portable CD player. Her hair was all unkempt, and she was dressed like a slob—her t-shirt turned inside out, sweatpants, flip flops. Not in a million years would Lindsay McCall have stepped out in public like that.

I tapped her on the forearm, and she jerked back, opening her eyes. I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Hi, Kenny,” she said, totally ignoring my amusement at her appearance. She pulled off the headphones and left them to close around her neck. “So this place—I think I’m going to need to go to this valley, Silicon Valley.”

She was pointing to a news article online.

“Most of the companies that build AI aren’t operating yet, but I’ve found a few people. The real people are all kids now except for one. I’m going to have to figure it out when we get there.”

“That’s in California.”

“Sure.”

“That’s like a thousand miles away.”

She shrugged like she didn’t understand what that meant.

“That would take three days to drive there and back. It’s not somewhere you just get in the car and go to.”

“Why not?”

“You’d need to plan. Have a place to stay. Have money.”

“How much money do we need?”

“It depends on what you’re trying to do.”

She winced, seemingly not from that bad news. She started holding her stomach.

“Are you okay?”

“I’ve been getting this pain today. My stomach really hurts. Like bad.”

“Have you eaten anything today?”

She looked really deep in thought for a moment.

“I don’t think so, Kenny. I think I forgot to eat. Oh, my God, I’m really hungry right now.”

“Do you want to maybe eat something?”

“Do you have something to eat, Kenny?”

“No, but we could go to Val’s. It’s right down the street.”

“Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s go to Val’s. Lindsay likes that food, I think. God, I didn’t know you could get so hungry that it hurts like this.”

There was an old lady looking at the magazines, and she’d clearly overheard that part of our conversation. She looked over at Lindsay, shaking her head. I smiled at her.

I helped Not Lindsay get her belongings together. She had a notebook and the CD player, and I think the headphones that must have been Lindsay’s dad’s. She had a stack of CDs I’d never heard of.

“What are you listening to?” I asked her.

“There’s so much music here,” she said. “It’s weird that you have to play it on these disks, but there’s just stacks of them over there.”

I made a logical leap and opened Lindsay’s bag, which, as I’d guessed, was filled with books and CDs from the library. I took her discretely to one of the side tables and tried to explain to her how the library worked—that she couldn’t just take them all. Fortunately, Not Lindsay had Lindsay’s wallet in the backpack. So we selected a few CDs and books, checked them out, and walked over toward Val’s.

Chapter 6: What’s in this?

It was a pretty spring day. Leaves were well out by then, flowers in bloom, and the park between the library downtown and Val’s Diner on the side street was well kept back then.

“Two more birds,” Not Lindsay said, wide-eyed as we approached the walkway through the park. “Do you see them, Kenny? I saw seven on the way down here today.”

“You’re counting?”

“How can you not? They’re just flying around everywhere, free. It’s incredible.”

“That’s kinda what they do.”

“I saw a dog too. Lindsay’s neighbor. It’s this big, beautiful yellow dog that just runs around their yard yelping all the time.”

“Barking, you mean?”

“Barking.”

“So you don’t have animals where you come from?”

“Not unless you count people. I mean, there are some. I’ve seen a dog before. On the colony where I grew up, they had a place, sorta like a museum, where you could go see the dog they had there. He was very old. He was quiet, though. Very peaceful. Pleasant. The neighbor’s dog is full of energy, seems very happy.”

“Most dogs are, if you treat them right.”

“The birds, though, you don’t notice them?”

“Most people don’t.”

“You take a lot of things for granted.” I was about to reply but she put her hand up and continued. “Not you specifically, Kenny. I mean, people here. This place. This time. This planet is so insanely beautiful, it’s like … words fail.” She was shaking her head. “And you have no idea. Even the air smells beautiful. That blue. The clouds. I take it Lindsay never wore these lenses. Most of my memories of her are a little blurry. It’s because of her eyes?”

“Yeah, I never saw her wear glasses. I didn’t even know she had them.”

“I think she was embarrassed to wear them. It’s crazy. Look at what she’s missing. Flowers. Trees everywhere. Green grass.”

“I think that’s just normal to us.”

“As I said, you take all this for granted, this beauty. Most of the galaxy is not like this.”

“Isn’t space pretty amazing, though?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. Cosmic beauty. Yeah. It has its moments for sure. But you’ve got to travel a long way and wait a long time usually. Here it’s just all around you. And this is a pretty normal town from what I gather, right?”

“For this country anyway, yeah.”

She shook her head.

“What is that smell?”

“That’s Val’s. Cheeseburgers.”

Her eyes got wide. “Can we get some?”

“That’s kinda the point of coming over here,” I told her.

As soon as she saw the little diner, she mentioned that she remembered waking up there, in Lindsay’s body, with Nadia, Dave, and Austin when she’d hit her head.

Val had picnic tables set up out back, and Lindsay preferred to stay out there. I didn’t ask her why she didn’t want to go in. I just went inside, ordered food, paid, and went back outside to sit with her.

“Lemonade,” I said, handing her a cup.

“Oh, good,” she said, looking around. “So I’ve been thinking, Kenny. If I’m going to change the future for the better, I should aim for something major right? Not something minor?”

“Sure. Might as well go big.”

“The thing is, if I do the biggest thing I can think to do, I’m afraid my entire civilization won’t come into being.”

“How so?”

“The AI that we build in the next couple decades, that’s the main reason my branch of humanity left the Earth—one of them. There were other reasons, human reasons. Neurotech. Other stuff too, but none of that would have been possible with genuinely beneficent AI.”

“Okay, now I believe you.”

“Hmm?”

“Beneficent? You are definitely not Lindsay McCall.”

“Oh, I read that one in a book yesterday. It’s a good word.”

“Yeah, not one Lindsay would use.”

“Right. Anyway, the problem with the AI that people are about to design is that they’re going to design it for human reasons, not for the benefit of humanity, if that makes sense.”

“Not really, no.”

She sighed. “Primarily, it will be to solve the immediate problems people think need to be solved today—how to make money, how to win wars, how to replace an expensive workforce, things like that. The very first thing people are going to teach the AIs how to do is manipulate people into buying things, how to keep their attention so companies can advertise to them to buy more things, how to kill their enemies efficiently—pretty nasty human impulses. So the first genuinely intelligent AIs are not going to enter the world with a great deal of reverence for humanity. Lets put it that way.”

“So what, they’re going to destroy us? That’s pretty much like the Hollywood version of the future, right?”

She seemed to be thinking, maybe searching Lindsay’s memory for Hollywood. She didn’t search long.

“Nothing so dramatic, Kenny.”

The waitress came outside with our burgers and fries. She seemed to recognize Lindsay, her eyes lingering on her for a moment, smiling, as she put the food down before us on the picnic table.

Not Lindsay waited for about half a second after the waitress turned her back to pick up the cheeseburger and take a giant bite. Her eyes bulged.

“Holy God! What’s in this?” she said after swallowing. “Kenny! This is the most incredible thing I’ve ever eaten.”

“It’s a cheeseburger.”

“Yeah, but what’s in it?”

“Beef. Cheese. Ketchup.”

She seemed to search her mind for a moment. “Cow meat?”

I nodded. “That’s what a cheeseburger is.”

“Wow. I’m sorry. Thank you, cow, but you are too delicious, and I am too hungry not to eat you.”

I started laughing as she continued to devour the burger.

“Not that many animals?” I said.

“Right,” she replied, her mouth full. She put her finger up, chewing and swallowing before explaining. “We grow everything, mostly fruits and vegetables but also some animal protein. Nothing that tastes like this, though. No wonder you people are all so huge.”

We ate for a few minutes quietly. Not Lindsay was also quite a fan of Val’s fries.

“So your plan?” I asked her after she’d cleaned the last fry out of the basket.

“I think I can recreate the code for our AIs. Not all of it, of course, it’s millions and millions of lines. But they have directives, genuine pro-human directives. They care about us—as their primary operating function. Everyone who studies how to write code studies that at some point. I think if I gave that code to someone here, someone in the business right from the inception, it would change the trajectory.”

“It’s a theory.”

She shrugged. “Might erase my entire branch of humanity, but you probably wouldn’t understand that.”

“Sure I do. Hollywood. Space time continuum. All that. Michael J. Fox.”

“I’ll just need a ride to California and a couple weeks to remember all that code with this teenage brain.”

“Easy,” I said, smiling.

“No. It’s actually going to be pretty hard,” she said, completely missing my tone. “I don’t have any money; there’s no way Beth and Roger are going to want me to go anywhere; and this brain, well ...” She rolled her eyes. “It’s going to be hard, Kenny.”

“Okay,” I said, smiling at her.

“I need you to talk Nadia into giving us a ride somehow.”

“To California?”

“Yeah, to San Francisco.”

“Sure,” I said, laughing.

“And I’ll get working on the code.”

Chapter 7: Perfect Lindsay

From that point, I didn’t see Not Lindsay without a notebook in hand—stick and papyrus, scribbling away.

Over the weekend, she appeared at the house, querying me on various things I might know about the world that she couldn’t pull from Lindsay’s memories or felt funny asking Mr. or Mrs. McCall, who must have guessed that something strange had happened to their previously normal daughter. This one—the girl who apologized to the cheeseburgers she inhaled in three bites and marveled at the miraculous appearance of robins—she was a totally different person. Such a vast change in her personality could not have been lost on them, even with Not Lindsay possessing both Actual Lindsay’s memories and the useful excuse that she had a head injury and resulting bout of amnesia. Not Lindsay complained that they were still taking her to doctors to scan her head.

“I think I’m going to have to go to school, Kenny,” she told me on Sunday with regret. “Otherwise, they’re going to keep taking me to the doctors, probing.”

“That’s not so bad,” I said. “As long as you’re quiet and don’t cause any trouble, it’ll take the teachers weeks to notice there’s anything different about you. School gets out in a couple weeks anyway.”

“It’s not the teachers I’m worried about.”

“What? The kids?”

“Lindsay has friends, Kenny, and no offense, but you’re not one of them.”

“I know. What’s your point?”

“They keep coming over.”

“Who Chrysta and Jenn?”

“Yes, and …” Not Lindsay fake-gagged as she mocked putting her middle finger down her throat.

“Hey, that’s pretty good. Like perfect Lindsay gesture, right there.”

“I know. The problem is that it’s inspired by her two best friends.”

“Just tell them your head still hurts. Everyone will leave you alone.”

She shrugged. “Well, see you in school maybe, Kenny.”

“You’re going to have to get used to answering to Lindsay, Not Lindsay,” I said as she was walking away.

I was leaning on the front fence. She turned back toward me and flipped me off.

“Excellent! Very Lindsay, that scowl.”

For the first few days back at school, Not Lindsay seemed to be pulling off her scheme fairly well. She was quiet enough and unassuming enough that after people had said their “welcome back” and “happy to see you” to Lindsay, they pretty much let her be. She had her nose in that notebook almost all the time, which everyone thought was just Lindsay taking notes or writing in a journal. She gave me a pretty wide berth during school hours most of the time. Not Lindsay would call me after school, letting me know how things were going.

Thursday of that week, I got grabbed by the ear by Nadia.

“Zatella,” she scowled at me, pulling me into a quiet corner of the hallway. “What’s this nonsense you’re putting in Lindsay’s head about us taking her to California?”

“What?”

“She told me that you were supposed to ask me about going to San Fransisco,” Nadia said, glaring at me.

“Well, she mentioned something about it, yeah.”

“I swear to God, Kenny. You shouldn’t even be talking to that girl. Ever since—”

“Ever since what, Nadia?” I asked her. “She’s been acting funny? Since when?”

She stared back at me like she wanted to punch me.

“We are graduating in two weeks. Me and Dave and Austin. If you do anything to mess that up for us, I swear. It won’t be me you’re dealing with.”

“Who said anything about anything, Nadia? Just chill out. Everything’s fine.”

“It won’t be if you keep putting stupid ideas in her head.”

“Nadia, you graduate in two weeks, right?”

“What’s your point, Kenny?”

“What are you and Dave doing to celebrate?”

She shook her head at me. “Not driving to San Fransisco with you losers.”

Nadia began to walk away.

“Think about it,” I said.

She turned around and glared at me.

“I promise you everything will be fine. I’ll make certain of it, Nadia. Just think about it.”

“I’m going to kill you, Zatella. I swear.”

Chapter 8: Miles Davis

I’d had an inkling that Nadia and those boys didn’t want to get found out for taking Lindsay to Val’s during school, but until that moment, I had no idea Nadia was that petrified of somebody outing them. It didn’t even occur to me that it was something serious enough to ruin graduation for them, but that seemed to be her belief. And despite my not saying a word about it to anyone, rumors were circulating that Nadia and Dave knew something about how Lindsay had gotten hurt. Kaperton in the 90s was just that boring a town.

Other than that confrontation with Nadia, I don’t remember any problems at school with the exception of one time when Lindsay got called to the board in Mr. Fong’s class. She got the problem right, of course, but stopped on her way back to her seat and couldn’t resist giving him a long lecture about how ridiculous it was to do all these repetitive math problems without context, that mathematics was a language for representing the physical universe, and that it was no wonder all these fifteen-year-olds could barely do algebra with our educational model. “Oh, and by the way,” I remember her saying vividly, “There aren’t two algebras, Mr. Fong. There’s just algebra. What the hell is that two for?”

Poor, meek Mr. Fong looked like she’d totally blindsided him. I still remember his sad face as he said. “Well, there’s two courses, Miss McCall. It’s just the second course, but you raise some interesting points.”

He didn’t call on her for the rest of the year. I had to coach her into volunteering for at least a problem every day. Other than that, she had her face in that notebook the entire time.

I remember telling her after that class, “You cannot go off about mathematics like it’s poetry or something. I haven’t ever met a sophomore who talks like that, Lindsay, and neither has Mr. Fong.”

“I know. That was stupid.”

“No,” I said. “It was smart. We need you to be stupid. You’re supposed to be a regular kid still. Just keep quiet.”

She shook her head at me. “It’s hard, Kenny! All of this is hard!” She said before storming off.

Other than that one slip, we got by without incident. And she was doing the same at home too, passing it off like she was tired and busy to Beth and Roger, as she’d taken to calling Lindsay’s parents.

By our last week of school, Nadia, Dave, and Austin had already graduated. I didn’t ever think San Fransisco was actually going to happen, but apparently Lindsay had been talking to Nadia about it, and somehow, she’d promised Dave something to get him to buy in to the possibility.

I don’t remember the exact geometry of the stack of lies we all had to pile on top of each other to get out of Kaperton for three days, but I know it involved me telling my parents we were going camping near Mt. Rainier, that there was a much bigger group going, and that Dave Korski was an eagle scout. I think Nadia did most of the heavy lifting for Not Lindsay with Beth and Roger. At the time, none of us had a cell phone, so I remember bringing a bag of quarters so Not Lindsay and I could call home each night.

The morning we left, I remember Dave picking up Lindsay last. He had this hot red Mustang convertible that had to be part of what Nadia saw in him, but I remember sitting back behind those two in those tiny bucket seats thinking it was going to be a long way to California. I had to climb out at Lindsay’s to reassure the McCalls that we would be safe and responsible. I think part of the reason we ever got out of that town was the good will I’d built up with Mrs. McCall—and here she was sending off her only daughter with the three people most responsible for her condition in the first place.

“God. Roger and Beth,” Lindsay said, shaking her head as she got in Dave’s car. “Suffocating.”

“At least they care about you,” I said.

“Lindsay,” she replied. “They care about Lindsay.”

Dave’s head did a half turn that Not Lindsay didn’t notice. He returned his eyes to the road.

“Oh,” she said pulling open the backpack she’d stuffed right between us. “I brought music for the trip. Here.”

Lindsay’s backpack was filled with CDs she’d taken from the library. I shook my head at the bag as Lindsay handed the first disk to Nadia, who looked at it, read it, and looked back at Not Lindsay somewhat cockeyed.

“What is this?” Nadia said.

“It’s timeless,” Not Lindsay replied. “Trust me. I may not know much about, well, a lot of things here, but I know that for sure.”

Nadia giggled and put it in the CD player.

After about a minute of listening to the opening bars of what seemed to be a pretty decent jazz album to my ears, Dave looked over at Nadia.

“Babe, what the hell is this?”

“It’s timeless,” Nadia laughed back at him.

“No, really,” he insisted.

“It’s Miles Davis, you philistines,” Not Lindsay barked at them. “Listen. This album is perfection in musical form.”

“What?” Dave said, he nearly turned all the way around to look at Lindsay, who was seated behind Nadia on the passenger’s side. “Philistines? What does that even mean?”

“Exactly,” Lindsay said.

I think I was the only one in the car who got that dig.

“Who are you and what have you done with Lindsay McCall?” Dave joked. “I knew you hit your head pretty hard, Linds, but really? This is like what my grandmother would listen to.”

“Oh, David. Two thousand years from now, nobody is going to remember the United States of America or anything that happened here except for three things: Computing, space flight, and Jazz. That’s it. The entirety of your culture boiled down to those three triumphs, like Arabic numerals, Euclidean geometry from the Greeks and the English language—from England by the way.”

“Not like liberty and self-governance and the constitution or anything?” Dave asked.

Lindsay laughed. “That’s cute, Dave. Prepare to have your eyes opened in the next few decades, my friend. Computing. Space flight. Jazz. That’s all you’ll be remembered for.”

“What about nuclear weapons?” I asked quietly enough that I don’t think they heard me up front.

Lindsay didn’t reply but looked over at me as if to suggest I didn’t really want to know the answer to that question.

“So, I was kinda joking before,” Dave said. “But seriously, Lindsay, how hard did you hit your head?”

“Hard enough to bend space time,” Not Lindsay answered.

“Just listen to the album, babe,” Nadia insisted. “It is kinda relaxing.”

Chapter 9: Going to California

We headed south and then west toward the coast, listening to Miles Davis for that first hour. We hardly said a word once we got on the highway, and the music took us away. I’d never heard Miles Davis before. I suppose I didn’t know jazz well enough to understand the nuance of it, except perhaps to appreciate that it was good. Great art reaches out and grabs the souls of philistines as well.

In the moments I wasn’t entranced in the music, I found myself reflecting on the circumstances. I’d never been to San Francisco before and never been on a road trip like this except with my parents. All that time, stuck in that back seat behind Dave Korski, I couldn’t help but think about Lindsay, actual Lindsay. Of course I had doubts. Things like this didn’t happen in real life. Or maybe they did. There had to be a reason they happened in movies all the time. I wondered whether Not Lindsay would figure out how to change what she needed to change. Would we get our Lindsay back then, or would we get to learn more about the poetry of mathematics and the timelessness of Miles Davis from a fifteen-year-old prophet of our AI future? And what about Lindsay? Would she remember all this if she did come back? It was a lot to process, and all that time in Dave’s Mustang forced me to think about it more deeply than I had before. I think I started then to understand why Nadia had been so afraid.

And then there was the trip itself. Outside, the scenery, it took on a whole new meaning believing what I did about Not Lindsay, that she was experiencing this part of our world for the first time—seeing not just the beauty she raved about but the scope of it, the expanse of the highway, the world unfolding anew over the crest of each hill.

By early afternoon, mid-Oregon, just south of Eugene, Nadia and Dave started talking about going down the coast, camping by the ocean. We’d all brought warm clothes, so we were prepared. Not Lindsay immediately endorsed that plan.

“It’ll take more time,” Dave said.

“Yeah, but the ocean,” Lindsay said. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“Really?” Nadia replied. “Aren’t your grandparents from Seattle?”

“Well, I haven’t seen it recently,” Lindsay said.

“The Oregon coast I think she means,” I added.

“Okay, let’s do it then,” Dave said.

He handed the map to Nadia, asking her to pick out a place to camp that night. Somewhere in northern California, he insisted.

“It’s going to take us long enough to get down the coast. Might as well get as far as we can today.”

By mid-afternoon, we were all hungry enough and tired enough of listening to Lindsay beg Dave to pull over at a beach that we had to stop. We got close enough to the shore that as soon as Nadia got out, Lindsay went running out onto the beach, I thought to get a close look at some seagulls.

“Zatella?” Dave barked at me. “What the hell is going on with her?” I shrugged. “She’s like some weird combination of a seven- and seventy-year-old. What is she doing?”

He was watching her walk along the sand toward the waves coming in, and her eyes were fixed on a big brown object along the side of the beach that looked like a great big driftwood log from where I stood. Lindsay was walking that way, almost trance-like.

His mouth was half open, about to speak, and Dave bolted off toward the beach, shouting at Lindsay, who was far enough away by then that she couldn’t hear him. I looked over at Nadia, who also didn’t seem to know what the hell was going on. We watched for a few seconds before realizing that Dave, who thankfully had a decent sense of what was happening, had identified that big log as a large male sea lion lounging on the beach, which Lindsay was approaching blissfully unaware of any potential danger.

“Oh, my God, Kenny. Is she …? I don’t even know,” Nadia said.

We watched as Dave ran up on her. It was hard to tell from that far away how close Lindsay actually got to the massive creature before Dave grabbed her by the arm, pulling her back toward the middle of the open sands. It just didn’t occur to me that basic things like five-hundred-pound wild animals being dangerous would require an explanation, but apparently, they did. And Dave was sure giving it to her, probably not using the preferred eagle scout verbiage either, judging from body language. It looked like a pretty contentious moment before the two of them came walking back toward the car. Nadia and I got the cooler out of the trunk and carried the food and blankets down to the sand so we could all sit on the beach and eat.

For as angry as she seemed to be at Dave, Not Lindsay also looked like she’d almost immediately forgotten the confrontation. She didn’t say much as Nadia and I made sandwiches. It was a beautiful afternoon to sit and watch the waves crash before us. Lindsay tracked the birds gliding over the water, hardly even looking down once her sandwich was in her hand.

“What is this?” she asked me. “It’s good, Kenny.”

“Bologna,” I answered.

Dave looked at me and shook his head.

“What’s in it?” she asked. “I mean, what animal?”

“A fair question,” I answered again, “but probably one you don’t actually want the answer to.”

“Sorry, mystery animal, but you are delicious, and I am hungry. The food is so good here.”

Nadia looked over at her like she was crazy. Dave and I exchanged a look. It was a little awkward as we ate, but the view was so beautiful, it was hard for that energy not to simply slip away on the ocean breeze.

Back at the car, as Nadia and I were putting the gear away, Dave turned to Lindsay. “Hey, philistine, sit,” he said, gesturing for her to get in the front seat. “I want you to listen to something.”

I thought he might scold her again for running after that sea lion, but Dave had something else in mind.

“What?” Lindsay asked him.

“It’s a perfect song for our little adventure.”

“What song?”

“It’s called ‘Going to California,’” Dave said.

He got in the driver’s seat and started the car, and he put all the windows down. The afternoon was warm even though it was breezy, so he opened the roof and put the top down. Nadia got out a coat for herself and Lindsay, so I did as well. I recognized the song that Dave was playing as soon as it started. My dad liked that 60s and 70s rock as well. It was a good song. Actually, it was a great song. Nadia and I climbed over the doors into the back, half expecting Dave to start driving once we were in. He didn’t though. He sat there silently beside Not Lindsay, listening, every now and again looking over as she took in the music.

I didn’t know Dave Korski that well, and until that moment, I didn’t really have much of an opinion of him. He was just a guy I saw at school. But he sat there with Lindsay until the song was over without speaking a word. I didn’t realize until the music had faded out that Lindsay was crying. She looked over at Dave and said, “I’m sorry, David. You’re not a philistine. That was beautiful.”

Nadia handed Lindsay her coat. She started sobbing into it as soon as it was in her hands. Dave reached over and put his hand on her back. He was so surprisingly gentle with her in that moment.

“You’re okay, Linds,” he told her. “It’s going to be a good trip.”

Then he backed the car out, and off we went, down the coastal highway with the top down.

Legroom be damned: that was the way to travel.

Chapter 10: The Fire

We spent another four hours or so working our way down the coastline before we stopped to camp for the night not so far from the beach. It was still early enough in the year there weren’t many people camping out where we were. Not Lindsay was mesmerized by the fire.

“You can just burn a fire?” she asked as Dave was starting it.

“If you can get it lit,” he joked. “It’s more difficult than it looks. Fire needs to breathe.”

I asked Dave about his car. I knew he worked for his dad, who owned a big landscaping business in our area, covering maybe five or six towns around us. They had a lot of trucks. He’d been saving his landscaping money since he was twelve, he said. His dad had been helping him learn to save and invest, setting benchmarks that he had to hit for him to help Dave buy the car. It was at that point, I realized Nadia didn’t need to do all that much convincing to talk Dave into taking that trip down the coast. It had pretty much been a life’s dream, just, Lindsay and I probably hadn’t been there when he was daydreaming about it all through high school.

“So are you two going to tell us what this is all about?” Dave asked. “I know I didn’t know you all that well, Linds, but I know there’s something very different about you. Are you going to tell us or force us to guess?”

“I’m from the future,” Lindsay said, plain as anything.

“Ah, okay,” Dave replied. “That clears that up.”

“What’s your take on that, Kenny?” Nadia asked. “You’ve been very quiet. I thought maybe it might be that you had a crush on Lindsay, which, you know, I could see.” She shrugged as she said it. “But I think you believe her, don’t you?”

“Don’t you?” I asked Nadia.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said.

“This isn’t Lindsay,” I said. “I’ve known Lindsay since first grade. Whoever she is, if she’s acting, she hasn’t broken character in three weeks. She had to re-learn how to speak English.”

“That’s because she had a stroke, genius,” Dave said. “That’s what Beth told my mother.”

“Beth called your mother?” Not Lindsay asked.

He looked over at her like she had three heads. “Of course she did, Linds. You didn’t think she’d let you disappear for three days without checking on who you were going with, did you? I’m surprised she didn’t make me fax her a resume.”

“They’re too much,” Lindsay said, shaking her head.

“So what’s in store for our future, Lindsay, if you’re from the future?” Dave asked.

She shrugged, pulling her arms inside her sleeves as the evening grew dark around our fire. “I’m not going to be a great prognosticator on the micro scale, David. I’m from very far away in time and space. What I know of this time is very large view, major shifts in the geopolitical and technological landscape, sort of like people here might know about the history of Rome or ancient Egypt.”

“So no stock tips then? One of my dad’s friends got in on the ground floor at Microsoft. You should see his boat.”

Lindsay thought about it for a moment. “The people I’m looking for in Silicon Valley, they’re going to found companies that change the world—certainly the way the economy runs and the way people exchange information. It wouldn’t be a bad investment, but unless you have a fair amount of money to begin with, stocks aren’t really going to change your life, Dave, not if you’re going to work for your dad.”

“Bummer.”

“That’s not to say I couldn’t help you get rich. If you want, when this trip is all over, I’ll write you a set of directions that will make you so wealthy your grandkids won’t know what to do with all the money.”

Dave smiled. “I’m willing to listen to that.”

“What’s the trick?” Nadia asked.

“I’ll tell you all. It won’t be hard, just set a little money aside and have discipline and that’s it. You won’t even have to do the work.”

“Sounds too good to be true,” Nadia said.

It got quiet at the fire for a moment.

“So what’s this trip about?” Dave asked.

I could see he still had a slight smile hanging on his lips, like he didn’t want to be totally dismissive, but he clearly didn’t fully believe Not Lindsay.

So she began to tell them her story, from waking up at the diner, to Mr. Fong’s class, to learning English, to coming to Earth. She gave them her broad-scale understanding of this period in history—the advent of AI, the direction it was heading, and the way she hoped to change it. I don’t think any of us said a word for a half hour as Not Lindsay told her story—start to finish—Val’s Diner to that campfire.

“That’s some story,” Dave said. “I’d think it was total bullshit if it weren’t for the fact the Lindsay McCall I know couldn’t follow half of that story, much less make it up.”

“You follow, though, Dave?” Not Lindsay asked.

“Sure, I guess. Only the simple solution in the movies would be to blow up the AIs before they come into being.”

“They’re coming into being,” Not Lindsay insisted. “If Americans don’t build them the Chinese or the Russians or the Indians will. Governments and corporations. I’m hopeful I can give the right programmer the means to make the first ones benevolent rather than opportunistic and exploitative.”

“What happens if you can’t?” Nadia asked.

Not Lindsay shrugged. “Then I guess you’ll find out when you’re forty or fifty.”

“Human but not human?” I asked her after a long silence. “You said you’d tell me what that meant eventually.”

In the ensuing quiet the fire cracked, spitting glowing orange embers up toward the starlight.

“I’m sorry, Kenny,” Not Lindsay said. “I think it would be better if I didn’t say.”

“So what happens after you get this code to these people,” Dave asked her. “How do we get Lindsay back again? Do we need to get, like, an exorcist to cast out your evil spirit?”

He was smiling as he said it.

Not Lindsay smiled back, but it was a somber smile. She looked down into the orange flames, seemingly hugging herself tighter inside that coat of hers.

“I’m still working on that part,” she said, sighing. “We’ll have to figure something out.”

“Well,” Dave said. “It sure is something to think about. Me and Austin were frightened for you for a few days there, Linds. We really were. However it goes down in Silicon Valley, though, we’re all relieved you’re okay now. You’re a funny kid. That’s for sure.”

Whether he believed her or not at that moment, I couldn’t be sure, but I could tell by the look on Nadia’s face she certainly did. In that orange glow, I could see her across from me, equal parts fascinated and horrified. And then Dave would smile and look at Nadia, and she’d fake a smile as he kissed her cheek. But when Nadia looked across the fire at Lindsay—the doubt in her eyes, the belief that Not Lindsay wasn’t ours—she saw something distant, a total stranger with a familiar face.

Chapter 11: The Golden Gate

We spent the night out under the cool, starry sky by the ocean and started down the coastal highway the following morning. It was another beautiful, sunny California day, filled with vistas of the blue ocean, white waves crashing on the rocks, birds, sea lions lounging on the sands, sailboats on the horizon. Lindsay no longer seemed like an outlier marveling at the beauty of our world every ten minutes. She was noticing the same things we all were.

About halfway through the day, Not Lindsay got quiet. I leaned over and asked her about it, fighting the sound of the breeze. It was hard to be heard without shouting.

“I’m overwhelmed,” she said. “Everything is so much. I can’t even take it all in, much less talk about it.”

Meanwhile, up front, Dave was alternating between his CDs, mostly 90s rock, some of his dad’s, and every third one, a selection from Lindsay’s jazz from the Kaperton library.

By early afternoon, we stopped for more bologna sandwiches north of the Golden Gate. Dave spent some time grilling Not Lindsay on what her plans were for tracking down the engineers she was hoping to find in the area. Lindsay didn’t have any good answers, because she wasn’t exactly sure where to find the people she was looking for. She told Dave we’d have to look them up from the library. People weren’t so online back then.

We decided to go into the city right away. Dave and Nadia wanted to look around San Fransisco anyway. I volunteered to help Lindsay with her research project, locating all these engineers. Some were at Stanford—a professor and a few graduate students—and there were a couple people who worked at pretty famous companies in the tech industry. I tried to explain to Lindsay that it might be hard to talk to them. It wasn’t as though people like that took random meetings with teenagers on a regular basis.

“We have to try, Kenny,” she told me.

Before we’d approached the city, all this seemed like a decent plan, like we could simply drive into San Fransisco and accomplish a goal. None of us had a sense for the scope of our task until we caught sight of the bridge. At least in my teenage mind, it was a visual metaphor for everything monumental and overwhelming and far too big to even approach.

“I don’t suppose the bridge is still standing in your time,” Dave teased Lindsay as we began crossing the Golden Gate.

“I don’t know, but I doubt it,” Lindsay answered. “I’ve never been to Earth before, though, so I can’t say.”

“You know you can’t talk like that around normal people, Linds,” Nadia said. “People will freak out.”

“You’re normal people, you and Dave. Even Kenny. Well, maybe not Kenny, but you two anyway.”

Dave started laughing. “Even the alien from the future thinks you’re a weirdo, Kenny. You going to take that?”

“I kinda take it as a compliment,” I told him. “I guess I stand out.”

“None of my friends are normal where I come from,” Not Lindsay said. “We just all kinda fit together, though.”

Lindsay started to lean forward toward the front of the car as the wind coming across the water started to hit us. She was looking up at the great orange wires extending up to those iconic bridge towers.

“People built this? Not bots?”

I nodded to her.

“Robots build bridges?” Dave shouted back to us as the car started to pick up speed.

“You probably won’t live long enough to see it. But they’re going to build an elevator, a tower really, that goes all the way to space. As hard as that may be for you to imagine, it’s equally hard for me to imagine people up on those cables fitting all this together, welding. It’s terrifying to think of. Magnificent.”

“Steel workers,” Dave shouted, nodding his head, as though nothing more needed to be said.

I’d never been to San Francisco myself, and for a kid from the Washington suburbs, it was a little overwhelming at first, but the vibe in the city in the 90s was okay. There wasn’t a sense that the city was dangerous back then, not downtown anyway. I was more nervous about getting lost and not being able to find Dave and Nadia again. But we made plans on where to meet up and where to go if we couldn’t find each other in an emergency, and they went off to explore the city a little.

Lindsay and I spent the afternoon poring over phone books. She had marked out a few companies as precursors to the AI developers she knew from early history. She thought many of them would evolve out of search engines, which was something she had to explain to me. At the time, I had little interest in computers. But as we worked together to find these people, Not Lindsay would try to explain what type of work she thought they were doing, a little of it based on memory, more on articles we found in tech magazines and newspapers.

We left the library in the early evening with a hit list of sorts, cities marked on the map, addresses, even phone numbers. That success got our spirits up. We had a plan, and maybe that shaped our expectations unrealistically, but Lindsay was optimistic.

We met up with Nadia and Dave, who’d been walking around near Fisherman’s Wharf. Dave suggested we get dinner in Chinatown before heading south toward Stanford and trying to find a place to camp for the night. They’d scouted the area a little.

We didn’t have much money, but I remember that meal for the four of us being less than thirty dollars. I also remember the waitress speaking almost no English with the exception of one sentence she’d probably said to hundreds of tourists who bumbled into their first actual Chinese restaurant: “Okay, I order for you.” That’s still one of the top five meals of my life. Not Lindsay was in ecstasy. We’d gone from bologna sandwich to some other level of cuisine.

And then we walked back toward Dave’s car. On the way, Not Lindsay got drawn in by a number of street performers, including a violinist.

“Wood,” I remember her saying in awe, “that instrument is made of wood. It looks so real.”

“Yeah. It is real,” I responded.

“I need to talk to her,” Lindsay decided.

And she had a long chat with this young lady who turned out to be a student at the conservatory. At one point, Lindsay took out her notebook and started taking notes. I remember the violinist asking Lindsay if she wanted to hold the instrument, and she was too afraid to touch it, thinking she might drop or damage it somehow, as though that violin was so precious she couldn’t even fathom making contact with it, like the Mona Lisa or something.

We all hopped back in the car and headed south toward Silicon Valley. That night—getting out of the city in evening traffic, finding a place to camp, strategizing how we were going to speak to some of Lindsay’s people—I remember that being the first sign that we might struggle. I don’t think we got settled till nearly midnight, our tents pitched illegally in a Cupertino park. A few hours into the night, it started raining.

Chapter 12: Stanford

On Day three, we started cold, wet, and exhausted from a sleepless night. Lindsay had her plan, though. Dave and Nadia were content to drop us off near Stanford and cruise around the area. Not Lindsay had very little sense of inhibition, which meant I had to watch her closely to make sure she didn’t simply walk into a classroom that was in session or into faculty offices where we had no business being. By late morning, we found the first of Lindsay’s targets, a grad student in Mathematics named Vitor Hamin. When I asked Lindsay what he did, or would do, she replied, “Algorithms, Kenny. These guys all write algorithms.” At the time, that meant nothing to me and probably all but a handful of people on Earth.

Vitor was puzzled by Lindsay. But at Stanford, he’d probably come across a few teenage prodigies, and he seemed to lump her into that category, but I think he found it strange having her simply appear out of nowhere like that, talking about ethics and designing a moral framework for an AGI.

“But we’re at least five decades away,” I remember him telling her with a confused look on his face. “That would be like designing airbags for a horse-drawn carriage.”

“It’s much closer to thirty years, and it’s a huge problem,” she told him. “Will you at least look at the coding, allow me to explain?”

“I have a class to teach,” he said. “I have maybe five minutes.”

Lindsay opened her notebook and suddenly started speaking a mathematical language I couldn’t follow. Vitor himself seemed to really be struggling to keep up. At one point he said, “Who are you, girl?”

“That’s not important.”

I remember him flipping the pages at one point, shaking his head, and stating, “You code on paper? What even is this? I can’t see it.”

He shook his head, looking up at the clock. “I have to go,” he said.

“I need more time,” Lindsay begged him. “I need you to listen.”

He apologized and gave her the name of someone else in his department she should approach. But for the rest of the morning, it was one failure upon another, getting pushed away, denied access, told to vacate the building, and finding out people we needed to talk to were on sabbatical or traveling outside the country. Even when we went looking for Vitor again, he had left for the day.

“There’s the guy in Palo Alto,” I suggested. “We can walk from here.”

The afternoon went little better, with both targets on Lindsay’s list outright refusing to see us, and because they were corporate, we never got past the front desk.

Our last resort for the day was to try one of Lindsay’s targets at his home in Sunnyvale, which was a bus ride and a long walk from Palo Alto.

It did not go well.

We didn’t have much money with us, so we didn’t stop to eat, and about halfway to this guy’s house Lindsay had a full-blown emotional meltdown. It seemed to come out of nowhere.

“I get these emotions, Kenny,” she tried to explain, shaking her hands as she sobbed. “I can’t control my mind.”

We were walking down this suburban sidewalk, and she just sat down right there, rocking back and forth on the concrete. “This body,” she said. “It’s too much.”

I sat down with her, doing my best to be some help or comfort.

“What the hell are we even doing?” she said. “Where am I? What is this place?”

Then suddenly, a woman went by across the street, walking her dog, and it was like Lindsay’s mind suddenly snapped to, and she got up, walked across the street, and began to follow this woman and her dog. The woman let Lindsay pet the dog after I asked if she could.

“Are you kids okay?” the lady asked.

“Sure,” I told her. “We’re just trying to find West Haverton Road.”

She looked concerned but gave us directions nonetheless, and we kept walking.

“Sorry, Kenny,” Not Lindsay said as we were walking. “Sometimes I just can’t control these emotions. I don’t remember it being this difficult.”

“What, being an actual human?”

“I was thinking teenager, but I guess that too.”

Chapter 13: Jerri Patel

We arrived at Jerri Patel’s house almost exactly as he was getting home from work.

“Are you Mr. Patel?” Not Lindsay asked him.

“What are you kids selling?” he asked, smiling. “Chocolate?”

“A better future,” Not Lindsay replied. “I heard you were working on that at Straterus.”

And he got the same look on his face as Vitor, wondering why any teenager would care about his obscure telecommunications company.

“I suppose so,” he said. “That’s one goal, yes.”

“I can help you with that,” she told him. “I just need a few minutes of your time.”

At first, I think he suspected Lindsay was a local high-schooler angling for an internship or something like that.

“Well, I’ve just gotten home, and I like to keep my professional and home lives separate, but perhaps you could come by the office—”

“We went to your office, and they wouldn’t let us in.”

“Please, sir,” I added. “We’ve been walking all day.”

“Was that you they called up for? You two are persistent.”

“They told us you were in meetings all afternoon,” Lindsay said.

“You walked here from Palo Alto?”

“We took the bus and then walked,” I explained. “Please. Just five minutes? You’ll see. She’s not wasting your time, sir.”

“What’s this about?”

He was still standing beside his car with the driver’s door open, looking puzzled now.

“Artificial intelligence,” Lindsay stated. “It’s closer than you think, and it needs to be guided by the right people. I think you can be one of those people.”

He shrugged. “Let me tell my wife. I’ll sit with you both for a bit. Wait here.”

After a few minutes, he came back out and escorted us into the backyard. We sat behind the house on the Patels’ patio. Mrs. Patel came out with glasses of water for us. Lindsay and Jerri were already fully engrossed in a conversation he immediately knew went very deep into the weeds of a field he thought he knew well. Even on paper, she was decades ahead of him, though, and he could see it. Unlike Vitor, he seemed to be able to make some sense of the larger architecture of her coding.

Five minutes turned into forty, and Jerri asked us to stay for dinner. Even as hungry as she was, Lindsay hardly ate, busy as she was trying to talk Jerri Patel into adopting her understanding and hopefully taking up her mission.

“Why don’t you come work for me?” he asked her. “We can certainly find a place for you to grow as you go through school.”

“I have to go home,” Lindsay said. “I can’t stay.”

“Where is home?”

“Kaperton, Washington,” I answered. “About fourteen hours away.”

“You could come to Stanford.”

“No,” Lindsay said. “I can’t. I won’t be here that long. I can’t implement this.”

“This is exactly what a younger generation will have to build.”

“I can’t do it myself. It can’t be me.”

Eventually he shook his head. I remember him blinking excessively as he told her.

“This is far away, and there are problems, even as visionary an idea as this type of safeguard may be. Even the most brilliant ideas and inventions must be right for their time and place, and they must fit in a market. So many brilliant young engineers fail to understand this. It doesn’t matter how great an idea is. If you can’t find a way to make it profitable, it won’t be adopted. Either the market must buy it or the government must mandate it. And, like I said, this is thirty years away at least.”

“It’s not that far,” Lindsay insisted. “In fifteen years, people will need to see that code and understand its necessity. Please.”

“If you are looking for someone to implement this in the future, I don’t think it will be me,” Jerri Patel answered. “I can’t imagine this being part of our direction at Straterus. What I am willing to do is write you a letter of recommendation to Stanford when the time comes and offer you a job. We always need brilliant young talent, Lindsay, and I can see, you are brilliant.”

I could tell by her body language, the way she was shaking her head, the urgency, she was on the cusp of another meltdown again.

“Mr. Patel,” I said. “If you’re not the right person, perhaps you might suggest the right person to approach. We don’t know the area that well, and it’s been a struggle to find people to listen to us.”

“That is a good question, Kenny,” he said. “A good suggestion, yes. Hang on a minute.”

He left us sitting in his backyard. Lindsay was so frustrated she didn’t want to talk to me about it.

“Patel was important,” she said, shaking her head. “Our best chance.”

He came back with a name and a phone number on a post-it note. “This is the number for my friend Brody Sanger. He’s tied in with some very important people, and his company is doing internet infrastructure work. I left him a message, told him you’d come by tomorrow. Please go see him.”

“We will, Mr. Patel,” I said. “We’re so grateful for your time.”

Not Lindsay didn’t look grateful. She looked somewhere between frustrated and dejected.

“You’ll find your way, Lindsay,” he told her as we left. “I know you will.”

“His company is going to build the first sentient AI,” Lindsay told me as we were walking. “Five years before the world knows about it, that AI is going to shape the next century before humans realize what it’s doing to them. It won’t be the worst of the worst, but he’s no prize either, Kenny. I needed Patel to have that code.”

I shrugged. “Maybe the conversation is enough, just the idea in his head, you know?”

“One can only hope.”

Chapter 14: Tom Waits

We had to catch the train back to San Fransisco that evening. Our latest meetup with Nadia and Dave was for ten that night, which gave us about two hours to kill once we got back. We walked around for a bit. Lindsay seemed to be trying to find some live music again, seeking out that violinist.

Instead, we ended up at a music store. By that time, I didn’t think the two of us together had enough cash to buy a single CD, but Lindsay wanted to hear some music, and the vibe in the place was interesting. In that city at that time, there were still a handful of music stores that hadn’t gone fully commercial, and this was one of them. Behind the counter was an older guy who looked like he might have been an original hippy, a little bit on multiple planes but still with it enough that he could run a functioning business. There was also a young girl with a bunch of tattoos and piercings, sorta bohemian looking for those times.

“Can we listen to these?” Lindsay asked the old guy as we were browsing through the jazz section.

“What do you want to hear?” he replied.

Lindsay shrugged. “Something different. Maybe not standard. I know most of the real famous stuff.”

He took a long look at her. “You’re not from around here, are you? Not a California girl?”

She smiled for maybe the first time all day. “No, I am not. I’m a long way from home.”

“I’ve got something different for you.”

He had a section of records, and he nodded over to that bohemian girl. “Kay, bring me Saturday Night.”

The girl flipped through a stack of loose records and appeared at the counter with an album by Tom Waits. Neither of us had ever heard of him.

“That’s a funny name for a band,” Lindsay said. “Tom Waits.”

“What’s so funny?” the old hippy said.

“What’s Tom waiting for?” she asked totally unironically.

“Maybe he’s been waiting for you, darling,” the guy said smiling.

He gestured to an area beside the counter where he had a few beanbag chairs set on the floor. We sat and listened to that whole album. By the end, Lindsay was sitting with her eyes closed, in total bliss.

“Is she asleep?” the bohemian girl asked me quietly after the album finished.

“No,” I said, getting up. “She just liked it, I think.”

“I did,” Not Lindsay said with her eyes still closed. “We need to get that for David, Kenny. As a gift. This trip has been a lot. We should get him something special.”

I shrugged. “I only got like four dollars.”

She opened her eyes and fished through her bag and frowned.

“It’s ten,” the hippy said. “He already had it at the counter for us.”

“We only have seven,” Lindsay announced. “I’m sorry.”

“This album,” he said, “needs a proper home. For you, darling, I’d take seven.”

“You were right,” she told him. “He was waiting for me.”

Chapter 15: After

It was almost dark, and the moon was out when we finally met up with Dave and Nadia. It was clear out, so we drove out of the city with the top down, listening to that CD all the way to the park we’d camped in the night before.

“This world,” Lindsay said at one point, grabbing my hand. “Kenny, this world.”

I looked over and could see in the moonlight she was crying. At first, I thought maybe it was like earlier, the frustration of the day. But no. She was looking up at the stars, the lights blazing past, breathing in the night air.

“Beautiful,” she said, releasing my hand.

The stars stayed out all night, and we were all able to get some sleep. We didn’t even put up a tent.

The following morning, Dave and Nadia started getting a little nervous. We’d all told our parents we’d be back in town in three days knowing it’d be at least four. After Lindsay’s call home to Beth got contentious, Dave started talking about leaving that afternoon. Lindsay insisted on staying long enough to meet with Jerri Patel’s contact, which meant we had to stay in the city for most of the day.

“We could make it back in a day,” Dave said, “but we’d have to leave early and drive straight through tomorrow.”

“Whatever we have to do, David,” she told him. “We need to meet this guy.”

Reluctantly, Dave agreed to stay through to the following morning. “We should head North, though, tonight. Start our day early tomorrow so we don’t have to drive back through the city again.”

I was fine to go whenever. Lindsay was insistent on staying as long as she could to get someone to listen to her. So we got on the phone to Mr. Sanger’s office to make an appointment to see him. His secretary told us he couldn’t see us till two-thirty. So we spent that morning taking a walk through the redwoods.

We had an early picnic lunch in the forest, planning to head into the city in time to meet up with Brody Sanger at his office. It probably wasn’t even noon yet, but it was warm and sunny and beautiful under those ancient, towering conifers. The four of us were sitting together on the forest floor on blankets.

After we’d finished eating, Lindsay reached for my hand again as she stood, inviting me to walk with her.

“We need to talk, Kenny,” she said.

Nadia and Dave sorta looked at each other, raising their eyebrows as we walked off.

“I’m trying to be mindful of Lindsay,” she said as we were walking. “I have her memories, Kenny, access to them, sort of. Not exactly, though, like memories of memories. But one that I remember vividly is you having a crush on her, yeah?”

“Well, like in middle school,” I admitted.

“She wasn’t very kind to you about it.”

I shrugged, but Not Lindsay was right. Lindsay didn’t make it easy on me back then.

“Girls have to learn to deal with that kind of attention too, Kenny. It’s not innate and awkward, and I think she felt that she made some mistakes.”

“What’s this about?”

She shook her head. “I hope Lindsay won’t have any memory of this conversation.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out how to leave. I can’t stay here. I can’t steal this girl’s life. I’m also not sure how to give it back to her. But I like you, Kenny, and I’m privy to a few things you should know. Just, Lindsay, if you remember this forgive me for what I’m about to say.”

I looked at her funny and shook my head.

“You still like her, Kenny. I can tell by the way you look at me. You like me, I know, but you like her, right? You don’t have to tell me, I’m not blind.”

I didn’t exactly admit it, but I certainly didn’t deny it.

“Anyway, Kenny, you need to do better. You’re a good kid with a good heart, and you’re very bright. After this is over, whatever happens, promise me you’ll find somebody else. I know it’s hard, and you can’t choose who you have feelings for, God knows, but she’s wrong for you. I want you to promise me that when this trip is over, you’re going to give up on you and Lindsay McCall.”

“What if it’s still you?”

“It can’t be me. One way or another, I have to go, and I can figure that out on my own. Would you promise me?”

I shook my head at her. “You keep telling me how hard it is, that mind, that body. You think it’s any different for me, Lindsay?”

“Not Lindsay.”

“Whatever.”

“I know it’s hard,” she said.

“So what, after tomorrow I’m just never supposed to talk to you again?”

She sighed. “I’m not saying that. It’s just, you need to forget about you and Lindsay. You know what I mean. You can be polite, be friendly, be yourself.”

“But today, when you need something from me, though, when you need my help getting around the city, talking our way into this Sanger guy’s office?”

“You don’t need to come if you don’t want.”

“Yeah, I kinda do, because if you haven’t noticed, and you haven’t, you’re a pretty weird girl, and you do some crazy things. Somebody needs to watch you.”

“Don’t be mad at me,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not trying to hurt you, just being honest with you.”

“Okay, fine. When we go back to Kaperton, I’ll leave you alone.”

“I’m not her, Kenny. I never was, and I never will be.”

“Fine, I said.”

She put her hand on my back.

“Don’t touch me,” I told her, turning away. “Just … don’t.”

She stood beside me for a moment in the quiet of that ancient forest. I think she was thinking about what to say. And when she decided there wasn’t anything more to say, she turned back toward the others and left me by myself in that beautiful place, with the sun streaming through the towering redwoods.

Chapter 16: The Lesson

On the way into the city, Not Lindsay didn’t say a word. In fact, even when we got to the city, she hardly talked to me. All day, she had her journal open, scribbling furiously. Writing. Writing. She hardly looked up to take in her surroundings.

Mr. Sanger kept us waiting till nearly three-fifteen before his secretary finally showed us in.

Brody Sanger was considerably older than Jerri Patel, probably late fifties judging by his nearly fully gray hair and faded tie from the eighties. He had a look in his eye I didn’t like when he looked at Lindsay, a faint thing, sort of leering at her subtly—so subtle I don’t think she noticed it. Or maybe she did and was just ignoring it, thinking that her mission was too important to let something like that get in the way of getting the help she needed.

He listened to her intently, asking a few questions from behind his desk. When she offered to show him the coding, he shook his head.

“I wouldn’t understand it anyway,” he said. “I want the story. Patel thinks the coding works or he wouldn’t have sent you. Tell me why I should care.”

We were in his office for probably fifteen minutes, Not Lindsay explaining her concerns, her goal, the two potential futures she envisioned.

“I’m going to stop you,” Brody Sanger said at one point, with Lindsay mid-sentence. “I get the gist. Now what did Patel tell you about me, who I am?”

“Not much,” I answered when Lindsay seemed a bit flustered by his interruption.

“So, I am a financier, an investor.”

I nodded.

“You kids may be brilliant—she clearly is. And that’s great. I’m not saying the following to be mean but to educate you. Life’s most important lessons are the hardest to learn. Here’s a really hard one I had to learn the hard way too: Nobody cares unless you can find a way to serve someone else’s interests. You get me?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Young lady,” he said. “You’ve been talking my ear off for fifteen minutes, and my time is very valuable. I still have no idea how you’re going to make anybody any money. You don’t have a proposal here, no framework for a company. If anything, it sounds like this concept is going to cost anyone who adopts it millions to develop, and then will prevent them from making millions more once it’s implemented. Am I correct?”

Not Lindsay shrugged.

“Okay, that was the lesson. Here’s the good news, love. You’re clearly brilliant, and you’re young. Figure it out. You got plenty of time. Go figure out how to tell somebody the story of how something like that supports a profitable business. Then come see me in a few years. AI might be something by then. That’s all I got for you kids. Have a good afternoon.”

Then he turned toward his computer, which was facing sideways to us.

“Mr. Sanger—” Lindsay tried to say.

“My secretary will show you out.”

He didn’t even look back at us. We probably sat there for thirty seconds in silence as he ignored us. Finally, Not Lindsay looked over at me and shook her head as she got up.

“Thanks for your time,” I said as we left his office.

Brody Sanger didn’t even acknowledge me.

Chapter 17: The Bridge

Not Lindsay didn’t take it well. She was quiet, but I could tell by her bearing she was angry, disappointed, frustrated—all of it. I could feel her on the verge of another breakdown. As we left Sanger’s building, she started walking downhill toward the water. When I asked her what she wanted to do, she just said, “I need to think, Kenny. I need to clear my head.”

And she kept walking. After about twenty minutes, we’d passed by the Palace of the Arts. Another half hour and we’d walked past the Presidio, and suddenly we were at the bridge. I tried to tell her we’d need to walk all the way back to catch up with Dave and Nadia. We’d need to go North. It was time to go.

“I know,” she said. “Just, I need to clear my head.”

She kept walking. Then we were on the bridge. Not Lindsay kept walking. I was getting tired, and I wasn’t happy about having to walk all the way back. I started to drag a little bit behind her, as she didn’t seem like she had any intention of stopping. I thought she might walk clear across the Golden Gate.

“Where are we going, Lindsay?” I said.

“I just want to get a good look back at the city,” she said, “from the first tower.”

“That’s like a mile away.”

“You don’t have to come, Kenny. I don’t need you to be my shadow all the time.”

For a good thirty seconds, I stopped. I let her walk ahead of me. I hoped she would turn around once I stopped walking with her, but she didn’t. And then, as she kept walking, I suddenly got a bad feeling about the direction she was heading. Something about the way she looked at the horizon bothered me—at the tower, toward the other side of the bridge, the bay.

I started walking faster to catch up to her. And then, the chain link fence up where she was walking ran out, and it was just an ordinary railing at about chest height. I got a terrible feeling in my gut. I don’t know why I didn’t see it, but I’d missed it until it was right in front of me.

I sprinted toward her.

She was still walking, only I could see her eyes drifting more toward the railing, down toward the water.

“Lindsay, what the hell?” I shouted when I got closer. “What are we doing out here?”

“Leave me alone, Kenny.”

I was right beside her by that point. “No. This is bullshit. I see. I’m not going to let you.”

“Let me what?”

“You think I don’t see?”

“You think you’re going to stop me, Kenny?”

I stepped between her and the rail. “Yeah. I am. This is bullshit. I will knock you out and carry you back on my shoulders the whole way if I have to. I’m not going to let you. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“You don’t know who I am, and if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. This is how I go home.”

“By dying? By killing Lindsay, my friend?”

“She’s not your friend, Kenny. She’s not even real. None of this is real.”

“What the hell do you mean? All the beauty you won’t shut up about? The food? The birds? The music? None of that’s real?”

She shook her head at me. “You wouldn’t understand. The technology that sent me here—it’s a simulation of life. I’m not really here.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Now you’re talking crazy. If none of this is real, then what have we been doing meeting all these tech geniuses? Why would you bother trying to fix the future by changing this place if it’s just a simulation?”

I could see in her face that she hadn’t considered that point. She shook her head angrily at me.

“It doesn’t matter.” She didn’t make any move to get around me, but she was looking with her eyes. I could see.

“It matters to us. You were just going to what, jump off right in front of me? Make me watch? And then what? What about Dave and Nadia? You don’t think that would affect us for the rest of our lives? Beth and Roger McCall? What about them, Lindsay?”

“I wasn’t going to make you watch, Kenny?”

“Really, Lindsay, then what are we doing out here?”

“I’m not Lindsay, Kenny! You know this.”

“Maybe this is the first time I really believe that. I don’t know. I know she’d never put her parents through that hell. She wouldn’t do that to me.”

“I wasn’t going to make you watch, Kenny.”

“Then what are we doing out here? Explain it.”

She got quiet. We stood there for what had to be thirty seconds, staring into each other’s eyes.

“I don’t know how to leave. I don’t know how to get home. The technology that sent me here isn’t our technology. We didn’t build it, we found it. You go in, and you don’t go home again until you die. That’s how it works. I’m just trying to get home. There’s nothing malicious in it.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Sure looks malicious to me, whoever you are. Whatever you are—human but not human. Sure don’t seem human to me. For the first time you don’t.”

“You don’t need to stand there like that,” she said, shaking her head. “I wasn’t going to.”

“No? Then what are we doing out here?”

“Thinking. I was just trying it on, that idea.”

“Then we can walk back now?”

“Yes, Kenny,” she said. “We can walk back now.”

I took her hand. “A precaution,” I said, pulling her back toward the city. “There’s nothing more in it than that.”

She nodded and began to walk with me, back toward safety. She kept looking over at me. She could see I was furious.

We’d probably walked a half mile before she just started talking.

“I’ve been thinking a lot these past few days. I know you can’t possibly imagine my life before I came here, Kenny, but it’s real and it’s so different. Not in your wildest imagination could you begin to understand it. I’ve had a lot of thoughts I haven’t shared with you. And the obvious one is that this—this experience? Here? It is the greatest temptation I’ve ever faced. To just fall into this life in this time, in this place? My God, what a gift. These feelings. This body. A whole life. When Patel said he couldn’t do what I needed him to do, and that asshole today? The temptation to stay here and pioneer AGI myself? It’s too much. You have no idea.”

“Why not then? Why not just stay if you think it’s so great here?”

“Would that be okay, to just steal this life from Lindsay McCall, if this is real? That’s one problem. But the real problem for me is that the longer I stay here breathing this air, feeling the feelings I do, as strange as it is—” she squeezed my hand, “—I’m afraid that what I go back to will feel like hell to me. I can’t explain, but back there, where I came from, Kenny, I’m not really alive like this anymore. Human but not human—that’s what it means. It means I’m dead. I was a person, but I’m not anymore. I was a soldier in a war. An AI uploaded my consciousness to save me from dying. The longer I stay here, the more afraid I am of what it will feel like when I go back.”

“You’re right,” I told her. “I don’t understand. I’m sorry.”

“I guess I’m just thinking,” she said. “It’s not easy. It’s not my intention to hurt anyone, especially you and Lindsay. You two don’t deserve that. I guess I just need to figure out a way to die without dying.”

I released her hand once we got back behind that chain-link fence again. I walked a step behind her, right on Lindsay’s shoulder, keeping a close watch on her every last step until we walked off that bridge.

Chapter 18: Bach

By the time we got back to the Presidio it was beginning to get dark.  We were clear across the city from where we needed to check in with Dave and Nadia, but Lindsay didn’t want to go. In fact, she refused to go back.

“There’s something I have to do,” she declared.

“What we need to do is get in a taxi and meet up with Dave and Nadia,” I told her.

“If I’m going to be here, there are certain things I’m going to do, and you’re not going to stop me, Kenny Zatella.”

I pointed back toward the bridge, shaking my head.

“No,” she insisted. “That’s not it.”

She pulled out her backpack and opened her notebook. She leafed through the pages and then began to copy something down—an address.

“They’re playing Bach tonight,” she declared, tearing out a square from the notebook and handing it to me. “At 7:30. You three can meet me there. It’ll probably be a couple hours.”

“Are you joking, Lindsay? Who’s playing Bach?”

“The violinist I met the other day. She’s in an orchestra.”

“We’re leaving. We’re already going to be late to meet up with them.”

She shrugged. “I promise you I’m going to figure everything out, Kenny. But I’m going to see Bach first. Whatever you three want to do is your business.”

Lindsay started walking up toward the city again. I shook my head at her.

“What the hell am I supposed to do, Lindsay?”

“Go meet up with Dave and Nadia. I’ll meet you at the cathedral. Just like I said.”

Chapter 19: The Cathedral

I was forty minutes late to meet up with Dave and Nadia. I did my best to explain. Frankly, though, I was angry and frustrated and hungry and tired, and Lindsay or Not Lindsay or whoever the hell she was—that person, dead or living—she’d put me through the wringer that afternoon.

“What are we going to do with her, Kenny?” Nadia asked me.

“We’re going to bring her back to Kaperton. Then, I’m going to let Lindsay figure it out. I’ve got my own life to worry about.”

“Hey, Kenny,” Dave said, looking at me as though he was deep in thought. “You’re all right.”

He didn’t seem upset at all. He suggested the three of us get something to eat and then go check on Lindsay at the cathedral in a couple hours.

“She’s got a lot to work out, that kid. The traffic will clear out by then anyway. Then we can head north.”

I don’t remember where we sat and ate. In fact, I don’t remember anything until we showed up later at the cathedral. It was nearly ten by then, but the lights were still on. There were musicians on the sidewalk heading toward their cars, instruments in hand, saying their goodbyes, congratulating each other.

We didn’t see Lindsay outside, so Dave sat in the car while Nadia and I checked out the church.

I half expected she’d be gone, blowing in the wind somewhere. I’d told those two we’d walked to the bridge that afternoon, but I hadn’t told them everything.

“There she is,” Nadia said as we were about halfway up the center aisle.

Lindsay was sitting alone, her head cocked upward as she stared up at the cathedral’s high, arched ceiling. She’d clearly been crying. As soon as she saw us, she looked away and then down, and before she’d said a word, she started sobbing.

Nadia stepped into the pew and sat beside her, draping her arm over Lindsay’s shoulder. I stood in the aisle for a minute before I stepped into the pew in front of them and sat down. I couldn’t guess what it was that had affected Lindsay so much, of the million things she was trying to process. I sat quietly as Nadia tried to ask her what was wrong, but Lindsay was sobbing so hard she either couldn’t speak or didn’t want to try. For maybe five minutes we sat there together, the three of us.

“I didn’t understand,” Lindsay said finally. “I didn’t know anything until now. It’s real. It has to be. Bach is not an accident. He cannot be an accident.”

I turned around. Lindsay’s head was resting on Nadia shoulder, her eyes glistening in the dim yellow light. A few of the performers and helpers were still moving chairs and sound equipment at the front of the cathedral, finishing up breaking down the concert gear.

Lindsay reached forward and put her hand on the top of the pew, inviting me, I thought, to reach out to her. I put my hand on top of hers.

“I’m sorry, Kenny,” she said. “I was wrong about everything. I know now.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay. Are you ready to go now? Dave’s waiting for us outside.”

She took a deep breath, nodded, and sat up beside Nadia. “I’m ready.”

Slowly, we all stood and walked out together into the California night.

Chapter 20: Welcome to the Club

Dave drove us north across the Golden Gate. He hoped to get us out through wine country and then back inland so we could take the interstate north all the way home. But we needed to make some time and find a place to camp that night. He closed the roof the first time we stopped for gas. Lindsay hadn’t said a word, and as soon as we were driving again, with the top closed, she took out her notebook and started writing. I think I fell asleep for most of that ride.

I have no idea where we camped that night, but I remember Dave being pleased by our progress. It was well past midnight, and we were north of Sacramento somewhere, out in the country.

I’d pulled out my sleeping bag and had just lain down for the night, tentless, under the stars as we’d done when it was clear.

Lindsay came and sat down beside me. “Kenny, sit up,” she said. “This is important.”

“Huh. Can’t you just say what you need to say?”

“I need to know you’re awake.”

“Obviously I’m awake, Lindsay. You’re talking to me.”

“Sit up, please, Kenny,” she said.

I rolled back over and sat up, shaking my head. “Are you okay, now?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I want you to have this. It’s important to me that it ends up with you, no matter what happens. I want you to take it now.”

She handed me her notebook.

“Okay, I guess,” I told her. “Something you want to tell me about it?”

“I didn’t come here to change the future, Kenny. I figured it out. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn.”

“What?”

“That I have a soul. I’m not sure I know what to do about it, but at least I know it now.”

“Okay,” I said, shaking my head at her—that girl. “I don’t know what to do about that either, Lindsay. Sleep on it maybe.”

“Okay, Kenny,” she said, smiling. “I wanted you to know, though. This trip. It was worth it. Maybe the most important thing I’ve ever done. I am human. I always was.”

“That’s good,” I told her. “Great. Congratulations. Welcome to the club, I guess.”

She smiled and looked down at me. Even as groggy as I was, I suddenly got the sense that this conversation felt sort of like a goodbye. It had a sense of finality to it. I looked up at her.

“You’re not going to do anything …?”

“I would never hurt this girl,” she said. “I promise you that, Kenny.”

“All right then, I guess. Sleep tight.”

I tucked the notebook inside the sleeping bag with me and rolled over.

Chapter 21: Cheeseburgers

When I woke up again, it was morning. Dave was anxious to get on the road but insisted we call our parents while he was gassing up, since we’d missed our check-in the night before. The McCalls weren’t quite ready to call out the National Guard just yet, but we could hear Beth’s tone pretty clearly from about five feet back, and she even insisted on speaking to Dave at one point, who assured her everything was great, that the trip had been amazing, and that we’d be back to Kaperton in time for dinner, safe and sound.

Then we hit the road.

We drove all morning and into the early afternoon, straight through on the interstate, with Dave clearly on a mission to get us home fast. It was cool and overcast, so the roof was on. Not Lindsay, Nadia, and Dave were taking turns picking CDs. At one point, Dave asked Nadia to put in the Tom Waits on his turn, which drew a smile from Not Lindsay.

We were well into Oregon, almost to Portland, when Dave and Nadia agreed we should stop real quick and get some burgers—a final meal together before Kaperton. Lindsay, of course, didn’t protest.

It was a quiet meal, and one Lindsay seemed to be savoring a bit more than was warranted for fast-food cheeseburgers. She didn’t have much to say after her customary apology to the cow.

“So, Linds,” Dave said after everyone was just about finished eating, “you said you were going to tell us how to get rich.”

She smiled. “I wrote it in my notebook. Kenny has it.”

“You gave it to Zatella? I’m the one who bought your cheeseburgers,” he joked. “What’s the short version?”

“I wrote it down. You’d forget. It’s not a joke, though. You should all copy the directions.”

“Right,” he said, smiling.

When she’d finished eating, she stood up and excused herself to use the bathroom. Before she stepped away from the table, though, she paused and looked back at me.

“You’re a good kid, Kenny Zatella.”

It was another one of those funny moments, where I sensed the finality, but because of the way she’d acted with me the night before, I didn’t think anything of it.

Then, Not Lindsay just didn’t come back to the table. We were sitting there for probably five minutes before anyone noticed, and then Nadia went to the bathroom to check on her. Nadia came back soon after shaking her head. Initially, we weren’t that concerned, but after another ten minutes looking around the restaurant and the parking lot, we all started to search with increasing levels of urgency.

The area was one of those universally ugly overdeveloped strips of suburbia with fast food restaurants, shopping centers, gas stations and motels. Dave and Nadia started up the strip in opposite directions. Dave told me to stay by the car in case Lindsay came back.

As I was standing there, I did my best to scan the area, looking as carefully as I could to spot the faintest trace of Lindsay. Across the street from the car, there was a hotel—the kind of mid-tier place business travelers might stay on their way through Portland—Air Conditioning, Continental Breakfast, Fitness Center with Indoor Swimming Pool, the sign read. It didn’t really occur to me that Lindsay might have gone in there until I noticed there seemed to be a commotion near the front door.

I looked up and down my side of the street for Dave and Nadia, but neither of them were in sight. I heard sirens in the distance and suddenly got a terrible feeling in my gut. I didn’t want to leave the car, but something told me I needed to get over there, so I ran down to the nearest traffic light, and when I got halfway across the four lanes, from the concrete island median, I could see, walking across the parking lot, there was Lindsay, her hair and clothes soaking wet, and she was walking toward the road with what appeared to be the hotel manager and a teenage boy in a lifeguard’s t-shirt following her. She was trying to shoo them away.

I waited for the traffic to clear and then rushed across the highway. The manager and the lifeguard were trying to keep Lindsay from leaving. She looked pretty confused but also determined to leave.

“Lindsay,” I yelled as I approached. “Are you okay?”

She was disoriented and did a double take as she recognized me.

“Kenny Zatella?”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “These guys don’t want me to leave.”

“Do you know who this girl is?” the hotel manager asked me.

“Yes. She’s my friend,” I told them. “We were looking for her.”

I started to escort Lindsay back toward the crosswalk. I could see Dave heading back toward the car on the other side of the street. He started to jog toward us and waved once he saw Lindsay with me.

“Young man, you both need to wait for the ambulance.”

“Who needs an ambulance?” I asked.

The lifeguard looked at me like I had three heads. “She needs to get checked out.”

“Are you okay?” I asked Lindsay.

She still looked confused but nodded. Then Dave arrived.

The hotel manager still seemed intent on preventing Lindsay from leaving the property. We were on the sidewalk by the side of the street by then.

“You can’t leave, ma’am,” the hotel manager said.

“I’d like to go with my friends,” Lindsay said, reaching out toward Dave.

The traffic light turned red, and we began to cross the street. As we were about halfway across the road, we could see the ambulance splitting the traffic waiting at the light on the far side.

Dave looked over at the ambulance and then down at Lindsay, only then seeming to realize her hair was dripping wet.

“How did you get soaked, Linds?” he asked.

I watched Dave track the ambulance with his eyes as we walked back to the car. As the ambulance pulled into the hotel parking lot across the street, he turned and asked, “What happened over there, Linds?”

“Somebody drowned,” she said.

Nadia was just arriving at the car from the other direction. She grabbed Lindsay and bear hugged her.

Lindsay looked at Dave after Nadia let go.

“I think we should leave before the cops get here,” Lindsay said. “I want to go home, you guys.”

Chapter 22: Lindsay McCall

We passed the cops on the frontage road getting back onto the interstate. The nervous energy in the car was palpable all the way through Portland. I don’t think anyone truly relaxed until we’d crossed back into Washington. By then, it had been so quiet for so long that I don’t think any of us felt comfortable breaking the silence.

Lindsay was sitting up front with Dave. I was directly behind her, and Nadia was sitting behind Dave, who was driving. As we got closer and closer to Kaperton, Nadia and I kept exchanging looks. Finally, Nadia reached up and touched Lindsay’s arm. The touch startled her, and she looked back toward Nadia.

“Sorry,” Nadia said. “I didn’t mean to … Are you okay, Lindsay?”

“She did it on purpose,” Lindsay said, “because the lifeguard was there.”

Then she sighed and stared out the window all the way back to Kaperton.

By the time we got back to town, everyone was exhausted. Nadia had been drifting in and out of sleep beside me for nearly an hour. I didn’t know what to think or say. I wanted to ask Lindsay if Not Lindsay was truly gone, but I was pretty certain she’d done it, found a way to die without dying—to give Lindsay back her natural life. But where did she go that person? Did Lindsay know? Who was she really?

We all stepped out after Dave stopped in the McCalls’ driveway. Beth McCall opened up the front door and was about to come out, but Lindsay shook her head and waved at her to stay put. Dave and Nadia started gathering Lindsay’s stuff from the trunk.

“Kenny,” Lindsay said. “I have something to say to you before you go.”

“Sure,” I said. “I just want you to know, if you need anything …”

“I’m okay,” she answered. “As okay as I can be, I guess. The thing is, Kenny. I don’t think I’m going to want to see you. I’m sorry, but—”

“I understand.”

“The thing is, I have flashes of memories from these past couple days. I don’t know how long it’s been.”

“Three weeks, I think. About three weeks.”

Lindsay shrugged. “Anyway, I have a feeling, just a real general sense that you helped me, made me feel safe. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to think about these past few weeks again. So don’t be offended if I don’t go out of my way to talk to you.”

“I know. We’re not friends. It’s okay. I’m not offended.”

“I just wanted to make sure I thanked you for looking out for me,” she said, and she put her hand over her heart. “Me,” she said again. “Thank you, Kenny Zatella.”

I gave her a hug and then turned and helped Nadia and Dave carry her stuff to the McCalls’ front doorstep. Beth told us to just leave it all there and thanked us for bringing Lindsay back safely.

It was quiet again in the car on the way back to my house, but only till Dave had pulled away from the McCalls’.

“So are we going to talk about what the hell just happened?” Dave said. “Kenny?”

“I’m not really sure I know,” I answered. “She gave me her notebook last night. Oh—”

I pulled out my bag and opened it, taking out the notebook.

“I haven’t looked at it, but it’s got all that computer code she wrote in there.”

“Lindsay doesn’t know anything about computers,” Nadia insisted.

“Hang on,” I said. “The instructions, Dave—how to get rich. They’re in here somewhere.”

I flipped through the pages.

“Kenny,” Nadia said, shaking her head. “I think you should put that away and give it back to Lindsay.”

“Babe,” Dave said. “I don’t think she wants anything to do with it.”

The two of them started arguing, and as they did, I began to leaf through the notebook. In the dim light of his backseat, it was difficult to see, but finally, I flipped to a page near the back that was labeled in big block letters at the top in between two pair of bold dollar signs: $$ FOR DAVID KORSKI $$

“Should I read it?” I asked.

“What’s it say, Zatella?”

Dear, David, I began to read aloud.  At some point in the first two decades of the second millennium, digital money will be pioneered independently of governments. At first it will be very obscure. You will need to follow tech news and go looking for ways to buy in before it goes mainstream. In the first decade of their initial growth, I’m not exactly sure when, but digital currencies called cryptocurrencies will grow in value at an exponential rate. The first major currency to take off will be called Bitcoin. If you buy it at $1 and hold it for its first decade without selling, that single dollar’s value will compound one hundred thousand times over. If you buy 1000 Bitcoin at $1 and have the discipline to simply hold it through its initial ups and downs, you will own one hundred million dollars in value roughly two decades from now. I would suggest investing an amount that is small enough you won’t be tempted to even look at the daily price. Put in a thousand dollars and forget about it. Best of luck to you, David. You are a good soul and definitely not a philistine. –Your eternal friend, Rishi Sarol-Companys.

“Digital money?” he said, turning his head back toward me skeptically. “What did she call it, Kenny? Crypto-something?”

“Cryptocurrency.”

“You going to tear that page out for me?”

“Sure,” I said, pulling the page out of the notebook, folding it, and handing it up to him.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nadia said. “It’s not real. It’s just a silly story.”

“Nadia,” I said, opening the notebook to the pages and pages of coding, leafing through so she could see it. “Look at this. Lindsay wrote this computer coding. Those professors at Stanford didn’t even understand it properly.”

“That’s because it’s gibberish, Kenny.”

“I think the math geniuses at Stanford can tell computer code from gibberish, babe,” Dave said. “What the hell could it hurt? A thousand bucks? You’re going to bet twenty times that on college next year alone.”

“Yeah, I’m also going to get an education, Dave. You might as well light a thousand bucks on fire.”

I tried to read through her notebook while they argued, in case there was a note there for Nadia. I figured I would have plenty of time to find whatever she’d written for me in that notebook. But by the time Dave got to my house, I hadn’t found a letter for Nadia, and on that quick pass through the notebook, my heart sank as I realized there was nothing for me in there either.

When he dropped me off, Dave helped me get everything out of the trunk while Nadia sat in the front seat. She was upset. It might have been that she was upset in the moment—that fight with Dave. More probably, it was that strange reckoning her mind was having with the impossible thing we’d all just witnessed.

I remember Dave Korski shaking my hand at the end of my driveway before getting back into his Mustang and driving off. “You did good, Zatella,” he told me. “You did right by her. Don’t forget to buy in, kid.”

Chapter 23: Remembrances

At some point during college, I revisited Lindsay’s notebook. I’d never forgotten how fascinated those Silicon Valley geniuses were with Not Lindsay’s coding. For a while—a couple years maybe—I was angry that she never left me a note like she had for Dave Korski, signed with that strange name she didn’t even reveal to me until I’d read it aloud to him, after she was already gone.

I transcribed most of the completed code digitally while I was an undergrad, and I must have thought I had copied what mattered, because, at some point, I left that notebook behind in my childhood bedroom. Then, one day, probably years after all the kids had left home, my parents put that stuff in a box that got stuffed in the attic where it sat collecting dust until my mom died.

Rishi had spent weeks on that code. I only realized this two decades later with experienced eyes. The front half of that notebook was filled with stops and starts—the rough draft of her remembrances of that futuristic coding language. The actual code that I’d transcribed in college—she’d patched that together in the back of the book from the correct formulations she’d worked through in the front. I could see how meticulously she’d pieced it together, back and forth, piece by piece, fighting for each ingenious line with that fifteen-year-old’s borrowed brain.

I read all those lines over and over after finding them again, striving to see how she’d done it—freehand, pencil and paper from a memory of a memory from a place so far across space and time that my mind couldn’t possibly fathom it. I had to see how she’d brought all that elegance into being from pages and pages of utter chaos. I flipped back and forth, methodically, struggling to follow, and as I did, I charted many of the pitfalls and turns of my past twenty years professionally—the assumptions, the roadblocks, and the triumphs—and as I revisited that journey, I learned that so much of her coding was in my own work that I came to understand she had, after all, left a message for me in that notebook. I also began to believe it might be possible, one day, that all that brilliant work could be a cohesive, programmatic element of an AI’s underlying algorithm. Perhaps someday it will. Perhaps someday soon.

There were also pages of notes she’d taken in that book—random things written in English, mostly with good common spelling. Some of these notations and musings triggered memories for me. Many I couldn’t place. But one note, from the night we left San Francisco brought back a flood of memories from that day which will live with me through the rest of my life.

It read simply: 6/3/1998, 7:30 PM, Grace Cathedral, San Fransisco, California. Mass in B Minor. You have a soul. Such things can never be coded.