 
### The Loneliest Whale

Copyright 2016 Lily Markova

Published by Lily Markova at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

00000 (Prologue)

Chapter 00001

Chapter 00010

Chapter 00011

Chapter 00100

To Vera and Alex,

on whose couches and in whose bathtubs I slept to recharge my lungeyeart,

and who, when I had been cut off from my kind's collective consciousness, taught me that

while blood is thicker than water,

water is a lot nicer to swim in.

00000 (Prologue)

As we were falling to the wet boardwalk, we thought about people. About their eyes.

Have you ever looked yourself in the eye? No, have you ever _properly_ looked into your own eyes? Have you ever stood there, nose to nose with your image reflected in a mirror, peering into its pupils, those micro black holes, deep tunnels, wondering what's at the bottom? What's lurking behind that absolutely dark matter letting no light in, letting no light out so that others cannot figure it out, distracted by the fanciful patterns of the irises? But sometimes, when the room is lit dimly, when you're all alone—have you noticed it yet?

Have you noticed it staring back at you out of the shadowy depths of yourself? Something that makes you twitch and suddenly feel creepy all over when you look just a little more intently, just a little longer than usual? Something strange. Something alien.

You are starting to recognize yourself.

People. Five billion magnificent, beautiful ordinary people. Pulling down their puffy lower eyelids in front of their mirrored bathroom cabinets in the mornings. Briefly checking their makeup when passing by a shop window on their way to work. Furtively grimacing at their distorted reflection in a teaspoon when a lunch conversation becomes too boring. Wearily scrutinizing the dark circles under their eyes in the glass doors of a subway car on their way back home. Never properly looking right into their eyes. They have learned to avoid meeting their own direct gaze, because they sense they might see _something_ that will send a chill down their veins.

Right. You must be still dwelling on the "five billion" part. "What happened to the rest of us?" you may wonder. "What happened to the other two billion human beings?"

There are, indeed, two more billion human beings—only they are not ordinary people. They have recognized themselves. . .or are on the verge of doing so.

The human genus. Human species. Hundreds of human subspecies, ordinary people being one of the two most ancient of them. People have been evolving, unhurriedly, naturally, securely, generation after generation, adjusting to the ever-changing environment. They are, every skin tone and eye shape, exactly the way human beings are supposed to be at this moment of the planet's unceasing dance.

We love people more than any other human subspecies, but sometimes they just aren't enough.

Sometimes, the planet throws tantrums. It strives to shake us off, bury us under the oceans. Sometimes, the Sun plots to turn us into fascinating ice sculptures frozen with our terrified faces, with our motionless running legs and our air-grasping hands. Sometimes, the Sun longs to hug us until we're ashes. And sometimes—most of the times—brilliant, curious people do silly, wicked things. They craft bombs, they poison their water and air, they play with technology that's growing too smart to be controlled—so smart that a couple of years from now, websites might demand that you _prove you're not a human_.

Humankind must survive.

And that is why people have us. Another human subspecies, as ancient as people, indistinguishable from them, slinking after them on tiptoe to have their back when the time comes.

We are the ultimate Plan B.

We are walking storages carrying _Human Genome: the Complete Edition_ within us, all the possible things humans could ever be. We are your _Emergency Express Evolution._

We guess that that is what people would call us if they knew about us. They like to give things loud labels. We, however, don't have our own name for our subspecies. We don't have our own names for anything. Though we speak—when necessary—every human language that has ever existed, they are not enough to convey all that we see and feel. We don't need words; we share one mind, a mind vast like the Universe, dark and bright like the Universe too, where ideas and stories and melodies drift and shine like vibrant galaxies.

You have seen us—though, of course, have never properly noticed. We are that passenger on a crowded bus next to whom there's always an empty seat. We are that friend-of-your-friend who never seems to have a job or a hobby. We are that traveler who sleeps under the constellations and claims that home is everywhere. We don't have our own life; we only have our mission. We look calm, confident, and aloof. In our eyes, there's superior peace, almost evil self-sufficiency. We are here to observe.

Sometimes, we use paper and ink to show people the stories we saw—and this one is special.

Chapter 00001

This story began at around six a.m. on the last day of summer. The day promised to be fine, but here around the pier, which was busy despite the early hour, the air was still damp and chilly.

A young man in his late twenties stood leaning his back against the wet iron railing and squinted through the fog; it wasn't so thick as to prevent _him_ from seeing but was dense enough to tinge everything with bluish gray. People materialized fully ten yards away, passed him, and thirty steps later, dissolved into vague shadows again.

The young man didn't have a name—at least, not one that he remembered. Instead, he had a gripping sensation at the nape of his neck, just above the seventh vertebra. Having never known any different, he found the sensation reassuring and agreeable—as if it were the gripping of a knot holding him tied to his family, invisible cords running from it to every one of his kind, all their feelings and knowledge tirelessly streaming through those wires.

In spite of the ocean's cool breath that was tickling the back of his neck, he felt warm, protected, and peaceful. That was mostly because in the center of his chest, there was a well-functioning organ that ordinary people, were their medical equipment able to detect it, would probably call something like "lungeyeart." Lung-eye-heart. That would make plenty of sense, since the organ was shaped like a third (middle) lung, served as a second, _energy_ heart pumping power to his cells, and determined the way he—for want of a better word— _saw_ the world. It was another sense, a different way of perceiving, which, so far, was beyond people's comprehension. It felt like seeing the whole world at once without even looking, like embracing it, touching it with his heart, letting it into his chest. He hadn't engaged in a conversation for almost a week, so his lungeyeart was full.

Although so remarkable on the inside, on the outside the young man was nothing unusual: shoulder-length dark brown hair, straight and tucked behind his slightly pointed ears; thin (not unhealthily or exhaustedly thin, just thin) triangular face; narrow mouth, as if designed for little talking; and attentive, bright eyes. A rather typical big-city dweller (his anonymity-appreciating kind preferred to hide in crowded cities because those were the loneliest places on Earth), casually dressed (jeans and a dark blue sweater with a light-blue collared shirt underneath) and with a look of grave concentration on his face that was his kind's courteous way of warning people off.

That didn't always work, of course, so when a street vendor slowed down as she was passing the young man, and pointed her chin inquiringly at the clattering cart full of snacks and drinks she was pushing in front of her, the young man had to put in extra effort. He shook his head and replied, "No, we're fine, thanks." The vendor shot him a suspicious look and rattled away. The young man frowned a little, inwardly telling himself off for the incorrect pronoun choice.

It was only when the bluish haze had absorbed the woman's figure that he noticed a glass bottle of lemonade rolling back and forth across the wooden planks under its own momentum—right in front of him, just a few steps away. It must have fallen out of the vendor's cart. The young man glanced in the direction where she had disappeared, but could no longer find her among the faceless human silhouettes or hear the noise produced by the cart amidst the distant cloud of muted voices and purring of the engines. Not that he would have called after her, anyway. He was not supposed to interfere.

" _Somebody might stumble on it and knock their teeth out,"_ he thought with fleeting sadness. And sure enough, a blonde man in a Hawaiian shirt soon tripped over the bottle, kicking it even closer to the young man. Having avoided sprawling flat on the pier only thanks to the support of the massive suitcase he was dragging behind him, the man cursed and continued to walk, the rubber soles of his beach sandals slapping the wood a bit more resentfully than before.

The bottle rotated one last time and froze, caught in a crack between two planks, parallel to them. The young man looked to the left, to where its neck was pointing, and there, in the distance, he could discern a teenage boy moving toward him. He turned his head to the right, and there was a girl nervously shifting from one foot to another as she peered through the fog. The young man always instinctively knew where to look, and amongst everyone else on the pier, it was important, he felt, that he keep an eye on these two.

She saw him first. With a little shriek of glee, Joy Ramonnes dashed toward Julius Artin, maneuvering among the passengers hurrying in the opposite direction. In that instant, Joy was a wild mess of flying blurs: a spinning wheel of orange high-top sneakers, a bouncing knee-length purple tutu skirt, and a swaying cloud of light-brown wavy hair.

Julius walked steadily, stretching the sleeves of his gray hoodie over his fists, yawning, and hunching his shoulders against the misty morning. He met her a little less than halfway along the pier, and she threw herself around him, miraculously _not_ breaking a hole through his chest as she crashed right into it. Julius waited patiently for Joy to get enough of squeezing him, his arms pressed tightly against his sides, his sleepy face arranged into its usual polite expression.

"I didn't think you'd come," said Joy, out of breath.

"Then why were you waiting?" His voice had a slight metallic ring to it, as if it had been passed through a special electronic device.

Joy lowered her eyes and laughed. For a few moments, Julius searched her face, perplexed, as though struggling to interpret the girl's reaction, and then he added quickly in the mechanical tone of a schoolboy reciting his lesson before a demanding teacher, "I figured you'd want me to be here. It must be important to you."

She raised her excited gaze back to him, nodding approvingly and suppressing a smile with an air of mock importance. "Good. Very good! Your people skills are improving at an unprecedented rate. I'm impressed."

"Plus, seven months, right?" said Julius, relieved that Joy had appreciated his attempt to please her. He indicated a dark bulk of something that seemed, behind the smoke-like veil, to be shaped like a mountain brooding over them. The mountain trumpeted in response, signaling its imminent departure. "Seven months. India. Anything could happen. A shipwreck. Exotic diseases. . . ." Julius puffed out his cheeks, apparently making an effort to come up with still more terrifying dangers, and finally released the air from his mouth along with, "Hmm-monkeys? I thought I should say good-bye to you, just in case."

"R-right. Great," said Joy, trying to still sound enthusiastic. "Monkeys."

The ship honked again, and she winced at the loudness of it.

"You'd better get going," Julius said. "Your old hippies aboard already?"

"Yeah." Joy shrugged, turning to look at the last couple of shadows rushing up the gangway. She pulled her phone from her jacket pocket and checked the time. "I've still got five minutes."

Julius shook his head. "Come on. You're going to be late again, like the last time, when you missed that flight. Your folks will. . ." He hesitated, rolling his eyes up, as if monitoring the sky for a suitable expression. "They will freak out."

"Who, _my parents_?" She snorted and gave a dismissive grimace. "They'll be running around the deck, laughing and yelling, 'Kevin! Kevin McCallister!', like in _Home Alone_. Besides, they never freak out, do they? We're the _keep-calm-and-the-kids-are-all-right_ kind of family."

"Fine, then _I'll_ go. You're not going to loiter here alone, are you?"

"No, please, Jules. Just two more minutes." She clasped his wrist, pleading. He frowned but nodded.

Joy let go of his sleeve, raised her arms over her head, and spun around several times, her hair and skirt flying out again and then wrapping around her as she stopped.

"So, what do you think, Jules—am I well-prepared for the journey? How do I look?"

To the young man, who safely watched the farewell scene from a dozen yards away, where their weaker eyesight couldn't reach him, Joy Ramonnes looked perfectly ordinary. Or should he say, "ordinarily perfect"?

"Your height is five feet six point three inches," said Julius, clearly happy to be of help. His eyes narrowed, their pupils flicking from side to side, gradually scanning Joy's forehead and sliding down her face, as though he were reading the lines of an invisible book. He didn't look perfect to the observing young man, by the way—largely because he was nothing ordinary. "Your skin tone is primarily F-F-D-E-A-D, 'Navajo White,' that is," Julius went on, "and your hair color varies from C-D-8-5-3-F, 'Peru,' to—"

"O-okay, nerdy boy," said Joy, "what's the code for 'Amethyst'?"

"Well, I believe it's 9-9-6-6-C-C, but **—** " he answered, blinking.

" _Well_ , I'm going to have to strangle you until you're _9-9-6-6-C-C_ in the face if you don't tell me right now how I look, using words a decent human being would use."

"You have medium-slate-bl—I mean, your eyes are blue, just blue," he corrected himself, having met her stare, which screamed, " _Honestly?_ "

"And how am I supposed to leave you after this? Jules, you can't go around peeving people off all on your own! That's a simple question. You don't really need to describe the person. Most of us are aware that we have hair and legs and everything. Why won't you just reply, 'You look nice'?"

"There's no code for 'nice,' Joy, sorry," said Julius.

"But"—Joy buried her face in her hands to express her helplessness and peeked at him through the gaps between her index and middle fingers—"are you seriously saying that you can't even tell if a person is looking okay?"

"W-well," Julius said, blowing out his cheeks again. He stood like that for quite a while, resembling a puffer fish without spines, so eventually, Joy pressed her palms gently to both sides of his face, and it deflated like a pierced balloon.

"I mean, your code looks neat," he said, in the hope that it would cheer her up a little. Joy tilted her head to one side and wrinkled her brow as though she couldn't believe what she'd just heard. "There are bugs, of course, but it's not too messy."

Joy rolled her eyes and bumped her head into his shoulder.

"I wouldn't rewrite you," Julius added, and it was obvious that that was the best he could do.

She laughed softly, her forehead still resting against his collarbone. "Well, thanks. I thought there wasn't a code for 'nice.' " Suddenly, she drew back a little and clutched at his shoulder. "I almost forgot! I've got another story for you."

Julius heaved an indulgent sigh and repeated, "You're going to be _late_ , Joy."

"No, no, hold on, listen. Have you heard of the loneliest whale?"

He muttered, "Uh-uh," and threw his head back, as though it were easier for him that way to wait for the end of the tale that he knew would inevitably follow.

"No, listen. There"—she pointed—"there, in the oceans, there's a whale somewhere, a whale who sings differently. Other whales cannot hear it, so it's calling and calling and crying, but _no one_ will ever answer. It's so alone. Can you imagine? Never being able to unite with your own kind. Being condemned to just—just swim there in the dark amongst ordinary fish."

"You know whales are not fish, right?"

"Doesn't that make you feel at least a tiny bit sad?" Joy asked, peering into his eyes searchingly and disbelievingly. "Teensy tad? No?"

"Why? Why is it so important for you to get me to feel sad?"

"Hey, I've even got the recording." Joy pulled out her phone again along with a pair of earbuds, plugged them in, and put one in Julius's left ear and the other in her own. "Here. That's the loneliest whale singing. Fifty-two hertz."

She pressed the "play" button.

And so they stood, with their faces turned away from each other, listening to the lonely song together. To Joy Ramonnes, Julius was the best friend and the most wonderful weirdo she had ever known. To Julius Artin, Joy was the only friend and just a sequence of instructions, a combination of letters and numbers.

They had first met at this very place five years ago. Joy's parents were away saving some endangered tropical penguins, and her older brother, Bill, (mistakenly believed to be looking after her in their absence) was taking advantage of the opportunity to practically live at his girlfriend's. Joy was returning home from her dance class late in the evening, and as she was walking past the pier, she saw a boy in a gray hoodie at its far end. He was lying on his back, with his hands under his head and one leg crossed over the other, watching the sky, freezing, and getting soaked. Joy was fourteen, and she thought that those were some amazing things to be doing. She always acted the way she felt was right at the moment, so she simply went over there and lay down beside him. Julius didn't look at her, and he didn't say a word. Joy was silent too. After an hour of quietness, still looking skyward, he inclined his head a little toward her. Three hours later, she took his hand in hers.

When morning came, he walked her home. She smiled at him serenely at the front door and vanished inside.

The next evening, when Joy came to the pier, Julius was already there. She smiled broadly, as if they had been friends forever. He couldn't help but grin back, shaking his head with the strangeness of it all. It was absolutely ridiculous, and yet he felt as though it were something that had been meant to happen. As though it was right.

On the third night, he felt he could trust her enough to share his earphones with her.

On the fourth night, she burst out laughing all of a sudden while they were lying on the pier. That was the first time Julius had heard her voice. She was just laughing and laughing and pounding the wooden planks with her orange sneakers, and it was actually a little bit funny, so he couldn't help it again. They roared like a pair of madmen for a good ten minutes until their cheeks and stomachs hurt and their voices were hoarse. That night, she hugged him tightly before closing the door behind her.

On the fifth night, she wrote on the back of his hand, "I'm Joy." He laughed, confiscated the marker pen, and wrote on hers, "Yes, you are."

On the sixth night, he brought her a mixtape, whose cover said, "from julius, for joy." The only thing the songs on the playlist had in common was that they didn't make any sense. And they were beautiful in ways that only senseless things could be.

They sat holding each other all night long, listening to the music and watching the waves. Joy knew—perhaps because she was fourteen; perhaps her age had nothing do to with the matter at all—that this was it: something kind and nice and naïve and real. Something that had always been meant to happen to her. They had found a rare treasure. From that heartwarming and untroubled moment on, nothing could ever go wrong in their lives.

On the seventh night, he wasn't there.

They hadn't spoken even once.

It only took the young man a few seconds to acquire all this information. There were some stories about almost every person, living or dead, in his kind's collective mind. They watched people very closely and paid special attention to those who had been, or could be, converted into something new so that they would be able to serve their noble purpose. Julius Artin happened to be one of those people.

They selected wisely. The choice was never random. When they felt that a new threat to human survival was emerging, however underestimated by people at the time, they sought out those predisposed to become a perfect solution.

When lung diseases had become one of the leading causes of death in industrialized countries, and the world continued sinking deeper and deeper into tobacco smoke and exhaust fumes, they turned to those who practiced various breathing techniques, and picked about a million people who were particularly diligent in exercising reduced breathing. One by one, they tracked the chosen ones down and walked past them on the streets, brushing against them, as if by accident. It was all that was required: a slight touch. A brief touch was enough to impart to them all the necessary characteristics.

It took some of those selected longer than others, but eventually they all realized that they had transformed. There was something alien looking at them with their own eyes, and that alien didn't need to breathe anymore. Their bodies had developed a new mechanism of gaining oxygen: The initial ability of their skin to consume it had been amplified hundredfold. The entire surface of their skin could now take in enough oxygen for the organism to stay fully functional while preventing poisonous substances from sneaking inside. If air pollution reached deadly extremes, the million people would survive, and it would be their responsibility to make mankind last.

They had a subspecies of at least a million individuals at the ready for any occasion: the entire planet on fire or flooded, lack of fresh water, an ice age, starvation, radiation, epidemics, bio-terrorism, and many more. And they kept creating backups in case of new and enduring dangers alike as generations changed. There was nothing humans wouldn't overcome.

The day before Joy and Julius met, ordinary people's scientists had been celebrating one of their greatest accomplishments so far. They had perfected their robots; they had equipped them with emotions so the little machines felt contented when they fulfilled a requested task and upset if they failed to do so. People even went so far as to train robots to be afraid of the dark, miss their owners and fellow robots, and read facial expressions. Not only were the machines capable of feeling a bit blue now, they could also offer their sad human friends consolation and sympathy.

And that was beautiful.

But that was ominous, too.

Emotions had been the only thing that had made people invincible. A computer could calculate all the possible consequences of a confrontation, yes, but a human brain wasn't capable of that. Instead, it had to come up with unexpected, sometimes insanely irrational solutions that a metal genius wouldn't have imagined. Now the machines could have both the powerful intellect and infinite creativity. What if they learned to hate? Crave vengeance? Love someone to death? The young man's kind couldn't have that.

Having sworn never to interfere in any way other than usual (for that could corrupt the natural evolutionary route of the great mass of the ordinary population), they didn't try to warn people, nor did they attempt to destroy the innovations. They selected a million young women and men who possessed a knack for programming, and disabled their brains from decoding information gathered by their organs of perception. Now, when looking at a breathtaking sunset, the transformed ones would not see it, but they would read the code in less than a millisecond, and they would know it to be a sunset, and they would identify a million differences between this sunset and yesterday's. And when listening to an electrifying song, they would not really hear it, but they would receive the code, and they would know if the song repeated something they had heard before, even if that familiar piece was shorter than the blink of an eye.

Should robots become enemies of the human race, this subspecies would be able to fight back. They would be in no way inferior or disadvantaged: Their processing speed was as high as that of machines', and their human nature allowed them to be spontaneous.

The day before he met Joy, Julius Artin had been a fourteen-year-old with an exceptional talent for playing video games. He might have even made a couple himself—nothing too impressive, primitive graphics, though surprisingly deep gameplay. He considered learning to code more seriously sometime in the future, but for the time being he was just an ordinary teenager who didn't like to exhaust himself too much thinking about what was to become of him, let alone all of humanity.

The young man's kind decided that Julius would do.

Ever since a stranger had shouldered him as he had been dragging himself to school that morning, Julius had felt untypically edgy, although he, of course, didn't suspect a direct connection. He could hardly sit through his lessons that day. His fingers kept drumming an anxious rhythm on the table, his shaking feet echoing the pattern against the floor, as were his clattering teeth and his madly hammering heart. Even the ringing in his ears seemed to recur with measured regularity, heard by everybody in the room. Julius generated so much noise that his classmates giggled and turned around to stare at him, and the teachers were tired by the end of the school day of asking him to stop disrupting the classes. Julius was too busy panicking to care about any of that. His brains were burning; his back was cold with sweat streaming down it. He felt as though something horrid was coming at him, but he couldn't see what it was. The tension seemed groundless and was all the more overwhelming for that.

When he staggered home, pale green and shivering, his mother gasped, checked his temperature, gasped one more time, steered him to her car, and drove to the nearest hospital.

"My tentative diagnosis would be a bad case of influenza," said the doctor, after she'd run a few basic tests. (Julius's mother gasped again, and Julius began to tremble even harder). She recommended that the boy stay under observation for at least the next couple of days.

Julius went to bed early but couldn't fall asleep. The thin white walls of the ward let the hospital sounds through, and he kept tossing and turning and tried to cover his ears with the pillow to shut out all the coughing, and snoring, and shuffling, and teeth-grinding, but there was no escape from the thunder _inside_ his head.

At last, he sat up with a jerk, sprang out of bed, and proceeded to pace the room for half an hour, which to him seemed like the whole evening. Several times, he felt nauseous and rushed to the nearby bathroom, where he washed his face with icy water and tried to calm his shaky breathing, clutching the edges of the sink so hard his knuckles whitened. In the cold, sickly light of the humming and flickering lamps, his eyes in the mirror looked wrong, unfamiliar.

It was just the fever driving him mad, Julius told himself. He couldn't bear to stay in the ward any longer, so he sneaked out and headed for the pier. There, lying in a puddle of his own sweat and rainwater, and showered from time to time by especially high waves, he finally managed to steady himself. The evening was starry and smelled of seaweed. Julius stuck his earphones in his ears and let his favorite song drown out that stupid little voice in the back of his mind, a voice telling him how scared and lonely he felt.

Then that quirky girl turned up, all carefree and why-the-hell-not, orange sneakers and denim overalls, and somehow her silent presence made him feel okay again.

It was like that the entire week. Julius wouldn't know what to do with himself in the daytime, restless, aching, almost paranoid, and only by nightfall could he quiet his mind down, after he'd run away from the hospital and meet Joy at the pier.

On the seventh day, having made it through the hellish week of insomnia and ineffective medication, Julius Artin finally recognized himself. His body had undergone a process of painful transformation, and all he had to do now was come to terms with the change. Exhausted, he accepted his new self. And the moment he looked into his own eyes and let it all in, the pain was gone.

Whatever had happened to his brain was incredible. He felt high on all the information that was avalanching right down on him from everywhere. There were no sounds, no smells, no faces anymore—only numbers, endless and omniscient numbers, and he could read everyone and everything as easily as if he had been given some ultimate, _Universal_ directions for use.

Of course, it was all too exciting, and Julius had a lot to figure out about his upgraded self, so he barely remembered a girl called Joy.

With his flu suddenly over, Julius was told he could go home. And that was where it all got a bit complicated. It turned out his parents would be less than happy to have a superhero for a son. They were not pleased to hear the news at all. Worse still, his friends were sure he was making fun of them, and they soon got tired of him trying to explain that he could actually see their code and that not all of them were written perfectly. He ended up more alone than he had ever felt before, misunderstood by his family and alienated from his old friends.

Julius's dad, thoroughly irritated at his "childish jokes," paid a bunch of counselors and therapists to fix the troubled teenager, so after several months of boycotting sessions and school, arguing, and boiling with self-righteous indignation, Julius had come to realize that he was just wasting his time and his parents' money and it would be better for everyone if he stopped trying to prove himself. So instead, he now did his best to pretend to be normal whenever someone was around, but it became harder and harder, as each passing day of this inner loneliness estranged him further from who he used to be and made it more difficult for him to understand ordinary people. They were just numbers, after all. He comprehended how they worked, and that was enough. It wasn't that he felt arrogant about his new abilities—he was only a program himself—it was just that establishing close relationships with others didn't seem to him as important as before. They would never get it, anyway.

Such were Julius's thoughts as one evening, about a year since the last time he'd been there, he was lying at the end of the pier, looking into the sky, which consisted entirely of numbers that flared up and faded, and never stopped moving and changing, and that was to him one of the most fascinating things he'd seen.

"Hey, you." That was an unusual instruction for the sky. Julius turned his head to the side to look at what intervened between two of the stars. #F87217. Pumpkin Orange.

"Hi, Joy."

She sat beside him and craned her neck. "So many stars tonight."

"Only one hundred and seventy-two."

"Huh?"

"That's exactly how many you can see from here with the naked eye at this moment," he explained.

"Oh," said Joy, "okay."

"Have you been here all year?"

"Well, I come here a lot, yeah," she said, her cheeks turning #C25283, Bashful Pink. " _Not_ because of you, obviously."

"Obviously," he agreed.

"It's just a good place to think about how everything's more complicated than it has to be, you know?"

"Yeah. A lot of code could be shortened, and things would still operate the way they are supposed to, if not better. Such disrespect to free space."

"I've no idea what that means," she confessed. "Will you come here tomorrow, though? Would be cool if you did. It's just—"

"What?"

"You wouldn't happen to have any friend vacancies, would you? Because I felt really nice around you last year, and I'd love to hang out more. Sorry if I seem too clingy, I just hate losing touch with the people I like."

Just like that. It didn't need to be any more complicated.

"Hi, I'm Julius," he said. "I'm not the same Julius you encountered last fall, so it's very nice to meet you."

"Hey, I'm still the Joy the previous Julius met, and I'm very excited to meet the new Julius and all the Juliuses that will follow."

A deep, rich bass note interrupted the whale song: The ship had just issued its final warning.

"So, what do you think?" Joy said, as Julius handed her back the earbud. "Pretty sad, huh?"

"I think you definitely should hurry up."

"Right." She nodded and hugged him around the shoulders again, while he held his hands out behind her in a sort of surrender gesture. "Take care, okay?"

"You too, Joy. Beware of monkeys. See you."

Joy smiled almost sorrowfully, bit her lower lip so that she wouldn't cry, and sped off. She didn't look around much, coiling up the cord of her earbuds as she ran, and just as the young man had foreseen from the moment she'd turned to walk away from Julius, her foot landed right on the lemonade bottle and rolled out from under her. Joy soared up, then hung, for a split second, suspended horizontally two feet above the pier, and obeyed the law of gravity, her fingers clawing at the first thing they could reach: the young man's sweater.

_That_ he had not expected, and stepping forward to regain his balance, he awkwardly slipped on the wretched bottle and joined Joy in her short journey to the ground.

As the young man was falling, he (and everybody else inside his mind) thought about people. About how they had never been supposed to be like Julius Artin. About how Julius was a complete failure. He was _their_ failure, of course.

What if the war his subspecies had been created for actually happened, what if Julius and his kind won despite their defectiveness? What then? There would only be a million of these creatures left, creatures looking like ordinary people but very vaguely resembling them in mindset. Who would have guessed that the hope of humanity, while perfectly capable of feeling emotions, would choose to discard them as redundant and hindering? With all the sense they made and all their rationality, something beautiful was notably missing in them.

They wouldn't even be able to communicate with one another effectively if they were left on their own. They simply wouldn't consider that necessary. They wouldn't be able to cooperate, help one another, create. What would be the point in their surviving?

"I'm so, so sorry," said Joy, as she rose, panting. "I didn't mean to grab you, much less take you along."

She shot out her hand to help the young man up and accidentally jerked the earbuds' cord out of the jack. The whale call broke free: solemn and mournful, pulsating, resonating in his ears and chest, giving him the shivers.

The bottle whistled, vibrating, like an old kettle, as if the lemonade inside it was boiling, and burst, splashing their shoes with sticky, fizzing liquid.

The young man's eyes widened, their pupils expanding like two supernovas. Still lying on his back, he gripped the back of his neck with both hands and started writhing. A few moments later, he pressed his palms to his ears, rolled over on his side, and curled up, his knees knocking against his chin as he shuddered.

"JULIUS!" Joy called, standing paralyzed over the young man, unable to take her horrified gaze off him.

"Turn. . .off," the young man wheezed, bringing Joy out of her numbness.

She sank to her knees and took his hand in hers. "What is it, what should I do? Tell me what I need to do to help you," she implored, and she screamed to Julius, who had just approached them, "Call an ambulance!"

Julius bent over the young man with incredulous curiosity on his face, an expression Joy had never before seen on it in the four years of their friendship.

"There's something wrong with him."

"Of course there's something wrong, Jules, he's convulsing!" Joy sounded as though she was on the brink of hysteria.

"No, I mean his code looks weird," said Julius, peering at the temple of the young man, who was quietly howling now.

"Julius, for Gates's sake, just call—"

"Turn. . .it. . .off," the young man whispered again, squeezing her hand. "It hurts. . . ."

"Hey, don't worry, don't worry, I'm calling them now, hold on."

She picked up her phone from the boardwalk, turned off the recording with her shaking fingers, and as she listened to the long beeps and watched the shadow of her ship grow smaller, she kept murmuring, "Oh, God, what have I done? What have I done?"

As soon as the whale had fallen silent, the young man breathed out noisily and went limp.

Chapter 00010

The young man felt as though his mind were spiraling down dizzyingly back into his head. When the spinning had slowed a little, he knew immediately that something was wrong. _Everything_ was wrong.

"I don't know, he just tripped, and he, uh—he had some kind of seizure," he heard Joy explain to the dispatcher over the phone. "No, I don't know if it's epilepsy—"

"It's not," said a slightly electronic voice.

"Julius, are you _sure_? Okay, no, he doesn't have epilepsy, um—young, twenty-five to thirty, I guess—unconscious now—"

The young man wondered whether he would be sick if he opened his eyes. His mouth tasted as if someone had squeezed a whole lemon into it and added a generous glass of cranberry juice (although he'd never tried either, he'd spent enough time studying ordinary people to know that that was exactly how they would describe the sensation). He had never passed out before. It was just one of those things he never did, just as he never ate, slept, or felt nauseated.

There was a light touch of cold skin on his lips and the tip of his nose.

"—breathing," said Joy. "No visible injuries. Pulse? Um—"

"Heart rate: forty-eight beats per minute," Julius prompted obligingly.

"Yes, yes, he has a pulse. Okay, thank you!" She added in a low voice, "They're transferring me to a nurse."

Apparently, the dispatcher had assessed his situation and didn't consider it an emergency. That was a relief; the young man felt too weak to give Joy a sign that he was relatively present, but surely he didn't need an ambulance to mend him? All he needed was—

"Hmm, heart rate: one hundred and ten beats per minute," said Julius.

That was right. The young man realized he was starting to panic, and panic was another of those things he never did. His lungeyeart was more than half empty. How could it be that nobody noticed? That nobody helped? His family was supposed to feel it if somebody had less than two thirds left. They were supposed to have shared their energy with him already. Where did _his_ energy go so fast, anyway? He couldn't have been out longer than a couple of minutes, judging by the fact that Joy had still been on the phone when he had awakened.

It was okay, though. He would just call for them. He would just let them know something funny was happening to him. They would restore him in a second.

A loud melodic sound announced an incoming call.

"Ugh. Damn it!" said Joy. "Mom, sorry, can't talk now. I was on the other line, and I really need to—I'm sor—no—of course it wasn't on purp—I'm— _I'm really sorry!_ I didn't mean to ditch you again. Tell Dad and Billy I said hi. Have fun there for me." She added in a whispered aside to Julius, "She's freaking out."

The young man had felt it all along, and he couldn't delay facing it any longer: When he had fallen, something had broken. Something that had hurt so much he'd blacked out. And it wasn't a leg or an arm. He would actually rather have had his spine fractured.

Joy shook him gently by the shoulder. "Can you hear me? Come on, please, wake up. Um, Mr.—Mr. Unconscious?"

"Mr. You-Missed-the-Ship-Because-of-Me-My-Job-Here-Is-Done-Might-as-Well-Take-a-Nap," Julius corrected her.

"No, Mr. If-I-Die-Now-It-Will-Be-on-You-You-Clumsy-Girl," argued Joy.

It was the knot that had been broken. The gripping sensation at the back of his neck was gone. His heart tightened into a new knot at the thought that he wasn't really sure they would be able to fix that. It had never happened before. At least not that he knew of. What if they _didn't_ know? Had they felt it when he'd been torn off, had it hurt them as much as it had hurt him?

He couldn't manage all the questions and guesses that buzzed in his mind. His mind was too tiny. Too uninhabited. He used to have a mind calm and solid like Antarctica, and now all he had was a chunk of ice adrift in the open ocean. Would Antarctica even notice that it had broken off?

"Julius, what are you doing?"

"Just trying to collect more information."

"You can't smell half-dead strangers!"

"But I can. I have a good nose."

For a second, the young man wished he really had died. These two were a catastrophe. Joy shook him again. He felt like pretending to be half dead until they got bored and left him alone. Anyway, he thought, he ought to be thankful she wasn't trying to take advantage of his seeming unconsciousness and kiss him as ordinary people often did in their movies.

"Okay, I'm calling the nurse again," Joy said, her voice trembling a little. "Since you can't do the talking, will you please at least _try to try_ to help him?"

"Like how? How can you help someone who isn't doing anything?" It didn't sound as if Julius was mocking her; he seemed to be truly puzzled as to what he could do for a person so evidently free of any worries.

"Well, I don't know, keep trying to wake him, or do the CPR thing—"

Both Julius and the young man protested at the same time.

"But he's breathing as it is, Joy," said Julius.

"No, no, no! Please don't," groaned the young man, and slowly, he opened his eyes, blinking against the sharpness of the white-hot sunlight cutting through the fog.

Joy's olive-skinned, slightly chubby-cheeked, and overly sympathetic face came into view, hanging over him and blocking out the retina-burning light.

"Oh, thank God!" she said, knitting her eyebrows. "I'm _so_ sorry. How are you feeling?"

"We—" The young man broke off and swallowed. There was no substantial "we" anymore. Only a scrawny little "I." He closed his eyes again and tried to call out to them. Nothing. There was absolute silence in his head. There was no one else in it.

"Error Four-Oh-Four. Operating system not found," said Julius.

" _Hey, stop it_!" Joy threw Julius a quick shocked look. "We can get you to a hospital. Or would you rather we took you to your place?"

"No, I'll wait here," the young man said hoarsely. He cleared his throat and went on, saying more to himself than Joy, "I need to stay here so that they can find me."

"Who?"

"My family." He raised himself carefully on his elbows and sat up with Joy's help. "They will come for me."

Joy sat down beside him, crossing her legs under her skirt, which flattened out around her like a giant violet flower. "Okay. I'll wait with you, then, to make sure you're fine."

The young man merely shrugged. Julius paced back and forth past them, his shoulders raised up to his ears, his thumbs in his front jeans pockets. He stole scanning glances at the young man, who could feel them drill into his forehead without even looking up. But he kept his head down, half-consciously massaging his stinging neck with his fingertips and focusing his remaining energy on thinking as hard as he could with only a hazy, lonely mind at his disposal.

How long would it take them to get here? There were about a hundred of them in this millionaire city, the name of which the young man couldn't remember—he had lived in so many cities and towns and villages and on so many islands that their names didn't really matter anymore. Before he had zonked out, the closest to him had been a young woman—a young woman who was the closest to him not only in a geographical sense: He had met her in person. She would need about two hours if she hurried.

But what if she didn't hurry, because she didn't know he needed her to? What if nobody came? What if nobody ever heard his call again? How was he supposed to find them without _sensing_ where they were?

Or what if they weren't physically able to accept him back into the family, and the gripping sensation never returned? Nobody would hold him by his scruff anymore, and he could do whatever he wanted. . . . He felt like a teenager that had run away from home on a silly impulse only to realize all he wanted was for everything to go back to the way it used to be. The difference was that he didn't mean to run away. He'd never sought freedom. He didn't want anything for himself.

He knew he wouldn't be able to cope without them. And anyway, what would be the point? Alone, having lost touch with the ones he loved and the ones who loved him, unable to fulfill the very purpose of his existence. . . . Condemned to just—

Joy and Julius interrupted his thoughts by blurting out questions simultaneously.

"What are you?" demanded Julius, stopping his pacing and turning to openly look at the young man.

"Um, so, what's your name?" asked Joy.

—to just swim here, amongst ordinary fish.

Right. He was expected to have a name. He did have one, his ordinary-person name, but he had never been able to remember it, for it was just a pretense, a couple of fake words that didn't make any sense. He figured that it would be somewhat suspicious if he just pulled out his ID to check his name with it.

Alone. Unheard. Ordinary fish.

"Whale," he said grimly. "Could be Whale."

"Wail? As in 'cry'? Or Whale, as in 'fish'?" said Joy. "Wait, were you answering to me, or to Jules?"

"Whales are not fish," Julius said automatically.

The young man laughed to himself bitterly as he thought that he could now become one of those sad stories Joy often told Julius in the hope of making him feel sorry for somebody. She believed that sympathy was the last door that Julius had slammed shut behind him before withdrawing into his digital world. She believed that she would eventually find the right key to unlock it, and all other emotions would then gush out too.

Julius took a seat next to Joy. More and more people scurried past the three of them as the day grew brighter and warmer, as if it were just another day and the earth hadn't split in two. Joy made a few more attempts to draw the young man out. She apologized once more and asked how he was again and if he had changed his mind about going to a hospital. She tried to entertain him with stories and jokingly complained that all of her clothes were in a suitcase, and the suitcase was on its way to India.

The young man was barely listening to her and only gave her monosyllabic responses. Communicating with people was the second most energy-consuming process after converting them into new subspecies. With every word he spoke, he got closer and closer to draining his lungeyeart. Would he simply die when he ran out of energy? He wasn't ready to die, not like this, not alone. " _Please, hurry_ ," he begged in his mind. " _At least be here for me when I'm going_."

Two lingering hours passed, and the mist started to dissipate, along with Joy's patience. She jumped to her feet, announced that she was hungry, and headed toward a cluster of quaint beach cafés, most of which were still dormant. While she was away, Julius shot the young man sidelong stares, trying to decipher his code. The young man knew that Julius could read him easily; it was the incredibility of what he saw that baffled him. The young man's code reflected the fact that he carried all the possible (and some, to Julius, impossible) sets of human genes. To Julius, he must look like a giant monster made of lesser monsters' body parts randomly sewn together.

Joy returned with an armful of crunchy paper bags emitting the smell of freshly baked bread. She invited the young man, rather persistently, to join them for the picnic, but despite the unexpectedly tempting aroma, he managed a polite half-smile and shook his head. There was nothing left for the pair of them to do but tuck into their veggie sandwiches and grilled corn on the cob on their own—which Joy did with a slightly guilty expression, while Julius, naturally, showed no sign of being uncomfortable with anything.

They sat like that (or rather, the young man and Julius sat, and Joy scampered around, unable to bear another minute of stillness) until the fog became thick and blue again and the two strings of diamond-shaped lanterns that were clamped to the railings began to glow softly. Every now and then, Joy called Julius aside, and the young man could hear their whispered arguing.

"No, Joy, you can't bring it to our home!"

"You don't get it, it was my fault—"

"Look, I know I'm always telling you this, but I have to say it again: You're too emotional. _This thing"—_ Julius pointed brazenly at the young man _—"_ looks dangerous. Just leave it alone. You should learn to be more careful with strangers."

"If I were careful, I wouldn't have met you."

"Yeah, but really, it's got tentacles!"

"No, Jules, there are no tentacles. Your scanner's acting up."

"Yeah? What about its beak?"

"Oh, come off it!"

Only when the pier was empty apart from the three of them did it occur to the young man for the first time that the reason nobody rushed to his rescue could be far more terrible than anything he had imagined before. What if the thing that had happened to him had happened to all of them? What if his family was simply no more? What if today was the day his subspecies was undone? Without one another, they were doomed. All of them. A hundred million. What about the children? Their tiny lungeyearts would be completely wrung out by now without recharging. . . .

"Listen, um, Whale, I don't think anyone's coming today," said Joy mildly, squatting down before him and trying to catch his eye. He knew she was looking at him as if he were a wounded animal (which, technically, he was), so he refused to meet her gaze. "You really should go home," she said.

He let out a small, miserable huff of a laugh. "That'd be a long walk."

"Well, we'll take a taxi," Joy said, her tone encouraging.

"To Hong Kong?"

"Oh." She hesitated for a moment, then clapped her hands to her knees and, with decision, got up. "All right, come with us. You'll get some rest, and tomorrow you can figure things out."

"I don't—I don't rest," he answered, and to his terror, he yawned, just like an ordinary person.

"Yeah, I can tell. Come on. The thing is I'll sit here with you all night if necessary, because it was my fault that you fell, and now you can't think straight, so—but I'd really rather go home because I miss my delicious evening cup of thyme tea, so let's just go. Please?"

Joy reached out her hand, and Whale took it, half-aware of what he was doing. It was strange and nice to hold someone's hand without having to distort everything they were.

Whale felt as though he was dying. He hardly noticed the car lights and neon signs that flashed past the trolleybus window against which he was leaning his forehead. The sounds of the night city merged into a lullaby-like humming in his ears. He barely remembered how they had gotten into the buzzing elevator that slid unhurriedly upward until the red dots on the display arranged themselves into _23_ and the doors glided open with a ping. He didn't even resist when Joy steered him to the coach, seated him, and pushed his shoulder down lightly so his head sank into the soft bamboo pillow.

"Breakfast, boys!"

His eyelids were so heavy he thought he would need to expend all the energy left in his lungeyeart if he wanted to see again. Lungeyeart! His eyes flung open at once. His lungeyeart still hadn't shriveled up; on the contrary, it seemed to have put on some weight overnight. Was this what it was going to be like now? He would have to lie down and switch himself off for a third of a day to restore his energy? That was an unthinkable waste of time. Unacceptable. And that horrible feeling of being about to die—was that what ordinary people meant by "just tired after a rough day"?

Whale couldn't deny, however, that waking up from his first-ever sleep still felt a little bit incredible, even though he hadn't been so lucky as to dream.

He flipped back the multiple plush plaid blankets, sat up, and swung his legs off the couch, his toes meeting the fluffy carpet. This part of the compact studio apartment, separated from the rest of it by a folding screen, unmistakably belonged to Joy. There were shelves all around the draped walls, crammed with well-worn, well-loved books, statuettes, and photographs. Necklaces with wooden pendants hung out of the half-open small velvet boxes.

The room was full of subtle smells: an almond-and-grassy smell of old pages, sweet and smoky aroma of sandalwood incense, fresh and salty scent of sea that saturated the colorful clothes heaped up in a corner. Whale was sure this mixture had a lot to do with his more relaxed, happier mood.

He did feel a lot better today. His lungeyeart was warm; he was not going to die of lack of energy—which meant his kind wasn't endangered. Things weren't as bad as he had thought. He would find his kin, whether they were together or not, and they would work out a way to reunite.

Hopeful. He was feeling hopeful and grateful this morning.

"Breakfast," repeated Joy, who had appeared from behind the screen. She was carrying a bowl, bringing with her another sweet smell that caused an unfamiliar whirling sensation in his stomach.

"What is this?" he asked, when she forced the hot bowl into his hands.

"Um, banana-nut oatmeal with honey, best breakfast ever—and don't you dare tell me otherwise."

"I don't ea—" he began, but the whirling sensation intensified at the sight of the amber-colored treat. "Thank you."

"Now, that's the spirit." Joy winked at him, and she left. Whale could hear Julius mutter, "Go away, happy morning woman," as she tried to wake him up, too.

Whale chewed his breakfast, the "besteverness" of which he didn't even think to challenge, since Joy obviously knew better—seeing as he'd never eaten anything before—and his chest filled with still more gratitude toward this girl. Or was it just the warming energy that rose higher and higher inside his lungeyeart with every spoonful he took?

The previous day, in his fear and confusion, he had forgotten how much he loved her—well, not _her_ specifically, but ordinary people. Of course what had happened to him wasn't Joy Ramonnes's fault. She couldn't possibly have crippled him by just knocking him off his feet. It must take so much more to tear the nerve linking one of them to the rest of the family. It couldn't have been Joy's doing. And yet she stayed, she helped, she _interfered_. That was what ordinary people did. That was why his kind would fight for them until the end.

"I'm sorry," he said, when Joy returned with a big steaming cup of tea in her hands. "About India."

"Careful," she warned. She bent over him to replace the empty bowl with the cup, and it had not escaped Whale's notice that Joy's skin had acquired a faint bluish tinge, and the shadows under her eyes seemed darker today. "Chamomile tea. If this doesn't make you feel better, there's probably no hope for you."

"Thank you," Whale said again, giving her a small sincere smile. "For everything."

"Never mind India," Joy said, quite cheerfully, pulling the folding screen aside.

She cast a quick look toward the other side of the apartment. There were so many tangled wires there that the area resembled a giant nest, in the middle of which Julius was sitting like a very annoyed bird, wrapped in a blanket, with his hair spiked chaotically and his mouth wide open in an endless yawn.

"I didn't really want to leave, anyway," she said under her breath, turning back to the screen.

Whale put the empty cup down on the bedside table. He had just realized that his temporarily being an ordinary person with their ordinary approach to gaining energy was going to be a much wider range of experiences than he had expected. "Um, may I—?"

"Bathroom?" Joy forestalled him. "That way." She pointed at one of the two doors located in the "neutral" zone between her golden-and-brown, cozy corner and Julius's austere black-and-silver lair.

Even after he had locked the bathroom door behind him, Whale's keen ear enabled him to hear Julius grumbling about being "brutally" woken up for no reason.

"You shouldn't have worked all night," Joy replied.

"What are you, Bedtime Police?"

"Yes, sir! Officer Ramonnes. I'm here to get your sleep cycle back in sync," Joy reported, and she continued in an exaggeratedly disappointed tone, "What-are-you-police jokes? Really? Hang on a second, I need to make a call to the New Friends Search Service. Tough love, kid. Eat your breakfast."

"Are you sure you can't afford another ticket to some very beautiful, very faraway Asian country?" Julius said, chewing and rattling his spoon vigorously against the bowl.

Whale felt a slight sting of guilt as he saw a pile of blankets and pillows on the bottom of the bathtub. Apparently, Joy had spent the night in it because he had been occupying her couch. No wonder she looked so tired. He had trespassed long enough on her hospitality, and it was high time he left.

He had no idea where he'd begin looking for his family, but astonishingly enough, that wasn't what scared him most at the moment. His insides turned over at the thought that, as long as he remained disconnected from them, his survival depended on money, and he couldn't remember the last time he had had it. He wouldn't be able to just walk for miles and miles without ever getting weary anymore. He was going to need food and a safe place to sleep and shower. He would have to somehow return to his parents' apartment in Hong Kong, he would have to find a job. _He would have to pay bills and taxes._ Whale's hopefulness gradually gave place to despair as he contemplated his prospects. How did ordinary people cope with all of that? And more importantly, how did they trick themselves into _keeping going_?

When he returned to the living room, Julius was sitting in an office chair, leaning forward so his head rested on his crossed arms, which, in their turn, were resting on the long, narrow desk that spanned an entire wall. In front of him were six monitors stacked in two rows of three, all the screens matte black.

Whale was about to thank Joy again and say good-bye to her, but she jumped off her bedside table the moment she saw him, and saying quickly, "Right, uh, sorry about the mess. I'll clear the tub," she slipped past him into the bathroom.

As soon as the door behind her had clicked shut, Julius, who had been tapping his fingers on the lacquered surface of the desk and looking innocently bored, whipped around and beckoned Whale to approach. He pressed some key, and the displays came alive. Blue lines of code ran across the screens, jumping from one to another, an underscore blinking in the bottom right corner of the last monitor.

"What is this?" Whale forced himself to take his eyes off the cursor that twinkled menacingly, as if inviting Julius to continue typing.

"You," Julius said. "I've copied your code. Took me all night, but I've figured you out."

He spoke very quietly and kept looking back over his shoulder at the bathroom door, his hand hovering over the keyboard, ready to switch off the screens. "Impressed?"

"Are _you_?" said Whale.

Julius seemed not in the slightest troubled by what he had discovered. Maybe just a tiny bit pleased with himself. Whale was not sure what to do about it. In principle, there was no law forbidding him to tell ordinary people about his kind and what they did, but he doubted that his family would appreciate his sharing the information nevertheless. Then again, he couldn't have stopped Julius from perusing him after the little genius had found something he hadn't encountered before.

"There's still a part that I don't understand," Julius admitted, frowning. He pointed at several lines where blue numbers were replaced by angry red symbols. "It looks as if you're. . .faulty. But I could try to fix this."

Whale stared at him, startled. "Why would you help?"

"Scientific interest." Julius shrugged. "I must warn you, though, that I'm not very good at it yet. The editing, I mean. You may experience some freezing. The side effects of the cut-and-try approach—"

"I'd rather you didn't cut anything," Whale interrupted him curtly, making an effort not to sound terrified. He wasn't certain that Julius required his permission to experiment with his code.

"What you did to me, by the way—" Julius said, without turning to look at Whale. His long skinny fingers raced across the keyboard like spider legs, and the screens flickered and went black, one by one. Whale expected the next words to be hurtful, and they were—just not in the way he'd thought. "Thank you."

Whale had been prepared for Julius to blame him. He had been prepared to hear that he, Whale, had ruined Julius's life. That would have been fair. For a moment there, before Julius had said those two terrible words, Whale could see a fourteen-year-old, confused, ordinary Julius in the young man before him. They had done it for a greater purpose, yes—but they still had failed, they had made this kid, and many others, a monster. And the worst part was that Julius was grateful for that.

"Jules!" Joy's voice called from the bathroom, unusually high-pitched. "Would you mind coming over here for a second, please?"

She sounded somewhat alarmed, but Julius didn't move a muscle.

"You're always doing this," he said, loud enough for her to hear. "Why won't you simply tell me what it is?"

"It's my eyes," Joy said. Her matter-of-fact tone was too obviously forced. "I think there's something wrong with my eyes."

"WHAT?" said Whale.

"NO," said Julius at the same time. It wasn't a concerned or frightened "no"—more like the kind of "no" that would come in handy if someone told you something so incredibly exciting that you needed time to process it.

They exchanged knowing looks and darted across the living room.

"Let me see," Whale said firmly, squeezing past Julius into the tiny space next to Joy. A wet towel hanging from the clothesline above them brushed insistently against his cheek. He pushed it aside repeatedly, and every time, the towel slid back to the center of the sagging rope. Joy seemed a little taken aback by his intrusion.

"Uh, sorry, I don't think you understand what—" she said, frowning slightly, and she looked at Julius for help.

"Oh, he understands," Julius said quickly from behind Whale. He sounded busy, and Whale knew that Julius was already scanning her.

Julius's confident word proved convincing enough for Joy; she nodded briefly and stepped closer to Whale. She stood still while he peered into her dilated pupils, although her gaze kept slipping down under his concentrated stare.

Whale squinted and glanced up, grimacing at the bare, weak yellowish bulb dangling from the ceiling. "I need more light," he said, and the towel, about which he had forgotten, slapped him in the face again.

"Balcony?" suggested Joy.

Whale and Julius followed her through the room and to the wide glazed balcony belted with a steel pipe railing.

" _Glass floor_ ," said Whale, shaking his head at the sight of the street bustling about eighty yards below his feet. His legs instantly felt weak and tingly, weightless below the knees, if at all existent. "Of course."

"Yep. The apartment owner is a bit of a crazy bat," Joy explained. In the cold white natural light, her skin looked even paler, and Whale could see the thin purple blood vessels in her temple. "Afraid of heights?" He knew she'd asked that mostly to distract herself from what worried her much more than the giddy view from the balcony, which she was probably accustomed to.

"No, I'm not." _Not of heights. Of falling from them._ "It's just—" _The floor might crack, and somebody would—_

Whale forbade himself to even think it. His intuition couldn't be as reliable as it used to be. "Nothing."

Joy turned around to look at Julius, who was standing right behind her, staring very intently somewhere below her waist. She flushed and compressed her lips.

"Um, Jules? Jules, never thought I'd find myself saying something along these lines, but if you're looking for my eyes, they're up here."

"You don't suppose your eyes are always in the same place, do you? They move, obviously," Julius replied, and he resumed the scanning of whatever he had been scanning down there.

"Right. Okay," she said, turning back to Whale.

"Let's see what we have here." Whale took Joy's face in his hands, turned it up a little, and looked into her _medium slate-blue_ eyes, which were now big and watery with apprehension.

"Are you like Jules?" she asked.

Whale shook his head, not taking his eyes off hers.

"Am _I_ going to be like Jules?" Her voice quivered, betraying a hint of dread.

There was a long silence while Whale continued scrutinizing Joy's eyes, which blinked more and more often.

"I don't think so," Whale said finally, letting go of her face. "When did it start?"

"Yesterday—I guess." Joy lowered her evidently stinging eyes, her bare feet shifting on the cold glass. "I was so anxious. Just couldn't sit still. I thought it was because the day was kind of. . .well, haywire. Missed my ship. Almost killed a stranger. Stress and everything. And then at night. . ." She hesitated.

"Insomnia? Inexplicable unease? Depersonalization? As if you're not real, not quite yourself?" he enumerated the most common symptoms.

Joy nodded, biting her lower lip. Her shoulders sank.

"Listen to me, Joy," he said. "I'm not going to lie to you: You _are_ transforming." His voice was calm and low, and Whale himself was surprised at the tone of it. He was sounding like a seasoned doctor, and as much as he wished to instill trust and hope in her, he knew the patient's condition was serious. He considered her for another moment and added, a crease of confusion between his eyebrows, "But _we_ didn't change you. The past few weeks have been quiet: no new threats, no omens. We couldn't have changed you, not while I was still part of the family. Otherwise, I would know why you were chosen and what you're going to become."

"I don't—" Joy stopped and looked around slowly, as if hoping to find a translation of his words nearby.

Of course, that last part made no sense to her. To Whale himself, on the other hand, the meaning was clear, and devastating at that: If he had had no part in Joy's conversion, it could only suggest that his kind were still doing their thing. Without him. He was the only one who had been cut off. And they either didn't notice or didn't care.

Hell, they must have nudged Joy on the crowded pier just the previous day, _shortly after_ he had lost them. What was with the urgency? It was disturbing and not typical of them to skip days of research and preparations and jump straight into action, but that wasn't what shocked Whale the most about it; they had been there, they had been at the very pier where he'd been waiting, hoping, praying that they would come for him. They had simply walked past.

A feeling Whale had never experienced before rolled through his body in hot waves. Abandoned. Betrayed. That stupid conviction that he would be safe no matter what, that his family would always be there for him, gone. For once, Whale didn't feel that "heartbroken" was but a pretentious exaggeration. When something is broken, there are sharp splinters, and it did not feel nice to have something broken inside him.

"Tell her," Julius said, dragging Whale back out of the spiraling vortex of self-pity. "I would have been okay a lot sooner if one of you guys had just taken a minute to explain what was going on with me."

Whale knew that if anybody in the whole world could help Joy right now, it was him. And he _wanted_ to help her. She made a good ordinary person, she tried to be kind and high-spirited, and he felt sorry that such a personality had to go. The diagnosis had been made, and there was nothing he could do to prevent her changing, but he could at least save her from the strain of not knowing.

"But I don't want to transform." She looked at Whale pleadingly, then turned to Julius and repeated, her voice breaking on the verge of crying, "Jules, I don't want to."

"Joy," called Whale softly. "Joy, listen. You know that Julius is different, and you know he wasn't always like this."

She nodded.

"He was _made_ like this, and. . .and I'm one of those responsible for that. And I'm sorry," Whale went on, when Joy didn't say anything, "but there was no other way. There still isn't, and we're going to continue to convert some people. I don't know why you've been selected and what you're going to turn into, because I'm kind of off work—not for long, I hope. We are—"

"Phaeton," Joy muttered, looking absently through the glass wall of the balcony. This transparent box in which they stood so high above the ground was now darker inside, because outside it had been enveloped by an impenetrable gray cloud, and it was impossible to tell whether it was an actual cloud, or the perpetual fog of this city.

"What?"

"You're called the Phaeton," repeated Joy, barely audibly. Her voice seemed somewhat ghostly for a moment, filled with deep sadness and regret.

"Called. . . _by whom_?" Whale was starting to feel nervous. It was not usual for a new subspecies to be aware of his kind's existence at all, let alone have a name for it. The most unsettling part was that "Phaeton" sounded as natural and familiar to him as if they had been called that all along. The name seemed to match them perfectly, though Whale couldn't understand why he felt that way.

"Phaeton?" said Julius. "There used to be a planet called Phaeton. The fifth planet from the Sun."

"The word just sort of popped up in my mind. . . . They're whispering inside my head." Joy shut her eyes, wincing, as if in pain. "So many of them. . . ."

"A collective mind?" Whale was completely amazed. "Well, there are a million of you inside that poor head of yours now."

"One hundred million," Julius corrected him.

"Shut up!" Joy cried. Whale and Julius, who both had been about to say something, clapped their mouths shut and exchanged half-surprised, half-wary looks. Joy held up a silencing hand and tilted her head to one side, as if straining to hear something, and after a few seconds, she opened her eyes and let out an incredulous huff. "They've stopped!" Joy slid her hand under her hair and, gingerly, she probed the back of her neck. "But I can still feel them. . . ."

"This is impossible," Whale murmured to himself.

_One hundred million._ What on earth was going on? What kind of threat could possibly have forced them to make so many? Something was coming, something huge, and for the first time in his life, Whale had absolutely no control, no information.

"A hundred million," Julius repeated. "That's how many there are of _you_ , right? _And_ collective consciousness? Is Joy one of the Phaetons now? Instead of you?"

"No, that's not how we—" Whale fell silent, pondering the awful possibility that he had been replaced. He shook the silly thought off. "No, no, you have to be born one of us, just as you have to be born an ordinary person if you want to be one—well, not that you have a choice, but—"

"But how do you guys—?" interrupted Julius. "I mean, with you being—well, _you_?"

Whale gave him a disapproving look.

"Scientific interest," Julius added quickly.

"When a Phaeton—when one of us reaches the age of eighteen, she or he finds a match," Whale explained, rather reluctantly, "and when their child is seven, the three of them part and go their own ways."

"Seven-year-old kids go their own way?" Joy intervened. "You mean you just dump your children and leave them to roam the streets alone?"

"Our children are never alone," Whale assured her heatedly, and he pointed at his temple. "We're all together, always. At the age of seven, they do not have the consciousness of a child. We are one, and those children are part of something that possesses thousands-year-old knowledge."

Whale contemplated the gray substance clinging to the glass. He had been so sure that his family would never leave any one of them behind, and here he was, roaming the streets alone, with the consciousness of a child.

"But you don't take care of them?" said Joy.

"We do take care of them." Whale pressed his hand to his chest, inside which his lungeyeart was growing emptier and colder. "We sustain their energy. They have no need for food, nor do they need a shelter—"

"But you don't _want_ to take care of them? You don't _love_ them? You don't fall in love with the other parent? You only do that because your kind has to last?"

"Well, we _do_ treat the matter of our survival responsibly. That's why we have a second child when we're thirty—to make sure our numbers do not go down, or up, too fast. Two parents, two children."

"How old are you, Whale?"

"He's twenty-six," Julius said.

"Yes, I do have an eight-year-old child out there somewhere. And parents, and a brother, and the mother of my son. And they all basically have one personality, the same personality I have. I'm not even certain you can call that a full-fledged personality. Every one of us is the average of one hundred million individuals. You can see that there's not much space left for imagination, without which"—he smiled—"it's hard to fall in love."

"But this is. . ." Joy hesitated for a word strong enough to describe how horribly wrong that seemed to her. "Lame."

"Said by someone whose kind makes a cult of one feeling. You can be so tragic just because the one you love is no more, or you can never see them again, or"—Whale shifted his meaningful gaze from Joy to Julius—"because they can't see _you_. You people suffer from love while you could be, I don't know, traveling and happy to carry this warm feeling within you?"

"I got your point," Joy said pressingly, blushing at once and looking away.

"Yeah, me, however, you've lost on the word 'imagination,' " confessed Julius.

"Oh, no, no, no." With a sensation of ice-cold drainage in his chest, Whale remembered, too late, that he shouldn't get carried away like this. He swayed and steadied himself with his hand against the slippery glass wall.

"Hey, hey, what is it? Jules, help me." The pair of them sped to support Whale on both sides.

"I'm not supposed to chatter so much," said Whale, and having spent the last of his energy on the explanation, he slid, as if suddenly boneless, down the glass.

"He does that a lot, doesn't he?" panted Julius, picking Whale up under the arms before he could crash onto the balcony floor, or through it.

Chapter 00011

Whale dreamed that he was standing at the end of the pier, and out of his lungeyeart poured a low-pitched, deep-chested howling—his yearning for the lost family, which also used to be his home. The ocean splashed against his face more and more fiercely, and Whale was starting to suffocate. He threw his arm up in an effort to shield himself from the wall of water that wouldn't let him take a deep breath, and his hand knocked against something solid.

The pain in his knuckles woke him up, and after a few more moments of suffocating in reality, Whale became aware that the darkness before his open eyes and the wetness on his face were brought about by the towel that had dropped on his head. He wrestled it off and sat up, drawing in a gasping lungful of damp air smelling of coconut shampoo. Stretching to warm up his stiff back and numb legs a little, he looked around. They had placed him into the tub this time, which must mean Joy was a bit angry with him about their last conversation, but Whale thought this was still too kind of her—they could have just carried him out of the apartment and left him on the stairs.

Having climbed out of the bath, Whale went over to the round mirror to take a closer look at his sloppy reflection. He passed his hand across the prickly gray stubble shading his chin, which made his face appear wearier and older. His hair was all tangled, so Whale dug a black hair tie out of his jeans pocket and gathered the strands into a short ponytail at the nape of his neck, wincing when he accidentally touched the burning spot where the gripping sensation had once been.

"This is bullshift." He heard Julius's distant grumbling from behind the door.

Whale stepped out into the main room. Julius was sitting at the desk in front of the screens, all six of them glowing in the semidarkness, and he was holding his head in his hands. A moment later, Julius laced his fingers behind his neck, stretched his back with a crack, and swinging his arms forward in a circular motion, as if he was going to dive underwater, returned to striking the clattering keys. He typed so fast that Whale wondered how Julius didn't dislocate his fingers. Between checking all the displays and keeping an eye on the balcony door, through which Joy's silhouette could be seen, Julius also managed to cast an occasional glance out of the nearest window. The last disturbed Whale in particular.

"There's a woman," said Julius, yawning. He did not stop typing and did not turn to look at Whale, but Whale knew that the words were addressed to him. "Down there, on the street. She is walking past the building right now, and her code is pretty much the same as yours. Thought you might want to know."

Whale's half-awake brain took its time digesting the information.

"Well, why are you still standing there?" said Julius. "Forgot how to close your mouth? Go!"

Whale unfroze. "Right!" He rushed to the door, then back to the center of the room. His heart was drumming a militant march against his ribcage. A second later, he was hugging Julius's indignant neck. "Thank you, thank you!"

"No, no, no, stop it, what the hex are you doing?" Julius tried to free himself from the clutches of Whale's gratefulness. "If I'd known, I wouldn't have said anything. And you could use a shave," he added crossly, rubbing his cheek.

But Whale didn't hear that piece of advice; when the sound of the door slamming shut behind him reached his ears, he was already pressing the elevator call button—repeatedly, even though he knew that it wouldn't persuade the elevator to drop everybody off and hurry up to him.

Three of the four elevators remained inactive on the other floors, and the last one crept upward as slowly as if someone were pulling it back down.

"Come on, come on," Whale muttered desperately, pushing the button a few more times, but the metal tortoise was inexorable.

Whale gritted his teeth and dashed for the staircase. He whirled down the stairs like a hurricane, and when he finally leapt out onto the street, the rusty taste of blood was burning his throat, and the first gulp of the cool evening air reverberated with a dull pain in his lungs. He could even feel the pulsation of hot blood in his eyelids, and the lively street seemed to flicker in front of his eyes. Cars. Flashing. Honking. Chattering. Laughter. Faces, faces, faces. The annoyed faces of strangers, who either shouldered Whale aside, or had to skirt him.

Whale staggered backward from the middle of the sidewalk, bumping into passersby and apologizing. He set his back against the cold wall of the building, next to the revolving door he had just run out through, and took a moment to catch his breath. He craned his neck to see over people's heads, but the endless stream of them was too thick. What had he been thinking? How was he going to find her? Whale was unlikely to be nominated for "Relative of the Year": He could not remember all of the hundred million faces of his family members.

He closed his eyes and tried to listen to his intuition. There was no sign, not a single hint. Whale felt as helpless as ordinary people did when they lost one of their senses. He was blind, he was deaf. If he wanted to find his family, he would have to grope his way to them.

Whale lunged into the crowd at random; he kept turning his head around, and soon he himself came spinning forward, trying to look into the face of every person he passed or ran into.

Meanwhile, the revolving door spat out a breathless Joy, who was still wearing her pair of indoor shorts and a loose white T-shirt. Her feet were bare in the sneakers, their laces untied and dangling. "WHALE!" she yelled at the top of her lungs, ignoring the snorts and derisive glances that ensued. Joy looked around and noticed some disturbance in the torrent of people. The commotion seemed to be moving through the crowd. She flung herself into the current and let it carry her toward the cause of the jostling, which she was sure would turn out to be Whale.

Exhausted and hopeless, Whale stopped in the middle of the sidewalk again, pressing both hands against his chest, over his lungeyeart, the only freezing island inside his burning body. People pushed and shoved and swore, but he simply stood there, the ringing in his head drowning all the hasty sounds of the street.

And then he saw her. He had drawn ahead of her, and now the young woman was walking toward him so smoothly that she seemed to be floating above the ground, carried forward by a nonexistent wind. Her short fine blonde hair remained still as she moved, and the tails of her unbuttoned red plaid coat did not billow or flap around her legs.

It wasn't the calm, polite confidence with which the girl was staring in front of her that had helped Whale recognize her. It wasn't the peaceful, ancient wisdom in her twenty-six-year-old eyes. Her figure did not emit any magical glow letting her stand out from the colorless mass in the background. He just knew her well; in fact, he knew her so well that they'd had a child together. Whale had never been so happy to see anyone in his life.

His first impulse was to run over and hug her, but Whale thought better of it. His kind did not practice such reckless behavior. Who needed to express their affection when everybody could read one another's mind?

Whale was trembling from head to foot, either with excitement or fearful anticipation—he himself couldn't tell what exactly the muddled emotion was. He nearly missed the girl while bracing himself.

"Uh, hi!" he said—almost yelled at her—as she was about to bypass him. He could feel his cheeks turning red.

The girl paused, raising her eyebrows and giving him a small smile. Whale waited for her to say something, but apparently, she was waiting for him to speak, too.

"Do you recognize me?" He held his breath, and even his heart stopped beating for a second.

She shook her head slowly, her smile a little wider, and guiltier.

Boom. His heart started again. The girl stepped back, allowing an elderly couple to stroll between her and Whale.

"I—but— _please_! I'm one of you," Whale said, looking imploringly into her childish, curious face. "Something went wrong with my—" He raised his hand to his neck. It was so inconvenient that they did not have any name for that gripping sensation. "I—have you really _not_ noticed? Can you _really_ not feel that there are fewer of you now?"

The girl looked around, her expression guarded.

"Um, the Phaeton?" he asked, in the faint hope that the word would be familiar to her.

"I'm sorry," she said, shaking her head again. "We have to go. Sorry."

"Please, I need your help! I just want to get back. . . ."

Whale watched the mother of his child slip away into the crowd. Of course. Even if it was in her power to help, she wouldn't bother. His kind did not interfere when they saw people suffer every day, why would they make an exception for him? He was an ordinary person now. An ordinary person with a lungeyeart, yes, but what was the good of having a lungeyeart if he was excluded from the main source of energy?

"Get out the way, idiot! Not again with your stupid flash mobs!" Someone shouldered him once more, but Whale did not move; his misery petrified him.

"Hey," said Joy's voice behind him. Whale let her pull him sideways, into an arched niche in the wall of the nearest building. "What happened? Was she one of the Phaetons?"

Joy crossed her arms in front of her chest and rubbed her shoulders, shivering. Whale looked down at her blankly, his eyes wide. The sense of desolation gradually gave way to a weird, detached calmness—the calmness of the last survivor, a warrior walking among his friends' and enemies' unmoving bodies. The war was over, and everyone had lost, and everyone was dead. No strength to grieve or regret; no miracles, no hope ahead. The end. _Finality_. A heavy, heavy finality had settled in his chest.

"Whale?" Joy called again.

"She can't—she can't see me," he said.

"What do you mean, 'she can't see you'? Of course she can see you. She was talking to you, wasn't she?"

"No, she can't _see_ me," Whale said. "She can't—we don't have a word for that. It's just. . .sight, smell, hearing—that's not how we perceive the world. Those senses are secondary to us." He let out a tired sigh, meeting Joy's puzzled gaze. "Well, imagine that Julius is a ghost—"

Joy grimaced, baring her teeth, as if she had seen someone get injured. "I'd really rather not."

"—and you know he's in the room, you can somehow sense it, but you _can't_ see him, you _can't_ hear what he's shouting to you, you can't touch him." Whale stared over Joy's shaking shoulder. "I'm like a ghost to them now. A dead man."

"I'm sorry." Joy squeezed his elbow gently. "But it's not the end of the world. Maybe you'll figure it out, maybe you won't, but either way, you're going to be okay."

Whale couldn't refrain from giving a wry smile. Those naïve words people repeated over and over to comfort one another. _You're going to be okay._ Was anyone ever okay at all? He didn't want to be okay, anyway. He wanted his family back. They were alive, but it still felt as though they'd died, all at once.

"I should know," said Joy, "because I hardly ever see my parents anymore. Since my brother turned twenty-one, they would just hop onto a plane or ship, blow me an air kiss, and leave Billy in charge. But, hey"—she looked at her feet and chuckled, as if she'd remembered something funny—"they are _awesome_ parents. And it doesn't matter that we're apart. You know what matters? They're alive, they're happy out there somewhere, and so am I. Come on! Your family is fine. You are fine. Just. . . _separately_ fine. Lonely doesn't have to be so scary. You've still got _yourself_."

Once more, a tide of tenderness toward this ordinary girl swept over Whale.

"You're freezing," he said. "You should go home."

"Yeah, you're right. Let's go." She stepped onto the sidewalk and turned to look inquiringly at Whale, who was still standing under the arch with a bewildered look on his face. "What is it?"

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why are you so kind to me?"

Joy frowned and returned into the niche.

"Becaaause," she said, drawing out the word, as if collecting her thoughts, "while you were asleep, Jules told me what he knows. About the Phaeton, about your being cut off. I mean, he kept saying you guys have tentacles, but—" She rolled her eyes. "Don't assume that I approve of what you do. I don't. I think that before fashioning people into whatever you please, you should ask us if we want to survive all of those apocalypses at such a cost. But I understand that you meant well, and I know that you're hungry and about to collapse asleep again, and I know that you wouldn't ask for help."

"No, Joy—"

"Whale, it's okay to ask for help. Actually, I was running after you because I was afraid you wouldn't return, and I wanted to ask _you_ to help _me_. What do you say about such an upside down? Is it okay if _I_ ask something of you?"

"Sure," he said, although he wasn't at all sure that he could be of any use to anyone now.

"Great! But that's tomorrow, and today you need to recharge your"—Joy nodded at his chest—"battery." She stuck her elbow out, inviting Whale to link his arm with hers, and he obeyed.

"What is it with the tentacles, though?" she asked, as they strode back toward Joy's home. "Julius is never wrong—don't tell him I said that."

"When Julius looks at my code, he sees not only what I actually am, but also who I am _potentially_. Well, not _I_ , really, I'm just a carrier—the person to whom I'd pass on one of the gene patterns from my store."

"So, basically, there's this scenario of human evolution according to which we're going to need tentacles?"

"And gills," said Whale. "That people will return underwater in the near future is not as improbable as you might think."

And Whale told Joy about miscellaneous upgrades that the human race was destined to undergo. About skin that reflected light so brightly that people would need polarizing filters built into their eyes to be able to look at one another, about elephant-like trunks, about triceratops-like frills protecting the neck, about walking on all fours again. Joy was now terrified, now laughing, now punching him in the shoulder and yelling "No way!" As Whale wondered at her sincere interest in the future, the future she knew she wouldn't be a part of; as he wondered at her childlike buoyancy undaunted by her oncoming transformation, he calmed down entirely and discarded the gloomy thoughts of his own fate. It was pleasant to share his knowledge with someone; it almost felt nice to worry about someone other than himself, to forget his own sorrow. That was why, he thought, people loved stories so much, that was why they consumed books that made them sob and movies that made them bite their nails in fear.

He didn't have bad dreams that night and despite what he'd expected, didn't suffer from anxious insomnia either. That was chiefly because as soon as he and Joy had made it to the apartment, Whale, who had been keenly giving away all his kind's secrets to Joy, had dropped to the floor, completely discharged. The last thing he'd heard was Julius's sarcastic murmuring about narcolepsy and drawing mustaches.

On the following morning, Whale found himself where he'd fallen, found a pillow under his cheek and a blanket over his shoulders—Joy's courtesy—as well as a magnifier, a stethoscope, and a Geiger counter beside him. Apparently, Julius hadn't wasted the chance to investigate into him further.

Julius, as was his habit, sat solemnly on his wire-enmeshed throne. Now and then, one of the computers would issue an obnoxious beep, and its screen would begin to dance with multicolored lines. The merry rainbow didn't seem to uplift Julius's spirits too much, which was evident from the way he mimed banging his head on the desk and groaned "What the bug?"

Whale greeted him, but Julius only muttered "uh-huh" without so much as turning his head. Joy, as was _her_ habit, was standing on the balcony, her hands wrapped around a large cup of tea evaporating swiftly in a thin swirling trickle.

"How are you doing?" He gave her shoulders a light squeeze in a clumsy attempt to mimic the demonstration of encouragement he had descried numerous times in ordinary people.

Joy started—she must have been so lost in thought she hadn't even heard him come in and close the balcony door—and right away, she laughed at her own reaction.

"I'm terrified, actually," she answered simply, still smiling—it was a tired smile, but not forced; it still rang true, very Joy-like.

Whale nodded his understanding.

"I'd appreciate it if someone told me I am going to be okay?" She uttered the last word in tones of inquiry, as if she was trying to prompt him to supply the right answer. She had talked this way to Julius at the pier, when she had suggested how he should reply to harmless ordinary questions. With a prick of annoyance, Whale suddenly realized he hadn't gotten all that far ahead of Julius in that matter. Having spent so much time observing people's interactions, he still lacked practice.

"I can't promise you that," Whale said frankly, and he cringed. Here he was, sounding like Julius again.

"Poor me!" Joy cried in feigned anguish. "I'm so fortunate as to have two human beings around who know what's going on with me, but one of them doesn't think there's a problem—the ultimate support I could count on from Julius is 'Congratulations!'—and the other is too honest. Can you stay here until I'm changed, though?"

"Did they say anything else? The voices?"

Joy shook her head. It seemed not so much the answer to his question as an attempt to stir up the very voices.

"No, I tell them to shut up, and they listen."

Whale frowned. He hadn't been able to switch the mental connection on and off at will. Not that he'd ever wanted to switch it off, of course. "That's really weird. Do you feel as if something is changing, physically, I mean?" he asked, trying not to start missing the clamor in his head again.

"Not really, no. No trunks or frills pushing through, as far as I can tell, so that's nice. I just feel really restless. And there's this urge. . . .Like I have something important to do. Like I have a mission."

That, on the contrary, wasn't weird at all; most likely, that feeling had everything to do with Joy's new nature calling to her, persuading her to recognize and accept it.

Only now did Whale notice that Joy wasn't her usual cozy, homelike self. He had been so busy studying her eyes and face for changes that he hadn't paid any attention to her well-ironed jacket and the colorful backpack hanging off her shoulder.

"You're going somewhere?" he asked, confused. Going out during the transformation period seemed to him as odd and reckless as going ice-skating while on sick leave with a body temperature of forty degrees Celsius. He had, however, witnessed that among school kids, on more than a few occasions.

"Yeah. I thought since I'm staying in the city, might as well get back to work. I called my manager, and she agreed to cancel the vacation."

Again, Whale was surprised. He'd thought no ordinary person in their sane mind would ask for work when they had the option of lying around the house all day. Except, naturally, in those instances when—

He smiled. "You must love your job?"

"Oh yes, it's fun. I'm an announcer. _Radio Jupiter, music that changes you,_ " Joy sang with a broad grin.

"I've never had a job."

"What are _you_ going to do now?"

"Uh, die, I guess," admitted Whale. "I'd try not to, but natural selection. . . . Survival of the fittest. . . . Turns out I'm a bit maladjusted. Is that ironic or just funny in a pathetic way?"

"What about your home? You said something about China."

"You mean Hong Kong? Well, my parents lived there when I was born. I call it home only because that's where I spent the first years of my life. It wasn't really my parents' apartment. Our kind—we have to wait until the child learns how to walk, and talk to people, and communicate with us by our means. Until then, we cannot travel much. Most of the time, we just find an apartment whose owners are out of town for a while, and we stay there, and when we know they're about to return, we move somewhere else."

"Let me guess." Joy narrowed her eyes slyly. "You grab some clothes on your way out. I was wondering where you get stuff if you don't have any money. Is that where my earrings keep going? And Julius's socks?"

"We're saving your race from extinction. Is a pair of pants such a high price to pay?"

Joy sighed. "I just don't understand. You could be anything. You could activate some superpower. . . . Say, tele—oh my God, _teleportation_?" She jumped, clapping her hands together at this idea, which appeared to have thrilled her beyond measure, and Whale cast a furtive fearful glance at the glass floor. "Is that possible? Are people going to evolve to have a built-in teleport?"

"It doesn't work like that. As I said, I'm just a carrier. I'm kind of immune. I cannot transform my own genetic code, but yes, technically, there is the possibility that you, people, will be able to deliberately split yourself into atoms and then rearrange yourself at some other place."

"Oh God. Oh God." Joy covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes magnified to twice their natural size by excitement as if by thick glasses. "Can I have a teleport?"

"W-what?"

"Well, can you still do this thing? Can you make me a teleporter?" There was so much hope in her gaze, as though she were a child pestering Whale for candy. She jumped up and down a few more times. Whale's insides contracted at every thud of her sneakers against the glass. He couldn't help but wonder if she was doing this because she knew that it made him uncomfortable. Did she assume he would grant her the ability to teleport just so that she'd stop endangering them both by testing the endurance of the floor?

"Joy, this is not for fun," he said, feeling as if he were a strict parent who had to explain to her that candy could give her cavities. "There's no urgent external reason to equip people with this ability right now. Besides, I'm not sure I can still do that. Was this the thing you wanted to ask from me yesterday?"

Joy's face instantly took on a grave expression of concern.

"No! No. . . . Could you. . .could you reverse something you did?" she whispered. "Just one person. You'd still have your nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred—well, those six nines."

Whale nodded again, understanding what she was driving at. Joy was still looking at him with hope, but this was a different kind of hope—desperate, rather than excited. This kind of hope hovered in the air of hospitals, not children's toy shops.

"There is a great chance he'd die," Whale said, sneaking a glance through the clear panel of the balcony door. From where he was standing, he could only see Julius's bent elbow. "We can add something new, but we cannot change the part of him that has already been altered. It's too risky."

He turned away from the door and peered down instead. There, far, far beneath the balcony, people scampered to and fro like a swarm of ants. Time and again, some of them paused, creating an obstruction for others, and sometimes, they stood unmoving like that for several minutes.

Julius swore in the adjoining room, and Whale shook his head.

"Haven't you heard of it?" asked Joy, who was also watching the people below. "It was in the papers, even. They wrote that it was some kind of a never-ending flash mob, but _I_ think it's an anomalous zone. People just freeze like this. Nowhere else, only in front of this building. What the papers forgot to mention, though, is that sometimes they never get over it. They don't die. They just sort of. . .stop."

Julius cursed one more time, and Whale looked at Joy, checking for her reaction. She must have felt it, for she looked back at him and smiled.

"Do you know what Julius is doing there?" he asked, watching her more closely still for any signs that might betray her, but she didn't avert her eyes, didn't blush or flinch. She kept smiling.

"He's freelancing." Joy shrugged. "He's programming things. . . . I don't know, it's all Russian to me."

Oh no, of course she didn't know. She would never let anyone do such things. Anyone _else_ , Whale corrected himself. It was, after all, Julius they were talking about.

"No, Joy, that's not what he does. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell anybody. We don't interfere," he said, just in case she was being protective, not ignorant.

"Well, he might be hacking stuff. So what?" she said challengingly. It amazed Whale how blind and defiant people could be when it came to someone they cared about. Whale didn't want to disillusion her, didn't want to hurt her, but she had to know. He had to warn her.

"I'm so sorry." He pointed downward. "He's hacking _them_ , Joy."

Joy opened her mouth to say something, shifted her gaze back to the little immobile black dots scattered across the sidewalk far beneath her feet, and she clamped her mouth shut. Her lips quivered, and she compressed them more tightly.

"What are you talking about?"

Whale knew she'd only asked that to buy herself some time, to process it. "I'm sorry," he repeated.

She stepped away from him, looking suddenly alienated.

"I. . .I've got to go."

"Joy—" Whale began, but she was already running off, and in a moment, he heard the front door slam closed.

After several minutes, Whale saw a tiny bright spot shoot out of the entrance, collide with one of the motionless figures, and bounce off it like a pool ball. The black ball Joy had struck remained stationary, and she turned around and strode decisively away. Whale followed her with his eyes until he could no longer tell which of the hurrying ants was Joy.

He did feel sorry for her, so much so that he even caught himself regretting that he'd told her the truth. That had been sheer interference on his part, a violation of the basic rule his kind had honored for years, but Whale tried to convince himself that he had done the right thing. Joy could be in danger herself—it was, after all, Julius they were talking about—and she needed to know.

When he returned to the room, Julius didn't glower at him with contempt, but there was a hint of annoyance in his tone as he said, "What did you tell her? You told her what I do, didn't you? You didn't have to tell her."

Whale didn't feel sorry for Julius at all—or apologetic about exposing him for that matter, but the idea of spending the entire day tête-à-tête with him made Whale ill at ease.

He lingered beside the balcony door, gazing around and uncertain what to do with himself, until he finally acknowledged that his attempts to look anywhere but at Julius were flimsy and immature.

"Why are you doing this, Julius?" he said, turning to him at last.

"You wouldn't understand."

"Try me."

Julius heaved a disgruntled sigh, clicked a couple more keys, causing orange lines of code to speed across the screens of their own accord (or so it seemed), and spun in his chair to face Whale.

"I could cure cancer, like it's a computer virus. I could _delete_ pain." Julius snapped his long fingers. "I could make people emotionally and physically invulnerable. But you wouldn't understand. Because you don't do that. You could, right? But you don't. You go global. My death doesn't matter, Joy's doesn't. It only matters when billions are at stake. You see people, but you care about numbers. I see numbers, but I want to make our small, unimportant lives better here, now, not in some imaginary future that may not even come. I can literally _change_ the world, make it a more efficient place. Earth 2.0. Debugged. So tell me, _Whale_ "—Julius raised his eyebrows with an air of infallibility—"why shouldn't I?"

"Oh, this is all very impressive." Whale, who was getting aggravated in earnest, raised his eyebrows even higher. He pointed at the window and continued through gritted teeth, "But so far, all you do is ruin people! You screw up their code!"

Julius crinkled his face into a disparaging grimace, either at Whale's raised voice ("Caps Lock voice," Julius would probably call it) or at the naïveté of his accusations. "Because I'm _learning_. I will screw up a hundred people, and it will help me fix many thousands. Are you judging me? You? You, who take _millions_ to ensure our future safety?"

He wasn't blaming Whale; he was merely bringing forward a counterargument, and quite a disarming one at that, Whale was forced to admit with a sinking feeling in his stomach. They had, indeed, ruined a million people, people who were now like Julius, and to what end? The sinking feeling evolved into plain nausea. He would never have doubted his kind's actions, had they not forsaken him.

"You're not even supposed to care," grumbled Whale, defeated. "You don't feel anything. Or do you?"

"I don't." Julius turned to the keyboard and resumed pounding away and looking busy. "Not in the way you think I should. But that doesn't mean I'm evil. That doesn't mean I'm useless. Yes, I don't shed tears over collateral damage. I don't waste time feeling guilty or sorry. Yes, I don't have dreams. I have goals. And that's why I'll succeed."

Julius's fingers dashed off virtuosic ballet steps, and the intricate rhythm they tapped out in the process was almost music.

"I guess I wasn't one hundred percent right about you," Whale said quietly.

"Your opinion is very important to us," said Julius in a dull voice. "We will call you back."

"Whom are you typing now?"

"Joy." Julius's tone suggested it should be obvious.

" _What?_ " What little tolerance Whale had allowed himself for Julius a few moments earlier threatened to flee without a trace. He swept around the desk and stared at the orange symbols. " _Why?_ "

"Didn't you see the look on her face? When she stepped onto the balcony, she didn't know who she was. When she left, she was different. You had said something that triggered her transformation. She has recognized herself already, and I'm trying to find out what she is now. I have only copied a part of her new code, so I'm going to have to wait until she comes back."

"Can you see anything now? Can you read any major changes in the world, some threat?"

"No. But the part of Joy's code that I have is pretty interesting."

"How?"

"Look."

Julius pressed a combination of keys, and every screen split in two: one half displaying blue symbols, the other orange.

Whale swallowed. The blue code was his. "They're identical," he said, with a dry feeling in his throat.

"Similar, yeah." Julius nodded. "Are you sure she can't be one of you?"

Whale shook his head. He wasn't sure anymore, but he didn't want to believe the possibility.

"That doesn't make any sense." Except it did. It made perfect sense. His family was one member short, and it was only logical that they would want to make up for the loss. But why not just take _him_ back? "Well, I guess we should ask Joy when she returns," he said grimly. His lungeyeart felt wintrier than ever, and he wished he didn't have one.

"Strategically weak," objected Julius. "If she hasn't told us immediately, she doesn't want us to know. If we let her know that we know, she might stop me copying her code."

"She's your friend. You're going to act behind her back?"

Julius's shoulders rose and fell. "If that's what I need to do to keep her safe, yes."

" _Keep her safe_? How can you possibly—?"

"If the new Joy is not something the old Joy would have wanted to be, I'll roll her back to the previous version."

Whale felt sick again at the thought of Joy still and flickering like a jammed hologram. "You can't! It's too dangerous!"

"I know, _I'm not stupid_ ," Julius said irritably. "I'll try someone else first."

Whale was about to remonstrate, but instead he reeled and crumpled like a folding chair, with his mouth still open.

"I must say your way of ducking conversations is getting old," commented Julius, without deigning to unglue his eyes from the screens.

Chapter 00100

After Joy came back from work, she proceeded straight to her part of the apartment and made it explicit, with the help of the separating screen, that she had no wish for company tonight. Whale heard her clothes and blankets rustle, and then it went very quiet, except for the sound of relentless typing from the other side of the room.

_Maybe she would be ready to talk tomorrow_ , he comforted himself. Maybe it was denial that kept her silent. Maybe she hoped that if she didn't tell them about her completed transformation, it would be less real.

Julius was up the whole night, copying her code, and Whale couldn't sleep either; he sat on the balcony, rotating in his hands a cup of thyme tea, which he'd prepared for Joy. He peered into the lemony-smelling, brass-colored liquid, as though if he looked hard enough, he might find in it the answers to the questions that so unnerved him. What was the mysterious hazard that had compelled his kind to change Joy? Whale had given up trying to remember whether there had been omens he could have missed before he'd found himself thrown out of the network. So instead of racking his brains over the general cause, he now struggled to figure out what was so special about Joy Ramonnes. Why had they chosen _her_ , which of her qualities could they deem useful?

He also wondered if he had made a mistake he wasn't aware of. What if they had kicked him out, on purpose? What if this estrangement was his own fault, his punishment for some careless slip? These two events—Joy's conversion and his exile—seemed to Whale deeply intertwined, but he couldn't quite grasp what it was that they had in common. He felt as if his brain were a muscle, a slack muscle that would need plenty of training before it could lift such heavy problems.

Joy's alarm clock went off very early; Whale gave a start—he must have dozed off eventually. The balcony was still mantled in fog, and its dewy glass twinkled with cobwebs of red and blue lights from the street below.

Whale leapt into the room just in time to see Joy emerge from behind the folding screen with a cup of coffee on the go and fully dressed for the day.

"Joy—" Whale said, darting after her.

She paused at the front door and beamed at him. "No, no, I'm all better now."

"You do look better," he agreed, trying to hide the concern in his voice. Before him stood a Joy that seemed little like the frightened, jittery girl he had talked to the previous morning. This Joy emanated self-assurance and serenity, and her face bore no trace of tiredness or illness.

"You sound like it's a bad thing," she said with a laugh. Why don't you turn on the radio? It'll jazz you up." She winked at Whale, and without any semblance of a good-bye to Julius or even acknowledging his presence, was gone.

Whale hesitated, biting his lips and crinkling his eyebrows, and then obediently walked to Joy's shelves and fiddled with the old-fashioned wooden-cased radio receiver.

" _Radio Jupiter, music that sets you free, music that changes you_ ," the receiver responded Joy-fully. "The next song is for all the drifters out there. Get ready to relate to _The World at Large_ by Modest Mouse, and please stay afloat!"

"But she just left." Whale scratched the back of his head. "How can it be her voice?"

"It's not live," Julius explained. "They record announcements a day in advance."

Whale raised himself on tiptoe and looked over the screen. Julius was sitting, as ever, in front of the monitors, surrounded by a dozen empty coffee cups. He had dark circles under his eyes, which were so impressive that it would be fairer to say he had eyes above his dark circles.

"I don't get it," Julius said, pointing at the displays. "She's exactly like you. She has access to all the information you have—you _used to_ have," he corrected himself, much to Whale's frustration. "She's driven by the same sense of a great mission, it's like nothing can stop her. A collective mind, too. But she's not one of you. She's like your mirrored reflection. Left turns into right, right turns into wrong."

The receiver, meanwhile, had finished warbling and spoke in Joy's voice again. "Well, wasn't that a rocking melody? Good morning to you all! Hope you're having a great time, frantically trying not to be late for work you despise. Specially for you, here comes _Slave to the Wage_ by Placebo. _This is Radio Jupiter, music that makes you question your life choices, music that changes you._ Remember, don't cry; sing along!"

Whale sank to the floor, meditating. Why would the Phaeton create a copy of itself? Phaeton. . . . To think how quickly the name had grown on him. Phaeton. . . .

"Oh," he said. "This is interesting."

"Oh, _what_ is interesting?" said Julius.

"Oooooh, this is very interesting," Whale repeated, and his eyes flew open wider, just like his mouth.

"Let me know when you've regained the rest of your vocabulary, will you?"

Whale sprang to his feet and stared at Julius over the screen again. "The planet! What happened to the planet?" he demanded hastily.

Before he answered, Julius released an indifferent and exceptionally long yawn, which (due to his somewhat machinelike, iron voice) sounded a lot like the whiz of a falling bomb. "Well, it's just a bunch of asteroids now, isn't it?"

"But _why_?" Whale knew why, but he asked anyway. It helped him think. He felt as though he had grasped an important clue, or at least was about to seize it, and he had to be careful not to lose sight of it before he was sure where exactly it led him.

"Torn apart by the gravitational field of another—" Julius began automatically, but slowed down toward the end of the sentence. "— _planet_." He rolled around in his chair and, for once, gave Whale his undivided, frowning attention.

"The gravitational field of Jupiter," Whale confirmed, with a prolonged nod.

The gears in his brain churned faster and faster. Had his kind created for themselves a counterbalance? A successor? A nemesis?

"Can one human subspecies be dangerous to others?" asked Julius, as if reading Whale's thoughts. _Wait. . . ._ .An unpleasant, chilling surmise made the gears in Whale's skull grate to a standstill. _Could_ Julius indeed read his thoughts as fluently as he could read his DNA? Whale exhaled loudly through his nose and brushed the foolish thought away. No, of course Julius couldn't; or else he would have had no need to copy Joy's code in order to find out what was on and _in_ her mind, nor would he have to ask Whale such astoundingly unintelligent questions.

"You're not seriously asking me that."

"Fair enough," said Julius, with an unrepentant glance at the balcony, under which there was probably another portion of his failed attempts at editing humans' source code.

"Spiders eat spiders," added Whale, to make sure he got his point across. "Fish eat fish. A new human subspecies is coming." Whale himself flinched at his own tone, such a sinister edge there was to it.

"I don't like this." With grim decision, Julius turned to the computers. "I'll change her back."

His fingers began to spider, weaving an intricate lacy web across the keyboard, but Whale's firm hand landed on his knuckles, stopping him.

"Julius, you will change her _to death_ ," said Whale sternly. "We will talk to her first."

"Okay, okay!" snapped Julius, jerking his arm away with a look Whale could have mistaken for that of revulsion, had he not known, all too well, that Julius was incapable of revulsion. "Just keep your tentacles off me!"

The rest of the day Whale whiled away by slouching around the apartment, making timid forays to the fridge, and inventing foxy ways to approach Joy about her new kind and their purpose. He also remembered to keep a distrustful eye on Julius, and whenever the latter's hands crept toward the keys, Whale lunged to halt them, to which Julius invariably grumbled something along the lines of "only meant to order pizza" and "can't even play Sims now is what you're saying?"

Whether he was referring to the actual video game or the unfortunate passersby on the street below, Whale didn't know.

When Joy finally erupted through the front door, humming and appearing to be in an amused mood, all the unobtrusive methods of eliciting the truth from her that Whale had come up with slipped his mind, and he simply blurted out, "You have to tell me what's going on, Joy. I know it's happened. Let me help. Let _us_ help." He looked at Julius for solidarity, but he only tapped his fingertips on the desk, pointedly, very close to the keyboard.

Whale cleared his throat nervously with an almost undetectable shake of the head. Luckily, Joy seemed to have noticed neither of those movements, determined as she evidently was to deny Julius existence.

"Hmph." She raised an eyebrow, dropped her backpack on the floor, and shrugged. "Let's talk, then." Crooning again, she danced over to the balcony, swung open the door, and motioned with a theatrical, elegant wave of her hand for Whale to pass first.

"It's generous of you to offer help," she said, after closing the door behind them, "self-sacrificial, even, considering. . ." Her eyes lingered on something far under the floor. Now that she and Whale were more or less alone, there was not a vestige left of her outward light-heartedness.

"Considering?" Whale reminded her, inclining his head to one side in an attempt to intercept her gaze.

"Considering the scale and specifics of the threat we must eliminate." Joy straightened up, set her shoulders back, and boldly met his eyes. "But we don't require any additional assistance, thank you."

" _We_? Oh, Joy." Whale clutched his forehead and groaned.

Suddenly, it had ceased to matter who the new kind were and why they had selected her; all Whale wished at that moment was for Joy to remember how much she had feared the transformation, how much she had dreaded to lose touch with herself. And now she had traded "I" for "we," she conducted herself like a soldier, happy to serve and never ask questions. If the pre-transformation Joy could hear his thoughts right now, Whale knew, she would counter-accuse him of having been an unreflecting soldier his entire life. But this was unbearable—was she going to thank his kind for what they'd done to her, as Julius had?

"Why are you giving up so soon?" he said, shaking his head. "Joy, you were _so_ —you should fight for your ordinary self, you should be proud to be just an ordinary person."

Joy stared askance at him, as though to show she hadn't ever expected to hear words like these from Whale, and truthfully, he too found them slightly foreign, even though right nevertheless.

"Wouldn't that be a bit. . .sub-speciesist?" she said, only half in jest, judging by her lopsided smile. "Why should we feel proud, or ashamed, of who we were born as when we had no control over it whatsoever? It wasn't our fault or achievement."

"Now this is what I'm talking about!" said Whale with ardor. "I never say this—I never normally _think_ this, really—but. . . _you_ of all people didn't deserve this."

"Silly Whale," said Joy, suppressing a lenient smile that made him wonder if he had actually said something particularly unwise, "I wasn't better than other people, I was just the only one you'd met. It's harder to use us as tools when you know us personally, isn't it?"

It was reassuring that she'd used "I" to talk about the ordinary Joy, less so that she was referring to her in the past tense.

"That much is true," said Whale, embarrassed, but he added stubbornly, "and still, it's unfair that they changed you. I'm sorry."

The corners of Joy's lips drooped, and her eyebrows curled into an alarmed frown.

" _They_ changed me? What?"

"The new subspecies, the ones who are making so much noise inside your head—can you still fight them?"

" _Fight_ them?" Joy looked positively shocked now, with her new, alien eyes narrowed as though to protect what was behind them. "I'm their leader. _Our_ leader. Why would I want to fight them?"

"Leader, is that right?" Whale stalled. He was having difficulty wrapping his head around this one. The Phaeton didn't have a leader; they were some sort of utopian cross between a democracy and an anarchy. "Why didn't you tell us?"

It was more of a rhetorical question, Whale's uttered regret that there was no way to undo what had happened, but Joy did answer.

"We couldn't let Jul—Julius get in the way," she faltered. "He's clever, he'd have figured something out. What we didn't foresee, though, is that _you_ would change your mind."

"I don't—"

" _You_ created us, Whale!" Joy threw up her hands with impatience. "Don't you recall? The moment you fell—at the pier, remember?—you squeezed my hand"—she showed him how by clutching his—"you sent the rest of the Phaeton a threat signal. And they made us. _You_ made _me_." She studied him for a brief moment, then gave a perplexed shrug and looked away. "I guess it wasn't really conscious, then. . . . Doesn't matter, anyway. Our task is almost completed."

Whale stumbled away from her until his back hit the cold glass of the opposite wall. He remembered agonizing on the wet wooden planks and drifting away, he remembered gripping Joy's hand—and then, darkness.

"Oh, no," breathed Whale. "I didn't want that. I didn't mean to—" He must have launched the conversion process by accident, a second before he had fainted, when his brain had been mushy with pain. But _one hundred million_ people? Talk about a costly inadvertence!

Whale's lungeyeart shrank with shame, prickling. No wonder his family were mad at him. He had told them there had been a need to act, and they hadn't questioned it, even though no usual research or calculations had been done; they never questioned any one of them. If they did, that would be the same as if an ordinary person started doubting one of their eyes: pure madness. But of course, once the Phaeton had realized that Whale had been almost asleep when he'd struck "the emergency button" and there had been no way to reverse the transformation without risking a hundred million lives, they had become very upset with him.

He glanced up at Joy. She unlocked her phone and almost instantly locked it again and tucked it into her jacket pocket, from which Whale concluded that she had been checking the time or new messages. Either way, she looked as though she was waiting for something to happen. _Our task is almost completed_ , she'd said. What danger had his sinking, hurting mind imagined? If he was the one to have changed Joy, what had he done that for?

"What task would that be?" he said stiffly.

"Well, what was on your mind when you were creating us?" Joy's tone rang with tolerant, forgiving humor again, as though Whale were a very thick student struggling to even pronounce the name of the subject correctly. " _What threat_?"

Whale strained his brains. "I don't. . .Julius! I was thinking about how under no circumstances should people become like Julius."

"Excellent!" Joy nodded and gave him the same half-surprised, half-approving look she had given Julius at the pier when he'd managed to make proper small talk for a change, but Whale was hardly in the mood for relishing his sudden brilliance. If the new kind was the solution, and the problem was Julius Artin and the like—

"Joy, what is it you're going to do?"

"Look, you know it yourself. We cannot let advanced subspecies modify ordinary people as they please. We cannot let them experiment on us and get away with it. People must remain pure. They must evolve naturally."

"So, what, you want to take their new abilities away? They might die!" Whale strode over to Joy and grasped her shoulders, peering imploringly into her face. "Please, Joy, I told you, they might die! Julius—"

"WE KNOW!" she interrupted, wriggling free of his grip. "Exactly! Everyone the Phaeton has altered, two billion human beings, might die, and whose fault is that? You, the Phaeton, did what you believed was right," she said, a little softer, "you were well aware that someone might get hurt, but it never stopped you, because you deemed your mission much bigger than individual lives. We have a mission, too, Whale. And we believe in it strongly with all of our hearts. And as for Jules"—Joy grimaced, probably scolding herself for forgetting to use his full first name—"he's trying to edit people. Edit the world. This is just wrong. No one should be able to do that."

"Julius?" called Whale, his head turned a little toward the balcony door, but his eyes fixed on Joy, as if she wouldn't be able to move as long as he kept her in sight. "Are you getting this?"

"Yes," Julius's muffled voice drawled impassively. Joy gave a barely perceptible start.

"You have to stay away from her. If she's the reverse side of the Phaeton, then all she needs to do is touch you." Whale more than welcomed the idea of disarming Julius, but not if that meant possibly dis-heading him as well.

"I control a hundred million bodies," said Joy, quietly yet resolutely. "There's no point in running from me."

Whale squinted at her, wondering why she hadn't struck yet. "But you're waiting for something?"

"New subspecies are only the consequences. Ramifications. We can take away their abilities, but the Phaeton will simply create more. You will negate the results of our work, you will neutralize us. No, we'll deal with the mess afterward. First, we must finish what you've made us for, what the Phaeton couldn't do on their own: eradicate the main threat."

"Which is—?"

Joy bowed her head a little, as though to say that he already knew.

"Us?" gasped Whale. "The Phaeton? You're just going to kill us? All of us? You wouldn't—"

"Of course not!" cried Joy, looking insulted and even more dazed by such an assumption than Whale himself was. "We're not barbarians! If there _is_ a way to avoid bloodshed, we will. We only need to separate you. Look at you. When you're alone, you're useless. You're not dangerous. You won't be able to hurt anyone anymore."

"No, no, _you_ would never have said this. This isn't you, it's the program I've loaded into your head that's talking. And I didn't mean to—please, _please_ , Joy, they're my family!"

She patted him on the arm. "I'm sorry. As I said, it's basically done."

"You can't," said Whale, shaking his head still more vigorously, "you can't pull the Phaeton apart. It's impossible. It would take so much energy that you'd blow up the planet in the process!"

"I've already done it once, remember?" She gave him that new smile again, a condescending, pitying one, and Whale's hand flew involuntarily to the back of his neck. "Well, not the 'blow up the planet' part, of course. That's why I was appointed as our leader. I already had experience in cutting one of you off."

"Julius?" Whale called loudly again.

"Working on it," came the muted answer.

"Jules, Jules. . . ." Her back still turned to the room, Joy clicked her tongue and demanded in tones of mock, smarmy condemnation, "Are you going to rewrite me, Jules?"

It went a little quieter, as if some continuous noise had stopped, a noise so chronically habitual one only became aware of it once it was over, like the low hum of a fridge or the ticking of a clock. Whale reached for the door handle, turned it, and pushed the door ajar, his fingers still at the handle in case Joy tried to run away on them again. The crack revealed to him the cause of this uncanny quietness: Julius wasn't typing.

"What's wrong? Why have you stopped?"

"I promised her I wouldn't."

"Emotions?" said Whale indignantly. "Now?"

"This isn't about emotions." Julius looked back at him coolly and pressed the upper right button, which stood out dauntingly red against the otherwise black keyboard. "This is about rules."

Whale rested his head against the door frame and shut his eyes. He didn't need to be a computer genius to understand that Julius had just erased every bit of information he'd had about the changed Joy, thus wiping out their chances of stopping the new kind.

"Why don't you turn on the radio?"

Whale shifted his head to stare hopelessly at Joy, his forehead still propped against the frame. She gave her phone another brief check and tucked it away again, her face lit up.

"It'll jazz you up," she said, with a friendly smile.

" _This is Radio Jupiter_ ," sang her cheerful voice out of the receiver a few moments later. " _Music that changes you, music that blows your mind._ The next song is dedicated to you, my lonely Whale."

Whale turned the volume control knob to make it louder, rounded the folding screen, and went back to the center of the room. He felt oddly detached from reality again, like the time he had become convinced that his family was never coming back for him. As soon as the loudspeakers issued the first sounds of the loneliest whale's song, he knew exactly what was coming, just as he knew it wasn't in his power to prevent or delay the catastrophe in any way. Whale decided to resort to the single way of handling unexpected situations that made his kind feel in their element: watching and not interfering.

"For some reason," said Joy, "this certain sequence of sounds, this certain audio frequency breaks your connection, should you happen to be close enough to the source—the way wind or traffic or even footfall can cause a bridge to oscillate and, eventually, collapse.

"As you may have guessed, we call ourselves the Jupiter. There are one hundred million of us—no more, no fewer than is required: At this exact moment, each one of us is standing next to an assigned Phaeton. Granted, it took us a while to organize this—it's not that easy to operate millions of bodies when you've only got one mind—but right now, this song is playing on every TV channel, every radio station, every cell phone."

"She's right," said Julius, turning one of the screens so Whale could see it. There was a map of the world, where every bit of land and even some parts of the oceans were thickly littered with twinkling, rippling blue spots. "It's everywhere."

As if in support of his words, Joy's phone began to sing in her pocket, and then Julius's phone vibrated on the desk and joined in.

"You can't hack into it," he said with assurance, which was pretty unconvincing in the given circumstances. Vainly, Julius attempted to turn off his cell phone; in the meantime, the speakers beside the monitors issued crackling noises and also started lamenting.

"Listen," Whale heard Joy's rapt voice as if through a pillow.

Joy wrenched open the balcony window and leaned halfway out, holding firmly on to the metal railing. The ashy fog was still whirling outside, indecisively, as if mulling over the invitation, but the cool evening air did not hesitate to stream in. Nor did the chilling song from the depths of the ocean. The pulsating howl swelled until it was as loud and clear as if it were playing inside Whale's skull. The song was everywhere, enveloping Earth like a running wave. The walls of the balcony shuddered.

"The entire planet can hear it," said Joy. Her voice quivered with awe, and Whale could see the goose bumps rising on her forearms. "Maybe that lonely whale can hear it too. Maybe in some deep black waters, it's raising its head now, hopeful that there is someone else." Her excited expression faded into a frown of concern. "But. . .there isn't. What it's hearing is its own call. Is it a good thing to give it hope?"

"Joy," Whale called out, trying to sound calm. It was not easy, considering that his lungeyeart was freezing and writhing, which was only partly due to his lack of energy—his kind was being torn apart, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. But he couldn't afford to grieve; he had to concentrate on what was about to happen right here, right now. No, he couldn't go global. But he could save one small, ordinary life, unimportant in the grand scheme of things. He was not going to silently watch from afar, not this time. He couldn't let this horrible thing happen.

"Joy, you need to get back into the room. _Now_."

"Why?"

Joy turned around, letting go of the railing. For a second, Whale felt as though his own heart had collapsed from a height of two hundred and fifty feet. He held out his hands in front of him to indicate that she should move carefully, though the gesture turned out to look more as if he himself needed to clutch something for support. He clenched his right hand into a fist, his index finger pointing at the balcony door. Its glass pane was rattling.

Joy shifted her gaze from the door back to Whale, her eyes widening, her mouth curling into a soundless "Oh." She had remembered. She had understood. Whale's connection to his family wasn't the only thing that had been broken at the pier the day he'd met Joy and first heard the song.

"The lemonade bottle," she merely said.

There were a tinkle and the sound of glass breaking, and Joy gave a little scream. Whale closed his eyes and exhaled through pursed lips, feeling as though some taut string had snapped in his chest. _Just something in the kitchen._

"Joy, _now_." He stretched out his arm toward her, as far as it would go without him having to step onto the balcony floor. "Slowly. . . ." He saw Joy hold her breath, and he realized he wasn't breathing either, as if the weight of the tiniest whiff could become the very last straw for the vibrating glass.

Joy reached out. There was only an inch between their trembling fingertips. Her eyes started to water. She seemed to desperately want that gulp of air, but the fear was stronger, and she refused to inhale. Cautiously, very cautiously, she unglued her left foot from the floor and took a tiny step toward him. She bit her lower lip, still not daring to shift her weight forward.

Another ring, much louder, made Joy draw back and grasp the railing again. _Crash! Crash! Crash!_ _Crash!_ Whale's outstretched arm twitched at every sound. Joy shut her eyes, but two tears still broke out from under her closed eyelids. Windows, screens, dishes, and mirrors burst and sprayed the apartment with splinters. Whale imagined, unwittingly, how everything made of glass was exploding across the whole planet. Terrible images flashed through his mind, all the consequences, all the victims, the ruins that humankind would wander among tomorrow, people and the Phaeton alike. . . .

He had to focus on what he _could_ affect. The balcony glass was strong, but so was the whale song, which still hadn't ceased.

"Joy," he called, his tone almost begging, voice loud enough to outshout the apocalyptic howling and the sounds of the city falling apart. "Take my hand."

She shook her head jerkily, her eyes still shut. Her entire body was quaking, except for her arms. Her arms seemed stiff, fingers paralyzed in their grip on the metal pipe. "I can't—I can't let go."

"Joy, I can't come closer to you. The glass might not hold both of us, so you have to take my hand and let me pull you—no, no, no, not now. . . ."

Whale felt as if the ground had given way beneath his feet, and then his legs gave under him too, and he fell heavily to the floor. In response to that thump, the balcony gave another great shudder. A zigzag crack ran all the way through the ceiling and down the wall and finally split the floor between Joy's sneakers.

"JULES!"

Julius appeared in the doorway to the balcony, stepping over Whale, who was lying face down, soundly asleep and useless.

"My hero." Julius poked at Whale's unresponsive side with the toe of his sneaker.

The song was deafening now, rolling through Joy's body and leaving it to shake uncontrollably. She knew, she simply knew that the moment she let go of the railing, the moment she pushed off the floor to jump to safety, would be the moment it all collapsed.

Julius's face was covered in small cuts, and the glass dust sparkling in his ruffled hair reminded Joy of Christmas. Why was she thinking of Christmas, so foolishly, at such an inopportune time? Joy barely heard the booming sounds anymore; they had turned into distant shooting and thunder, had been drowned in the whale song. Someone was screaming for help on the street. Christmas. . . . Christmas was such a nice thing to think about, really.

She called him once more, this time in a broken whisper. The balcony cracked again, and again, and again. . . .

Julius looked at her at last. "Joy, _jump_ ," he said, his robot-like voice calm and earnest.

The floor creaked under her foot; Joy raised her eyes to his and sank, vanishing amidst the large falling shards and the silvery cloud of glass powder.

"Joy?" Julius stepped closer to the edge, peering down and waving a hand in front of his face to disperse the dust.

When the cloud settled, he saw two orange blurs dangling in the fog. He looked up. Joy was hanging from the railing, her bleeding hands clenched around it, her legs swaying.

Her eyes fixed on her barely visible sneakers, Joy wondered for how much longer she would be able to hold on. She inched her hand along the railing. If she could move this way to the end of the pipe, which was welded to the wall. . .that would be pointless. It would be still too far for her to reach the doorway. She could call for help. . .pointlessly. Everything must be screaming now. . . . She suddenly realized it was very quiet. The song was over. People were slowly coming to their senses. The continuing noise was just her own eardrums droning.

The fog concealed the city below, and somehow to Joy, it almost made the idea of falling no longer scary, as if there were no hard bottom beneath this gray cloud, as if the fall would be soft and endless. . . .

"If I give you my hand," said Julius, "you will try to change me back. And that will most likely kill me."

That wasn't a question; Julius was simply reasoning out loud, so Joy did not answer.

"If I _don't_ give you my hand," Julius continued, pacing back and forth along Whale's body, "you will crash. If you are the brain, what will happen to the rest of the Jupiter when you shut down?"

Joy remained silent. Her fingers were already numb, and her arm muscles felt as if they were tearing.

"You know what I think?" Julius came to a halt in front of her. "I think it's pretty sad."

Joy burst out laughing and crying at the same time. Her head spun, and her left hand almost slipped. "Yeah," she said, sniffling, and she broke into laughter again. She was sure her laughter had never sounded so happy before. It was so weird. . . .

"Come on."

Julius held out his arm, and it proved convincing enough for Joy. A moment later, she was hanging from his neck, her tears soaking his shoulder, her nails clawing into his hoodie as if she were a mad-scared cat.

"Don't feel anything yet," Julius reported, waggling his head to disentangle his nose from Joy's hair. "Have you initiated my conversion?"

"I'm so very, very sorry," sobbed Joy.

"I know." Julius's palm flattened uncertainly against her shuddering back. "It's okay. I know you can't help it."

"No, I'm sorry." She pulled away a little and looked him in the eye, her face red and crumpled with tears. "The Phaeton chose _me_ —not because I just happened to be at hand. It was because I tried to change you back, told you those stupid stories. Whale saw it; he saw that, just as he did, I thought what had happened to you wasn't right. Wasn't natural. So they chose me, and they gave me this ability to return you to the way you used to be."

"Well." Julius took a step back, and his hand hung in the air, waiting for Joy to take it. "Do what you have to."

Joy's face crumpled even more and she let out something between a bitter laugh and a cry of pain. She reached out slowly, shakily, and enfolded his hand in hers.

"I hadn't really gotten to know him, the old Julius. It was just for a week."

"It's okay," Julius repeated.

Joy shook her head. "With _you_ , we've had years. I just want you to know, I don't think Julius is gone and you're a stranger in his body. I think you're a brilliant version of him."

Julius smiled—only to please her, she knew, only because he had probably guessed that it was the reaction she wanted.

"I would never," she said, hugging him again.

And Julius hugged her back, almost as if he meant it. "I know."

"I would never, ever, rewrite you."

The crisp wind was whistling and marauding unchecked around the wrecked apartment. Whale gave a small shiver and stirred experimentally—still half adream, he was oblivious to his surroundings. The scrunch of the disturbed glass crumbs under his body brought him back to a most surreal reality. The first thing Whale saw upon opening his eyes was the back of Julius, who stood with his head drooped, apparently mourning the broken monitors.

"No, you haven't missed anything newsworthy," Julius said, unearthing his cell phone from under the pile of debris on his desk. He raised it triumphantly as though it was a winner's cup. "Plastic screen!"

Whale sat up, grunting and wincing as splinters dug into his palms. "Julius! You're alive!"

"Even better than that: By the frequency of your pulse I can tell you're not faking your relief about it."

"So the Jupiter hasn't changed you?" In an instant, Whale's relief mutated into horror. His heart rate must have skyrocketed. If the Jupiter had failed to carry out their mission— "What about the others?" What about _Joy_? Had she—?

"The Jupiter was created in the image of the Phaeton," Joy said in a small voice.

Whale wheeled his head around, and it spun with what seemed like an overdose of relief. Joy stood with her hands crossed on her chest, like a corpse, but she was alive, unharmed, uncrashed. She was overlooking the concrete cliff where the balcony had been, and although keeping at a safe distance from the edge, she still was trembling, which probably had little to do with the wind.

"Except for lungeyearts," she said, "we were built just like you, and I didn't think that through, did I? The song tore the Phaeton apart, but it tore us apart, too. Oh, Whale, now I know _how_ it hurts. Anyway, I lost them, the Jupiter, before I could give them the order to start ' _dealing with the mess_.' " She emphasized the last words bitterly.

Whale knew her regret wasn't on account of her being unable to make those converted ordinary again; it was for the way she had talked about them when she hadn't been ordinary herself. This was the Joy who had forgone her trip to India to babysit an injured stranger at the pier, and this was the Joy who had made him his first-ever breakfast, and this was the Joy who would never speak as cruelly as the Jupiter in her had.

"Everyone the Phaeton has ever touched is still out there," said Joy. "I guess that means people are still in danger, but to be honest, I'm glad I don't have to be the one to take care of that." For the first time since he'd woken up, she turned to look at him. "Whale, I'm so sorry."

"So am I, Joy," he said, not sure what more there was to say.

"Oh my God, I made a hundred million humans homeless." Joy hid her face in her hands. "I thought my head was supposed to be lighter and quieter without all those voices, but it only got worse. I feel like I'm having a hangover."

Whale grinned faintly, getting to his feet. "Ordinary again, then?"

For a moment, it seemed that Joy was going to begin crying once more, but she let out a strange chuckle. "Pretty much ordinary, yeah. What about you? What are you going to do now?"

"Uh. . . ." Whale hadn't had the chance to give it much thought lately, so after some intense massaging of his forehead, he decided to go with the obvious idea that was the first to spring to mind. "I'm going to find them. My family. I'll start with my son, and. . . _her_. They're on their own now, they must be terrified. Maybe together we can find a way to revive our collective consciousness."

Joy lowered her eyes, nodding.

"Sooner or later, they're bound to discover Twitter," muttered Julius.

"Even if we don't," Whale continued to think out loud, in the dark about what Julius had meant, "I guess this world could use some interference on my part." He paused, and added quietly, not entirely certain himself whether he was accusing or simply stating the obvious. "You've ruined my kind."

Joy pointed her index finger at him. " _You've_ been ruining mine for centuries."

Both of them dropped their eyes to the floor shimmering with glass dust, then looked up at each other timidly, and in a moment, they were hugging and laughing.

"You're going to be okay," said Whale, brushing a glass chip off Joy's hair. He let go of her, and turned to Julius to give him a hug too, but Julius dodged away, saying, "Nope, don't think so."

"Hang on." Joy squinted suspiciously at Whale and passed her hand over the top of her head, repeating his gesture. "Did you just change me?"

Whale forced his face to remain unreadable. "I'm not sure I can still do that, I told you."

"Whale, _what have you done to me_?"

"You'd better figure it out, and quickly."

She vouchsafed him a look expressing such a gamut of indignation, disbelief, and disappointment at his dastardly treachery that Whale felt compelled to back farther away from the giant hole in the wall, just in case.

"Stabbed me in the. . .head," gasped Joy, and she stormed past him toward the bathroom. It appeared as though she had been about to shoulder Whale on the way but thought better of it and made sure to skirt him in a wide berth. Whale smiled to himself.

"Revenge? That's low," remarked Julius casually.

"I'll be giving this street an occasional check for _freezes_ ," said Whale, "and trust me, it's in your best interest that people don't linger here too long contemplating what kind of coffee to kick-start their day with."

"I've got you right here, on the hard drive," said Julius, tapping himself on the temple. "Committed you to memory. Should you get in my way, I'll be quick and eager to tamper with your source code. Going to miss those tentacles?"

They would have probably stood like that for an unreasonable period of time, competing over whose stare was more intimidating, had it not been for a clatter from the bathroom.

Julius scowled at Whale as he sidestepped him and, having stopped outside the bathroom door, tugged at the knob. "Come on, Joy, I don't want to experience the 'human emotion' glitch twice in the same day."

The cell phone he was still holding vibrated.

"Plastic screen," he repeated with satisfaction, and after a brief look at the message, he turned the screen toward Whale. It was a picture of Joy, cropped at the bare shoulders half-covered with a palm leaf. With her eyes narrowed against the sunlight, Joy was looking happy to the point of indecency.

"She's in India," said Julius, underwhelmed as ever. "She says, 'thanks for the teleport' and 'is there any way to fix the clothes-losing thing?' "

"Oops," said Whale.

"There's the door, by the way. You should use it to get lost." Julius turned away and began to type something rapidly into his phone—which, as Whale apprehended, wasn't a social media update on how abysmally lame his day had been.

Without Joy, Whale didn't feel like staying here a minute longer, anyway. "See you," he said, heading for the exit.

"Please don't."

Whale chuckled against his will. He walked over to the elevators, pressed the call button, and looked back at the apartment door. For the first time in his life, he felt as though he was leaving behind a home, even if a very temporary one, a place where his story had begun. This was where he, willingly or not, had started to recognize himself as a young man called Whale, and not merely a cell in the body of the Phaeton. The Phaeton would have never done what Whale had done today for Joy, let alone what he was planning to do with his (slightly disheartening) freedom.

Still, he wanted to explore. He was getting more and more intrigued by his own new nature. He wanted to get to know everything about this Whale: Would he find a mission of his own? A passion? Would he develop little habits and quirks? What would he be thinking about on sleepless nights? What kind of coffee would he drink in the tired mornings, what kind of music would make his heart yearn? Whale wanted to see how he would learn and transform, little by little, day after day, and what he would do with his ability to change ordinary lives.

The elevator dinged and opened its embrace for Whale. He entered and reached slowly for the first-floor button, hesitating for a heartbeat as his eyes fell upon the little " _I_ " engraved next to it.

As solid and safe as "we" could feel, it could also at times be enchaining, and like an anchor, heavy, and perhaps, "I" didn't always have to be little or scrawny; sometimes, it was standing tall and straight.

As the elevator's doors were sliding closed, Whale was staring in front of him, and despite the lungeyeart-constricting grief he felt for his mutilated family, despite the guilt and sorrow he felt at the thought of magnificent, beautiful ordinary people and their lonely broken cities, despite his fear of his own unknown future, he was smiling.

The end.

