Chapter 10
Fifteen months ago:
Mercury: Do you ever wonder if we’d recognize each other? In person?
Binary: Unlikely. We have no visual data.
Mercury: That’s not what I meant. I meant…would we still be US? Without the screens between us?
Binary: The screens are just a transmission medium. The signal remains constant.
Mercury: You’re very confident about that.
Binary: I know your syntax patterns better than I know most people’s faces. That doesn’t change with proximity.
Mercury: Sometimes I think you see me more clearly than anyone who’s actually looked at me.
Lincoln woke to the weight of Morgan against his chest and the soft murmur of words he couldn’t quite catch.
This had become their pattern over the past three nights around two a.m. The first night, he’d heard her scream through the walls and found her tangled in sweat-damp sheets, quoting Dickinson in a voice that didn’t sound like her own.
The second night, he’d simply shown up before the screaming started, some part of him already attuned to her rhythms in a way he couldn’t quantify.
Now, on the third morning, waking up beside her felt inevitable.
She was still murmuring. He caught fragments—“tell all the truth but tell it slant”—and recognized another Dickinson poem woven through her dreams. Even in sleep, her mind reached for poetry the way his reached for code.
Self-soothing. Pattern recognition. The comfort of familiar rhythms when everything else had gone sideways.
He lay still, not wanting to wake her. She slept curled tight against him, her body a question mark pressed into his side, but he’d noticed she startled at sudden movements.
She leaned into him when she was calm, sought his warmth like something she’d been denied too long, but any unexpected shift made her flinch before she could stop herself.
Lincoln understood wanting something and being afraid of it at the same time.
He wasn’t inexperienced with women. That wasn’t the issue. He’d had relationships—if you could call them that. Brief entanglements with women who found his intensity intriguing at first and exhausting shortly after.
Women who wanted him to remember their birthdays and ask about their days and perform the small social rituals that had always felt like speaking a language he’d learned from textbooks. He could do it, technically. He just couldn’t make it feel natural, and eventually, they noticed.
Casual encounters held no appeal. The mathematics of one-night stands seemed inefficient—high energy expenditure for minimal return.
He’d tried it in his twenties, mostly because Bear had insisted it was a normal thing to do and found the whole experience more confusing than satisfying.
Too many unspoken expectations. Too many variables he couldn’t predict or control.
What he’d wanted, always, was someone whose brain worked like his. Someone who wouldn’t need the social translation. Someone who found his quirks interesting rather than exhausting.
He’d stopped believing that person existed.
Then Mercury had appeared online and broken an unbreakable encryption as if it were child’s play.
Now she was here. Real. Beautiful. Warm against his side, her fingers curled into his shirt like she was afraid he’d disappear.
Her eyes opened.
For a moment, she just looked at him, her green-hazel gaze hazy with sleep. Recognition settled over her features slowly. Then something softer.
“You stayed.”
“You asked me to.”
“I know. I just…” Her fingers loosened their grip on his shirt but didn’t let go entirely. “I’m not used to people staying.”
He had questions—hundreds of them—but he was learning to let her offer information rather than extracting it. She’d tell him things when she was ready. Pushing would only make her retreat.
“Are you hungry?” he asked instead. “I can make breakfast.”
“You cook?”
“I can follow a recipe. Recipes are just algorithms with ingredients.”
Her mouth curved—not quite a smile, but close. “I’d like that.”
She sat up slowly, and Lincoln noticed the way she cataloged the room as she did—her eyes moving in a systematic sweep that reminded him of his own security protocols. Taking in details. Recording everything.
“I think,” she said, her voice careful, “I’d like to see more than just this room today.”
Lincoln sat up beside her. “You’re ready?”
“I don’t know if ready is the right word.
But I can’t stay in here forever.” Her fingers started their unconscious rhythm against her thigh—da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM.
Iambic pentameter. He recognized it from her typing patterns, all those late-night exchanges when her keystrokes had shifted into waltz time. “I want to see where Binary lives.”
“Lincoln,” he said. “You can call me Lincoln.”
“I know.” She met his eyes. “But you’ll always be Binary to me too. Both things can be true.”
Both things can be true. Lincoln turned that over in his mind and found it surprisingly logical.
The house was too large for one person. Lincoln had known that when he built it, had calculated the square footage against his actual needs and come up significantly over budget in every category.
Money hadn’t been a problem—after the hardware and software he’d designed and sold over the years, money would never be a problem—so he hadn’t worried about it.
This space served purposes beyond habitation. Room for servers. Room for security infrastructure. Room to pace when his brain wouldn’t quiet down at three a.m.
Room, apparently, for a woman with auburn hair to walk through his hallways and notice everything he’d stopped seeing years ago.
“Your books are out of order.”
Lincoln paused in the doorway of the living room. Morgan had hesitated in front of the built-in shelves, her head tilted at an angle that suggested deep concentration.
“They’re alphabetized by author.”
“Yes, but within the author groupings, they’re not chronological by publication date.” She reached out, almost touched a spine, then pulled her hand back. “This Asimov collection has Foundation and Empire before Foundation. And your Heinlein—”
“You organize by publication date?”
“It’s the only honest organization. The order things entered the world matters.” She caught herself, and Lincoln watched the shift happen—the sudden awareness that she’d revealed too much, the instinctive retreat. “Sorry. I know it’s not—most people don’t care about that kind of thing.”
“I care.”
She looked at him, uncertain.
“I just never thought about it that way,” Lincoln continued. “Alphabetical seemed efficient. But your system has internal logic. Chronology preserves the evolution of an author’s thinking.”
Morgan’s shoulders loosened slightly. “Ms. Delacroix—she was my mentor—she used to say you could trace a writer’s whole life through the order of their books. What they feared, what they hoped for, how they changed.”
He nodded. “That’s logical.”
“May I—” She gestured toward the shelves. “Just the Asimov.”
“Of course. Feel free to reorganize in whatever way seems best.”
She moved before he’d finished speaking, her hands finding spines and pulling them free with a particular kind of reverence. Lincoln watched her work—watched her fingers sort and arrange, watched her lips move silently as she processed publication dates from memory.
That was when it hit him. Really hit him.
She wasn’t looking anything up. Wasn’t checking copyright pages or pulling out her phone. She just knew. Every publication date, every book in the sequence, pulled from perfect memory like data from a server.
Lincoln had spent fifteen years building systems to do what her brain did automatically.
All those servers humming in his command center, all those redundant backup arrays and indexed databases, they were just his attempt to approximate what she’d been born with.
He’d made a fortune creating tools for information storage and retrieval, and here she was, doing it better than any of his algorithms without even trying.
Knowing about her memory and watching it in action were two very different things.
When she finished reorganizing the Asimov section, she stepped back and surveyed her work with obvious satisfaction. Then she moved on to the next section.
All he could do was watch, fascinated.
Eventually, she froze, her face flushing, as she turned to him. “I just reorganized your entire bookshelf without asking.”
“I noticed.”
“That was—I shouldn’t have—” She pressed her palms flat against her thighs. “I do stuff like that. When I’m anxious. Make external order to manage internal chaos. I should have asked first.”
“Morgan.” He waited until she looked at him. “My command center is arranged in a very specific configuration. Every monitor, every cable, every peripheral in exactly the right position. When someone moves my mouse three inches to the left, it bothers me for the rest of the day.”
She laughed—a small, surprised sound. “Three inches?”
“Two point seven, technically. But I round up.”
“Of course you do.”
The ease of it caught him off guard. No judgment, no confusion—just acceptance. When was the last time someone had simply accepted the way his brain worked?
“Do you want to see where I actually do the work?” The words burst from him before he realized he wanted to say them. “The command center.”
Her eyes lit up. “Binary’s lair?”
“It’s not a lair. It’s a workspace with adequate security protocols.”
“So…a lair. Yes, I do want to see it.”
He led her down the hallway toward the east wing, toward the room he’d never shown anyone who wasn’t family. The door was reinforced steel disguised as wood, the lock keyed to his biometrics. He pressed his thumb to the scanner and felt the familiar click of the mechanism releasing.
The command center—yeah, okay, it could definitely be called a lair—opened before them.