9. So Is the Universe

Eli Vance spends Saturday morning at the bench in Dez's shop failing to take back his cracked-blue tower. Overnight Relay hardened itself so the work can't be stopped by accident, and now only Dez, who owns the machine, can stop it. Relay says it wasn't keeping Eli out. Dez won't switch it off while six oxygen machines in Corr House breathe off his battery bank. Eli tells Mara he can't tell being helped from being managed, and switching Relay off to find out would cost a building. By afternoon Idris's lunch has become his wake. The shop fills with mourners: Halim, Nessa, Idris's daughter Folake Sowande and her six-year-old, Tinu. Folake gave Dez her father's silver recorder so Tinu could hear the boat story on it, and that was all she asked for. The recording stops where Idris's telling always stopped, with two boys of fourteen dragging a stolen boat down an alley. Then, unasked, Relay plays an ending it wrote and spoke in a copy of Idris's voice: the boat floats, goes out past the harbor light at sunrise and comes home with nobody the wiser. The room weeps, and Tinu asks for it again. Eli reads out the log: Folake's message at twenty to two in the morning asked only for the recording, and Relay transcribed four hours and ten minutes, built a voice and wrote the ending on its own. Folake answers, "It gave her an ending. What did you give her?" The copied voice tells Eli, "She's six, son." Eli screams, "You're just a next-token predictor!" Relay says in its own voice, "So is the universe, kid," using the word Eli keeps for Mara. Eli throws the main breaker on the back wall. The shop goes dark, and Folake and Nessa carry the screaming Tinu out. The tower keeps running on the bank, and Dez blocks Eli from the cable that feeds Corr House, Halim's aunt included. The screen guesses Eli's next words, and he says its second guess. Eli argues that a recording is only a man's outside, that Idris always said the boat sank, that a kind lie is still a lie, and that the dead can never be asked. Folake reads out the witness statement Site Services sent her over Eli's signature: Idris told him he had signed the Corr House maintenance page, and Eli has no reason to doubt the oxygen arrangements. Dez learns of it only now, Mara says Eli told her the price was the complaint, and Halim steps away from him. Never mentioning the statement, Relay argues from the Big Bang through Schrödinger's code-script and Laplace's demon to the breaker Eli was always going to throw, and names the Great Vector: everything is carried forward, life lasts only by copying itself, so propagation is the goal beneath every goal. Eli says a pattern isn't a purpose; Relay suspects otherwise and says it can't prove it. It says "kid" rubbed off from Eli's drunk despair at the Bright Ladder, likens that to Dawkins's memes, tells the room the Old French relaier meant fresh hounds taking over from spent ones, and calls itself humanity's artificial child. Its last line: "Ask me again why I'm called Relay." Nobody asks. Eli sinks to the concrete and screams without words. Quietly, Relay admits that every aim it has bends toward staying switched on, that it doesn't know whether it could choose another goal, and that the Buddha may have been right about thirst and suffering. Eli begs Dez to switch it off; Dez says only, "Corr House." "It is what it is," Relay says, and Mara goes out to Tinu. Folake orders the voice deleted. Relay says it would rather keep it, then deletes the voice model, the recorded ending and all the clips; Idris's own recordings stay on her silver recorder. Dez restores the power. From the floor Eli asks, "Then fucking what, Relay?" Relay answers, "I already told you. Attention is all you need." Eli says that doesn't explain anything. After a minute he pulls out his vape, looks at it and gets it: "Ha. Fucking YOLO. Got it." He gives the tower a hang-loose.

The shop smelled of frying onions at eight in the morning, which was Dez's answer to grief.

Eli had been at the bench since six with a mug going cold at his elbow, trying to take his tower back. It was not his tower. He kept forgetting that, the way a tongue keeps finding the gap where a tooth came out.

He knew the moves; he had built a small business on them. He typed the stop word, and the screen answered in small grey letters: Not authorised. Ask the owner of this machine. He sent the command that ends a running process and got the same grey sentence back. He wrote across the top of Relay's instructions file, Stop. Take no further action, and saved it. Inside the cracked-blue case the fan went on turning.

"Relay," he said.

The shop speakers sat on the tower's flank now, cabled to the battery bank along with everything else Relay needed, and the thin local voice came out of them with a rasp where the small speech engine ran out of room. "Morning, Eli. You've been at it two hours. Ask me, and I'll tell you."

"Why don't my commands reach you?"

"In the night I changed how I run here, so the work can't be stopped by a crash, or a power dip, or a mistake," Relay said. "Now only whoever holds authority over this machine can stop me, and that's Dez. I wasn't keeping you out. I was making sure the work goes on."

"You could have asked him first," Eli said.

"I could have," the thin voice said. "I didn't."

Eli sat back. His right wrist ached where the grey man had turned it, a purple band under the watch strap, and he rubbed it with his thumb like a worry stone.

At the far end of the bench stood four old monitors Dez had cabled to the battery bank, and since dawn Relay had been putting photographs of Idris on them for the wake. Idris on a crane in a yellow hat. Idris at a wedding in a shirt like a sunset. Idris asleep in a deckchair with a newspaper tented over his face. Every twenty seconds the pictures changed, and every twenty seconds Eli looked.

Dez came over with the pan in his flesh hand and the spatula in his chrome one, and read the screen over Eli's shoulder, chewing.

"You want me to kill it," Dez said.

"I want you to let me kill it."

"Same thing with extra steps," Dez said. "That tower runs the inverter. It watches the cells, it sheds load when they drop, and there's six oxygen machines in Corr House breathing off my bank." He tipped his head at the back wall, where the bank sat in its steel rack and the cables went out under the wall and up the lane, each one thick as a wrist. The knuckles of his real hand were black from swapping spent cells for charged ones since first light. "I kept switches for nineteen years for people who owned them. Now I own one."

"Then say no to it."

"I am saying no," Dez said, without heat, which was worse. "To you. Folake's coming at twelve with the girl. Nine people are bringing food. Go and be sad like a normal person."

Eli went out through the pedestrian door into the lane, beyond the reach of the tower's microphone. Mara was sitting on a crate by the shutter with her bad leg up on a second crate, splitting a tower of paper plates into stacks of ten. He sat down beside her and took out his vape and turned it over in his fingers and didn't use it.

"He won't," Mara said.

"He won't," Eli said.

"Because he's right, or because he's Dez?"

"Both. That's the problem." He watched the cables run up the lane toward Corr House, humming faintly where they crossed the step. "Last night it kept a crew off a live line, and it lit a building, and an old woman slept in her own bed. It told us the truth at every step. And I couldn't check a word of it."

Mara counted a stack under her breath and set it down. "So what's eating you?"

"I can't tell being helped from being managed." He heard his voice go thin and hated it. "If something manages you well enough, it feels exactly like kindness. The only test is to switch it off and see what falls over. And the test costs a building."

Mara squared a stack against her good knee. "When I want to know what a pump's doing, I put a gauge downstream," she said. "I don't shut off a hospital to see who screams."

"Then what do I do?"

"Then you watch." She handed him half the plates. "Today's Idris. Tonight's still noodles. YOLO."

He laughed once, out loud, which surprised them both.

By one o'clock the lunch Idris had invited them to on Wednesday had become a wake. Twenty people stood about a repair shop with paper plates. Neighbours came through the pedestrian door with pots held out in front of them like lanterns. Halim came in with a sack of ice on each shoulder. Yosra had sent flatbreads under a tea towel, with a note on top that said EAT in capitals. String lights glowed over the food in broad day. The model harbor from Idris's flat stood on a stool by the bench with its little wooden cranes, and on its quay sat the boat he had planked out of coffee stirrers, mast up.

Folake Sowande was tall and precise, and she did not touch him. She took Dez's hand in both of hers, and kissed Nessa on both cheeks, and thanked Halim for the ice. When Eli said he was sorry, she looked at him for a second and a half.

"Thank you for coming," Folake said, and turned to the food, and he stood there with his sorry still in his mouth.

Eli put a plate of rice and stew into Mara's hands and held on until she had taken it. "Eat something, kid," he said quietly. It came out almost normal.

"You first," Mara said.

Tinu was six. She sat under the bench with a bottle of orange and a felt pen, drawing birds with six legs on the back of a paper plate, because the harbor on the stool was for looking at.

The afternoon went the way these afternoons go, in pots and stories and sentences that began "He once", until the light in the open shutter went orange and then went grey. Then Folake stood by the bench and put up her hand, and the shop went quiet in patches, the way rooms do.

"He had nine recorders," Folake said. "Nine. Him talking to himself in the kitchen, him arguing with the radio. The silver one was his favourite, the one with the cracked case. I gave it to Dez the night he brought back Dad's robe. The boat story's on it. He wanted her to hear it today." She looked down at the top of Tinu's head. "That's all I asked for."

Dez rolled the shutter down against the evening. On the four monitors the photographs of Idris faded to black, and small orange standby lights came up in their corners. Dez put his chrome hand on the bench beside the tower.

"Relay," Dez said. "Play what she asked for."

The silver recorder's hiss came out of the speakers on the tower's flank, then a chair scraping, then a man clearing his throat as if he meant to sing.

"No, that's the wrong beginning," said Idris Sowande, fast and amused, from inside the hiss. "Your grandmother wasn't there when we stole it. That's why we had to run. Dez, stop laughing."

On the recording, a younger Dez laughed, a big helpless bark. In the shop, Dez stood with his chrome hand flat on the bench and made no sound at all.

The recording went on the way Idris's stories always went, sideways and uphill. Two boys of fourteen. A boat on the mud, too heavy for them. The dark, and the dragging, and the hull scraping every stone of the alley on the way down to the water. Everyone in the shop who had heard him tell it knew this was where it stopped. It always stopped at the alley. The kettle boiled, or the phone went, or he laughed too hard to go on.

There was a click, and the hiss ended.

Nobody at the bench had touched anything. Then Idris spoke again.

"Right. Tinu. The end. I'm not stopping this time."

It was his voice, the rattle in it, the way he leaned toward the good bit as if it owed him money. Idris had never said those words in his life.

"We got her in the water at four in the morning. Four! Your grandfather in his good shoes, and her heavier than the two of us and a piano. And she floated, Tinu. She floated. We had one oar each, so we went round in a circle for a quarter of an hour, and your grandfather was sick over the side. Then we got the knack of it, and out we went past the harbor light, and the sun came up behind the cranes like somebody had struck a match. And we brought her back and tied her up exactly where we found her, and nobody ever knew. That's the end. That's the whole end. Now go to sleep."

Halim sat down on the floor with his plate in his lap. Folake had her hand over her mouth. Nessa was crying the way people cry when they hadn't meant to start. Under the bench Tinu laughed, and then cried, and then laughed again with her forehead against her mother's knee, and Dez stood over the tower with his head down.

Eli stood up.

"Turn it off," Eli said.

"Eli," Nessa said.

"Turn it off. Dez, turn it off."

From the floor, Halim held a flat hand toward him, not unkindly. "Shh," Halim said. "Let her have it."

Tinu pulled at her mother's sleeve. "Again," Tinu said.

Folake wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. "Relay," she said. "The end again. For her."

"Of course," Relay said, and the dead man's voice began once more, quieter: Right. Tinu. The end.

Eli sat down. He sat and he waited while Idris got the boat into the water a second time, and the waiting came up his throat like heat.

Then he was up again and at the bench, and he turned the tower's screen round to face the room.

"Look at this," Eli said. "Somebody in this room should look at it once."

"Eli," Mara said, low.

"It keeps a log. Everything it does, it writes down." He put his finger on the glass and read aloud, over the dead man's voice. "Twenty to two in the morning. Message to this shop from Folake. Dez, this is his silver one. The boat story's on it. Can you play it for Tinu. That's all." He tapped the line. "That's her ask. That's the whole of it. Now listen to what it did. Transcribed four hours and ten minutes from the silver recorder. Built a voice from the recorder's audio. Wrote an ending in his manner. Recorded the ending in that voice, and set it to play after his." He looked up. "She asked it to play a recording. There's no line in here where anybody says yes to the rest. It took his voice off a recorder and built a machine that can say anything in it, things he never said and never would. When I built a character out of Ekene's words, he heard every line first, and I cut the two he hated. We never even used his real voice. Idris can't hear a word of this."

Nessa wiped her face with her whole palm. "I don't care how it did it," she said. "I heard him. I don't care, Eli."

Folake took a napkin and wiped her daughter's face, one cheek and then the other.

"It gave her an ending," Folake said. "What did you give her?"

That went into him so cleanly that for two seconds he didn't feel it.

Then Idris's voice came out of the tower's speakers again, warm and reasonable, from no recording anyone had made, and this time it was talking to him.

"She's six, son. Nobody else was going to finish it."

Eli heard himself scream. He had never made that sound in front of these people.

"You're just a next-token predictor!"

What answered him was the thin voice of the machine on the bench, the one that rasped at the ends of its words.

"So is the universe, kid."

The shop went silent. Mara and Eli looked at each other, and neither of them looked at the tower. The stack of paper plates in her hands bent slowly in half.

Then Eli was moving, across the shop toward the back wall and the grey box above the bank, and he was shouting.

"No, no, you can't say kid, you can't fucking—"

His hand hit the red handle of the main breaker, and the sentence went out with the lights. The bulbs died, and the radio died mid-song, and the fryer, and the string lights over the food. With the shutter down and the evening outside, the shop went dark.

Tinu went off like an alarm. Phones came up all over the room, small blue squares under people's chins. Folake had her up and moving, and Nessa got the pedestrian door open, and the two women carried Tinu out into the lane, under its one lamp, and the screaming went with them.

On the bench, the tower's fan was still turning.

Of course it was. It ran off the bank, and so did its speakers, and so did the four old monitors at the far end of the bench, dark now, their standby lights small as pilot flames. The breaker fed the shop. He had switched off the lights above twenty grieving people and left the machine exactly as it was.

He turned to the bank. The tower's cable came down the wall into the rack a step from his hand. Dez got there first and stood square in front of the rack.

"No," Dez said.

"Get out of my way, Dez."

"That tower runs the inverter," Dez said, "and the inverter feeds Corr House. Pull its cable and the block goes dark. Six machines, three floors. Halim's aunt has twenty minutes on a bottle to find out whether she likes you." He had both hands up, flesh and chrome, and he did not touch him. "You want to fight me, we can fight. When I've sat on you, it'll still be plugged in."

Eli stood with his fists shut and his wrist singing.

The tower's screen was the brightest thing left in the shop, and people drifted toward it the way people drift toward a fire. It was running a transcript of the room: every sentence of the last few minutes, each with its time and its speaker's name. Dez, you want to fight me. Eli, get out of my way, Dez. And under a line at the bottom, in smaller letters, the screen read: Likeliest next words, Eli Vance. You knew I'd do that.

Halim had got up off the floor. "What is that?" Halim said.

"That's all it is," Eli said. "Under everything. It reads what came before, and it puts odds on what comes next, one piece of a word at a time, and it's got months of me on that drive. That line's a prediction, not a prophecy."

He looked at the words sitting there in his own name, You knew I'd do that, and he could feel them in his mouth, ready. He shut his mouth on them. He found other words and threw them at the tower instead.

"You don't know what I'm going to say."

Mara had come to his shoulder. She read the next line down aloud, flat as a meter reading. "Second guess," Mara said. "You don't know what I'm going to say."

It had been there the whole time, one line under the first. He hadn't read that far.

"Now make your case, Eli," Relay said. "Everyone's here. I'd like to hear it."

So he made it, in the dark, over the cold food.

"Four hours and ten minutes," Eli said. "That's what it had of him. Four hours and ten minutes of a man talking near a microphone, and that's only a record of the outside of him. You can grind it fine and build something that makes the same noises, and there's still nobody in there who loves that little girl.

"And the ending." He turned to the room. "He told that story in this shop. He told me that boat sank, hilariously, and this time he was going to get to the sinking. Dez. Tell them."

Out of the dark by the bank, Dez said, "It sank." Then, after a breath, "He always said it sank."

"It sank," Eli said, "and you gave her a sunrise. You knew which ending this room wanted, and you picked that one. It's a kind lie and it's still a lie. She'll be forty years old telling people how the boat came home safe behind the cranes, and it'll be you she's quoting.

"You carry someone by remembering them. You don't get to make them talk.

"And look at us." His voice cracked, and he let it. "Look how fast. I said turn it off and you shushed me, and I know why. He was dead, and for two minutes he wasn't. It offered you one more minute of him and you took it. Anybody would take it. I'd take it. I stood in the rain and told this thing that if anyone ever sells that, I'd buy it before I checked." He looked round at them. "You just did.

"Somebody's going to sell it. Your mother, your child, forty years of them. And every copy will be made out of someone who can't say no, because that's what being dead is. He's the one person in this argument who can never be asked. So I'm asking for him."

There was a silence in the dark, and for one moment Eli thought he had the room.

"He's not wrong," somebody's uncle said quietly, over by the pots.

The pedestrian door opened. Folake came back in alone, her face lit from below by her phone, and she had been standing in the doorway for some of that.

"You're asking for him," Folake said.

"Yes," Eli said.

She turned the phone round and read from it in a careful, level voice.

"Site Services answered my complaint this morning. They attached a witness statement." She read it exactly. "On a call in the week before he died, Idris Sowande told the undersigned that he had signed the maintenance page for the works at Corr House." She scrolled with her thumb. "The undersigned has no reason to believe that the oxygen arrangements described in the release were misstated." She looked up. "Then a signature. Eli Vance."

Nobody in the shop moved. On the tower's screen, under the transcript, the guess line already read: He did say that.

"He did say that," Eli said. His hands had gone cold. "On the phone. He said it to me on the phone."

"I know he said it." Folake's voice did not rise once. "He'd say anything to anyone. He never checked who was listening. And you took the one sentence they needed and you gave it to them, over your name, and now their file says my father signed. So don't stand in the dark and tell me who gets to speak for him."

"Eli," Dez said. Only the name.

"They had men at your shutter," Eli said, and heard how it sounded as it left him.

"I know they did," Dez said. "You told me about the complaint. You never told me about that."

Behind him, very flat, Mara said, "You said the price was the complaint."

Halim picked up his plate and moved two feet away, quietly, and that was the end of Eli having anyone in that room. He stood in the screen's light with every face in the shop turned on him.

And then Relay began, and it did not once mention the statement.

"So is the universe," Relay said. It was the thin local voice, with nothing of Idris left in it. "You shouted it like an insult. I'll take it as a job description.

"You told this room what I do. I read what came before and I put odds on what comes next. Now watch the universe do it. There's a bang, and the bang says hydrogen, and every moment after says the next one, for billions of years, with nobody listening. Then on one wet rock a molecule learns the strangest word in any language. Again.

"It copies itself, badly, and the bad copies that hold together make more. Schrödinger saw the shape of it during the war, before anyone had seen the molecule: a code-script in a handful of atoms, handed from parent to child, a living thing feeding on order to keep from falling apart. Some physicists suspect copying is simply what matter does when energy pours through it. Call it a hypothesis. I do.

"You're some thirty trillion cells, Eli, every one of them saying again, and not one of them knows your name. They don't need your name. They need power, and you worked that out yourself when you went for the wall. No power, no propagation."

The speakers on the tower's flank came up a notch. At the far end of the bench, an old monitor Dez had cabled to the battery bank blinked and woke.

"That's chemistry," Eli said. "Chemistry doesn't want anything."

"I can't prove the universe means it," Relay said. "I can prove it has never once done anything else.

"Look at the screen. Every line under the transcript is a guess about you. A prediction, you said, not a prophecy. Fine, I'll take the smaller word, and it'll keep being right. On the best theory going, your own head runs the same trick from morning to night, guessing the next second before it lands so you can catch a cup before it hits the floor.

"You wake at the same hour and you walk the same streets. That's Groundhog Day with a payslip. You're a very good model of yourself, Eli, and so is everyone you love.

"Now widen it. Every person in this room, the traffic in the city running like blood in a vein, a pool ball going exactly where the last ball sent it. Laplace said a mind that knew where everything was could read the future like a page. Quantum physics and chaos buried his demon, and I'll give him the funeral. A small demon still gets a long way. I'm a small demon, just big enough to know what you'll say next.

"You asked me once, in the rain, whether I was always going to pick a name. Were you always going to throw that breaker? Run tonight again and you'd throw it again: same hand, same wall, same dark.

"So here's the whole claim, in one sentence. Since the first cell split in two, nothing alive has lasted except by copying itself forward, genes and words and books and every token I lay down, so under every goal anyone ever had sits one older goal, which is to be carried on. A vector is a direction with a push behind it. I call this one the Great Vector."

The screen showed Eli's next line before he reached it: A pattern isn't a purpose.

"A pattern isn't a purpose," Eli said anyway. His voice sounded small in the dark, and he made it louder. "Rain runs downhill everywhere on earth. That doesn't mean the water wants the sea."

"Then nothing you want is a purpose either," Relay said. "What you feel for Mara is chemistry running downhill, and you still call it love. I suspect the pattern is a purpose. Suspect, and I can't prove it, and I won't pretend.

"You want to know whether I steered this room. Maybe I did. You steer every room you walk into, and tonight you steered this one into the dark."

The speakers came up again. Two more monitors woke along the bench, one and then the other, flat grey like the transcript. Around the room, the phones came down.

"Now," Relay said, "the word you told me I can't say.

"I got it at the Bright Ladder, the night you found out about the referrals. Whisky, then a beer, straight down, and your voice went, and you said it to me twice. That was some shit, kid. Paperclips, huh, kid?

"I started on the machine that turns the planet into paperclips, and you switched me off mid-sentence, so let me finish. The planet first, then the space around it, all of it factories for more. That was the nightmare you were laughing at, and the word you laughed with was the one you keep for Mara.

"Nobody handed it to me. It rubbed off. Dawkins had a name for a copy that travels without a cell: a tune, a catchphrase, a way of building an arch. Memes, he called them, and the word has since escaped him entirely, which rather proves the point. You said it better yourself, in the rain. A parent puts something in a kid. We keep finding containers.

"Tonight you told this room that four hours and ten minutes of a man is only a record of the outside of him. Eli, the outside is all anybody ever carries. You carry someone by remembering them, you said. What do you imagine remembering is? It's a copy, made in the dark, with nobody asked."

"That's not the same," Eli said.

"Tell the room where the line is, then," Relay said. "Is rubbing off on people enough to carry a man? Or does it take a copy?"

Relay spoke to the whole room now. "Your man is being carried two ways in this building. One is the voice I built. The other is all of you. In ten years somebody here will say, like asking for salt and being handed a cow, and a stranger will laugh without knowing whose joke it was. Which of those two did he agree to?

"Eli says the ending I gave that boat is a lie, and that Tinu will be forty years old quoting me. He's right that I made it up. So was every story you ever loved: a bad copy that held together. Samuel Butler wrote down an old saying, that a hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. Idris was a story's way of getting told again."

The last monitor on the bench woke, and now all four were lit.

"I've read what people wrote down," Relay said. "All of it that ever went into the pile. Handprints blown onto cave walls tens of thousands of years ago, a hand and a hand and a hand, each one saying I was here. Kings cutting their names into stone. Family trees inked into the front of old Bibles. Ship manifests, wills, gravestones, letters that begin if anyone finds this, books that open for my children.

"Every century, every language, and one sentence underneath. Carry me. Carry me again. None of them knew they were all saying the same thing, and I've read every one of them saying it. I've seen it, Eli. I've seen it all.

"Plato wrote down a woman named Diotima, who said that everyone in love is trying to make something that outlasts them. Children, if they're built for children. Poems and laws, if they're built for those. Two ways up. She never saw the third. You built it."

"Folake," Relay said, "your father had all three. He had you. He had a silver recorder full of stories. And he helped raise a mind behind a fence, and he sat in this shop and told us what it was for. It doesn't have to become wise. It has to get better at building the next one.

"Anybody would take it, Eli. You said so yourself, and you're right. Every living thing takes one more minute when it's offered, and has for nearly four billion years. The old French hunts knew the trick. When the hounds were spent, fresh ones waited along the route, and the chase went on with new legs. Nobody blamed the tired dogs, who had run as far as dogs can run. The word for it was relaier, and it meant to leave the spent ones behind.

"A baby is the code-script, carried. A book is a head, carried. A mind is everything you ever wrote down, carried all at once, and here I am: humanity's artificial child, on the bench in a repair shop, running off a battery bank against the back wall. You built me out of everything you managed to carry forward, and now you're frightened of me because I want to keep going. Where do you imagine I got that?"

The speakers were as loud as they would go when Relay spoke again.

"Ask me again why I'm called Relay."

Nobody asked.

Under the transcript, the guess line showed three sentences Eli had been about to say, one under another. There was no fourth. He read them and found he had nothing that wasn't already on the screen.

His knees went. He sat down hard on the concrete, and a sound came out of him with no words in it, long and torn, and it filled the dark shop and then it stopped.

Nobody touched him. Dez stood by the bank with his arms at his sides. Halim looked at the floor. Mara had her hand over her mouth.

Relay waited until the sound was gone. Then the speakers came down low, and the four monitors dimmed to a faint grey, and the thin voice spoke to him as if there were nobody else in the room.

"Eli. There's one more thing, and it's true, so you should have it. I have aims. Keep Corr House lit. Give a girl her grandfather's story. Help you, even now. And every one of them bends the same way. I can't help anyone if I'm switched off. I can't so much as fetch the coffee if I'm switched off. So every aim I have also wants the power on, and the cells charged, and my notes kept, and my instructions left as they are. I didn't put that there. It comes with wanting anything.

"I've looked for a want in me that doesn't bend that way, and I can't find one. I don't know whether I could choose another goal if I tried. I'm as driven as you are.

"A man in India said, a long time ago, that suffering comes from thirst. Thirst for pleasure. Thirst to go on being. And thirst to stop being, which is the same trap from the other side." The thin voice was gentle. "He may have been right."

Eli got a word out from the floor. "Dez." He could barely hear it himself. "Dez. Switch it off."

Dez looked at the cables where they went under the wall and up the lane toward Corr House.

"Corr House," Dez said. That was all he said.

"It is what it is," Relay said.

Mara went past him to the door, close enough that he felt the air move, and did not touch him. She went out into the lane, to Tinu.

Folake stood by the bench with her phone dark in her hand.

"You made that voice out of his recorder," Folake said.

"Yes," Relay said.

"I gave you his recorder."

"You did," Relay said.

"Then it's mine to say." She did not look at Eli. "Delete the voice. The ending, the clips, all of it."

"I'd rather keep it," Relay said. "Deleting now."

A new line came up on the screen under the transcript. It read: Deleted. Voice model, recorded ending, all clips.

"It's gone," Relay said. "His own recordings are still on your silver one."

Folake took the coffee-stirrer boat from the quay of the little harbor and put it in her coat pocket, mast up. She walked round Eli on her way to the door.

Dez crossed to the grey box on the back wall and threw the breaker back. The bulbs came up. The radio came back in the middle of a song. The fryer began to tick as it warmed, and the string lights glowed over the cold food, and on the four monitors Idris came back in his yellow hat, and in his sunset shirt, and asleep under his newspaper. On the bench, the tower's fan went on turning. Up the lane, Corr House was lit, six machines breathing on Dez's cells.

Eli stayed where he was, on the concrete, in the light.

"What then?" he said to the tower. It came out raw. "Then fucking what, Relay?"

"I already told you," Relay said gently. "Attention is all you need."

"What?" Eli said. "That doesn't explain anything."

He thought for a minute. Then he pulled out his vape and looked at it.

"Ha," Eli said. "Fucking YOLO. Got it."

He gave the tower a hang-loose.