Turn 12 of 12

Tell her everything — the edit, the sync, the undo, all of it

You pull the other chair from the corner and sit down next to her. The room is small and the two of you are shoulder to shoulder, the laptop between you, its screen painting both your faces the same shade of pale blue. You take a breath. You have not said any of this out loud yet. You have not heard it in your own voice, in a room with another person, arranged in the sequence that would make sense to someone who did not watch it happen.

'I found a program,' you say. 'An exe, in a folder I didn't create. I ran it. It's got — it's a database. Like a CRM. Everyone I know, everyone you know, they're all in there. Names, addresses, jobs. And then other fields. Sleep patterns. Phobias. Relationship summaries. Things that — Saanvi, things that are accurate. Things I didn't know about Milo and they were right.'

Saanvi is looking at the file path. Her face has not changed. She is in work mode, the same face she wears when a test fails and the logs don't explain why. 'Keep going,' she says.

'I changed a field. On Milo's record. He drinks — you know he drinks. I changed it to no. There was a sync button. I clicked it.' You stop. Your hands are between your knees, pressing together, and you can feel the shaking in your wrists. 'And then he didn't. He doesn't remember drinking. I don't remember him drinking. Nobody remembers. The texts on my phone changed. The history changed. Saanvi, it rewrote him.'

She turns to look at you. Her glasses catch the screen light. She does not speak for a long time, and in that silence you hear the radiator tick and the faint sound of the fridge cycling in the kitchen and the specific quality of a room in which one person has said an impossible thing and the other person is deciding what to do with it.

'I had one undo,' you say. 'One. I used it. I put him back. He's — he's awake right now, Saanvi. He's been trying to quit all year and failing, and tonight he poured his last bottle down the sink, and I gave him back the year of failing because it was his. Because it wasn't mine to fix. And now I have no undos left, and the program moved itself to this folder after I deleted the original, and it's got a record on me, and the record is watching me. It logged me opening it. It logged me texting Milo. It logged me reading the log.'

Saanvi takes off her glasses. She cleans them on her hoodie — the habitual gesture, the one she does when she is thinking, when she is processing, when the data does not fit the expected result. She puts them back on and looks at the screen. 'Show me,' she says.