we entered the building and went to fetch two weeks of mail from my postal box.
“I won’t curse anymore, either.”
She remained deep in thought for a moment, but waved her hand as if the sacrifice were trivial. “What good is it, anyway? Cursing just makes other people mad at you. Words have meanings, they shouldn’t be abused.”
I smiled and sorted through the envelopes. I saw one with Vair’s name and handed it to her. “Having your mail forwarded already?”
“I think you got it backwards, these are my tickets back to a saner part of the globe.” She slid her unadorned fingernail on the envelope as if it were a razor blade.
We got into the elevator. Normal-looking ratty doors folded closed behind us.
“Four.”
The loud mechanism fired up.
“Your amai was Cris.”
“What?” I asked.
“They printed it on the ticket,” she said, showing me, “the same amai who helped me get priority tickets to LA, but just two instances of the same program: unthinking, unfeeling, just existing on the whim of the moment.” She stopped. “Do you think leaving her running is what made Lisa… You know…”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I guess it couldn’t have hurt. I mean… Is lightning more likely to strike a rod when it’s left up for hours or when it’s left up for years?”
“Do you think it’s as simple as lightning?”
She responded with a thoughtful smile. “It’s kind of interesting to me that Aether thought she would find the meaning of life in humanity. To think that, from someone’s perspective, we’re the strange creatures inhabiting a strange world, and that we’re the ones possessing some otherworldly wisdom.”
“You’d have probably liked her… after she got over wanting to kill you, I mean.”
“It must have been very frightening. I can’t imagine what I’d have done.”
I nodded. “There were close calls, but someone else was seeing me through it.”
We walked out into the hall of worn carpet and scratched paint, beautiful wear-and-tear.
“Monday,” I said, noting the date on her ticket. “So you have another day here, right?”
“After all the frustrating attempts from home, I assumed I would need a lot of time here.”
“Well, we can take a trip up the coast tomorrow. There’s a place in Santa Barbara I’ve been meaning to look at.”
“Why Santa Barbara?”
Why, I thought. What