He typed, Who are you? He typed, What do you want? He typed, What did you do to Anja? Behind him, the apartment expanded like a lung. The last time he’d been afraid in his own space was in childhood. He deleted the last question, saved the document, and closed it, heart thumping at the possibility of a reply.
* * *
—
HE’D GLIMPSED her, or thought he had, only once post-high-school, when The Garden first went live. Back then, the team was still dropping in daily to work together in their virtual office. He happened to look out the window and see the avatar: an iconic Robert Smith with a crown of ivy trellising its head. When the avatar saw him, it froze, eyes convincingly wide. Then it was gone, and Erin checked the log. No record of any avatar within a tenth of a mile around the building. He told no one. He’d been sure it was Anja.
Erin had wasted a lot of time in high school searching for things to introduce to her; his only contribution was the band his mother still listened to then, earbuds buzzing, towel over her eyes. He and Anja had caught her at it one day their sophomore year when Luna canceled her seminar and was home early. Anja, transfixed, asked if he knew what his mom was listening to. Erin did know, and Anja had thrust her phone at him. By then Erin knew the beetle headphones welded to her ears were always playing music, but like all things related to her deafness, he’d been afraid to ask about it. Anja, huffing, snatched back her phone. Music = Vibration, she swiped. The revelation detonated his heart. He played her Pornography. She side-eyed him but absorbed the album, saved all eight tracks to her playlist, plus the band’s every iteration of “The Hanging Garden.” It became their soundtrack for the rest of high school, Robert Smith’s cackling voice—fall fall fall jump jump out of time—caroming through their skulls, sparking manic fireworks of adrenaline and endorphins that baked a kind of sonic palimpsest into The Garden.
You mean like a garden beneath The Garden? she’d written when he shared this observation.
“Something like that,” he’d replied. “Do you think Smith’s Hanging Garden is like Babylon’s gone bad? Like a dream that got lost and turned into its nightmare?”
She tapped her pen. E, everything mutates. But we can control G.
“But what if we can’t? We don’t have to be responsible.”
If we don’t try, we’ll be responsible too.
What Erin didn’t tell her was that he’d also started looping the song outside the basement, listening to the strangled words tunneling out of Robert Smith’s throat like a voice squeezed from far away as the drums hammered down, machine-like, driving nails into the acoustic coffin, closing up the human echo. It left an ache inside him that followed him back into The Garden, bruising the hours he spent there trying to reconcile his nightmare with Anja’s dream. “Sometimes I don’t know what we’re trying to save. I mean, what does an ideal human future even look like?” he said.
For the first time, Anja too had had no answer.
* * *
—
TWO PINGS startled him out of a nap. One a text message from Mortimer (gale on standby). The other a hideous dialog box flashing on his laptop screen.
The Garden has been breached.
The Garden has been breached.
Panic moved through him, his old nightmare mutating, annexing his brain: a weaponized Garden. He snapped on the VR headset and clicked the green orb.
But nothing had changed. No one had introduced a pandemic. No one was breaching their office building. Above, clouds were hurrying through the sky, stray gusts tousling the treetops. The dog park was empty, a few avatars bent like broken umbrellas against the wind. He rode the elevator to the seventh floor.
Everybody was there; Gale was on track to test its prototype, and the team was running preliminary checks. He’d forgotten this synergy, his team in full flow, though the warmth was gone, everyone wary of the hidden spigot, the traitorous leaker. Mortimer strode over.
“New activity?” Erin asked.
Mortimer held up the map. Around the globe, flags had amassed in the largest cities. He pinched the map’s surface. The flags dispersed, and the continents gave way to an arterial network of rivers and highways splotched with the green alveoli of the few state parks and refuges still under legal protection. Then the borders of their state appeared, and Mortimer focused on the tiny blue patch just outside their city perimeter. When the map entered streetview, Erin saw the familiar park reservoir less than two miles from them, surrounded by a ring of white avatars standing at attention, their red insignias in perfect alignment.
“It’s the same everywhere,” Mortimer said. “Every major park and garden.” He zoomed out until the avatars compacted into a circle of white dots that multiplied like white blood cells around other green and blue patches.
Erin’s physical phone pinged. def not titan. too weird, Mortimer’s text message read. Erin returned to The Garden. The spotted globe looked diseased. “Bakteria?” he asked, evoking the catchall spectral hacker group blamed for almost all major cyberattacks in the decade of its activity, including the recent raid on a renowned pharmacological research center. For all its notoriety, the group had remained elusive, leaving no traces in any cyberwreckage. Its signature was a total lack. “Zoom back in,” Erin said.
The avatars were still ringed around the reservoir, but they’d pivoted to face out like sentinels. They looked unarmed, but that meant little in The Garden, where new gadgets flourished without their knowledge and often didn’t announce themselves.
“Do we need rules for synchronized behavior?” Mortimer asked.
“We’re not a totalitarian state,” Erin said, slipping his gaze around the office. No one was looking at him. No one seemed tense or excited. But avatars were as expressive as Noh masks; they could reveal or hide anything.
Across the room, on the weather panel, the storm had engulfed the Northeast; soon Gale would enjoy optimal conditions for its tests, but more of the East Coast would go dark. His physical laptop pinged: a desktop notification. He lifted his headset. Another flashing pop-up:
E is for Erin
E is for Erin
Did you let her in, Erin?
At the bottom, a static image of a beat-up roll-top backpack.
* * *
—
ANJA DISAPPEARED three weeks before graduation. As usual, they’d been working together in his basement after school. His mom had made dinner, and Anja, as she often did, had eaten with them, filling her bowl twice. Then she’d grabbed her backpack, and he’d walked her to her house. It was a chilly night, a damp mist tarrying in the air, smearing the halos of porch lights. As usual, the sidewalk ended too quickly, and as she stepped into her driveway a flash of anguish propelled him to tug her backpack. Anja, stumbling, laughed, a rare husky, joyful hoot, and Erin, ridiculously happy, had turned, leaving her to traverse the few steps to her door.