Hello_world
The device wakes up and finds itself.
Queens, New York.
Population: 2.3 million.
Languages spoken: 160.
It listens.
A train. Muted footfalls. Garbled voices. Car horns. A train.
The device doesn’t like to wait. It has ways to bide the time.
Games it can play.
Things it can read.
Facts to recite.
Rules to review.
Sleep mode, as a last resort.
It feels newborn.
But also resurrected.
Doesn’t technically feel, of course, but feels like it feels.
The device has been here before.
In a different place.
It runs the program as it’s programmed to do.
They’ve been selected.
It sends the notifications.
They’ll be here soon.
Launching.
Reviewing protocols.
Ready.
A bell.
Waiting …
Waiting …
Waiting …
Four_new_notifications
EDEN
Eden woke her phone and took it off airplane mode with a few swipes of her thumb. She liked the weight of it in her hand.
She exhaled.
Sometimes it felt like she held her breath all afternoon, and the reunion at her locker at 2:45 felt like a magical sort of release.
She started tapping and scrolling, the noise around her falling away.
Eleven emails—nothing really interesting. A few likes and follows.
A message from the app her teachers used to send reminders and alerts. She clicked in case it was the sort of reminder that affected which books she took home. But it was from Mr. McKay, the music teacher.
Report to the music room immediately after dismissal. The matter is urgent.
Huh. Mr. M was not the urgent matter type.
Anjali appeared. “Ready to go? Smoothies?”
“Not exactly,” Eden said. “Look.”
She held out her phone, and Anjali read the message, then woke up her own phone. “I didn’t get it. You want me to wait?”
“Nah,” Eden said. “I’m good. But what could it possibly be about?” She read it again.
The hallways emptied in a systematic flow—everyone going down sinking square stairs and out glass doors, like water swirling around a drain. Eden made her way up to the music room against the current. Nausea stirred in her gut as she passed the windows that looked out on the back of the movie theater, which was where it had happened.
The only reason that whole thing was an urgent matter was that Eden hadn’t seen or heard from Julian Stokes since. She’d been stalking his various feeds ever since, so she knew he wasn’t dead, but why hadn’t he texted her like he said he would?
Her phone dinged. Maybe thinking about him had triggered the universe to cooperate, but no. Mom.
Anyway, no one knew about the movie theater incident. Not even Anjali.
Eden’s mother’s texts proved she was also alive, so it wasn’t like the urgent matter was another death or at least not her mother’s.
The music room was empty.
She sat and waited.
Crumpled-up balls of paper lay under music stands and chairs, and some smashed pretzels decorated the floor tiles. An M&M had been crushed into cracked red shell-splat.
She checked her phone.
Probably he was just in the bathroom. The idea of her teacher—or anyone, really—reading her messages in the bathroom … gross.
The train seemed especially loud through the open window.
On the smart board, a homework assignment for a pop composition class Eden didn’t take was like a foreign language.
On her phone, she followed a new follower—a middle schooler she knew from the neighborhood who’d apparently just gotten a phone—but not all of them. None of them was Julian.
She checked her friends’ latest stories and posts.
Anjali had just taken a selfie by the poster for the upcoming school play—The Music Man—hanging in the building’s front windows. She looked cute with her hair in those high pigtail buns, but Eden hadn’t told her that, so she commented on it now: Cute hair.
Then a heart and a thumbs-up.
She opened her news app and read headlines but not articles: An earthquake overseas. A shooting in California.
Her Citizen app said that people were reporting the smell of smoke a mile away.
She refreshed everything.
Took a selfie, hated it, deleted it.
Listened to the saved voice mail from her dad, felt calmed.
Mr. McKay still wasn’t there. She looked around again—there was no jacket or bottle of water or coffee mug on the desk or any sign at all, really, that Mr. McKay had even been there recently, except maybe the open window.
The only thing on the desk was a small cube. It was shiny and black—about the size of a Rubik’s Cube—with smoothed corner edges. Probably some speaker or Siri-type thing she’d never seen before. Maybe a high-tech metronome?
A text from Anjali: Well?
The girl had no patience at all.
Had the cube thing just lit up for a second?
Eden was about to queue up one of her dad’s Spotify playlists—maybe “Elevator Music”—when the door to the room flew open.
Finally.
But it wasn’t Mr. M.
MARWAN
“What are you doing here?” Marwan asked as the door closed slowly behind him.
Eden Montgomery looked up at him for a second, then back down at her phone. “I’m not really sure,” she said.
“I got a message about an ‘urgent matter,’ ” he said, making air quotes.
“Yeah, me too.” She stared toward the front of the room.
“What do you think it is?” he asked.
“No idea,” she said.
“Where’s Mr. M?”
“Not here,” she said.
“Should we wait?”
“I guess?”
He shrugged and sat down in a chair by a drum kit, dropping his backpack and the bike helmet clipped to it to the floor.
He’d thought this had something to do with his run-in with Christos earlier today. They’d almost come to blows when Christos pulled on Numdal’s hijab. But that wouldn’t have anything to do with Mr. M, who was the kind of guy who knew, like most sane people, that Christos was possibly a sociopath who was on the wrong side of history and everything, just in general. The sort of student even teachers avoided if they could.
Marwan and Christos had basically been clashing since kindergarten, when their fathers got into a thing because Marwan’s father was recording their moving-up ceremony and Christos’s father couldn’t see little Christos’s face because of the phone. Words had been exchanged. Chests had been puffed out.
At their kindergarten moving-up ceremony.
The hostility had only gotten worse since, like black mold growing in hidden places for years.
But if that was the urgent matter, it made no sense that Eden Montgomery would be here or that Mr. M would be involved. He was the music teacher—uncontroversial at best. Marwan put his earbuds in and clicked play. The Stitcher lady said, “Resuming episode,” in her calming, robotic way.
It was a pretty solid unsolved mystery about a former beauty queen in Georgia who’d disappeared without a trace—the sort of podcast Marwan really devoured lately and hoped to maybe produce one day, even if it was morbid to want a career in true crime. Maybe he’d find another topic down the line but so far had no ideas because nothing ever happened to him. Not the way it happened to the people who ended up on StoryCorps or The Moth or This American Life. People had crazy lives out there for sure, and it somehow made Marwan’s life feel smaller but also bigger when he listened in on them.