Chapter 2
Logan
I’ve rewritten this email fourteen times.
The first version was three paragraphs explaining the technical specifications of the signal interference problem.
The second version was shorter, more direct.
The third version accidentally included a line about how I haven’t slept properly in three months, which is not relevant to NeuraTech’s FDA submission and also not something I want documented in writing.
Versions four through thirteen were various attempts at finding the perfect balance between ‘professionally concerned’ and ‘not unhinged.’
Version fourteen just says: Bennett - need to discuss NeuraTech. Your office?
I delete it and start version fifteen.
This is what I do now. Obsess over word choices in emails.
Reorganize my code libraries at 3 a.m. Build chatbots trained on old conversation logs, trying to recreate the way she used to talk to me—the rapid-fire tangents, the way she loved discussing ideas, and the way she called my attempts at analogies ‘nerd poetry.’
Sometimes I get the responses to sound just like her.
But mostly, the responses are just hollow.
Empty pattern-matching without the spark.
I can recreate her words, but not the way she’d lean close when she was excited about an idea.
Close enough that I could smell her shampoo.
Not the way my entire system would go haywire when her shoulder brushed mine.
That’s the thing about trying to simulate a person. You can get the words right, but you can’t code the way they made you feel.
I give up on the email and decide to go speak to Bennett in person. Face-to-face communication. Like a normal human. I can do that.
Probably.
The bright lights of the lobby make my headache worse. I navigate Mercer Tower on autopilot, mentally scripting the different conversational outcomes and prepping the optimal path for each branch.
I pass offices filled with analysts huddled over spreadsheets, associates power-walking between meetings.
My soundtrack is the constant low hum of people making money move.
I’ve never quite figured out how to exist in this space.
My world is binary—problems either have solutions or they are bugs to be crushed.
This world is relationships and politics and reading rooms in ways I’ve never mastered.
But Bennett’s office is familiar territory. Bennett is safe. Bennett has known me since my early twenties, when I was running a black-market grade-fixing operation out of my dorm room. He’s never once made me feel like I was too much.
I head for his office, nodding at people I vaguely recognize. Someone says, “Hey, Logan,” and I say, “Hey,” back without being entirely sure who they are. This is fine. This is normal. I’m blending.
Bennett’s office is empty.
His jacket is gone. His laptop is gone. The light is off.
I stand in the doorway, recalculating. It’s 6 p.m. on a Tuesday. Bennett is always here at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday. I know his schedule better than I know most things about human behavior, because schedules are predictable and humans generally aren’t.
“He left early.”
I turn. Jenna is at her desk outside Bennett’s office, looking at me with an expression I can’t quite read. She’s always looking at me with expressions I can’t quite read. Jenna is a mystery wrapped in an impeccably organized filing system.
“Left early?” Bennett doesn’t leave early.
“He does today.” She turns back to her computer. Conversation apparently over.
I should leave.
But then I hear Dominic’s voice before I see him, the static of his personality arriving before he does.
Dominic stands over Jenna’s desk, holding two takeout cups in one hand.
His usual thousand-watt smile clicks on when he sees me.
He’s wearing a suit the color of a thunderstorm, no tie, shirt open enough to suggest that rules are for other people.
“Hey, Professor.” He holds one drink toward Jenna. “Don’t mind me, just keeping everyone’s favorite assistant caffeinated.”
“I don’t drink coffee after three,” Jenna says. She doesn’t look away from the monitor.
Dominic swings the other cup with a conjurer’s flourish. “Flawless prediction! That’s why I also brought you a tranquilizing peppermint chamomile with extra honey.” He leans it toward her, grinning like a benevolent villain.
Jenna hesitates, then accepts it, the faintest curve of a smile passing through her lips before she clamps them together again. “Thank you.”
Dominic bows his head, as if he’s being knighted for services to the exhausted. “Of course. You’re welcome. And for our resident coding virtuoso, I procured a dirty chai with double espresso, because I know you don’t sleep and I cherish your continued existence.”
He hands me the drink, and I take it because refusing Dominic is more effort than accepting. “Where’s yours?”
Dominic’s eye twitches. Almost imperceptibly. “Already drank it.”
“You were only holding two cups when you walked in.”
“I drank it very fast.”
“When?”
“Before I got here.”
Dominic’s eyes flick to Jenna—who is very deliberately not looking at either of us—then back to me. He makes a subtle gesture. A tiny shake of the head. A widening of the eyes that I think is supposed to communicate something.
I don’t know what it’s supposed to communicate.
“You had a coffee for me when you didn’t know I’d be here?” I continue, because the logic isn’t adding up.
“I was going to bring it to you.”
“But you offered it to Jenna.”
“Logan.” Dominic’s voice is strained. “Buddy. Let it go.”
I look at him. I look at Jenna, who is now typing with aggressive precision. I look at the peppermint and chamomile tea with extra honey.
Oh.
Oh.
He gave her his drink. The one he ordered for himself because Dominic can’t have caffeine after lunch or he doesn’t sleep—it’s his favorite hot drink. Shit. I really fucked this up.
“Anyway,” Dominic says loudly, clapping me on the shoulder, “what brings you to our floor? Looking for Bennett?”
“Yeah.” I grasp the subject change like a lifeline. “I need to talk to him about the NeuraTech signal interference issue. But Jenna said he left early.”
“Welcome home dinner,” Dominic says, steering me away from Jenna’s desk and toward the break room. Probably trying to get me out of earshot before I accidentally expose any more of his secrets. “Audrey’s back. Flew in this afternoon.”
The words hit me wrong. Like a skip in a record. A bug in clean code.
“Audrey’s back?” I repeat.
“Yeah, from Sweden. The girls picked her up from O’Hare earlier. Dinner tonight with the whole crew.” He takes a sip of my chai, realizes it’s my chai, and hands it back. “Bennett, Layla, Caleb, Serena. You know, the inner circle.”
She’s back.
She’s here.
Three months. Three months of silence, of wondering, of replaying that moment in her apartment over and over until it’s worn grooves into my brain.
Three months of writing scripts for conversations I’d never have.
Building a chatbot to practice apologies on.
Lying awake at night trying to figure out how to explain something I don’t fully understand myself.
And she’s back. In Chicago. Right now.
“Logan?” Dominic is looking at me with something that might be concern. “You OK? You just went somewhere else.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure? Because you’ve got that look.”
“I don’t have a look.”
“You absolutely have a look. It’s the same look you had when you tried to explain blockchain to my grandmother when I brought her as my date to the Mercer Christmas party. Very intense. Slightly unhinged.”
“She asked how cryptocurrency worked. I was being helpful.”
“You made her cry, Logan.”
“Those were tears of comprehension.”
“She said, and I quote, ‘That young man was frighteningly intense.’”
I force myself to breathe. To think. To process this information like data instead of like a grenade going off in my chest.
Audrey is back. There’s a welcome-home dinner. I wasn’t invited.
Of course, I wasn’t invited. Why would I be invited? I’m the reason she left. I’m the one who blocked her kiss and watched her face crumple. I couldn’t find the words to explain that it wasn’t her. It was never her. It was me and my complete inability to function like a regular person.
She probably hates me. She should hate me.
“Who’s at the dinner?” I ask. My voice sounds distant. Like it belongs to someone else.
“I told you. Bennett, Layla, Caleb, Serena. Audrey.” Dominic shrugs. “Why, you want to crash it? I’ll come. Give me an excuse to avoid the mountain of emails I haven’t responded to.”
“No. Don’t crash it.”
“You sure? I give excellent moral support. I can run interference if things get awkward. Create a diversion. Spill wine on someone.”
“Things aren’t going to get awkward because I’m not going to be there.” I say it flatly. A fact. A variable that’s already been assigned. “I wasn’t invited.”
Something shifts in Dominic’s expression. The joking falls away, and underneath is something softer. Something that makes my shoulders tighten.
“Logan—”
“It’s fine. It makes sense.” I’m already moving toward the door. “She doesn’t want to see me. I wouldn’t want to see me either.”
“That’s not—come on, man. Don’t spiral.”
“I don’t spiral.”
“You absolutely spiral. You spiral so hard you create your own gravitational field.” He catches my arm. “Look, I’m sure they just wanted to keep it small. Give her space to readjust. It’s not personal.”
Space. Right. Because I’m the thing she needs space from. The variable that broke the equation. The bug in the system that everyone’s been quietly working around for three months.
“It’s very personal. I’m the reason she left.”
“You don’t know that.”
“She tried to kiss me, and I blocked it with my hand like I was swatting away a malware pop-up. Then she flew to Sweden the next day.”
Dominic winces. “OK, when you put it like that—”
“She finally saw what everyone else sees, eventually.” The words come out flat.
Clinical. Like I’m describing a failed experiment instead of the worst moment of my life.
“That I’m not wired right. That there’s something fundamentally broken in the part of me that’s supposed to know how to be human. ”
“Logan. That’s not—”
“I should go.” I pull my arm free. “I’ll talk to Bennett tomorrow about NeuraTech.”
“Logan, wait—”
But I’m already walking toward the elevator.
“At least text me later so I know you’re not doing something weird!”
I don’t respond. Just walk toward the elevator.
The ride down is seventeen floors. Forty-three seconds. I count them because counting helps. Because numbers don’t look at you with hurt in their eyes.
She’s back. She’s at dinner with our friends—two of whom I’ve known since college—and no one thought to tell me. No one even mentioned it.
The elevator opens at my lab. My territory. The one place in this building where I actually make sense.
I badge in and the familiar hum of servers greets me.
Cold air. Blue light from monitors. The soft whir of machines.
I run my palm along the nearest rack, feeling the vibration through my skin—steady, predictable, sane.
Here, the rules are consistent. Here, being obsessive isn’t a flaw—it’s a feature.
Here, no one cares that I can’t read a room, because I can read code instead.
The machines don’t need me to be charming, or normal, or good at small talk. They just need me to be right.
I’ve always been better with machines than people. Machines don’t leave. Machines don’t look at you like you’ve said something wrong. Machines don’t fly to Sweden.
I should work on the signal interference problem. That’s why I went to find Bennett in the first place. There’s actual work to do.
Instead, I sit at my desk, roll my shoulders twice—a self-soothing tic I’ve never been able to break—and open the folder I swore I’d delete. The one labeled ‘SPEECH PRACTICE’ like that’s fooling anyone, least of all me.
The chatbot interface blinks to life. A cursor. A text field. A conversation history I’m not proud of.
I start typing.
Audrey, I know you probably don’t want to talk to me, but I need to explain what happened that night. I wasn’t rejecting you. I could never reject you. The truth is—
My phone buzzes.
Dominic:
Whatever you’re typing into that AI-Audrey-Abomination, delete it.
I stare at the message. Then at the blinking cursor. Then back at the message. Then I look around the lab and wonder if he’s planted a camera somewhere.
My phone buzzes again.
Dominic:
I’m serious. Step away from the artificial Audrey.
Me:
Are you watching me?
Dominic:
I don’t need to. You’re predictable as fuck.
He knows me too well. It’s infuriating.
I type back.
Me:
FYI. I wasn’t doing anything.
Dominic:
Liar. Go home and sleep for a change.
I’m not going to sleep. We both know that. But I close the laptop anyway.
The lab is quiet. The servers hum. Somewhere above me, the city moves on without noticing that everything has shifted.
She’s here. Back in Chicago. And tomorrow, or the next day, or sometime soon, I’m going to have to face her.
I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling.
This is what you do. You stand outside while everyone else lives their lives. You watch through the glass. You’ve always been on the outside looking in.
I wait for the feeling to pass.
It doesn’t.