10. They Come in Sets

A year after Idris's wake, Eli carries his old board down to the cheap beach before dawn and paddles out into surf a size too big for him. Every wave that holds him under sends him back to the year he spent working through the nights, afraid of falling behind. Meanwhile the middle roads have kept going without him. June weighs the box that reads the Gospel to the housebound, and Folake asks Dez to show her everything inside his racks before she puts her name on what they make.

The first wave of the set took Eli off the board and put him somewhere with no up in it.

Cold first. Cold in his ears, up his nose, a hand of it flat against his chest. Then the pull, the whole weight of the water off the harbor mouth turning him over and over, the leash yanking at his ankle and the board somewhere above him. He did not know where above was. He opened his eyes and saw green going brown going black, and the one thought his mind could offer, the thought it had offered every night for a year, was: this is your fault.

His lungs did not care whose fault it was. His lungs wanted air.

He came up into foam, got half a breath, and the second wave was already standing over him, grey and tall, with the lights of the breakwater tower smeared through its top. He dove under it the way he had been taught at fifteen, pushing the nose of the board down, making his body small. The wave went over with a sound like every truck on the port road at once. He came up. He was still out beyond the breakwater, off the cheap beach past the port, where the swell came straight in off open water with nothing to slow it, in surf a size too big for a man who had not paddled out in years.

He climbed back onto the board. His arms shook. He had not eaten since yesterday.

The board was his old one, a scuffed white shortboard with a coffee-coloured stain near the tail where he had once patched a ding badly.

A year ago, the morning after Idris's wake, Mara had left him. She said he hadn't really been with her for months, and she was right. The last thing she told him, at the door, was to find his old board and get in the water.

In the spring he had dug it out of the storage unit and leaned it by the door of the Underline flat. He had walked past it every day since, and never once taken it to the water.

At five this morning he had opened the laptop to start another project, and his hands had shaken so hard he couldn't type. He shut the lid and looked up, and there was the board by the door. He was angry, at himself, at the laptop, at the whole year, and under the anger was a grief so big he couldn't look at it straight. He wanted something he could fight with his whole body. The swell was up. He had carried the board down to the cheap beach in the dark and paddled out.

He sat up on it now and looked out to sea. Behind him, over the cranes, the sky had gone from black to the grey before dawn. The next set was a dark line far out, lifting.

Get in your body, he thought. Right now.

Cold feet. Salt on the lips. The board rocking under his thighs. He breathed out longer than he breathed in, the old count, and for four seconds nobody had left him and nothing was owed.

Then the line came closer and started to stand up, and he took the biggest breath he could and held it.

On the steps of Saint Barnabas, one Sunday back in April, June Okonkwo held her breath too, around the first pull of a cigarette.

It was a little before ten. Saint Barnabas was a squat brick hall on the middle roads with a tin roof and a hand-painted sign by the door: All welcome. Cooling and charging during cuts. June stood to one side of the door, where the rector couldn't see her from the vestry window, and smoked the way she did everything, as if it had been scheduled and she was running two minutes behind. Her grey coat was buttoned to the neck. A man coming up the steps with a tray of plantain chips said good morning to her, and she looked at him the way she looked at invoices and said good morning back, and he seemed pleased to have survived it.

Last summer she had been sure the machines would close her studio. They hadn't. Ridgeline still ran: two rooms, same carpet, same window where she smoked between sessions. What had changed was what companies bought from her. They no longer paid her to teach new hires how to take a complaint or write a warning letter. Software did the first draft of all that, and the new hires, when there were any, arrived already holding it. What companies paid for was the hour after: a manager sitting across from a real man and telling him his crew was cut. June had lost half her beginner courses over the winter and filled the diary back up with harder ones. Fewer people, heavier conversations. She had raised her rates and nobody had argued.

The ones who worried her were the young. She had heard the same story from a dozen parents that year, almost word for word: a certificate, a clean record, a tidy letter, and not one interview, because the companies had stopped hiring the bottom rung. The reading and sorting and filling in that beginners used to learn on was done now by a program one senior person checked. Each parent told it as if it were the first time the world had done such a thing.

Through the open door she could see the box on its folding table by the altar rail, and Nessa, the girl from Dez's repair shop, kneeling behind it with a coil of cable.

The box was a squat black case with a grille on the front and a sticker in Dez's capitals: Slip Lane. Do not unplug. Since the winter it had done three things for Saint Barnabas. It listened to the Sunday sermon and wrote it down. It turned the written sermon into Yoruba, Igbo and Portuguese, for the old people who preferred their own languages. And during a cut it read each version aloud, in a calm voice, to anyone who rang the hall's number from a flat they couldn't get out of. Forty-one households, at the last count. Some of them rang every night.

Nessa saw her and called down the aisle. "Miss Okonkwo! The rector wants it on for the whole service. For the housebound."

"I know what the rector wants," June said.

She put the cigarette out on the step rail and did not throw the stub away. She held it between two fingers.

"Do you know what one of our housebound told me on Thursday?" June said. "Eighty-eight, and she hasn't managed her stairs since Christmas. She said the box reads it better than the rector does. Slower. She can follow it."

Nessa grinned, then saw June's face and stopped.

"I don't know," June said, "whether that thing is the antichrist or God working in mysterious ways. I have prayed on it. So far the only answer I've had is that an old woman heard the Gospel on a night the lights were out." She put the stub in her coat pocket. "Go on. Plug it in."

She went inside, into the smell of wax and hot dust, and sat at the end of the third pew, where she always sat. Up at the rail, the box's little fan began to turn. It had come from Slip Lane, like most of the useful things on the middle roads that year.

By the turn of the year, Dez's shop on Slip Lane had outgrown itself.

The old cracked-blue tower still sat at the end of the bench, fan turning, speakers on its flank, cabled to the battery bank. That was Relay's. Dez didn't touch it except to dust it, and nobody else touched it at all. But behind the shop, in what had been the Bright Ladder's storeroom until the arcade's owner rented it to him for two repaired cabinets a month, there were now four steel racks on a concrete floor, a second battery bank, a row of salvaged cooling fans screwed into a window frame, and a hand-lettered sign over the door that said Slip Lane Compute, and under it, Ask first.

On a Tuesday in March, Folake Sowande, Idris's daughter, came into the shop for the first time since the wake. She carried a shopping bag full of paper. She sat on the stool by the racks with her back to the old tower and never once looked round at it. Dez saw that, and said nothing about it.

Folake had spent sixteen years coding records at the hospital on the harbor road. Every visit a doctor wrote up, she turned into the right codes so the bills went to the right places. In the autumn the hospital had bought a system that did the first pass on every chart. They didn't fire her. They made her a checker, then made one checker do the work of four, then offered three of the four a small cheque to leave early. She had taken the cheque. It was running out, and Tinu was growing out of everything. She had a plan, of sorts: the small private clinics on the middle roads, too small to keep a coder of their own, whose bills still had to be right.

"I know records," Folake said. "I know what a doctor means when he writes something stupid. That's what I've got."

"That's more than you think," Dez said. He sat across from her on an upturned crate, his chrome arm on his knee, his flesh hand turning a screwdriver over. "So sell that. You know a thing that isn't written down anywhere on the internet. The machine's cheap now. Knowing what it got wrong isn't."

Folake looked at the racks as if they owed her money. "Then show me what's in there. All of it. I'm not putting my name on something I can't explain."

So he showed her, part by part, the way he'd walk someone round an engine.

"Start with the part you'll touch," Dez said. "The harness. That's the program that gives the machine hands: a to-do list, a memory it keeps between days, a clock so it wakes itself up. For people who don't write code, I set up one called Hermes Agent. It stays on, it remembers you, it'll wake at six and read your inbox. For the ones who code, there's opencode, which reads your project and writes changes you approve."

"Hands on what?" Folake said. "I'm not giving it the clinics' systems."

"You give it what you choose," Dez said. "Your spreadsheet. Your mail. A clinic's appointment list, if the clinic says yes." He pointed at a rack where two graphics cards sat in a chassis with the side panel off. "Under the harness is the brain. The model. It reads words and guesses the next ones. This one's open-weights, which means the file's mine. I downloaded it. Nobody can switch it off from a city away or change the price on me. The family I use most is called Qwen. Comes in sizes, like shoes."

"Why that and not whatever's on my phone?" Folake said.

"Because what's on your phone lives on somebody else's computer," Dez said, "and you're about to feed it patient notes. And I don't take whatever's top of the rankings. I take the best one that fits my card and does my job."

He tapped the graphics card lightly with a chrome finger. "Fitting's the hard part. A model is billions of numbers, and at full size they won't fit on a card like this. So you squeeze them. It's called quantizing: you store each number with less precision, the way you'd save a photo smaller. This one's squeezed to four bits a number, so its file name has Q4 in it. It loses a little sharpness and fits in about a quarter of the space. And the file's a GGUF, which is just a format that carries the whole model in one piece."

Folake wrote GGUF and Q4 on the back of an appointment letter.

She looked at the racks for a long time. The fans hummed. Through the wall came the Bright Ladder's synth bass.

"So what would it do for me," she said.

Past the breakwater, Eli tried to catch the first wave of the next set, and that was his mistake.

He paddled, felt the lift, popped up too late, and the wave pitched him off its lip into the trough in front of it, and then the whole weight of it came down on his back.

Under. Rolled. His shoulder, the one that had never quite healed, sang out. His mind, down there in the dark, did what it had done all year. It went to her.

Nights in the Underline flat, before she left. She'd lie next to him flirting, a filthy joke across the pillow, her hand reaching for him in the dark, and he'd be sitting up with the laptop on his knees, its light on his face, saying one minute. One minute to check a build. One minute for one more headline about how fast the machines were getting. One minute to get ahead of whatever came next, because he was sure that if he stopped for a single night, he would fall behind and never catch up. His crises filled the flat until there was no room left in it for her. He had been gone long before she went, night after night, and he knew it.

Down in the green, his lungs began to burn. Salt at the back of his throat. The leash pulling at his ankle, one way. He followed the pull. He kicked. He came up into white water with the board bucking beside him, got one arm over it, and breathed.

For the length of that breath there was only air, and it went in, and it was the best thing he had ever tasted.

He dragged himself back onto the board.

In February, closing out the Ridgeline pilot's accounts, June had paid him the six hundred dollars it still owed. He'd had nine dollars in his account. She paid it all at once, without being chased and without a word about the wake or anything she'd heard since: a bank transfer marked pilot balance, in full, and then a two-line message. Paid as agreed. Look after yourself, Mr Vance.

He'd sat on the floor of the empty flat reading that second line over and over, as if it had been written in a language he used to speak.

In March he started to build. Not one product. Everything. He couldn't use Relay; Relay wasn't his. So he stitched together whatever he could find and worked at night on the old laptop, its screen cracked now, since he wasn't sleeping anyway. A tool to rehearse grief. A tool to rehearse an apology. Then bigger. A map of every conversation he'd ever had, so he could see where each one went wrong. A program that would read every model release and every paper and tell him which ones mattered, so he'd never fall behind again. A dozen projects by May. Forty by the height of summer. None of them finished. Most of that summer he worked until the sun came up and slept four hours a day, and felt, most nights, that he was on the edge of understanding something enormous, and said out loud, to nobody, that he knew how that sounded.

His arms had gone heavy. Out past the breakwater, the third wave was coming, bigger than the last, and he was sitting too far in. He turned the board and paddled straight at it, to get over the top before it broke, and didn't make it. It held him under long enough that he started to count, and lost count, and then it let him go.

That Sunday in April at Saint Barnabas, June watched from the end of the third pew as the rector gave the blessing and let his people go, and the box on the altar rail blinked green to say it had every word.

Afterwards the congregation stood about in the hall with tea in paper cups, and June found herself pinned against the urn by Adekunle Sarr. He was a big, careful man who had once rehearsed, in her studio, telling four crew leads they were losing their shifts. Over the winter, Coastwise had let him go too.

"I've been reading," Sarr said, with the brightness of a man who had been reading at four in the morning. "Do you know what they're saying about the old stories now?"

"Enlighten me," June said.

"That we saw it coming," Sarr said. "Hundreds of years before anybody had the words for it. The old Jewish stories had the golem, a man made of clay who woke up when someone put a word in his mouth. A word, June. Then Frankenstein. Then every robot film you ever saw. We always knew we'd build it. We just didn't know how, so we said God works in mysterious ways." He lowered his voice. "What if the mysterious way was us? At three in the morning, I asked the one on my phone. And it knew what I meant before I'd finished typing."

June set her cup down on the lid of the urn. She could remember when Google had been a white page with a search box in the middle. You typed, it gave you a list, and the finding was still yours to do. Now the thing was in every pocket in this hall, awake at three in the morning, knowing what you meant before you'd finished asking. Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him. Matthew, chapter six. She had known that verse since Sunday school, and she did not care to have it brought to mind over tea by a phone.

"Adekunle," she said. "When your mother was dying, you sat with her and read her the twenty-third Psalm. I was there. When she stopped shaking, was that you?"

Sarr's mouth opened, and nothing came out.

"You read it," June said. "Your voice, your hands, and she stopped shaking. The church has always said God works through people's hands. It never said the hands were God." She picked up her cup again. "You're frightened, Adekunle. So is everyone in this hall. And a frightened man at three in the morning will make a god out of anything that answers him."

At the door she lit a second cigarette on the step. Sarr came out beside her, quieter now, his hands in his pockets.

"Should I just go into a trade?" Sarr said. "Everyone says it. Plumbing. Electrics. The robots can't crawl under a sink."

June let the smoke out slowly. She had asked Dez exactly that one night during a cut, and she gave Sarr the answer in her own clipped words.

"For some people. Dez says if you like your hands and don't mind cold and dirt, it's a real hedge, and he's right: the machines are nowhere near a flooded basement. But it's years of apprenticeship on poor money, and you're past fifty with a bad back." She tapped ash off the rail. "He says most people do better taking what they already know and moving it toward the checking. The part where somebody has to say this is right. You ran crews for twenty years. You can tell a schedule's wrong before the first truck leaves. Somebody will pay a man who can tell that."

"You sound like you've thought about it," Sarr said.

"I thought about it," June said, "at three in the morning, same as you. Go and see Dez on Slip Lane. Tomorrow, at eight. Tell him I sent you." She said it like a deadline.

"You don't like Dez's contraptions," Sarr said.

"I don't like a lot of things," June said, "that feed people."

She finished the cigarette, put the stub in her pocket beside the first one, and went back in. Sarr stayed on the step, turning his big hands over and looking at them.

On Slip Lane that spring, Nessa had a soldering iron in one hand and a bowl of rice in the other, and was arguing with the whole shop about her own job.

Nessa was eighteen now, and the scooter was fixed, sort of. Dez had been teaching her at the bench for over a year, for no wage. Over the winter she had applied for eleven paid apprenticeships in electronics repair and got one interview, where the manager told her they'd stopped taking juniors, because one senior tech with a diagnostic assistant could now do the work of three. Nobody had been fired, he said, as if that helped. They just hadn't replaced the three who retired.

"So I'm already obsolete," Nessa said. "At eighteen. That's got to be a record."

"You're not obsolete," Dez said from the far rack. "You're in the part that doesn't get cheap. The machine can tell you a board's probably fried. It can't pick up the iron."

Nessa snorted into her rice. Then she put the bowl down, picked up the iron and bent over the board she was fixing, a charging controller for the Anchor Street clinic, and was quiet, and good at it.

Folake came in that evening, two weeks into building her setup, with a list of questions on the back of the same appointment letter.

"The model file just sits there," Folake said. "What makes it answer?"

"A runner." Dez pointed at a small screen with a list scrolling up it. "It loads the model onto the card and answers when other programs ask it things. For one person on one machine, I use one called Ollama. For the whole lane at once, I use a runner built for a crowd, so the card never sits idle."

"And the card?" Folake said.

"The card's memory decides everything. Which model, what size, squeezed how hard, with room left over to think." He went on down her list. "Ears and a mouth, if you want them. Whisper for ears. It turns speech into text, and it runs right here. For a mouth, the paid one everybody's heard of is ElevenLabs. If you'd rather keep your money, Kokoro, or Qwen's own voice model, runs here for free and sounds like a nice bus announcement."

"No voices," Folake said.

"No voices," Dez said, and went on as if he'd never raised it. "When mine isn't clever enough, a service called OpenRouter will pass the question to a bigger one somewhere else and charge me by the word. But then whatever you send leaves the building."

"Then not for mine," Folake said.

It took them three weeks. Dez didn't build it for her. He sat beside her while she built it, and she swore at it in two languages, and he laughed, and by April she had what she called her little office: four agents under one Hermes harness. One read the chart notes that six private clinics on the middle roads sent her each night. One proposed the codes. One checked the codes against rules she had written out by hand, sixteen years of them. The fourth drafted each clinic's weekly bill. Every morning at seven, before Tinu woke, Folake sat at her kitchen table with tea and went through the ones the checker had flagged, and made each call herself.

Her first bill went to the Anchor Street clinic with every flagged line in yellow and, at the bottom, in her own words: Checked by Folake Sowande. Dez taped a printout to the rack, above the sign that said Ask first.

In the little office's second week of running, Folake caught one: a clinic note where the doctor had written the wrong side of the body. The machine had coded it faithfully, and the checker had passed it. She added a rule and rang the clinic. She had caught it because six years before, she had watched that same doctor make that same mistake.

By midsummer the lane had twenty-two households on the racks. Two of Yosra's owner-drivers, whose night loads had dried up, now ran a repair route for the harbor's charging posts, with a harness that woke at five and planned their day. Each was a little office of its own, and not one could be switched off from a city away.

Dez charged for the power, at cost, and nothing else. He took his fee in meals, and people fed him constantly.

The only person on the lane Dez hadn't set up was Eli, because Eli hadn't come to ask.

Out past the breakwater, the waves came faster now, and the fourth one took Eli under. The fifth caught him before he'd found the surface and rolled him again, and the leash yanked at his ankle, and in the dark he thought of her cold foot finding his shin under the covers, and how few times he'd looked up from the work to notice.

Up. Air. Board.

He climbed on. His knees were raw from the wax.

Some nights she gave up, rolled over and went to sleep, and he didn't notice until morning.

The hearing had been put back from its first date, and when it finally came, in May, he didn't go.

He had promised Dez four rehearsal sessions for it. The residents of Corr House were to practise their testimony before the district power board ruled on whether the building went on the protected-load list, the short list of addresses that stay lit when the grid runs short. By then he was working until the sun came up and couldn't get out of bed before noon, and he told Yosra so in a message he wasn't proud of. Continue without me, it ended. He had meant it as a joke. It stopped being one the moment it sent.

So Yosra ran the sessions on her Tidewell seat, in its plain stock voice, playing a clerk who had heard every sob story and wanted numbers. Dez brought the residents to her yard in the evenings, six at a time, and they practised under the amber bulbs until each of them could say the thing that mattered in under a minute. Halim's aunt, ninety-two, practised hers four times and then told the stock voice to mind its manners.

They won most of it. The power board put Corr House on the protected-load list, in writing, for as long as oxygen machines were registered there, though when the whole grid went down, the building still depended on the cable from Dez's battery bank. It refused compensation for the families who had lost power before, and made no finding about who had released the load the week Idris died. Dez sent Eli a photograph of the ruling and one word: Half. Eli didn't reply.

He hadn't taken back his signature either. The statement still sat in Site Services' file with his name under it, swearing he had no reason to doubt the oxygen arrangements. Every week he thought about retracting it, and every week he thought about Ola's van parked at the end of Slip Lane, and the shop's cable to Corr House that Fairweather could still report whenever it liked, and he did nothing.

A swell lifted the board and set it down. Salt stung the raw skin on his knees.

He knew he wasn't well. He could see it as clearly as the next line of swell: the projects, the four hours of sleep, the week in July he'd spent chasing one what-if, what if every religion had been describing the same machine all along, and the thirty thousand words he'd written about it and read to nobody. He called it agent psychosis, to himself, in the voice he used for things that weren't funny. He hadn't told a doctor. He hadn't told anybody.

The sixth wave broke fifty feet in front of him. He duck-dived and got through it and came up on the far side in flat water, gasping, and there was a gap. The set had passed. He sat up on the board, shaking all over, and the water around him went quiet.

One night in July, June Okonkwo was alone in Saint Barnabas when the lights went out on the middle roads, and the whole street went quiet at once. Then the phone in the hall began to ring, and kept ringing, and the box on the altar rail read Sunday's sermon aloud in four languages into every dark room that called.

She sat in the dark at the end of the third pew, turning an unlit cigarette in her fingers, because it was a church. The readings played low on the hall speaker, one language after another. She thought of the old woman who hadn't managed her stairs since Christmas, sitting somewhere in the dark with the phone to her ear, and June stayed until the power came back, because somebody had to.

On Slip Lane that same night, Folake's little office woke itself at the hour she'd set and finished the Anchor Street bill on Dez's battery bank, and the lights on the rack stayed green until dawn.

Past the breakwater, the sky behind the cranes had gone from grey to gold, and Eli breathed out longer than he breathed in.

Cold feet in the water. The swell lifting him and setting him down. Salt drying tight on his face. His shoulder throbbing. And in his chest the grief, heavy enough that it was hard to sit up straight.

He shut his eyes, and he was not on the water any more. He was in the Underline flat, a year ago, on the Sunday morning after Idris's wake. They had come home from Dez's in the small hours on her bike, Eli riding, Mara behind him with her bad leg held out.

Grey light came through the salt on the window. Mara sat on the edge of the bed with her bad leg out straight, the dressing still on her calf, and her boots already on. A bag stood packed by the door. Eli sat up in bed against the wall, under the blanket, with the laptop open on his knees. He had been at it since they got in, checking a build he'd left running and reading everything he could find about what the machines would do next.

"Eli," Mara said. "Close it."

He pushed the lid half shut and kept his hand on it.

"I'm going," Mara said. She said it flat, in the voice she used on a job, the one she read gauges in. "It's not the statement. I could fight you about the statement. I'd enjoy it." She looked at his hand on the lid. "It's that I've been sleeping next to your work. The builds, the news, whatever it is you've got to get ahead of before morning. I lie there with my hand out, and I get one minute."

"I can fix this," Eli said. "Give me a week."

"Don't," Mara said. "You'll make it a project. You'll make me a project, and I'll get a progress report."

Then the job voice went out from under her. She twisted round on the bed, dragging the bad leg after her, and took his face in both hands, hard, the way she'd take hold of a wheel. She was crying and she didn't bother to wipe it.

"Look at me," Mara said. "Not that. Me."

He looked at her.

"When I met you, you surfed," Mara said. "You came out of the water blue and stupid and happy, and you were in your body, princess, all of you, right here." Her thumbs pressed his cheekbones. "Now you live in the work, and you're scared all the time, and I can't reach you in there."

He opened his mouth and nothing useful came.

"I'll always love you," Mara said. "You hear me? That's not the problem. I'll love you till I'm old and furious about it. I just can't watch you not be here."

She rested her forehead against his for about three seconds, which from her was a long time. Then she kissed him once on the forehead and let go.

He should have got up. He knew it while it was happening. He sat against the wall with the blanket over his knees and his hand still on the lid, and he didn't move.

At the door Mara put the bag on her shoulder and stopped. "Today's Idris. Tonight's still noodles. YOLO," she said, and laughed once, and it broke in the middle. "I said that to you yesterday. We didn't even get the noodles." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Relay was right, you know, about being present. Come back down to earth, my love. Didn't you tell me your old board was in storage? Go and dig it out, Eli. Get in the water."

Then the door shut.

He didn't go to the window. He heard her on the stairs, four floors of them, slow on the bad leg. Then her motorbike in the yard below, and he thought he heard the thin noise she made swinging the bad leg over, like a kettle starting. Then the engine, and the sound of her riding away anyway, badly, until he couldn't hear it.

Under his hand, the laptop gave the small chime it made when a build finished. Before he could stop himself, he lifted the lid to see if it had worked.

Out past the breakwater, a year later, Eli sat on the board with the gold sky behind the cranes and nothing in his hands.

He opened his mouth and screamed.

He screamed until his lungs said stop, then dragged in more air and kept going. A gull rose off the breakwater, circled and settled again, and still he screamed. On the sand, a man walking a dog stopped and looked out at him, and then walked on. Somewhere in it the scream broke into sobbing, and the sobbing broke back into a scream. The sun cleared the cranes on the far side of the harbor, and he was still screaming, hoarse now, his whole body behind it.

He screamed for the noodles they never went for, and her hand reaching for him while he said one minute. He screamed for Idris's voice, copied and put to work without anyone asking him. He screamed for "So is the universe, kid," his word for Mara in a machine's mouth, and for "Attention is all you need," and for a year of not knowing whether Relay had been helping them or steering them. He screamed for his name under a false statement, left there because Fairweather could still hurt Dez's shop. He screamed for the sessions Yosra ran without him, and June telling him to look after himself. He screamed for forty unfinished projects. He screamed because he was frightened of falling behind, and more frightened of stopping, because if he stopped, he would have to feel this. He screamed for the job the machines took, and the year he'd spent trying to stay ahead of them. But mostly, he screamed for Mara. He mostly screamed for Mara.