The trucks that pick us up from our boats only take a few minutes to get to the airport. Our jet is waiting for us when we get there. I give Keeya and Lucie each a hug.

“Are you sure you don’t want to at least come for the funeral?” I ask.

Lucie shakes her head. “We’ve said our goodbyes.”

“Well, come visit us soon,” Louise insists.

The flight back is packed full. With Max, Lin, and Yang Song added as passengers, every seat is full and we need to create a few extra ones. Once we get into the air, Lin and I claim the back bedroom. We’re all so tired, Evan doesn’t even bother giving me a sly look. Lin and I sit on the bed with our backs to the wall, our fingers interlaced. Fifteen minutes later, Yang Song comes by, nominally to see if Lin wants anything to drink, but really because she’s not at all comfortable with our relationship.

“I’m ready to talk,” Lin says once Yang Song leaves.

“I understand what you’ve been going through,” I tell her. “At least, I understand it as well as anyone possibly can.”

“You are sweet, Noah,” she tells me.

“No, that’s the thing,” I say. “I’m not sweet. There’s a lot you still don’t know about me. You may not want to be with me once you know. I would understand if in a few hours, you never want to see me again.”

She looks at me expectantly.

I double-check my logs. I have permission from Evan, Louise, and Andrea to bring her in on the biggest secret of our lives. I had to agree to let Evan tell Valerie, and each of my sisters get a one-time pass to bring someone else into the circle of trust at their discretion, but it was worth it.

“It all started when my mom died,” I begin. I start telling her everything. Coming to the campus, finding out about Father’s involvement with Mom’s death, getting the implant, ignoring all the warning signs and burning myself down to nothing day after day to master the damn thing, the damage that it caused me, the ways I used the implant to work around the disabilities I had brought down on myself. Through it all, she holds my hand and attentively listens.

Yang Song stops by again with a plate of food and insists that Lin eat. She does and Yang Song leaves.

“So you forget everything every day and have to relearn it all?” Lin asks once we're alone again.

“Something like that. I still have the memories in there somewhere, some of them, anyway. They just don’t come to me like they should. Memory is more complicated than you might think. Skills tend to stay better than experiences. My short term memory mostly works, and I can hold what I read for hours, but I'm only functional at all because I have a computer in my head.”

“Well, that’s not so bad,” she says. “It sounds like you have a system that works for you.”

“I do. But none of that was the bad part. I’m still getting to that.” She nods and settles back in to listen. “The more I learned about the implant and the cloud,” I continue, “the more certain I became that we couldn’t kill my father with just those. He knew them too intimately. They were his. We needed an edge that he wouldn’t expect. I had to make a sacrifice.”

I brace myself for the devastating rush of shame I know is coming as I describe how I manipulated Jeff, gaining his trust only to use it to drive him closer and closer to the edge. How I played on his paranoia and fear of the sentient AI that built the bots in the first place. With each sentence, I know I should feel a crushing wave of guilt, but I don’t. Why don’t I feel what I’ve always written that I felt? I describe exactly how I betrayed my brother, putting his life on the line to force Father to choose between his own life or his son’s, but for some reason I just feel…

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Nothing.

No remorse. No guilt.

That’s new. And maybe troubling.

“And so I killed my father. Jeff held the knife. The scalpel, I mean. But my hand was the one pushing his, if you know what I mean. The cameras showed me standing across the room and Jeff slashing his throat open so I could make sure that he would take the fall for it and not me. And he did. He’s locked up indefinitely at the Wallace Hospital now for psychiatric treatment. He’ll probably never get out.”

She looks at me for a long time, her face unreadable. I can’t even bring myself to read her vitals. She’ll hate me now. This thing that I had for a moment will be gone forever.

“I…” I start. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say. “I’ll go. Give you time to process.”

I start to get up. She grabs my arm, pulling me back. She keeps pulling until she forces me down on my back with my head on her lap. Her fingers run through my hair. That feels nice.

“Hush,” she says. “You are mine. No matter how broken you are, you are mine.”

At last a feeling breaks through the numbness. I think I really love her.

“I still talk to my Mom,” I confide. “I know she’s dead, but I still talk to her. Never out loud, just in my implant console where I write all my thoughts. You might not want a crazy person who speaks to the dead.”

“I still talk to mine sometimes, too,” she says. She traces her fingers across my scalp. I feel a warm drop on my forehead and look up in time to see another tear fall from her cheek.

She tells me about her mother’s death, the years of her father’s abuse, the mind-numbing pain of cancer and chemo, the drugs, the dependency, the withdrawals, and the hopelessness of knowing that she was dying anyway despite it all.

“Then there was you and Louise and Evan and your little magic nanobots. And hope. For the first time in so long, real hope. And a day without pain, and then another, and another. And you were so cute. And then you wrote back to me. And you were so… you.”

“I’ve never thought of me being me as anything worth being.” The words come out automatically, but the feelings I know I should have behind them just aren’t there. Something is wrong with me again, something new.

“Hush,” Lin commands again. “Whatever made you who you are now, everything that led up to the creation of this man who is now mine, I am glad for it.”

“I’m glad you feel that way,” I tell her. “I never thought anyone would ever want anything to do with me if they knew who I really am.”

“I watched what you did. On the cameras. I know you will kill when you need to. I also believe you would only do it if it was the right thing to do. I trust you, Noah.”

“Thanks.”

I stare up into her eyes as she runs her fingers through my hair. She’s so beautiful, even with the purple bruises covering half her face. She trusts me. Why? I don’t even trust me.

“Does it get better?” she asks. “The guilt?”

“It’s gotten better for me,” I tell her. “But it’s been a long road to get there.”

I tell her about the many months of self-deprivation, the constant guilt that feels somehow alien to me now, the boat in the Pacific where I tried and failed to end it all. Then the path out, the endless hours talking to Andrea as she did her best impression of a silent head shrink.

I don’t mention how the guilt has seemed to magically disappear over the last few days. I don’t even feel a shred of remorse for all the people I killed at the conference. Or about Father anymore, now that I think about it. Or Jeff? Why don’t I even care anymore about the brother I destroyed? Whatever is going on with my gray matter, it’s not likely to be something she can duplicate.

“I hope it gets better.” She breaks down sobbing and now it’s my turn to put her head on my lap and stroke her scalp through her short hair.

If my capacity for guilt and shame has been destroyed by my ever-evolving brain, at least my ability to care for her hasn’t gone with it. I feel the same way about her when she’s broken, hurting, and crying as I did when she was happy, teasing, and geeking out in our letters and chats.

No. I care more for her now.

I understand her, and I think she understands me.

Is this what love is? If it’s not, I don’t care about love anymore. I just want this.