“One hundred forty-seven words per minute.”
“I remember. You told me once.” A ghost of something—not quite a smile—crossed her face. “You were bragging.”
“I don’t brag. I was stating a relevant fact.”
“You were bragging.”
This felt familiar. This felt like them, the rhythm they’d built over two years of late-night exchanges. Lincoln felt something loosen in his chest.
She sipped a spoonful of her soup. Good, that would provide both some nourishment and hydration.
“Do you remember what you told me once?” she asked between sips. “About silence?”
Lincoln searched his memory. They’d discussed so many things over two years. Philosophy. Security. The nature of consciousness. Whether machines could feel.
“You said that silence between most people is uncomfortable,” Morgan continued. “But silence between the right people is just…room to think.”
He remembered now. Roughly fourteen months ago. She’d asked him why he didn’t mind their pauses, the gaps between messages when one of them was processing something complex.
“I remember.”
“I think—” She took a breath. “I think I need some room to think. Is that okay?”
“Yes.” Lincoln pocketed his phone. “I’ll be downstairs. In my command center. If you need anything.”
He moved toward the door, then stopped. Turned back.
“The clothes will be here in a few hours. I’ll bring them up when they arrive.”
Morgan nodded. She still looked fragile. Fractured. But something in her expression had shifted—some small tension releasing.
“Binary?”
Binary. He liked hearing that on her lips just as much as his real name. “Yes?”
“Thank you. For not…” She gestured vaguely. “For not trying to fix the parts you can’t fix.”
He didn’t know how to respond to that. It felt like a compliment wrapped in something sadder.
“Get some rest,” he said. “The soup will help.”
He closed the door behind him and made his way back downstairs, the house quiet around him. In his command center, he pulled up the archived messages.
Every conversation they’d ever had, preserved in chronological order. He scrolled through them, reading fragments at random.
Sometimes beauty IS the function.
Your iambic pentameter has a trojaned hexameter in line six.
Systems can’t hold your hand in the dark, Binary.
He was looking for something, but he didn’t know what. A map, maybe. A user manual for the woman upstairs. Some pattern in their history that would tell him how to help her now.
But the messages were from before. Before the warehouse. Before the box. Before whatever had carved those lines into her skin.
The Morgan in these archives was Mercury—sharp and quick and unbroken. The woman upstairs was someone else. Someone he didn’t fully know yet.
He read until his eyes burned. Until the words blurred together and the time stamps ran backward and the two years of their friendship unspooled across his screens like code he couldn’t compile.
