Viral followed his feet down the sixth floor hallway, aimless as an anecdote from his president. He had a goal once: to be a world famous researcher responsible for cures to both alzheimer’s and cancer. If he had any time leftover, he’d consider a vaccine to HIV. Those had been his ambitions; ambitions that had buoyed his self worth through high school and into the Ivy League. Now, they were deflated.

He had just spent the past five hours next to Farroq staring at a screen resolving matrix multiplications in a Jupyter notebook. Sure, he’d known the foundational math, the theory of the practice, that lay beneath the code in which Tyler had written his neural nets. But the artistry, he found, lay not in the knowing but in the application of the know-how. As the notebook churned through the cores provided by the cloud server, Viral snuck looks at Farooq to see where and when his forehead crinkled. If a mathematical principle or line of code bent the brow of a cryptographic genius like Farooq then Viral could find solace in the shared fellowship of the dim-witted.

But Farooq’s brow never broke. He continued to dig his fingers into the bottom of Planters’ Peanut bags, wiping his hands on his black t-shirt, while collecting the crumbs in the dimple near his crotch. Occasionally Farooq offered a curious squeal or piqued grunt, either stimulated or provoked by Neuralmancer’s dubious syllogisms between Tyler’s code and the repos of repos comprising its training set. Trying to keep up, Viral mirrored Farroq’s behavior, but the performance was mimicry furthering the falsehood of Viral pretending like he knew what was what.

The hand that grabbed his forearm felt cold and clamped like a handcuff. Viral’s breath caught in his throat.

“Don’t you know you’re not supposed to be up here?” a man’s voice said.

Jumping back, Viral pulled his arm loose. “Who the heck are you?”

“Your babysitter is going to be mad,” the man said, his hooded eyes hidden beneath bangs parted in the center.

“Babysitter?” Viral asked.

“The Rican with the little ass,” the man said.

“Oh, right,” Viral said.

The man folded his arms across the brown and gold pinstriped shirt unbuttoned to his mid chest. Shaking the hair out of his eyes, he said, “The little ass said none of you could come up and none of us could leave except to the kitchen.”

“Us…” Viral repeated. Viral’s eyes followed the man’s down the hallway behind him. Almost a dozen people stood leaning from the doorways to their rooms. What had once felt to Viral like a ghost town now felt like a town full of ghosts. Viral saw small children in pajamas, brown-skinned women in saris without shoes, men in spectacles with more hair on their lip than their head.

“We work here,” the man said.

Viral caught the musk of body odor and paprika in his nose. “Do you live here, too?” he asked.

The man ran a finger across a thick eyebrow. “That seems to be the case now,” he said.

Viral didn’t follow. The man went on to explain. “Me and three other guys live in a house down on Cedric. You know it?”

“No,” Viral said.

“Down by the titty bar,” the man went on.

Viral shook his head.

“The one with the door man, who’s got the little hand.”

“I don’t –,” Viral started.

“They got dollar Kingfishers on Tues–,” the man continued.

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“I don’t know it,” Viral said, interrupting.

“Anyway,” the man said, tucking an arm beneath an elbow, “Aniruddah got the bug. He spread it to his family and one other. We can’t go back there so we brought our families here.”

Viral peeked around the man into his hotel room. He saw a woman sitting on her heels heating a roti over a kerosene burner.

“Chapati?” the man asked.

“No thanks, I’m good.”

“Adil,” the man said, holding out his elbow in greeting.

Viral told him his name and bumped Adil’s elbow with his own.

“How long have you guys been up here?” Viral asked, feeling the grip on his butt hole loosen.

“Day before last, same as you. Two days…or has it been three?

“I don’t know,” Viral said, increasingly worried about his loosening grip on time.

Sighing, Adil said, “It’s not so bad. Prakash knows the kitchen better than anyone.” He nodded toward a man carrying a sack of rice toward the freight elevator. “Don’t get any ideas about using the freight,” Adil said to Viral, winking.

Viral forced a smile, looked again toward the exit sign at the far end of the hallway. Adil leaned his shoulder against the door jam to his room, blocked Viral’s path with his hip. Slipping his hands into the pockets of his black dress pants, Adil bent his lips toward Viral’s ear.

“Now, you didn’t tell me what you were doing up here,” he said.

“Maybe the little lamb lost his way,” a slurring tenor said from behind Viral.

“Easy, Karu,” Adil said.

“What?” said Karu, poking his finger through his belly hair into his navel. Viral could see his dark nipples through Karu’s A-shirt, worn from too many wears and not enough washings. “Maybe he’s a carrier. I should give him a test.”

Adil put his hand on Karu’s arm. “I told you we need to save those,” he said.

Karu snapped his arm free. “Ain’t no one made you the boss,” he hissed.

A woman called him by his name. “Leave the boy be,” she said from the doorway to her room. “Come finish with Bonnie before I start the home school.”

Karu ran his tongue over his curled lips, growled as he turned from Viral and cast one last glare at Adil.

“I hope we’re not stuck too long in here with the likes of him,” Adil said.

“When can you go home?” Viral asked.

“When can you?”

“We’re here on a project.”

“What kind?”

“I can’t really say,” Viral said, scratching at the skin behind his ear.

“If you know something I don’t, you should tell me,” Adil said.

Viral held up his open hands, shrugged. “I just do what I’m told.”

“The babysitter, right,” Adil said.

Viral pointed his chin over Adil’s shoulder. “Is that your wife?”

“Sister.”

“Can I bring you guys anything?”

“I said you’re not supposed to be up here.”

“I was wandering…thinking,” Viral said.

Adil looked to Viral like he understood. “All this for a cold, can you believe it?”

“It’s still sinking in.”

“If the hotel stays closed much longer, money is going to get tight.”

“It shouldn’t be too much longer.”

“All that equipment that came through yesterday, that you guys?”

“Yeah.”

Raising one of his thick eyebrows, Adil said, “A lot of hardware for I don’t know.”

“I know as much as the next guy,” Viral said.

“If you knew more would you say?”

“Probably not.”

Adil smiled. He lightly punched Viral on the shoulder. “Well, my nephew’s got asthma. Too long in this place and the dust will kick it up. If you all are up to something down there, make it quick would you?”

Viral nodded. Adil turned his shoulder toward his room. “That door at the end of the hall will slam if you let it,” he said.

“I won’t,” Viral said.

“You take care of yourself, Viral,” Adil said. “And lock up at night,” he added, “Karu tends to walk when he sleeps.”

After Adil closed the door to room 604 Viral looked down the hallway behind him. It was empty once again. He wondered if he’d imagined the whole thing, or if there really were a handful of families sharing rooms on the floor.

The chill he got kept him from wondering too long. He moved quickly toward the stairwell. In the back of his mind his thoughts churned like rapids. What would be worse, he asked himself: if the conversation he had just had was real, that there was a hirsute, South Asian predator wandering the hallways while people slept, or if Viral’s grasp on reality was as feckless as the faith he had that anyone, anywhere knew what the fuck was going on.