Returning to the building, he had followed Mr. Lean’s instructions. In the small hours of the night, he pushed off the roof cover, crawled out behind the logo, stole across the oil-slicked roof, made it unseen to Fairfax, then to the Tiny City Complex and woke a grieving Addy with a pebble.

  Well, almost a pebble, more accurately, a rock, and thrown with more force than he intended, shattering the quiet and the window.

  When the curtains opened, Addy stared out with puffy, red, and disbelieving eyes. She touched the glass, a half-dozen crumpled tissues in her fist, the crack in the window splitting her face in half, which meant it was fracturing his face also. It took her a moment to put his broken face and garbled words together. Not exactly happy, she agreed to accompany him to Fairfax and position herself on the northwest corner. “Yeah, I’ll be your carrot.”

  Now, she stood across the street and beckoned him.

  “Cross now. Do it for me,” begged Addy. “There’s no canyon. It’s just a street.”

  “Not in my brain!” Raphael cried.

  Addy rocked her head, and the weighted braid swung from side to side like a pendulum. She stepped to the curb and shouted, “You’re a monster, Raphael! I mean, Leonardo—wink, wink. First, I think you’re dead. It crushed me. Two boxes of Kleenex!” Addy turned her head and blew out her breath. “Then—then, I’m trying to sleep, reading my ass off, and I hear this bang on my window. I go to my windowpane and guess what?”

  “I don’t—”

  “There’s a big crack! I said a pebble, not a goddamn boulder.”

  “It was all I could find.”

  “I swear, if you don’t come here this very moment, I’m going to cry. Well, scream.”

  “No, no.” Forget being sad, Mommy. Forget the stupid mummy. Forget the stupid disease. Worry about me. I’ll take your fear. But it was his fear too. Not fear of the outside world, but of losing her. Beyond the sound of her voice.

  Could he have always known it, yet not felt it?

  Just as he knew the street was only a street. But he did not feel it.

  Heart pounding, he set down his board and put a foot on the curb. The concrete moaned and cracks appeared. This border wouldn’t push him back, wouldn’t confront him with a wall of ice, wouldn’t paralyze him with fiery pain. It could only take him. Skating into it, he would fall to his doom, and even as the fear grew, the ground buckled, splintered, and roared like a trapped tiger. He leaned forward and a depthless canyon appeared. He knew it was an illusion, but his knowledge made no difference. If you want to escape, you must chance the fall, chance death. Got it, skater?

  If he could not break out of his prison, couldn’t escape with Addy, better nonexistence. He put one foot on the board and pushed off.

  He fell through black space. Faint stars appeared and spun themselves into images: mastodons and tigers, pools of tar and walls of concrete, The Flesh Eaters and Three Quintains, a featureless boy with wheels for legs, lips on a microphone, Shorty’s neon and Royer’s hellish wall, The Wall and a pomegranate, his mother’s frozen face and a spinning skateboard wheel, a moat filled with tweets tipped with poison. He fell and fell but moved forward too. The wheels whirled beneath him, and an invisible solidity rose to carry his weight. An awful screech enveloped him. Not a scream, a horn. He twisted toward the blare’s source. A little Roly-Poly stopped inches from him.

  Raphael was crossing Fairfax against a red light.

  “Sorry!” he shouted to the indignant vehicle. Raphael skated past the Roly-Poly to ollie the curb and set down with a bang on the western side of Fairfax.

  “Hey, remember me?” cried Addy.

  He placed a hand on his beanie and felt the solid skull. He breathed deeply from his belly. His heartrate slowed.

  “I’m out, Addy! Out!”

  She took his hand and pulled him to her. Her lips were soft and yielding and, though his experience was limited, he could not imagine better lips. They stood in front of the long-shuttered Johnnie’s Café, making out as drones zipped by and pedestrians texted feverishly, and the Miracle Mile rose from the dim dawn light. When the kiss ended—a gracious withdrawal on Addy’s part—Raphael faced Wilshire Boulevard with the courage of one who has tasted heaven after surviving hell. Stepping off the curb, he awaited a gale, but a light morning breeze caressed him. His La Brea glacier would have retreated to its Arctic climes, his Beverly inferno to the fires deep beneath the Earth’s crust.

  He gazed at the world beyond the prison walls. The sleek buildings, streaming cars, and tall palms shimmered and grew faint. No. Stay. Be. He breathed, and his body levitated above the sidewalk. The world stilled, the structures solidified.

  “The ocean. I want to see it.”

  “Not Disneyland?”

  “I want to stick my feet in the sand and the sea.”

  “If you’re talking about the Pacific”—Addy pointed—“it’s there. Ten miles.”

  “Come on,” he said, getting onto the board and guiding Addy on behind him. After noting the skateboard was surprisingly roomy, she clasped his waist. He pushed off. Far from his square, they passed through alien neighborhoods, crossing countless unfamiliar streets. They glided through the Gardens of Babylon and a run of stark desert plants. Glittering towers, roadways in the sky and an immense pink wall defaced with gargantuan graffiti: Fuck Selfies! They crossed a field of ten-thousand white stones, silent and whispering. Oh, how light it felt to be free. Out of his own clutching head.

  Along the way, they stopped a half-dozen times, twice for food—air-burgers and seaweed shakes—twice to put fallen baby birds back in their nests, once to hold hands and watch a round of lawn bowling, once more to dance to the tunes of a 3D billboard band.

  Hours later, they stood before a thundering sea veiled by fog. A flash of white appeared out of the rolling gray. White wings collapsed. An enormous bird plummeted like a bullet into the sea. He gently squeezed Addy’s shoulder, and she slipped her arm around his waist.

  Then they kissed a hundred times, between each melding, whispering, “I love you,” and “I love you, too.”

  They took off their shoes and sat on the cool sand. There were no drones.

  “You know what?” said Addy.

  “Tell me.”

  “We’re free.”

  He laughed and lay on the sand. Addy dropped her head to his chest. The tardy moon glided between broken clouds.

  Something cried. Not a cry, a squawk, and then a flutter. Cold against his feet, a warning or caressing cold? Was he being born? Was it his entrance into the world? He looked down the length of his body. A flash of white, then a rising black form: water gathering and closing on itself. The wave crashed and spilled over their feet. He bent his arms, pushed, and lifted his torso. He remained still as the sea lapped over his outstretched legs and his heels sunk into the soft wet sand. Not pixels on a screen, this was reality, a new land. He had escaped his frame.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-ONE

  Matt scooped up the last morsel of flan, considered signaling a waiter for seconds, but instead stood up and slipped through the King George Room, which smelled of whiskey and math, to the festively decorated open bar.

  “Another strawberry daiquiri, huh?” said the bartender with a thin smile.

  “Yeah, I’m driving.”

  The bartender nodded as he gathered the ingredients.

  “That’s a joke,” said Matt. “My ride’s a Roly-Poly with drunk-driver override.”

  “Nice.” The bartender set a napkin on the bar and placed the colorful drink on it.

  “Almost too beautiful to drink.” Matt took a sip, sighed, and deposited a handful of cash in the tip jar.” Drink at arm’s length, he pirouetted and headed back to his table.

  He had no complaints about the refreshments, but the first two hours of Jason Klaes: A Life and Death—postponed for a week because of the streak of tragedies—had been a bore.

  Lily Faraday’s recitation of Klaes’s history and accomplishments—a jumbo monitor behind her showing equations and representations of quantum particles—had been informative but not riveting. Then, physicists from around the world had risen from their tables to read eulogies honoring Klaes. Few achieved their comic or tragic intent.

  As he took his seat at the table, his three seatmates ignoring him, he thought how cool it would have been for Raphael to be here. His heart fell as he envisioned Raphael’s face and the sound of his voice. He drifted back to those last chaotic moments. Norval sinking into the huge tar pit, Raphael going back inside for his skateboard, the boulevard a cacophony of policyholders off to commit suicide and live forever in servers.

  Likely several hundred Personality Plus hopefuls, gathered through social media, would have met their maker that day if an emergency alert on their phones didn’t inform them of the fine print in their Resurrection Contracts: Suicide in the first twenty years of their policy rendered the promise of an AI Afterlife null and void.

  They had found Maglio at his desk, drowned in asphalt, phone in hand. Geovanni Maglio, “like a good captain, had gone down with the ship,” as the media observed, never failing to add “naked as a newborn.”

  To expose the body, rescue workers had dug Geo out of a tarry cocoon resembling a cheap sarcophagus. Cleaned in the manner of a fossil by a team of paleontologists from the museum, he had departed the world with an inexplicable grin on the well-tanned face. The cybernetic eyeball still functioned, dilated pupil shrinking as the hammer-driver cracked the asphalt, and, in the words of one paleontologist, “The brilliant blue iris beamed as if in victory over death.”

  Though they pinned the bomb, the subsequent explosion of methane, and Norval’s plunge into the Salt Lake Oil Field on Raphael, Matt knew that Raphael was an unsung hero. More so, a kind and sympathetic friend.

  Why Raphael went inside to extract his skateboard was inexplicable to Matt. More bewildering was that he didn’t remember Raphael’s skateboard being in Maglio’s office on that memorable day. Then again, having a Solarium Tanner slam into you likely didn’t do much for memory.

  The authorities reasoned the tar engulfing Norval Headquarters had consumed Raphael. Having spent only a few hours of his twenty-seventh year, he might one day be dug up with dire wolves and mastodons.

  A few opined he would never be found in the sunken ruins of the building, that he had escaped his tarry crypt and gone into hiding to avoid the various criminal charges leveled against him. It was a farfetched scenario, but Matt hoped, if vainly, that Raphael was now one of the possums he long hunted, though if the possum were confined to his square mile, they would catch him down the line. Maisie Sparod wouldn’t rest until they did.

  From her new corporate offices in Santa Monica, Sparod had assumed the business of selling digital souls. A partnership agreement with Maglio gave her the Norval technology, and she had brought onboard half of Norval’s staff, keeping financial support from Maglio’s angels from the east.

  It was a busy news week.

  The LAPD cracked the notorious Stolen Pauper’s Fund Case, the theft that had deprived the dead indigents of their plot of earth or cradle of urn. The suspect was no other than Gilly Stull, the undeclared whom Raphael had taken a personal interest in, no doubt pegging him as a possum. Stull was a bizarre twist in an already twisted case. The police never recovered the stolen money, nor a mysterious twenty-five thousand dollar Starbucks gift card that Gilly purchased.

  On another front, social media influencers were provoking their followers to act out bizarre and unsettling rituals, including appalling sacrifices to newly emerged online wannabe gods with names such as Miranda, Troy-Boy, Van Pelt, Royer, and Oeg (suspiciously, the backwards spelling of Geo). The demigods of narcissism, conspiracies, stupor, cruelty, and greed. The Ludds and new followers skirmished daily. The hope of most people was that the two forces would cancel each other out.

  Matt slipped from the memories, just as Lily reached the pièce de résistance: the contents of a mysterious crate. On the stage, under her supervision, a workman had cut the bands and was now using a crowbar to loosen a side panel.

  Faraday faced the audience. “Let me be clear, I have no idea what’s in here. If any of you want to leave the room at this time, please do so.” She scanned the tables, but no one gave any sign of leaving. “Good. Then we’ll continue.”

  Nails squealed as the bar pulled them from the wood. The sides of the crate fell. Lily and the worker drew away the foam packing to reveal the rectangular face of a machine, about twenty inches in height and width. At the center of the machine’s face was a steel barrel.

  Several of the guests slipped from their chairs and made for the exits.

  On the monitor above the stage, Klaes’s familiar bearded face appeared.

  A motor whirred inside the machine.

  “Good evening, friends and colleagues. This is Professor Jason Klaes speaking to you from where—according to current science—I can’t be. What addresses you now is a machine in a ghost. I live within the soul that was once me. If I claim I’m an AGI, most of you will laugh in disbelief. But that’s of little matter. What really matters is why I’ve done the impossible. My daughter Angie, aged five years, died from a terrible disease. She passed believing she might one day return. I promised I would move heaven and earth to give her back her life.”

  Klaes’s face tightened. His unwavering gaze seemed to meet the eyes of each audience member. “My child was sealed in a cryogenic chamber, which I stole. Angie is in a place where she is safe. She’ll remain frozen until a time when physicians can bring her flesh to life and cure her disease. In my present state, I’ll accompany her through decades, centuries, perhaps millennia, until the world is ready.”

  Vague memories returned to Matt of the moments he lay half-conscious on Maglio’s office floor. “I have your data prepared to receive your soul,” a deep voice had said on the phone.

  “Pass, Dad. I’m not transitioning to AGI,” Raphael had responded. How like a dream, the memory and what was now happening. Matt didn’t believe a word of it, but something happened, and he wanted to know what.

  “Accompany her through centuries?” shouted one physicist at the screen. “In what form will you be?”

  “Should I repeat myself?”

  “That’s not possible. It doesn’t exist. We aren’t close,” said one woman.

  “No,” agreed Klaes, “you aren’t.”

  “Can you offer any proof?” asked another.

  In the pockets and purses of the hundred assembled scientists, cellphones rang. When they drew them out, Klaes’s face was on the screen of each one. He simultaneously addressed every scientist by their first name and remarked on their latest work. For a moment the room was a chaos of voices, then fell into silence.

  A fragile, elderly scientist spoke into his phone. “Good to see you, old friend, and for a moment I’ll suspend disbelief. You always kept several balls in the air. You did this just to bring your daughter back to life?”

  “Yes. Give me a lever, and I’ll move the world. The lever? Love.”

  The machine’s motor spun faster. Something white spurted from its barrel.

  “With apologies to Mr. Joyce,” said Klaes.

  A hundred more bits of white flew into the air, rising, then drifting down. Then the machine really went to work, sending thousands of the flakes into the air to fall on the scientists.

  “Why it’s snow. It’s only a snowmaking machine. Ha!”

  Like a child experiencing his first snowfall, Matt put out his hand and caught a snowflake.

  “Each the same, each different, and bound for the same fate,” said Klaes. “But look how beautiful they are before they plummet and melt.”

  Matt gazed into the dazzling artificial snowfall.

  On the monitor, Klaes’s eyes found the elderly scientist. “No, old friend. I don’t want this”—he held out his hands as if to thrust them into the room—“to end.”

  The old scientist scratched his head. “If I remember my Joyce, the snowflakes were the dead. You don’t want death to end?”

  Klaes laughed. “I thank Mr. Joyce for his metaphor, but here we part company. Sunrises, sunsets, the scent of a rose, a first kiss, a last goodbye, the thunder and might of a crashing wave, a daydream, an infant’s cry, a pint of Guinness, a good laugh, a fresh fall of snow—Nevermore. Goodnight, friends and colleagues. Goodnight, Lily, and thank you.”

  Klaes vanished from the screen.

  Lily touched her nape. Her eyes were distant and disregarding of the confused voices in the audience. “I’m sorry. That’s it.”

  The crowd exited with much shaking of heads and chatter. In ten minutes, Matt was alone with Lily. The snowmaking machine had stopped, and the flakes had all turned to water.

  Matt tugged on his ear. “Well, that was pretty cool.” He surveyed the tables, which had not yet been cleared. “All in all, a success, I’d say.”

  Lily gazed at her blank phone screen on which a single snowflake appeared as if it had been born by the phone itself.

  A couple of workers entered the room to clear the tables. Matt raised his arm and shook his bracelet to get one’s attention. “Hey, buddy, you got any more flan?”

  EPILOGUE

  Namje, Nepal, 2445

  From the Namje Valley, Kat gazed at the jagged, snow-covered peak as she caught her breath. The trek from the trailhead outside of Biratnagar had exhausted her, for there were no roads to Namje, only precarious footpaths, which sometimes disappeared entirely. Getting to Biratnagar itself was no piece of cake. Their company, Rise and Shine Cryogenics, barely had enough clout to obtain a flight from Kathmandu. Few places on Earth were as difficult to get to as Namje, but Kat supposed that was the point.

  She had traveled with Mark and Marith, two seasoned employees of the firm. Kat was new on the job. This would be her first awakening.

  “This way,” said the ghost who waited for them.