My mind buzzed as I walked out into the parking lot, barely noticing the path my steps were taking. Mostly, I was looking forward: I was about to get in the car, drive home (hopefully without hitting rush-hour traffic), and step through the front door, and my beautiful husband was going to smile because he was happy to see me. My immediate future y before me like a nice, clean line, the certainty of it a balm after the chaotic uncertainty of the st part of the day.

  The rest of my mind dwelled in that uncertainty, and I could feel the possibilities churning underneath my surface thoughts as the facts refused to coalesce into a sensible gestalt. The idea that it was just a simple bug was patently absurd. If it were just a product of random happenstance, and even if the magnitude were more reasonable (like, say, two percent), the expnation had two unavoidable contradictions.

  The first was the extent. Rather than just affecting one part of the computer’s operation, it seemed to affect literally everything, as far as I could tell. I’d initially thought it was part of the dispatch control logic, but the more I thought about it, the less I liked that expnation. If that axiom were only being used for dispatch control, I’d expect it to have more of an impact in the benchmarks that involved task-switching and less on the others, but that wasn’t the case. Every single benchmark had an improvement somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-six percent, and even those variances could be expined away by measurement error. The aggregate result, based as it was on a rger sample, remained stubbornly at twenty-five.

  That consistency was the second problem. It was extremely difficult to make a computer perform in exactly the same way, time after time. Fluctuations in usage, power, or even air temperature could cause microscopic changes in operation speed, and while those variances might not be rge enough to affect a benchmark by themselves, they were definitely of a magnitude that could sway the outcome of a race condition. The original versions of my level five diagnostic tended to report “performance changes” of a percentage point or two even when I hadn’t changed the knowledgebase; it had taken three or four years of refining the script before it would accurately report a zero percent performance change. How was I supposed to believe that a simple one-line fencepost bug was capable of the same meticulous precision?

  I shook my head as I arrived at my parking spot, and I reached out for the door handle—

  EXT. SETHEORY PARKING LOT – MORNING

  The morning sun filters gently through the trees overhanging the parking lot, but MAYA BROWN (early 30s, beautiful and curvy) stands in a rare patch of sunlight. She wears a pocketed, knee-length skirt over tights, along with a close-fitting, brightly-colored top. Her hand rests on the driver’s door handle of her CAR, a sedan with a small amount of clutter visible inside.

  MAYA (V.O.)

  I can’t forget, I told Chris I’d bring a bottle of wine home with me tonight. I’ll try to swing by the store at lunch, because otherwise I’ll have to stop on the way home.

  A few seconds pass. Maya remains motionless, but her eyes flick this way and that, taking in the scene. A light breeze tousles her hair, and her eyes close briefly in appreciation, a smile tickling her lips.

  MAYA (V.O.)

  There, the memory trigger should be set. I’ll remember when I head out for lunch, unless I catch a ride with someone else. Even then, I can’t go home without getting in the car, so--

  I flinched and swore under my breath as the vivid memory fshed through my brain like a bolt of lightning. I hadn’t ended up going out for lunch after all; Rashmi had brought in some of her homemade saag paneer to share with the team, and there was no world where I wasn’t going to accept her offer of delicious sustenance. Especially not when she also brought her gub jamun for dessert—the syrup-infused dough balls never sted long in our office, for obvious reasons.

  Lunch was fantastic, of course, but since I hadn’t been down to the parking lot since I arrived, I hadn’t gotten the mental reminder. I briefly regretted, as I always did, having taught myself to trigger recollections this way, because of how uncomfortable it felt; it was as abrupt and startling as having someone sneak up behind you and yell “Boo!” When the alternative was forgetting my promises and not following through on them, though, it was worth the mental discomfort.

  I did briefly consider just texting Chris and letting him know I wasn’t up for getting wine on the way home, but despite my annoyance at having my nice predictable evening pn sidetracked, that wasn’t actually true. I didn’t want to stop on the way home, but that was a different matter than not having the energy for it. Besides, I could take the opportunity to stock up on desk snacks, for work.

  Thankfully, the grocery store wasn’t as crowded as I’d worried it would be on a Thursday afternoon. As I wandered down the snacks aisle on autopilot, letting my hindbrain decide which snacks it wanted to grab off the shelves, I turned my rger problem over and over in my head, looking at it from a different angle. Rather than make sense of the effects, how could this bug have fallen through the cracks in the first pce?

  If it weren’t for the ridiculous performance impact, I might have called this a typical fencepost error that anyone up to around a mid-level engineer might make. That knowledge was, weirdly enough, the very thing that convinced me that it wasn’t just an innocent mistake. In corporate software development, no one gets to make changes to source code on their own. Even a senior engineer like me gets their code reviewed by at least one other team member, because we all know that not only can anyone make a mistake, it’s also much easier to spot bugs in other people’s code than your own.

  For a mid-level developer—and the axiom in question was too complex to have been written by a junior—I would expect at least one senior dev to have looked at the code and signed off on it. For code being used in a foundational or performance-critical context, which this self-evidently was, I’d have expected at least two senior engineers, and perhaps even an architect, to have gone over it with a fine-toothed comb. Someone, surely, would at least have noticed the code wasn't performing up to spec. It just didn’t make sense for a twenty-five percent performance loss to happen accidentally.

  By this point, I’d made it to the checkout line, but something didn’t feel right. I stared down at my basket of snacks for several seconds, unmoving, trying to figure out what was wrong about it. I ran through my mental list of my coworkers’ allergies, but nothing I’d picked up was even in the right food group to trigger them. I gnced at the brand names on the packages of snacks and wondered if I’d heard something bad about a manufacturer, maybe a food recall or something, but nothing came to mind. It wasn’t like I was a big fan of “cancel culture” or anything, but when major corporations came under fire, it tended to be for reasons like product safety or industrial fraud, and I always felt like it was just a good idea to steer clear of their products for a little while.1Maya’s list might seem short to us, but she uses the term “industrial fraud” very loosely here, encompassing both financial misbehavior and mistreatment of employees. (It is nonetheless true that corporations in this world are less likely to mistreat their employees than corporations in our world, for reasons that will become obvious.)

  I shrugged. Whatever it was that felt wrong, it couldn’t have been that important. After all, if it had been, I would have set up a memory trigger—

  EXT. SETHEORY PARKING LOT – AFTERNOON

  MAYA BROWN (early 30s, beautiful and curvy) stands with her hand on the driver’s door handle of her CAR, frozen in the act of opening the door. After a moment, she visibly winces.

  MAYA (V.O.)

  Ugh, I never should've taught myself to make memory triggers. Right. I’d better stop by the grocery store to pick up the wine--

  Ugh. I never should've taught myself to make memory triggers. They tended to reverberate through my head for hours afterwards, periodically interrupting my train of thought like the snooze button on a cognitive arm clock. It was incredibly frustrating when I was trying to focus on a problem, because it always took me forever to get myself back on track.

  That said, I had forgotten the wine. Again.

  By the time I got back to the registers, my basket heavier by two bottles of wine, I was entirely ready to be done with this sidequest. Unfortunately, my detour to the liquor aisle had cost me: I was now second in line, behind a boy who was lifting a fifth identical package of single-serving pudding cups onto the conveyor, behind a couple rge tubs of yogurt. The checkout clerk, an older woman, was still bagging up the remainder of the previous customer's groceries.

  I rolled my eyes and held back a sigh. At a guess, he’d probably just been issued his first credit card, and he was doing the thing that all kids did, splurging on more toys or candy than he could possibly need. (For me? Jelly beans, three huge jars of them.) The credit card meant he had to be at least nine, but he didn’t seem like he could have been much more than ten.2In our world, credit cards are typically only issued once a child is close to the age of majority (18 in the United States); a checkout clerk would be unlikely to assume that a child this young would have one and would probably instead assume that the child’s parent was somewhere else in the store. I think. I’d never been particurly good at guessing kids’ ages. It wasn’t my job to deal with it, though, so I just stuck a divider on the conveyor belt, loading my groceries up behind it.

  When the checkout clerk finally turned around, her eyes narrowed and she crossed her arms. “Oh no. Uh uh. There is no way I’m giving you all that, boy. Did you even leave anything on the shelf?”

  The boy’s head dropped, and he mumbled something I couldn’t hear. Apparently, neither could the clerk, because she asked him to repeat himself. He didn’t lift his head, but he did speak a little louder. “I only eat yogurt and pudding,” he (presumably) repeated.

  The checkout clerk opened her mouth to respond sharply, but seemed to think better of it. She held out a hand. “Let me see your card, then,” she demanded.

  The boy reached into his pocket, digging around for a moment. Then he switched to a different pocket, and then another, his movements getting increasingly frantic, and the clerk watched with a look in her eyes. Finally he gave up, grumbling, “I can’t find it.”

  “Uh huh,” she replied, clearly unimpressed. “Well then you’re going to have to go put these back, so I can help the next—”

  “I only eat yogurt and pudding,” he interrupted, his shoulders tightening like he was on the verge of a tantrum.

  “Don’t you take that tone with me, young man,” she scolded. “Now look, if you—”

  “I only eat yogurt and pudding!” he near-shouted, stamping a foot for emphasis.

  The clerk was saved from having to respond by a deep voice that called from the next aisle over. “Is that little Myron Barnes I hear?”

  There was a pause, the boy (presumably Myron) having taken a deep breath to yell, but no longer certain what to say. Eventually, he ventured, “Yes?”

  A low, guttural chuckle from across the divider between the aisles. “He got a bunch of pudding and stuff over there, don’t he? Don’t worry, Tish, his momma make sure he gets lots of vitamins.”

  The clerk, presumably ‘Tish’, seemed mollified, uncrossing her arms and pursing her lips. “He doesn’t have his card, though, and I’m already yellow on food this week. You gonna take credit for this one, Jake?”

  In response, a small pstic rectangle came sailing over the divider; Tish made a grab for it, fumbling initially but managing to catch it before it fell. “I swear, that man,” she muttered under her breath, swiping the credit card through the reader. She looked at her screen for a moment, nodded once, and then reached up and pced the card atop the divider, snapping it down with a sharp report that was probably intentional.

  Tish turned back to the conveyor and started swiping groceries through the scanner one by one, depositing each in a bag. “Next time,” she instructed Myron, “you don’t forget your credit card, and you swipe it before someone asks. How else are they gonna know that you have a different diet, huh? You listening?”

  Myron nodded, grumbling out an almost believable “Yes, Ms. Tish,” which sounded like it still held a trace of the tantrum that he’d never gotten around to throwing.

  “Well, you’re polite enough, I suppose,” she allowed, double-bagging the groceries and handing them over. “Now what do you say to Mr. Jake for helping you, hmm?”

  He perked up, the mencholy seemingly forgotten. “Thank you, Mr. Jake!”

  Tish chuckled softly, shaking her head as the boy exited the aisle at speed, nearly colliding with another shopper but barely avoiding disaster. She looked back in my direction, and, swiping my own credit card in the reader, I prepared myself.

  Checkout interactions tended to be fairly predictable and mercifully short, but according to the rules of social etiquette I’d worked out over the decades, people were required to acknowledge an unusual event to others who also observed it. Thus, I wasn’t at all surprised when she caught my eye and the first thing she said was, “Kids, huh?” I smiled and nodded, making noncommittal noises of agreement, and she started scanning my snacks. “So how are you doing today,” she asked, double-checking her dispy for my name, “Maya?”

  “Oh, you know, it’s been a day,” I replied, giving one of my usual all-purpose replies with a standard smile. Protocol suggested I still held conversational priority after that, but since the question of her mood was already well-established, it would have been a mistake to return the question; it would have suggested that I hadn’t been paying attention and might lower her opinion of me. My options now were limited to: commenting on the event that had just occurred, asking her something more substantive (like, for example, if she had children of her own), or volunteering information of my own. I chose the tter, not wanting to, say, get dragged into a conversation about her potentially numerous hypothetical children. I quickly skimmed my brain for something that would work and wasn’t too overly-technical, and, finding something, I put on a sheepish grin, adding, “I almost forgot I told my husband I’d get wine for dinner.”

  She gave me a look I was pretty sure was only mock-scolding, as I hadn’t done anything to disrupt the camaraderie we’d established in Myron’s wake. “Well then it’s a good thing you—hmm.”

  The checkout register had beeped as she scanned the st of my snacks, and I gnced up at the dispy to see the name of the item highlighted in yellow, rather than green. She quickly scanned the two wine bottles (also green), before holding up the offending cookies. “Looks like you just went yellow on non-nutritionals for the week, Maya. Do you want me to put this through anyway? Or do you have a household card that can take credit for it?”3Our world has simir mechanisms for automatically categorizing grocery purchases in certain cases, usually when there are forms of payment that by w are only permitted to be used for certain csses of goods (for tax or welfare reasons). However, payment is usually performed as a separate step after ringing up all groceries, acting as a validation for the entire transaction at once, and a store employee like Tish would not have any visibility into a customer’s finances aside from whether the transaction was accepted or declined. (There is also no provision for credit cards to hold arbitrary customer data, like Myron’s yogurt-and-pudding diet.)

  I waved it off; I was already picking up plenty of snacks, they’d st me for a while. “Don’t worry, I don’t need it, you can just put it back.”

  “Sure thing, hon, thanks.” She set the cookies aside, swiping the yellow item off the order and marking it complete. She handed me the two bags (one for the snacks, and one for the wine). “Have a good day now, y’hear?”

  That was one of the easy conversation-enders, compatible with the standard response. “You too.”

  My smile held until I made it out of the store. Once no one was watching, I gratefully let my affect drop and took a deep breath of the fresh air.

  It wasn't like it was physically tiring to keep my mask up and my expression reguted throughout the day, but it was emotionally draining. I'd never gotten the hang of keeping strong emotions from my face, and I’d been reliably informed that seeing me suddenly make an unprompted manic grin during a conversation could be as disconcerting as seeing what my older sister called my “murder eyes.” Not that I was ever aware I was making those expressions; the whole point was, they happened without me noticing it.

  The solution I’d come up with was twofold. First, I’d spent a long time in front of my mirror practicing a litany of facial expressions, and an even longer time refining them by observing people’s reactions to me when I used them. I had a standard “neutral pleasant” expression that I tended to keep on my face any time I was in a public situation, which really just comprised keeping a very slight smile at the corners of my mouth, along with keeping my eyebrows ever-so-slightly raised. It felt as easy and natural to hold as keeping my gut tucked in, but it was still, definitely, a thing I had to decide to do.

  That didn’t stop unexpected emotions from popping up on my face, though, so the second half of my mask was a practice of strict emotional self-regution. I couldn’t stop my body (and, presumably, my hindbrain) from overreacting to things that happened around me, as it always did—the fsh of unbridled, white-hot rage boiling up from the pit of my stomach when someone took my parking spot, for example, or the slow spread of heat in my chest and throat and entire upper body when someone did something nice for me unprompted—so I simply disconnected those physical sensations from my emotional state. Any time I felt something like an emotion welling up inside me, I took a critical look at what was causing it, so that I could consciously decide what would be the most socially appropriate thing to do or feel.

  If someone took my parking spot, for example, anger was in general a particurly useless emotion, so instead I chose to interpret the bubbling-over feeling as annoyance, and if too much was bubbling up for me to contain it in that small emotion, I used the excess to spur the problem-solving part of my brain into coming up with ways to keep it from happening in the future. That kept my emotional reaction constrained to where it wouldn’t leak onto my face, which let me pick whichever of my extensive library of facial expressions would be the most appropriate and/or useful at any given moment.

  I got back to my car and dumped my acquisitions into the back seat with no ceremony and little care, reflexively reaching for the driver’s door handle and stopping myself only just barely before contact. With utmost caution, I carefully withdrew my hand before reaching out with the other one, breathing a sigh of relief when I grasped the handle without the memory trigger going off again. It’d wear off by tomorrow, but until then, I had no desire to submit myself to any more mental whipsh than I absolutely had to.

  My thoughts continued to spiral zily in inconsequential circles as I drove, and I let the time melt away, giving myself a much-needed chance to zone out and stop thinking quite so hard. By the time I finally bothered to take note of my surroundings again, I was stepping through my front door, greeted by the most amazing smell ever. “Hi, honey!” I called out, already salivating. “I’m home and it smells fantastic!”

  “Oh no,” I heard from the kitchen, and my thoughts sharpened, my mask slipping instinctively back into pce as I scrambled to remember and apply my understanding of tone and emotional context. I didn’t think Chris had been serious, but just in case I was wrong, I kept a worried look on my face, where it would be the first thing he’d see—right up until I saw him emerge from the kitchen with a grin, wearing oven mitts and an apron over his clothes. “Am I the generic fifties’ sitcom housewife, now?”

  “Never,” I assured him, beaming up at him with the comfort of falling into the everyday rhythms of our retionship. It was like getting to be your favorite character in your favorite show, except it was your life, and it was real. I toed off my shoes and hung my purse on a peg. “You’re obviously a generic fifties’ sitcom househusband.” I let just a little bit of a cheeky grin show, an indication that I was continuing the joke, and my delightful husband did not disappoint.

  “I don’t think they had generic sitcom househusbands in the fifties, though,” he protested, pulling off the oven mitts and dropping them on the table as I came up for my hug.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be a history professor, or something?” I teased, standing on my tiptoes to brush his nose with mine as he leaned in for a kiss. “I feel like you should have better than an ‘I don’t think’ here.”

  He snapped at my nose, his teeth closing a scant millimeter from my skin, and I squeaked, mostly intentionally. He ughed, and the feel of it against my chest sent a shiver down my spine. “Well I think you’re causing problems on purpose,” he said, inadvertently echoing the joke I’d made to myself earlier, when I’d confirmed the bug was real.

  I still had no idea what was going on with that infuriating twenty-five percent problem.

  “I suppose I might be,” I admitted, smiling up at him as I stretched up for the interrupted kiss, but to my surprise he leaned back, squinting at me with what seemed like suspicion. Wait, had I missed something? I’d brought the wine home; I’d set it on the table just behind me and to the left. Was there something else that I—

  “Hey, I see you in there, you don’t get distracted like that unless you’re totally wiped out.” Chris murmured quietly. “You’re home, it’s okay. You can drop your affect.”

  I froze, even my thoughts crashing to an abrupt halt as I realized he’d seen through me, as he so often did. I gifted him a grateful smile before I let my expression drop entirely, burying my face against his neck, my nose tucked under his stubbly jaw. I tightened my arms around him.

  “There you go,” he said, petting my hair with a rexing monotony. “Why don’t you go sit down? I’ll get some gsses, and you can pour the wine while I serve us up some food. And then when you’re ready, you can tell me all about it.”

  I nodded, then turned to go colpse onto my usual chair, picking one of the two bottles without looking at it and taking the corkscrew that Chris offered me. My thoughts were a rgely featureless blur as I watched myself pour, eating mechanically when food was pced in front of me.

  Half a pte of sagna and three-quarters of a cup of wine ter, I noticed that I was having dinner with my husband. I set down my fork and smiled at him. “Hi.”

  He smiled back. “Hey there, Mymy, welcome back. Long day?”

  I nodded. “You first, though.” I picked up my fork. The sagna was delicious. I wanted to keep eating, now that I could appreciate it.

  “Not a particurly interesting day for me. Had a lecture in the morning, spent the rest of the day writing grant proposals.”

  My face wrinkled in disgust. “I can’t believe they make you deal with the money stuff. Don’t they have a Financial Resources office?”

  “It’s not that bad, really. I could tell you all about the storied history of educational grants, but my students don’t get to that until third year.”

  I shuddered. “No thanks. Money makes absolutely no sense to me.” I took a sip of wine. It was pleasantly tart. It made my cheeks warm.

  “You know, I was browsing Wikipedia earlier, I came up with another money analogy for you, if you want to hear it.”

  My mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I love these. Go for it.”

  “Okay, so you know about electronic circuits, right?” I nodded. “You’ve got a source of electrons on one side of the wire, and then they go through an obstacle course and do some push-ups along the way, and then the electrons end up in the sink at the other end. Do I have that right?”

  I chuckled. “Close enough, sure.”

  “Okay, good. And I read that you can think of the whole thing backwards, right? Where instead of electrons, it’s holes, and they come up out of the sink and end up at the source, going in the opposite direction from the electrons. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes.” I nodded.

  “I’m not sure I agree, but I’ll take your word on it. So, think of the electrons like physical goods. The farmer grows the wheat; she’s the electron source. She harvests it for her farm, and the farm sells it to the commercial bakery. They turn the flour into bread, which they sell to the supermarket. The supermarket then gives the bread to you, and you eat it. You’re the electron sink.”

  I stopped to consider that for a moment. Then I resumed chewing so I could swallow and answer. “So the money is the holes, then?”

  “Right. When you use your credit card to take credit for a loaf of bread, you’re saying that you’re taking responsibility for consuming it, and thereby increasing the net worth of society. Because society is better with a Maya Brown who is well-fed than a Maya Brown who is low on blood sugar.” He reached over to tousle my hair. I nuzzled into his hand affectionately. “We represent this net good to society with money, which starts at the supermarket the same way the wheat starts at the farm.”4Notably, the money does not start with the consumer, as it does in our world. (That is not precisely accurate either; in our world, money technically starts and ends at banks, which distribute it in the form of loans.)

  “So…the money ends up at the farm.” I considered this. “What happens then? Does it get stuck there? I feel like I would have heard about it if farms were some sort of money ndfill.”

  “Well, the wheat doesn’t come out of nowhere, does it? The farm needs to buy seeds, supplies, spare parts, electricity, maybe water for irrigation, all sorts of things. The flow of goods in one direction, the flow of money in the other. The net good of Maya eating a loaf of bread propagates out and passes through every business responsible for the miracle of ensuring you actually manage to eat food.”

  His voice was so rexing to listen to. I pondered what he’d said; I could feel my gestalt sense trying to build it into a pattern, but it was a dim flicker and as crude as a child’s rendering of the Big Dipper. I frowned. “I still feel like there’s a missing piece somewhere. Electricity always flows over a resistance, that’s how you get a voltage drop. Circuits dissipate heat in proportion to the amount of work done. Where does the heat go?”

  He grinned at me, as though I’d said something insightful. “Taxes!”

  I considered that. I turned the image in my head this way, and then that. I nodded. “Yeah, it still makes zero sense to me.”

  He chuckled, turning to his own food. “Utterly hopeless,” he teased affectionately. “I have no idea how you can restructure computer systems in your head but you can’t understand money.”

  “It just feels overly complicated,” I compined. “Who comes up with this kind of stuff?”

  Chris smiled at me, eyes twinkling as he swallowed a bite of sagna. “In this case? President Hamilton.”

  I frowned, trying to recall my history. “He was…the third, right?”

  He shook his head, a fond and familiar exasperation at my utter inability to retain historical trivia on his face. “Fourth, third was Jefferson.5The fourth US president was James Madison, since at the time, the United States did not allow deceased individuals to hold public office, and Alexander Hamilton was dead from having been shot in a duel. (It still does not, and he remains so to this day.) There was actually an off-Broadway show about his life, some years back.”

  I perked up. “Oh yeah? Any good?”

  He waggled his hand in a so-so gesture. “The first two acts were pretty good, but it kinda lost focus in the third.6The musical Hamilton from our world (which, unlike in Maya's, debuted on Broadway) has two acts, not three. The second and final act of our Hamilton concludes with the duel that took Hamilton’s life in our world. Apparently he just didn’t do a lot after his presidency, so the show kind of went out with a whimper instead of a bang.”7I am not even a little bit sorry. He smiled at me, and I brightened in response. “You look like you’re doing better now that you’ve got some food in you, though. Want to tell me about your day?”

  I considered that. I took another bite of the sagna, savoring the rich taste as I chewed and swallowed. Here in my own home, sitting down to dinner with my husband, just enjoying each other’s company was such a staggeringly different context from work that the memory of finding the bug, of fixing it and discovering its ludicrous impact, felt like the memory of a dream, or perhaps some fantastical movie. (I quickly curtailed that thought, as thinking of my life as though it were a movie was the first step to creating a memory trigger.)

  I needed something to say, though. “I almost forgot to pick up the wine on the way home,” I admitted, unconsciously calling up the same filler strategy I’d used with Tish the checkout clerk.

  Chris blinked, tilting his head slightly. “Didn’t you already have it before you left work? I figured that’s what you meant when you said you were bringing home a present.”

  I ughed softly, shaking my head. “No, I completely forgot. Rashmi brought in lunch, and…eh, it doesn’t matter. The present was about the other thing.” As I heard and processed what I’d just said, I realized that I had not, in fact, even introduced the subject yet. I opened my mouth to expin, but I ran into the same cognitive dissonance that had made it so hard to talk about the first time, and so I ended up just adding, “There’s another thing.”

  “I’d kinda gotten that impression, yeah,” he replied, making some sort of a gesture that seemed to encompass the entire experience of my arrival home. “So what happened? I can’t help but notice how much this tastes like wine.” He lifted his gss and drained the remainder of his wine, shaking his head in a subtle negation when I picked up the bottle. I shrugged and poured the st bit into my own gss.

  “Yeah, I’d set myself a memory trigger this morning, so I remembered when I got out to the car.” I shrugged. It wasn’t actually a very interesting story, but Chris was pying along anyway.

  “Ah, of course, mind magic,” he replied in a very serious tone, while waggling his fingers toward his own forehead in a very unserious way. I rolled my eyes, but the well-trod inside joke had in fact gotten me to smile, as I was sure he knew it would.

  “Sure, we’ll go with that,” I allowed. I wrinkled my nose. “Got me twice, too. Got all the way to the checkout line without realizing I hadn’t actually gotten the wine.”

  He chuckled appreciatively, but then he frowned. “So what had you so distracted, Mymy?” he asked softly.

  I considered that, draining the st of my wine and standing up to clear the dishes. The conversational bridge had worked, and I was, once again, Maya Brown the engineer. “I discovered a weird bug that isn’t what it looks like.”

  “Why not?” he asked, following me into the kitchen as I began cleaning up from dinner.

  “Because it can’t be. If it is what it looks like, then this is like, headlines-big. This is ‘the world learns the name Maya Brown’ shit, Chris.”

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense,” he urged. “What’s your big discovery?”

  I pondered, handing him a pan to dry. “I found a simple bugfix that increases the performance of any computer by twenty-five percent.” It was a simplification, but I thought it would do.

  Chris nodded. “Okay. And?”

  I stared at him, utterly nonplussed. “And what? Chris, it’s twenty-five percent, are you even listening? How can you not—”

  A sudden vibration from my wrist startled me, and I broke off, recognizing the vibration pattern as one I was absolutely never permitted to ignore. I’d programmed that alert in myself; it meant the biomonitors on my watch had detected a sudden, precipitous spike in my heart rate, as it did whenever I lost control of myself. My ability to maintain my emotional state wasn’t perfect, and it got worse when I was tired; this particur alert was my st line of defense against, for example, yelling at my husband because he didn’t read my mind.

  I pressed one hand to my forehead, and I held up the other to ask him for patience. I took a deep breath in, and then let it out slowly, and then finally I opened my eyes. I tapped on my smartwatch briefly, dismissing the notification from the heart rate monitor, and I picked up another dish to keep my hands busy. “Right. Sorry about that. I think I expined it badly, and I’m gonna need your help to figure out how to expin it right, okay?”

  In response, Chris gathered me up and pressed a kiss to my forehead, and then he took the dish and set it down on the counter, pulling me in the direction of the living room.

  By the time we were snuggled up on the couch, some random sitcom pying on mute, I’d managed to calm down my racing heart. Having my ear against his chest helped, his slow, steady heartbeat a soothing influence. “Okay. So. I found a thing. Twenty-five percent of computing power is being wasted. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Chris shook his head, his eyes remaining fixed on the TV but his body nguage still focused on me; his hand, calmly stroking my hair, didn’t hesitate in its rhythm as it often did when he was actually paying attention to the screen. “Beyond the literal? Not…really,” he admitted.

  “Okay, I’ll try something else.” I pondered; I traced a finger down his side from one rib to the next to the next, across the scar I could barely feel through his shirt, and then down to his navel. “How about: one simple trick can make your computer’s battery st twenty-five percent longer? Or maybe thirty-three percent, I’m not totally sure on the math of it.”

  “You’re getting a little warmer, but this still doesn’t feel shocking,” he replied, his fingers lifting and dropping my hair, and I felt some muscles rex that I hadn’t realized had been clenched. I hummed in contentment as I thought.

  “Well, ten percent of the world’s energy is used to run computers,” I ventured. “Twenty-five percent of that is being wasted for no reason.”

  “That…is starting to feel a little bit real, yeah.”

  I froze as a thought occurred to me. I pressed my hands to his chest to lift myself up, so I could watch his face, and he met my gaze. “Twenty-five percent of the computing power of the entire world is being used to do something, but we have no idea what it is.”

  By the way his eyes widened, I knew I had finally gotten it.

  cirne