Turn 2 of 12

Scroll through Milo's full record before deciding anything

You scroll down. The record is longer than you expected — longer than any contact card has a right to be — and the fields do not follow any schema you recognise. The first section is mundane enough. NAME: Milo Fenwick. NICKNAME: Fen. DOB: 11/03/1997. ADDRESS: 14b Henley Road, flat above the chip shop, the one that smells like vinegar on Thursdays. JOB: Site manager, Kestrel Construction. SISTER: Priya Fenwick, 31, Manchester. YEAR MET: 2016, university halls, the night he put a fire extinguisher through a vending machine. These are facts you knew. They sit in their text boxes like nothing, inert, the kind of data that lives in your phone contacts and your memory equally.

Then the fields get strange. INJURIES: Right knee, meniscus tear, October 2022 — the six-a-side incident, yes, you remember the way he hobbled for a month. But there are more. LEFT HAND: Scar, webbing between thumb and forefinger, age nine, broken bottle. You know this scar. You have never known the story. The field knows the story. It is not a notes field; it is a single text box with thirty words of detail. PHOBIAS: Heights, moderate. Deep water, mild. You did not know either of those. You have known Milo Fenwick for eight years and you did not know he was afraid of water.

Further down. SLEEP: 6.2 hours average, disrupted. MOOD: baseline low, seasonal dip November–February. The program has a number for his mood. It has a decimal. You scroll past a section labelled RELATIONSHIPS — six entries, each a name and a one-line summary, none of them romantic, all of them people you know or half-know — and then you reach a field that makes you stop scrolling.

HABITS (CURRENT): Runs 3x weekly, early, alone. Quit smoking 2021, vaping since. Attends Sunday league, competitive. Drinks: no. The last two letters are still yours, still sitting in the text box like they grew there. But below them, in a field you did not touch, the text reads: QUIT_ATTEMPTS (ALCOHOL): 0. Zero. Because the year of trying and failing, the year of hating himself, the year of telling you about it at 1 a.m. on a Wednesday while you sat on his sofa and did not know what to say — that year does not exist anymore. It is not in the record. It is not in Milo's head. It is only in yours, and you are not entirely sure how long it will stay there.

The cursor blinks at the bottom of the record. There are more fields below — you can see the scrollbar is not at the bottom, maybe a screen's worth of text you have not reached — but your eyes keep returning to the zero. QUIT_ATTEMPTS (ALCOHOL): 0. A clean record. A field that has never needed to be anything else. The undo counter in the corner still reads 1, patient, indifferent, the only number in the program that seems to understand what it is for.