Inhabited - chapter 20 (with images) (Patreon)

Sunday afternoon on a university campus goes quiet. The hallways are empty. The floor wax smells sharper without the body heat of students to soften it. She sits in the desk chair in Room 312, wearing the same dark green wool coat, keeping it buttoned. The body's thermostat is broken. She could have another hot flash any moment, or she could have another hour of this thin cold blood in her extremities and the dull throb in her knees. She has stopped expecting to be able to predict it.

She looks at the clock. Three-fifty.

The framed photograph is on the wall next to the window. Elena and Cara in front of the brick building. She hasn't looked at it directly since yesterday, but she's aware of it. It's always in her peripheral vision from the desk. She hasn't turned the chair.

She traces the edge of an ungraded paper with a fingernail.

She is waiting for the physical bypass to a digital ghost she has been chasing across seven women's lives, and she finds herself, in the quiet of the empty building, thinking about the photograph again. About Elena's arm around Cara's shoulders. The arm of a woman who loves her daughter and has never quite understood what her daughter needed the love to feel like. She knows what it feels like from Cara's side.

She is thinking about this when, at three-fifty-eight, a knock comes at the door.

"Come in."

The door opens. A woman in a black trench coat steps inside and pulls it shut quickly behind her, testing the handle to make sure it caught the latch. Early forties. Dark hair pulled back in a severe utilitarian clip. The tense coiled posture of someone who has spent two years checking the rearview mirror.

The name comes to her - Kristin, last name three syllables, Russian, somebody from a faculty email four years ago.

"Dr. Vasquez," Kristin says.

"Hello." She stands and offers a hand.

Kristin's grip is dry and brief. She doesn't take off the coat. She stands in the center of the cramped office, scanning the overflowing bookshelves and the framed photograph on the wall. Looking for the trap.

"Brigid said you wanted to talk about the sync protocol," Kristin says, flat, no inflection. "Said you were writing a paper on corporate liability models."

"I'm looking into the dissociation events." She drops the academic cover; the woman in front of her is an engineer and will smell a theoretical approach. "I know about the intake server drops. I know they hardcoded a bypass to prevent the system from logging the white-outs. I have the Halston decision memo."

Kristin stops scanning the room. She looks directly at Elena's face.

The radiator spits a hiss of steam.

"You have the memo," Kristin says.

"Yes. I know Halston directed the suppression strategy."

Kristin lets out a breath. Her shoulders drop a fraction - the rigid tension giving way to something wearier and more cynical. She reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out a folded piece of printer paper.

"They wrote it up as a product brief. Internal only. R&D black box, maximum NDA classification. They mapped the mechanism, ran duration tests, and handed it to the monetization team," she says.

She takes the paper. "A product brief."

"To own the exploit rather than fix it." Kristin's voice is tight with old anger. "The memory leak in the headset buffer creates a highly suggestible transition state. When the sync fails, the user is trapped in the white-out. The board figured out you could hold someone there. That if you could control the duration, you could do things inside it." She stops. "I don't know exactly what applications. I refused to push the code and they had me out by the next morning."

She holds Kristin's eyes. A cover-up of a hardware flaw is one thing. This is a different category of decision.

"How does it fire," she says. "What conditions."

"The vulnerability only fires under extreme states," Kristin says. "Heavy emotional load. Heavy physical response. Under normal use the platform throws a calibration warning and pulls you back to baseline. The white-out can't take you because the system catches you first." She pauses. "Whoever fell through, the warning had to have been suppressed. Manually. Not by the platform - by the user. Someone modified their own rig to override the safety."

"How do I prove this is linked to the active sync failures," she says.

"You need the session archives. Raw user logs, before the intake server scrubs them." Kristin points to the folded paper. "My credentials were revoked twenty-four hours before they walked me out. But the developer API has a secondary authentication layer. Legacy projects. There's a credential chain - not fully closed - that relies on a sequence of deprecated tokens."

She unfolds the paper.

Command-line syntax. An authentication path through NovaSphere's developer API. She reads it. Her eyes move faster than they should. She is already tracking which proxy layer would absorb the handshake latency without tripping the security flag, working the timing, working the spoof requirement on the second deprecated token before she gets to the bottom of the page.

"If you assemble this across the right access levels, it should open the archive," Kristin says. "But you only get one shot. Fail the handshake and the system permanently burns the token."

"I understand."

"That’s all I can say," Kristin says.

She opens the heavy door and walks out into the empty hallway.

She folds the paper carefully and slides it into the inner pocket of her wool coat. She sits in the desk chair, her hand resting over the pocket, feeling the crease of it through the wool.

The commute back is slow. She stands near the car doors on the 1 train, holding the vertical bar. The hot flash from yesterday drained something cellular that hasn't replenished. Her lower back is a solid block of tension. The wide band of the bra presses against her ribs with every sway of the train, and her breasts pull downward with a constant dull ache she can't adjust away.

She unlocks the apartment at six-thirty. Flips the entryway light. Takes off the coat and kicks off the heavy loafers. Her feet throb.

She goes to the bathroom and splashes cold water on her face. Strips off the damp blouse and changes into a soft gray pullover and a pair of loose black trousers.

At seven-fifteen, the doorbell rings.

She stops in the kitchen, a glass of water halfway to her mouth.

She sets the glass down and goes to the door. Looks through the peephole.

A man in the hallway. Thick charcoal-colored tweed coat. Neatly trimmed gray beard. Dark eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He's holding a bottle of red wine, leaning slightly against the doorframe with the ease of someone who has stood in this hallway many times.

Before she has finished opening the door, the body already knows him.

She is looking at a man in his early sixties - gray beard, wire-rims, a bottle of Cabernet - and there is nothing in her mind reaching for him. The body is already there. The warmth gathers low and settled. Her shoulders come down without her deciding on it. The skin at her throat goes electric.

Oh, she thinks. He means something.

"Hey," the man says. He steps inside.

He doesn't wait. He closes the door behind him, sets the wine on the entryway table, puts his hands on her waist. He leans in and kisses her.

Her mouth opens before she has made any decision. He tastes like cold winter air and a trace of mint. The rough texture of his beard scrapes against her chin. His hands are large and warm, pulling her hips firmly against his coat. The pressure sends a branching current down her thighs. Her nipples go hard against the soft fabric of the sweater.

She breaks the kiss, stepping back slightly. Her heart is hammering.

"You look tired," he says. His voice is deep, observant. He takes off his coat and hangs it on the hook next to hers.

A name comes to her. Patrick. A historian in her department. Ten years her senior. Separated from his wife.

He walks straight to the cabinet with the wine glasses. Doesn't try the wrong one first. He has been here dozens of times. This is why the body knew. Not chemistry, though there is chemistry too, but months of accumulated attention, and she is experiencing all of them at once from the inside of a nervous system she is a tourist in.

The affair wasn't known to her when she woke up. She has had to read it from the body's response to him, and from the comfortable practiced ease with which he moves through her space.

She follows him into the kitchen.

"How was the seminar?" he asks, handing her a glass.

"Long." She takes a sip. Heavy dry Cabernet.

"You're shivering." He touches her arm. Another jolt of warmth, straight to her chest.

"Drafty office."

They take the wine to the living room. He talks for a while - a manuscript he's reviewing, some nineteenth-century industrialist biography, pacing problems - and she listens. Or the part of her that is still her listens, while the rest reads him. He doesn't need her to respond. He's not checking whether she is responding. He is sitting next to her on the sofa and talking because they are two people who talk on Sunday evenings, and that's the whole thing. No performance in it. No accounting.

He looks at her when he speaks. His eyes track the lines around her mouth without flinching. He has been looking at this face for months.

He sets his wine glass down. He shifts his weight toward her and reaches out to trace the line of her jaw with his thumb.

"Come here," he says quietly.

He kisses her again, slower. His hand slides around to the back of her neck, fingers threading through the short graying hair. She kisses back. She stops trying to manage the interaction from the outside - stops being the observer - and just lets the body lead.

They stand. He takes her hand and walks her down the hallway to the bedroom.

The room is dark, lit only by the orange bleed of streetlights through the curtains.

He turns her around to face him. Pulls the sweater over her head and tosses it onto the chair.

He unhooks the bra at the front - he knows the clasp, doesn't fumble - and it falls open. Her breasts settle heavy against her ribs. He cups them. His thumbs move across her nipples and a sound comes out of her she didn't intend.

He unzips the trousers and lets them fall. He strips off his own clothes. His body is older, softer around the middle, gray hair on his chest in the low light. He is solid and unhurried and entirely comfortable with his own body, which she finds - unexpectedly - steadying.

They lie down on the mattress.

Everything is slower than the younger bodies. The arousal doesn't spike. It builds from somewhere low and dense, and it takes its time getting there. She starts to wonder if the body is going to engage at all, and then it does. A heavy gathering warmth rather than a quick electric charge. Patrick doesn't rush. He has hands and time. He spends a long while moving over her - hands on her stomach, tracing the curve of her hips, mouth at the skin just below her collarbone - and he knows where he is going, knows this body, which means she can stop trying to track the geography and just stay in it.

Her head tips back against the pillows. Eyes closed.

The heat pools lower. She is wet, then wetter. When he finally moves down and his mouth finds her, her back comes off the sheets.

She breathes through her open mouth. He moves over her. He enters her.

The stretch is intense and slow - his weight settling into her, the mattress taking both of them - and he sets a deep unhurried rhythm. She wraps her legs around his waist. Her hands go to his shoulders, nails finding the skin. She is not tracking the room anymore. She is not tracking anything. Her mind has nothing useful to offer here and has stepped back.

The wave starts to build.

It comes from deep - deeper than she expected, lower than any of the other bodies, a dense sustained gathering rather than the quick sharp spike she has grown used to. She stops trying to track it. She gives the body what it needs, which is not effort. She surrenders. The world thins at the edges. The dark behind her eyelids begins to lighten.

The contraction holds - long, slow, total - and her breath stops. She makes no sound. There is no breath in her to make a sound with. The pleasure sinks down into her bones, into her thighs, into her lower back, washing the ache from the day out, and the ceiling -

The orange light cuts to black.

Patrick's weight lifts away.

The smell of his sweat ceases to exist.

The white-out comes in, silent and complete, and she is in it, untethered, in the sensory vacuum that precedes the shove into the next body. She waits for the gravity of the next life to take hold. She waits for the new lungs, the new skin.

She waits.

The white-out holds.

Seven times she has been in this vacuum. Every time the drop into the next body has come fast.

The drop is not coming.

Then, with no ceremony, the white-out releases her - not into a new body but back into the one she was in. The crown molding reassembles. The orange streetlight. Patrick beside her, chest heaving, a hand reaching out blindly to settle on her hip.

She is still here.

She doesn't move. She doesn't speak. Her heart is hammering but it's the erratic cold-spiking beat of something gone wrong, not the aftermath of what just happened. She lies completely still.

Patrick shifts and pulls the duvet up over them. Within fifteen minutes his breathing evens out into the slow pull of sleep.

She stares at the ceiling.

The radiator hisses. The streetlight bleeds orange around the edge of the curtain. She lies awake and turns it over and over, and what she comes back to, every time, is that she does not know.

The mechanism fired. The conditions were real - she has been through this enough times to know what real feels like versus what mechanical feels like. In Diane's bathroom it had been mechanical, and Diane's body had not responded the way it needed to respond, and the exit never came. Tonight was different. Tonight the surrender was complete. She felt the floor drop out. She felt the vacuum take her. And then the vacuum returned her here.

Maybe the perimenopause. The chemistry of this body is unreliable in front of thirty students and unreliable at random hours of the day, and maybe whatever has been going wrong with Elena's nervous system has gone wrong at the exit too - some short-circuit she can't see.

Or the mechanism stopped working. Maybe there's a number of transitions and she has reached it.

She runs it again. And again. There is no log. She is in someone else's bed at midnight and there is no one to call.

She thought she understood it.

She slides her hand out from under Patrick's arm.

She touches her own sternum. The skin is cooling, the sweat drying in the drafty room. She is still here. She is going to be here in the morning, and then she is going to get up and go to Elena's campus and teach Elena's class, and she does not know when she is leaving.

She lies in the dark and listens to the radiator spit and hiss, and she waits for a morning she was never supposed to see.