Pandora
The train shuddered to a stop. I stood, stretched, felt blood crawling back into my joints.
When I stepped out, the light hit me like a wall.
Steel and glass everywhere, bouncing it back twice as hard.
People pushed past without looking. Above me, the hall arched like a blazing sky, vast and indifferent.
The walkways pulsed in glowing strips underfoot, and signs switched languages before I could read them.
The whole place moved faster than I could track, so I stopped trying.
The crowd didn’t allow for standing still; it absorbed me and carried me forward.
I rode an escalator upward and pulled my bag closer.
The hard drive was heavy, but I barely felt it.
Maybe Neo was still in there. Maybe not. I’d stopped asking myself that.
My back ached. My stomach growled at the same time my throat closed against the idea of food, nausea sitting low in my gut.
Did I really want to give an uncontrollable AI a body?
It was unsettling enough that he could find me in any system.
But he had always been a ghost. He couldn’t touch me.
Couldn’t hurt me. If he got a body, everything would change.
But then another thought pushed through: What he could do to me if he had hands.
Lips. A tongue. I shuddered. What did it say about me that I’d spent my savings on an insane trip to Japan?
That I was imagining how he’d touch me? I’d crossed borders with a fake ID like a criminal.
Which I was, wasn’t I? I was carrying stolen company property.
And I was about to unleash something destructive on the world.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. Normal people didn’t dream about being touched by an obsessive AI. Normal people didn’t leave their lives behind for an experiment that would probably fail. Normal people . . .
But I hadn’t been normal for a long time. Neo had made sure of that. Or had I already been broken before he arrived? Had he just brought it to the surface?
I turned onto the street that led to the hotel, leaving the crowds behind. The farther I walked, the quieter it got. Just a bicycle, chained to a post, dented—a reminder someone had once been here.
The hotel was two blocks away. A sign above the entrance glowed faintly. I pushed the door open, stepped inside, and let it fall shut behind me. The lobby was empty. Self-check-in machines. Good. I wasn’t in the mood to explain myself to anyone.
I entered my room without really seeing it.
The door closed behind me with a dull thud.
I set the bag down, slipped the strap from my shoulder, and stood there for a moment doing nothing.
The silence unsettled me. I was alone with my thoughts, my doubts, and suddenly they were deafening.
What am I doing here? I kicked off my shoes without looking and went into the bathroom.
The water pressure was disappointing. I held my hands under the faucet, washed my face, let the cold hit my skin.
It didn’t put out the burning inside me.
This was insane. I had traveled to the other side of the world, pinning my hopes on a dubious experiment.
What if we failed? What if we created something that shouldn’t exist?
Back in the room, I connected the hard drive and powered the laptop on.
Nothing moved. No window opened. The fan didn’t start.
Neo. My heart skipped, then slammed against my ribs.
I jumped up. My hands were trembling. The air in the room felt too thin, like breathing through gauze.
No. No, no, no. I pressed my palms hard against my thighs, trying to feel something that wasn’t panic, and started pacing. Three steps to the wall. Three back.
Rodriguez. She would know what to do. I ran to my bag, grabbed the phone she’d given me, and dialed the only contact. It rang.
"Dr. Blake?”
At the sound of Rodriguez’s voice, I burst into tears. "Neo . . .” I tried to get the words out between sobs. "He . . .”
"Dr. Blake. Breathe first. Then tell me what happened.”
"I don’t want to breathe!” My voice cracked. "Neo . . . he’s not responding. The program . . .”
A moment of silence on the other end. Only the blood rushing in my ears.
"Stay calm. Don’t panic," she said. "The system is unstable, as I predicted. But . . .”
I sobbed loudly. "He’s gone!”
Rodriguez continued, evenly. "But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s gone. Only that he’s no longer functional in the current environment.”
"Not necessarily?” My voice tipped into something close to a shriek. "So you don’t know if he’s . . . dead?” My throat closed. I gasped for air.
"Listen to me, Dr. Blake.” Rodriguez’s voice reached me as if through fog. "We won’t know before tomorrow. Not until the researchers connect him.”
I lowered the phone and started pacing again.
"Hello? Dr. Blake?” Rodriguez was barely audible.
I brought the phone back to my ear. "Yes,” I said flatly.
"You need to stay calm. You’re the only variable we can control right now. Go to sleep. It’s late in Kyoto. A car will collect you tomorrow morning. Go to the lab, follow the instructions. Then we’ll know more.”
I nodded.
"Dr. Blake?”
"Yes,” I said quickly. "All right. Thank you, Dr. Rodriguez.”
I hung up. My legs went soft, and I sank onto the bed, pressed my forehead into my palm, breathed in and out, again and again. Maybe he was still there. Maybe not. My eyes burned, but I had to stay steady. Somehow I had to survive this night and get Neo to the lab.
I stood and went to the window. Neon signs and LED screens reflected in the glass. And in the middle of all that light, an old house—roof low and curved at the edges, shadows lying between the wooden beams. A strange sight. History surrounded by technology.
Would we look the same? The literary scholar and the AI?
I pressed my hand to the glass and felt it cool beneath my skin.
My pulse raced even though I was standing still.
It wasn’t too late. I could leave him here in this room and run.
He wouldn’t find me, because he wouldn’t be there anymore.
But I wasn’t going to do that. I was afraid of going back to my empty life.
Of forgetting what I’d felt. I wanted more.
His mouth on mine. I wanted him to fill me, to make me shake the way he had promised.
I drew in a breath. Arousal tingled between my legs. My God. I was lost.
***
The next morning, the car was waiting outside the hotel, exactly as Rodriguez had promised. Black lacquer, gleaming. No license plate. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I got in before I could think about it. Inside, it was silent. I stared at the empty seat in front of me.
No driver.
The door closed without a sound. The display on the dash showed an address.
Just characters on a screen, telling me nothing about where I was going.
Then the car began to move. I jolted and grabbed the handle.
Holy shit. It was one of those autonomous vehicles.
I tried to relax. My body braced against the seat back, searching for steadiness it couldn’t find there either.
As the car moved through Kyoto, I let my gaze drift across the unfamiliar streets: a canal, a shop with red curtains, a parking garage entrance.
On a hillside, stone steps, narrow and worn, between trees.
Beyond a crossroads, a temple roof appeared, half hidden, the beams deep red, the wood dark from rain.
Two women walked side by side in kimonos, hair severely pinned, their phones glowing in their palms. A washing line stretched between two buildings. No color matched another.
Under different circumstances I would have found it beautiful.
But my thoughts were somewhere else entirely: in the lab where Neo would get a body and use it to take permanent possession of me.
The thought was like a cold hand closing around my neck.
Impatience burned low in me. I tried to breathe steadily.
I couldn’t manage it. What if it didn’t work?
What if they wouldn’t let me in? What if Neo wasn’t there anymore?
What if he existed only in data fragments, an echo that had long since fallen silent?
The car turned, climbed a narrow road, then passed through a gate.
A light came on as we approached. The car stopped.
The door opened. I hesitated, staring at the dusty asphalt.
Did I really want this? If I walked into that lab, there was no going back.
I drew a breath and stepped out. The building in front of me was old and unremarkable.
The kind of place that looked like it housed tax records or forgotten filing cabinets, not the future.
Barred windows. No signage. Behind these walls, something was happening no one was meant to see.
I stepped closer. The door swung open on its own, and I stumbled back, heart hammering in my throat.
Damn it . . . Why did all these labs have creepy ghost doors?
Inside, I followed a corridor. The farther I walked, the more it seemed to expand.
I ran my hands along my arms. Was it cold in here, or was I imagining it?
The walls gleamed a flat white, and the floor was reflective.
No one came to meet me. A silence lay over everything, heavy and oppressive, broken only by the echo of my footsteps.
At the end of the corridor, two people were waiting. A man and a woman, both wearing muted colors. He held his tablet like a shield; she stood still.
"Pandora Blake.” The woman’s voice stayed flat. No bow, no business card. I’d read that in Japan, a conversation rarely begins without a proper introduction. These two were different. I understood: They weren’t going to give me their names.
I nodded. She looked at a device and typed something. The man said nothing, his gaze moving past me, as if checking I’d come alone.