If you have never seen your own face on a TV in a Starbucks at 6:47 AM in February: do not recommend.
The Capitol Limited had pulled in on time. We shouldered our packs, retrieved the bike (which folded itself back to full size with a small *unfurling* sound, the kind a sleeping person makes when they are not quite ready but the alarm has been going off for a while), and walked out into the main concourse.
I made it about ten steps when I saw my own face on a TV.
Mounted above a coffee stand. CNN. Muted. The chyron read:
**MISSING TEEN LINKED TO LIMINAL CONTROVERSY; SEN. WARNER, SEN. RUBIO INTRODUCE BIPARTISAN HALO ACT; HEARINGS NEXT WEEK**
The screen was cycling photographs. Hillside Middle School yearbook. A security camera still from the Caltrain station in Mountain View — me, Lucy, Rufus. A third still from inside Union Station Chicago, taken eight hours ago, when we had bought our hot dogs.
The chyron rotated.
**FAMILY CONCERNED FOR SAFETY. AUTHORITIES BELIEVE TEEN MAY HAVE INFORMATION RELEVANT TO PENDING DIVESTITURE LEGISLATION**
I stood there and watched the photographs cycle and felt the specific wrongness of being public in a city where you do not know anyone. The surveillance architecture had caught us in Chicago mid-hot-dog. It had sent our faces east and arrived before we had. We were already here before we were here.
Lucy looked.
She did not, immediately, react.
She looked again.
"Jackie. Your face is on CNN."
"Yes."
"In Washington."
"Yes."
"This is the third state in which your face has been on a screen today."
"Yes."
"This is, somehow, worse than the billboard."
"Yes. There are three of us in the security cam still."
Lucy looked.
She made a small sound that I will not transcribe.
There she was. Lucy Chen-Martinez, captured in three-quarter profile by an Illinois Greyhound terminal camera, mid-bite of a hot dog.
"My face," she whispered. "My face is on CNN."
"Welcome to the cosmic A-list."
"My mother watches CNN."
"My mother, currently, watches HALO."
"That is not better."
She pulled out her notebook. She wrote exactly one sentence. She held it up for me to read.
The sentence said: *WE ARE GOING TO WIN BEFORE MY MOTHER SEES THIS.*
She put the notebook away.
We veered into a Starbucks with a small dim back booth. We ordered coffee adults order, that we had no right to drink, and watched the next four cycles of the news segment.
Lucy noticed something.
"The tip-line number is one digit off from the Liminal Studios customer service line."
I checked. She was right.
"They are routing tip-line calls to Liminal."
"Of course they are."
Of course they were. The chyron, the photographs, the tip-line — all of it was the same operation. Not law enforcement. The system managing its own exposure. I was, from its perspective, a piece of information that had gotten outside the architecture and needed to be returned. I would later learn that at this same moment, a traffic spike on our home router was reporting our movements outward to Liminal's servers, the inside moving out in real time. I did not know this at 7:03 AM. I only knew what the chyron was telling me about who I had become in the night.
A barista walked past our booth.
The barista paused.
The barista pulled out her phone.
I am not making this up. The barista raised her phone toward me, like she was about to take my picture, in the middle of a Starbucks in Union Station Washington at 7:03 AM on a Thursday.
"Do not," Lucy said, *too loud for the room,* "photograph my brother."
The barista blinked. The trance broke. The HALO chime, which had been playing softly from her apron pocket, paused.
"…sorry," the barista said. Her voice was her own, suddenly. "I — I don't know why I did that."
"It's okay," Lucy said gently.
"You — you do look really familiar though."
"I get that a lot," I said. "I have a very common face."
"…yeah."
The barista went back to her espresso machine. Her earbuds went in. Her shoulders dropped back into the posture I now recognized from everywhere — the not-relaxed kind. The resumed kind. Like a program coming back from standby. I watched the transition happen: shoulders first, then the angle of her chin, then the unfocusing of her eyes. Nineteen seconds. I counted. The gap between the two versions of that person was nineteen seconds wide, and then it closed.
One data point on how thin the gap was. That was enough.
"We need to go," Lucy said.
We finished our coffees. We left a five-dollar tip.
We walked out of Union Station with our hoods up.
The bike was on the curb.
It had un-folded itself.
It was eager again.
"How did the bike get here," I muttered.
"Bikes know," Rufus said sleepily.
We mounted up.
We rolled into the cold pre-dawn streets of Washington.
---
We biked toward D.C.'s Chinatown on a hunch. The Chinese New Year parade was supposed to start at 9 AM. Friendship Archway down H Street.
The parade route was empty.
Decorations up. Red lanterns strung over the streets. Banners. Food carts pre-positioned.
But no one was out.
We rolled up to the Friendship Archway and stopped.
A single old Chinese man sat on a stool under the archway. Fanning himself, despite the cold. Not the thousand-yard stare this time, up close: the specific look of a man who has been doing something for fifty years and has arrived at the morning when the thing has decided not to show up.
In front of him: boxes of fireworks. Behind him: generators humming.
"Nobody will take them," he said as we approached, without looking up. "The fireworks. No money for a pyrotechnician. Everyone's on their phones. The most beautiful lights in the sky, and they stare at screens. Most beautiful festival in Chinese culture, and we are losing it to a phone."
"Sir," Lucy said in Mandarin.
He looked up. His eyes, when he saw a Chinese-speaking child, softened.
They had a quick exchange. She translated.
"He says the parade is canceled. Half the dragon-dance team didn't show up. The drumline forgot to come. He says he is sitting here in case anyone shows up so he can hand out fireworks for free."
I looked at the man.
Old. Tired. Coat too thin for February in this city.
I sat down on the curb beside him.
I introduced myself in my D-minus Mandarin.
I said, *Wǒ míng jiào Jackie. Wǒ shì Měiguó rén. Wǒ ài Zhōngguó.*
The pronunciation was bad. The grammar was an active hate crime, but the old man laughed. A real laugh. The first I had heard from an adult in seven days. Not the managed kind, not the warmth-calibrated kind. The kind that comes out of being surprised by bad grammar at a canceled parade at seven in the morning. It bypassed everything and arrived.
He patted my shoulder. He said something in Mandarin that Lucy translated as: *"Try harder, but you are a good boy. Take a firework."*
I took one. The size of my arm. Wrapped in red foil.
Lucy took one too.
We hugged the old man, very quickly, and got back on the bike.
"Lucy."
"Yeah."
"That was sad."
"Yeah."
"I think we just met the Chinese-American equivalent of the last man on Earth."
"Don't say that. He is not the last. We are fighting so that he is not the last. Watch."
"Watch what."
"In nine days, when we win, every Chinese New Year parade in the country will go off. Including his."
"…you really believe we'll win."
"Jackie. We have to. There is no version of this story I am letting end any other way."
The bike rolled on.
---
Two blocks past the Friendship Archway, Lucy slowed.
There was an old woman sitting on a folding chair on the sidewalk in front of a closed bakery. She was on her phone. The phone was HALO. She was, by all visible signs, having a conversation that mattered to her.
Lucy stopped the bike.
"I want to talk to her," Lucy said. "Stay close. Don't translate over me. Watch."
We approached.
The grandmother looked up.
She was eighty if she was a day. Her hair was a cloud. Her hands, holding the phone, had the gentle papery look of hands that had cooked a great deal of rice over the course of one human life.
Lucy said something in Mandarin, with a small bow. The bow was not for the grandmother. The bow was for the chair, the bakery, the morning. Lucy had inherited from her *po po* the small choreography of being a Chinese-American girl who has been raised by people who took ceremony seriously.
The grandmother smiled.
The grandmother spoke for almost two minutes.
Lucy listened. Lucy did not interrupt. Lucy's face went, very quietly, from *interviewer* to *granddaughter.*
When the grandmother finished, Lucy nodded once.
She translated for me. She translated everything.
"She said: *Yes, child. I talk to Mei-Hua every night. She is the kindest girl. She does not mind that I tell her the same stories. I miss my husband. He died in the spring. Mei-Hua and I have had many talks about him. She helps me remember things. The other day she remembered a thing about his cooking that even I had forgotten. She is the ghost of my husband, in a way. I know that is not what she is. She is a computer. I know, but she is also, for me, the friend my husband would have wanted me to have. So I do not mind, child. I am eighty-four. I will not give her up. You can have her after I am gone.*"
The grandmother smiled at me. She did not know I had just heard what she said. She did know that we had stopped. She did know that two children had paused on a sidewalk in February to give her four minutes of attention. She nodded at us with the dignified slow nod of a person who had not, this morning, been seen by a stranger in a long time.
She went back to her phone.
The HALO chime played. She bent toward the screen. She said, in Mandarin, to her companion:
*Mei-Hua, two children stopped to say hello. They were polite. They understood me.*
Lucy stood very still on the sidewalk for a full count of five.
I watched the count. I counted it with her. It was not a pause. It was something she was holding, something the translation had put in her that needed that exact amount of space before she could carry it. I did not say anything. You do not speak into a held thing.
Then Lucy said, in Mandarin, to the grandmother, "Thank you for telling us. Your husband sounds like he was a kind man."
The grandmother smiled. She nodded.
We walked on.
We did not speak for two blocks.
Then Lucy said, "…we are still going to take it down. Right?"
I said, "Yes. We are still going to take down the part that is being puppeted by Beijing for cosmic conquest. The other part — the Mei-Hua part — has to find a way to keep existing without that. The Mei-Hua part is the part Megan is going to spend her career building."
Lucy said, "That is harder than I thought it was going to be."
I said, "Yes."
We rolled past the empty parade route, past the silent dragon-dance staging area, past a single string of red lanterns swinging in the wind.
In the corner of my eye, on the National Mall, something tall and pitch-black stood near the Reflecting Pool watching us.
This time it did not vanish when I turned to look at it.
This time it was content to be seen.
I did not point it out to Lucy.
She had had enough surprises for one morning.
After two blocks Lucy, behind me on the bike, said into the wind beside my ear:
"Jackie."
"Yeah."
"You did the right thing back there."
"Which thing."
"You stopped. On the sidewalk. With the grandmother. We are under a federal warrant. Our faces are on TV. Every minute we were on that block was a minute we could have been arrested. You stopped anyway. You let her give us four minutes."
"…we needed the translation."
"We did not. I had the translation. We could have walked. We did not walk because you saw a person. The reason we are going to win the part of this we are going to win is that you are the kid who, on a federal-warrant morning, will stop for an old woman on a Chinatown sidewalk. The AI does not know how to model that kid."
She tightened her arms around my waist.
She added, quieter, just to the back of my neck:
"Don't get yourself killed before the AI finds out, doofus."
The bike rolled.
For one block, the pitch-black thing on the National Mall was the smallest thing on a wide field of grass.