Inhabited - chapter 4 (with images) (Patreon)

She reaches up. The hands are wrong. Longer fingers, nails cut straight across.

A living room. Real light, the harsh yellow of a streetlamp bleeding through the edges of drawn blinds.

The body underneath is different. Heavier. Taller. The body's weight settled higher in the chest than Cara's had — the breath rising further before it released. Her hair isn't the dark, heavy mass she just spent three days learning to manage; it's lighter, brushing the collarbone, no swing to it.

A name surfaces. It is in her head before she asks for it. Diane Kowalski. Thirty-four. Director of an environmental nonprofit. Manhattan.

And married. To Anthony.

The fact of the marriage arrives the way you remember your own phone number, already there, never learned. Anthony is down the hall. In the bedroom. He is asleep.

The panic is hers, the same panic she would have had in her own body. Strange apartment. Strange body. Cotton shorts that don't belong to her riding up somewhere they shouldn't. And a husband through the wall who is going to wake up and expect his wife.

She pushes off the couch. The legs answer with a solid, capable strength. Diane’s shoulders carry a deep, quiet strain. They have been holding something for a long time. The rig console sits in the corner, its standby light a dim green, a thick braided cable running along the baseboard to the wall. She moves down the hallway on the outside edges of her feet. The hardwood is cold and she doesn't want the boards to creak.

She finds the bathroom. Closes the door. Throws the deadbolt. The lock engages with a heavy, oiled snap.

The tile floor is cold. She stands in the dark for a second, then hits the light switch. A wide mirror over a double vanity. She avoids the glass. She has to get out. Right now.

She knows the mechanism. Three days in Cara's apartment, fumbling, waiting for the physiology to align, ending in the sudden total surrender that finally dropped the floor out. The exit requires the climax. The alternative is walking back out into that hallway.

She doesn't wait to acclimate. The shorts and the underwear beneath them go down past her knees. She sits on the edge of the toilet lid.

Her breathing is shallow, pulling too quickly in the top of the chest. Her breasts are fuller than Cara's, hot inside the t-shirt, and when she leans forward they shift sideways against her ribs in a way she has to brace against. She ignores it. She spreads her knees and reaches. The shape is different from Cara's. Slightly farther back. The hood thicker. Her fingers find it and she presses.

It is a clinical, desperate effort. She works at it. She drives the friction, forcing the response. Because it is living tissue, the body answers, sluggish, late, the way a foot answers when it has been asleep. There is heat where there was none. The skin under her fingers swells. None of it connects to anything inside her.

She pushes harder, changing the rhythm, jaw tight. She chases the peak. The friction borders on uncomfortable, the skin sensitive but uncooperative, and she forces it upward anyway.

The climax hits. It is small. Quick. A tight pulse low in her, over almost before she registers it, more like a reflex than a release. Her toes curl against the cold tile.

She waits. For the white-out. For the floor to drop.

The bathroom is exactly the same. The hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen is still audible through the wall.

She is still here.

She sits on the lid. Her hand falls away to her bare thigh. She had thought she understood it after Cara, that what was needed was the body finishing, but the body just finished and she is still here. Whatever the transition requires, it isn't this. The reflex fires and resets and she is still inside it, the heart rate already coming back down, the cold tile sharp under her heels.

She is trapped.

She pulls the underwear up. The elastic catches against her hip bone. She pulls the shorts up over them. She stands and turns on the cold tap. Splashes water on her face. The hands are capable, strong. She reaches for a hand towel and finally forces herself to look at the mirror.

Diane. Warm, competent face. A small spray of freckles across the bridge of the nose. She doesn't look like a victim. She looks like a woman who runs things. The marriage is failing. It is failing in the way two people quietly stop requiring things of each other.

Outside the bathroom, floorboards creak.

"Diane?"

The voice is muffled by the heavy door. Male. Low morning pitch.

She freezes.

"Yeah." The voice comes out of her throat. Slightly raspy, pitching lower than Cara's.

"You okay in there?" Anthony asks. He doesn't sound suspicious, just awake.

"Fine. Just a minute."

Footsteps receding toward the kitchen. The sound of a cabinet opening.

She unlocks the door.

The apartment is spacious. High ceilings, exposed brick in the hallway. She follows the smell of coffee into the kitchen. Anthony is standing by the espresso machine. He is wearing dark sweatpants and a gray t-shirt. Mid-thirties. Thick hair standing up slightly in the back. He doesn't turn around when she walks in. He just slides a mug across the island toward the edge.

"Morning," he says.

"Morning."

She steps up to the island and takes the mug. It's hot. The first uncertainty: she doesn't know if Diane takes milk. She doesn't know what Diane says to this man very early on a Saturday morning. She stands there, waiting for a cue. Anthony turns around. He looks at her collarbone, then at the mug in her hand. He doesn't look at her eyes.

"You were on the rig late," he says.

"Yeah."

He nods. A small, tight movement of the chin. "Okay."

He picks up his own coffee and walks past her. He gives her a wide berth, a deliberate arc that ensures their arms don't brush. He goes into the living room and sits in a leather armchair. Not the couch.

The silence in the room is the kind that takes work to hold. Both of them are holding it. She sips the coffee. It's black. She drinks it anyway, letting the bitterness coat the back of her throat.

She stands in the kitchen for twenty minutes, watching him read something on his phone. He keeps his distance. He reads her silence as something to respect, not press, and she has no idea what he thinks is happening between them. Whatever it is, he has already decided how to hold it.

She takes the mug and goes to the bedroom.

The bed is unmade on one side. Anthony's side. Diane's side is undisturbed; she fell asleep in the rig on the couch. A large closet takes up the far wall. She opens it. The clothes are different. Cara's closet had been denim and tight lines. Diane's closet is professional, expensive, completely uninterested in restriction. Wide-leg trousers. Soft, thick wool sweaters. Blouses made of silk that flows rather than grips.

She drops the sleep shorts and the t-shirt. She stands naked in front of the full-length mirror attached to the closet door.

The body is stronger than Cara's. The shoulders broader. Her hips have less of a dramatic flare, running straighter down to the thigh. She puts her hands on her waist, feeling the solid muscle beneath a layer of surface softness. Her breasts are heavier than Cara's. They sit lower. She finds a bra in the drawer. Not Cara's soft bralette. Underwire. She reaches behind, fastens the hooks. Her hands find them without her looking, the angle already known. The wire lifts everything up against the sternum. It digs. She breathes with it, adjusting to a slightly shorter breath than she would have taken without it.

She pulls on the wide trousers. The waistband settles comfortably above her hips. A gray cashmere sweater over the top. The fabric is impossibly soft against the skin of her arms.

She goes back out to the living room. Anthony is still in the armchair. He glances up, registers that she is dressed, and looks back down.

"I'm going to grab a donut down the street," he says. "Want anything?"

"No. I'm good."

He stands up, grabs his keys from a bowl by the door, and leaves. The door clicks shut.

She lets out a long breath. The relief of being alone is physical. The shoulders drop.

She goes to Diane's desk, tucked into an alcove off the living room. A sleek laptop sits closed next to a stack of manila folders. She opens it. The fingerprint scanner on the power button reads the pad of her index finger and the machine wakes.

She has to keep moving the investigation forward. The name she'd written down in Cara's apartment: Halston. The one quoted in the official statements about "isolated user-end incompatibility events." That's a thread she still has to pull. But first she needs to figure out what NovaSphere is actually doing.

She opens Diane's email client. The navigation pattern is already in her hands. Nonprofit emails. Grant proposals. The organization relies on large family foundations. She opens the donor database. It's a massive spreadsheet. She scrolls through the columns, looking for anything that touches tech, anything that touches VR infrastructure.

Her eyes snag on a cell in the fourth column.

Halston, again.

Cross-referencing the name in a new browser tab pulls up the corporate biography immediately. Bennett Family Foundation, primary liaison. And underneath that: senior board member at NovaSphere. The foundation has been funding Diane's nonprofit for three years. The money is substantial. It covers most of the operating budget for the current quarter.

She searches Diane's local files for any other connection to NovaSphere and gets administrative detritus. Tax receipts. A few photos from a Bennett gala, Halston standing too close to a sponsor in one of them, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. Diane in another, smiling next to a tall woman with a sharp dark bob and a glass of white wine. The image filename gives the woman a name: gala_with_laura.jpg.

The thread surfaces before she has time to look for it. Laura Wen. Senior counsel at NovaSphere. They met at a Bennett dinner four years ago and stayed in casual touch through the foundation circuit, the kind of professional friendship that runs on twice-yearly drinks and infrequent but warm texts. Diane likes her. Laura is funny in the way lawyers get to be when nobody important is listening. She has been at NovaSphere since before the platform launch.

She opens the messages app. Scrolls down. There Laura is, eight weeks ago, a thread that ends with next time you're in Hell's Kitchen. The cadence between them is established. The voice is comfortable.

She types. hey. weird ask. you have a sec?

The bubble sits for a long moment, no response. Then: always. what's up

She thinks. The message has to be plausible from Diane. It can't be too pointed. But Laura is a lawyer; she will smell vague, and vague will frighten her more than direct.

Halston sits on a foundation that funds my org and on your board, and I keep seeing forum threads about bad experiences disappear, should I be worried about taking this money

A long pause. The typing indicator appears. Disappears. Appears.

not on this thread. give me an encrypted handle. not signal, you've used signal with me. something fresh.

She thinks. The body knows the answer before she does. There is an app Diane installed for an environmental whistleblower contact two years ago and never uninstalled. She gives Laura the handle.

The reply comes inside thirty seconds. ten minutes.

She locks the phone and sets it face-down on the desk. The apartment is suddenly very still. The refrigerator's compressor cycles on and the high whine starts up in the kitchen. She gets up. Walks to the window and looks out at the street, then steps back from the glass without entirely understanding why she did either.

The encrypted app pings.

She opens it. Laura’s handle is a string of letters. The first message is already there.

i'm not at the office. don't ask where i am. you have one window. ask the question.

She types.

user safety incidents. dissociation events. is it true?

The typing indicator runs for a long time.

yes. and worse, there’s a memo. the version that exists outside legal is the third draft. the first one was a recall recommendation. that draft does not exist anymore. i watched it not exist.

She reads the line twice.

who killed it.

She types nothing. Waits.

i'm sending you the third draft. the only one that's still on a server. once it's on your end i am out of this conversation. do not write back. do not check in. if we end up at the same gala you say hi and you keep walking. i mean it.

laura.

diane i have a kid.

i know.

i should have done something about this eight months ago. i didn't. i'm doing it now because you asked and because i finally have something to say no with. delete the handle the second you have the file. uninstall the app before you sleep tonight. i'm serious.

okay.

A pause. Then: take care of yourself.

The typing indicator disappears.

A file lands in the thread. PDF. No message body.

She opens it.

The PDF renders. An internal NovaSphere decision memo. Date-stamped eight months ago. The subject line references user safety incidents. Dissociation events. Protocol vulnerabilities.

She reads it. The memo doesn't propose a software patch. It outlines a comprehensive messaging strategy to manage the fallout. Suppress public forum discussions. Flag specific user accounts for shadow-banning. Obscure the root cause under a veil of "user-end hardware incompatibility." There are bracketed talking points, the kind communications staff get given before press calls, and one of them is essentially a paraphrase of a quote she remembers Halston giving in a feature in The Verge two months ago. So Halston had been carrying the line. Knowingly or not. At the bottom of the first page is his approval signature. He didn't just know about the suppression strategy. He directed it.

Laura has a kid. Laura just sent that file from somewhere that wasn't NovaSphere infrastructure, on a personal device that she will probably also destroy, because Diane asked her to. The cost of the file is sitting on the other end of a conversation she doesn't get to have again.

She sits back in Diane's ergonomic desk chair. The cashmere scratches very slightly at the back of her neck.

She keeps reading until halfway down the second page and opens a new tab. The suppression strategy has Halston at the root. Communications below him, routing through legal. Shadow-bans pushed out through a mid-level account manager who probably didn't know what she was doing. Halston issuing the public denials. She maps the branches out on a piece of scrap paper, trying to see where the safety team's flag had been overridden and by whom, looking for the specific node where the system had been told to stop caring. It takes her twenty minutes before she realizes she's been diagramming a corporate cover-up as if it were a bad piece of code.

She copies the PDF to an encrypted partition.

She needs to get out of the apartment. The walls are starting to feel close. She finds Diane's purse, a heavy leather tote, and drops the keys inside. She puts on a long wool coat from the hall closet and leaves.

The street is loud. A garbage truck is aggressively backing up at the end of the block. The wind off the river is biting. She walks toward the avenue. Moving through the city as Diane is entirely different from Cara. Cara was smaller, more visually consumed by the street. Diane takes up more space. Her stride is longer, driven by the strong muscles in the thighs. The wool coat swings around her calves.

A man in a navy peacoat is walking toward her. He looks up from his phone. His eyes hit her face, drop to her chest, linger for a fraction of a second before sliding away.

The reflex is instantaneous. The shoulders pull inward. The chest angles slightly away. The same micro-contraction Cara's body performed. She forces the shoulders back down. The underwire of the bra presses firmly into the ribs with the movement.

She walks into a sandwich shop. The threat level drops slightly inside. She buys a bottle of sparkling water and a turkey sandwich, paying with Diane's phone through the tap terminal. The woman at the counter barely looks at her. She takes the food to a small park nearby, sitting on a green wooden bench. The cold seeps through the cashmere and the wool trousers.

She eats the sandwich and watches the pedestrians. A woman jogs past in tight leggings, and a small flicker of appreciation goes off somewhere, interest, recognition, yes that, but the body underneath doesn't follow it. Her body is cold. Her body is annoyed by the wind. Her body wants to go back inside.

She spends the afternoon at the desk, answering Diane's work emails to maintain the cover. She is competent. She uses Diane's voice over email, direct, warm, heavily reliant on exclamation points to soften demands. She approves a budget for a clean-water initiative. She schedules a donor lunch for the following week.

At six o'clock, the front door unlocks. She closes the email client.

Anthony walks in. He is carrying a plastic bag from a local Thai place. He hangs his keys on the hook. He takes off his coat and drapes it over the back of a dining chair. He looks toward the desk.

"I got dinner," he says.

"Thanks."

He goes to the kitchen and starts taking the containers out of the bag. The smell of basil and chili oil drifts into the living room. She gets up and walks into the kitchen. She opens a drawer. Her hand finds the silverware without her looking. Two forks.

They plate the food in silence. They take the bowls to the dining table. They eat. The scrape of the forks against the ceramic is the only sound. She watches Anthony's hands. They are large hands. Clean nails. The knuckles slightly red from the cold. He is a man who fixes things around the apartment. Now he keeps his hands strictly to his own side of the table. He chews methodically, his eyes fixed on the salt shaker.

"How was the walk?" he asks.

She pauses with the fork halfway to her mouth. He noticed she left.

"Fine. Cold."

"Yeah. Supposed to drop below freezing tonight."

"Right."

He doesn't elaborate. She doesn't press. The conversation dies, starved of oxygen.

She finishes her food. Stands up, takes her bowl to the sink. She runs the water, watching the red oil swirl down the drain. She rinses the bowl and sets it in the dishwasher.

The evening stretches out. Anthony sits on the couch and turns on the television, keeping the volume low. A basketball game. She sits at the desk, pretending to read a grant proposal. The physical distance between them is perhaps fifteen feet, but it feels oceanic. At ten-thirty, Anthony turns off the TV.

"I'm going to bed," he says.

"Okay. I'll be in soon."

He goes to the bathroom. The sound of a toothbrush. The pipes knocking slightly in the wall.

She stays at the desk for another twenty minutes. She does not want to go into that room. The requirement to perform the physical proximity of a marriage she doesn't understand is terrifying. Eventually, she turns off the desk lamp.

She washes her face. There is a cleanser she knows is hers before she reads the label, and a thicker cream after. Her hands move in slow practiced circles, the rhythm as automatic as buttoning a shirt.

She goes into the bedroom.

The room is dark. Anthony is lying on his side, facing the wall. The blanket is pulled up to his shoulder. She takes off the trousers and the sweater. She reaches behind and unhooks the bra. The breath goes all the way down for the first time all day. Her chest comes loose, hot where the band had been, and she stands still for a second letting it. She finds a soft t-shirt in a drawer and pulls it over her head. Slips into a pair of cotton pajama pants.

She walks around to Diane's side of the bed. The mattress dips as she climbs in.

The sheets are cool. She pulls the duvet up. She lies flat on her back, staring at the ceiling.

The space between them in the dark feels vast. A deliberate no-man's-land. Neither of them crosses it. She lies perfectly still, breathing evenly, projecting sleep. He does the same. The proximity of him, the heat radiating from his side of the bed, the careful policed suppression of movement. The suffocating tension of two people holding their breath, waiting for the other to finally leave the room. She can hear him swallow. She can hear the fabric of his shirt against the sheets when he shifts his weight.

She lies awake. The rig is out there in the living room. Diane uses it alone most evenings. The knowledge surfaces and resettles like a draft from under a door. Tomorrow, she will have to put it on. She will have to find a way into the underground community space through Diane's account. But tonight she just lies there.

She closes her eyes. Tries not to think about the lock on the bathroom door. Tries not to think about Cara's body finally opening, letting her go.

Diane's body feels like a closed fist.