Dez doesn’t have to reach for the idea. It’s right there, waiting between her eyes, almost fully formed. Before she expanded her Lens, she’d been imagining shooting scenes that would approximate her brother’s likeness. Now she’s wondering what more might be possible.
“What else is in the Vault?”
“I told you—”
“Don’t say ‘everything.’”
“Everything.”
“I need you to be more specific.”
“See for yourself,” Rafe says, and nods in the direction of the screen.
She turns to face it. Sees nothing but gray for a long time. She thinks of Mo. Not in the hospital, but across his life, the boy she’s always known. After a moment, she notices a dim orange light on the right side of the screen. Growing brighter.
“Good start,” Rafe says. “Now relax. Enter the drift of your emotions. Let it flow.”
She stares at the glowing shape, getting larger and coming intothree-dimensional focus. It resembles an old-fashioned Rolodex, tipped vertically on its axis. There’s a dark core in the center, around which something like cards slowly rotate in steady rhythm. It grows larger as it seems to grow closer, until the things that resemble cards on the Rolodex are about the size of movie posters. Each one features a variegated image, which Dez soon realizes are moving, changing. And one—she notices, just before it revolves beyond her vision—features her brother’s unmistakable face.
“They’re …” she starts to say.
“Scenes,” Rafe says. “Scenes from your brother’s life. We call this his Lifeline.”
“What?” Dez whispers, wanting to slow the spinning deck so she can focus on a single one. Dez can’t fathom what is happening. Nothing about this makes sense. But she could ask a hundred questions and Rafe still couldn’t explain what she’s experiencing right now. Her acute love for her brother, her need to see him—not a mummy in a hospital, but the kind, outgoing, bright and lucky kid he’d always been—is so powerful, so actively engaged by what she’s seeing on the screen that she doesn’t even need an explanation. All she wants is this.
Every single spinning card on the Lens features something from Mo’s life. She reaches out toward his face at six, at thirteen, at eleven, nine, at two years old. She sees a hundred of his T-shirts, haircuts, Band-Aids, smiles with missing baby teeth. Her fingers halt. Longing swells in her heart.
“How do I stop it from spinning?” Dez says. “How do I look at just one?”
Rafe reaches forward and simply taps on one of the scenes. The rotation stops. The scene Rafe tapped gets pulled from the deck of scenes, pivots forward so Dez can see it head-on.
“Once you’ve had more practice,” Rafe says, “you can use your mind to pull the scenes.”
And then, with awhooshDez feels in the pit of her stomach, Moses fills the whole dome.
Not his face, Dez realizes, but his point of view. It’s almost like she’s seeing through Mo’s eyes as he mows the lawn during magic hour at the Oasis Hotel, his summer job last year. Dez hears not only the up-close whine of the lawn mower, but also, strangely, the T. Rex album blasting in Mo’s earbuds, like a soundtrack for the scene. Did her brother film himself at work, out of boredom? His sense of cinematography while running a lawn mower is unexpectedly impressive. She gazes for a moment at the sunset and hears gravel crunch as a car pulls out of the hotel parking lot. For a moment, she thinks she can smell fresh-cut grass.
“Let me show you what you can do with mind selection,” Rafe says.
Without moving, merely staring, Rafe pulls another scene from the deck. This one features a green and empty soccer field. As it slides to fill the dome, Dez suddenly remembers: Mo used to play games on this field when he was five. He spent more time lying down on the field, making grass angels than he did actually playing soccer. Dez remembers sitting on the sidelines, the sugary tang of the Hi-C juice boxes her mom would bring in a cooler. She remembers the scratchy purple uniforms Mo used to hate wearing.
Whose camera is Dez looking through now? It looks like it could have come from the iPhone lens of a teammate’s parent. But what are any of these scenes doing in the Vault? Do people accidentally consent to sharing their memories with places like Acheron when they click “Yes” on Apple’s terms of service?
The image shifts up, toward the puffy, white clouds. Dez feels warm sun on her shoulders. And then she hears her mother’s voice, shouting:Get up! You’ll be trampled!
Dez stares at the clouds above Mo’s soccer field as they drift and rearrange. Even if some soccer mom had forked over the video, whywould anyone have captured the sky like that, as if they were lying in the grass next to Mo?
“Where did this come from?” Dez asks.
“Soccer moms,” Rafe muses, “unsung heroes of the film world.”
“Why are all these scenes archived so meticulously?”
Rafe lifts a shoulder. “AI helps with some of that.”
“But how—”
“I can tell that you’re asking yourself a series of very boring questions right now. Things like what kind of suckers sign away their kid’s digital privacy for free? Don’t worry about how we got it. Focus on how touseit.”
