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The Dartmouth Speculative Fiction Project paired eight faculty-members at Dartmouth College with eight veteran speculative fiction authors. Through design activities, panels, symposia and a mountain lodge retreat, they collaboratively imagined worlds that interrogate the future humanity is heading towards. These stories can be found in the anthology, Android in the Archives: Research, Creative Collaboration and our Speculative Futures (lightspeedmagazine.com/android), soon to be published by MIT Press in 2027.

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Maria Haddid looked like she was screaming.

I’ve heard singers say that’s all singing is deep down, but if you’ve seen enough screams you won’t often get them mixed up.

The faithful gathered around her in the picture—the soccer mom, the children, the person with the ill-advised beard—on the bright green pews of the Church of the Redeemer’s main worship hall. They smiled. They raised their hands in that way believers do, like babies who want Mommy to pick them up. They looked happy or high. But Maria looked like she had seen the face of God.

I asked: “Is this the only photo?”

The kid loomed over me in the dark. He was gym-big, looks-big-on-TV big. An animated eagle-cross tattoo beat its wings on his throat where the Adam’s apple would have been. He wasn’t quite thirty, or he had a good skin care guy, but he was Pastor Ralph’s son, and in the Church of the Redeemer that meant he’d always be the kid.

“It’s the only hard copy of a candid shot,” he said. “The only one we can be sure of.”

It was a pain, but it was also half the reason I had a job. The way the old coats tell it, there used to be so much information: pictures, digital records, databases of databases. Used to be you could ask a box a question and get pure knowledge in your vein, and all you’d owe was everything you ever wanted to know, or do, or screw, or be. But you could pretend you hadn’t given the box that stuff, not in a way that mattered.

Now the net’s full of dreaming ghosts, and you never can tell when one’s wandered into your house to rearrange the furniture.

That old world seems like hell to me—all built on air and light. But if you’re not in the business of needing to know things for sure, and most people aren’t, it’s easy to miss how much has changed. That the kid knew I’d care meant he was smarter than most of my clients. I don’t like what that says about me.

“Do you have another angle on her? What about air-gapped systems?”

The kid passed me an unlocked tablet. “Just this, from her personnel intake when she came on as CFO. The personnel records are secure, I think. They should be. That’s how I remember her.”

The trouble with smart clients is that they tend to know it. In my business it pays to be dumb. A rock could do the job better than most people. You just need to follow the slope downhill.

Maria, on the tablet, looked like the kind of woman I’d feel thankful to share a sidewalk with, then never think about again. Her eyes were big and dark, her mouth small—an owlish face: watchful, skeptical, or just bored with HR. The date on the form was three years gone. I picked up the photo of the scream. I wanted to see what she could see, the glory reflected in those dark eyes. “And this?”

“Two weeks ago. Just before she disappeared.” His weight shifted. I wasn’t looking at him, but when a guy has that much muscle, you can feel it.

“Why’d you bring her in from outside? You’re not exactly hurting for workers.”

“Faithful.”

“No accountants among the faithful?”

“She was more than an accountant. Have you seen our services?”

“I have a television. It’s on sometimes.”

“In baptism, the Church relieves the redeemed of their debts to this world.”

“But you didn’t need her until three years ago.”

“We’d grown beyond our limits. In the last Correction, people came flying in desperate search for baptism. We had to grow fast. We needed someone experienced with digital contracts, traunching, aggregating, repackaging. Those are New York people, Rio people, Hong Kong people, Veliky Novgorod people. Not around-here people.”

“You could have worked with any of them. They can afford the plane ticket.”

“We wanted someone on site, someone who understood our mission. That was Maria.” He was looking at her face on the screen.

“What’s she to you?”

“There is no one closer to the heart of our Church.”

I let that ride for now. It didn’t really matter what he wanted to tell me, or not. I’d find out.

“Did she have enemies?”

Most people laugh at that question. “There are serpents in every garden.”

I often wonder why I pull the cases I do. All the operatives in the Transcontinental Agency ask that sooner or later, and the best you can do is guess. You can’t get a straight answer from Old Al. He makes his choices about who goes where and does what deep down in the math of him, and while he can talk, the things he says aren’t real things exactly. They just remind him of things a person would say. But this gig, I understood. I know the lingo from way back. “You have a heresy problem.”

“There are always whispers,” the kid said. “Since she disappeared, the whispers have grown louder.”

“There’s a line between whispers and making someone disappear.”

“They have crossed the line, or hired someone to cross it. And there’s something else. As I searched for her, I was followed by a man with metal eyes.”

“If a pro’s involved, that changes our rates.” He could pay. Nothing about him was cheap. But you have to tell them up front or else they make a fuss.

“Can you find her?”

I looked back at the photo of the scream. The light in her eyes might have been reflected from a window. “I can try.”

• • • •

The old coats say you used to be able to do the boring part from the comfort of your air-conditioned office: search tax records, registries of deeds, police files, all that cast-a-net stuff. They say you just typed a few words into a form on a computer and the machines would do the work for you—and you could even believe the results, most of the time.

Maybe they’re lying. Hard to imagine trusting what a screen would show you. Anyway, if the old coats had been any good at this job, they wouldn’t be around to offer tips. If you make a habit of finding the truth, sooner or later it swallows you up.

Me, I like the boring part. It’s comforting to connect this scribble in that ledger to that document the old lady with the Simple Plan tattoo dredged out of the County Clerk’s office. So long as you remember that ink and paper can lie as neatly as a screen.

First, the ledgers. Maria’s own accounts were zeroed out. She’d pulled most of it in cash, in small increments over the last few months. Might have been feeding a habit, might have been getting ready to run. It was hard to trace cash but not impossible. I’d go that way if I had to.

The Church account books were a tangle. I’d sort through them later, maybe call in a favor from Old Al. I found payments for the new Rio ministry, payments for debt servicing, payments for a solar-paving job in the parking lot. Time to hit the street and see what the town’s cops and records offices knew about Maria Haddid.

I’d hit three county police stations, two registries of deeds, and four banks by the time we got to the part of my job people like to call “exciting.”

There were two of them, not so broad as the kid but taller, with shovel jaws and heavy eyes. Not the kind of men who look good in the off-the-rack Oxford shirts and khakis they were wearing, but I didn’t get the sense either had given much thought to a modeling career.

I made them in front of the town’s brick-and-marble city hall, and let them catch me against the chain-link fence of the bus lot a few blocks over. I put a little chase there in the middle. Some dogs need exercise, or they get nasty.

The blond got me by the lapels and bounced my head off the chain link. His buddy, a bald guy with a cap, nodded like he’d seen professional work done. And maybe it was professional. They didn’t ring my bell hard enough to daze me, and that’s harder than most people think.

“Gentlemen,” I said. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“You’re after the Haddid girl.”

He didn’t say the name right. The kid had. “And if I were?”

Baldie took this one. “We’d tell you to get lost.”

“Just doing my job, boys.”

“Do it for someone else.”

“Your objection,” I said, “is noted.”

That’s what I would have said. But the fist in my gut finished my sentence for me.

Blondie gave a couple good hits. Baldie supervised. I didn’t see much to complain about, in terms of technique.

While I was bent over, a cop walked past up the street. He looked our way, then walked on.

I figured they weren’t in this for keeps, and I figured right. They didn’t go much further once I was down. A kick to the stomach I could roll with, a glob of spit on my cheek, and the sound of tires receding.

I gave it a ten count, then cleaned myself off with special attention to the cheek. No telling where those boys’ mouths had been.

Blondie’s pockets had been bare—good practice, going in clean when you have to work so close. But I’d lifted a receipt from the Church of the Redeemer on-site wash and fold.

They might be heretics. But that didn’t track with the uninterested cop. That took pull—the kind of pull I wouldn’t expect heretics to have.

Factions in church leadership? Maybe. When you beat the shit out of someone, don’t let your right hand know what the left hand is doing.

My slacks were torn. The hits would bruise. I limped off to my ride.

Time to roll downhill.

• • • •

It had been a long time since I last went to church and when I did it was old-school. I remembered the full-body pulse of an organ prelude, the light through stained glass, the smells of dust and incense, hymnal pages and binding glue. I remember a velvet pad beneath my knees, antique sentences like marbles in my mouth.

The Church of the Redeemer had three banks of Vari-Lites and a concert sound system. The Church of the Redeemer had stadium seating, overflow amphitheaters with jumbotron displays, and a new outbuilding with VR goggles so you could pray with Pastor Ralph and angel choirs in a genAI heaven. The Church of the Redeemer had Holo-Jesus.

Holo-Jesus beamed in the lobby, seventeen feet tall, arms wide. His features shifted as the faithful passed: now Black, now white, now many shades of brown. Across from Him, between two banks of doors, a flat-panel display proclaimed the worldwide membership of the Rolling Jubilee. Souls saved: 17,623 . . . and the last three digits were moving too fast for me to count.

“Good day for the Lord,” I said.

“That would be the Rio ministry,” said the woman at my shoulder. I’d heard her come up, but I hadn’t looked. Sometimes you don’t want to seem too observant.

The greeter was about my height, and wore a gray sweater that fit well. She’d dressed to work the best-friend’s-older-sister angle, stunning on second glance, ostensibly safe-for-church: a hard look to pull off with a copilot lens over one eye. “They opened last Thursday,” she said, or the lens told her to say. “Even in these dark times, so many choose love. It’s wonderful.”

“It is wonderful. Meaning that I wonder about it.”

“Curiosity is a virtue.”

“Good. I don’t have many.”

She laughed. She was good enough that I couldn’t tell whether it was a customer service laugh or a real one. Same with her slight lean toward me, the warmth in her eyes. “I haven’t seen you around. I take it you’ve not been Redeemed?”

Make a fisher of man in a day, and they’ll be fed for the rest of their life. “How does it work?”

Her lens flashed with dialog options. “The grace of God passes understanding.”

“I’m funny about understanding. So’s my bank.”

“First, you accept salvation. You seal yourself to the Church in baptism.” She stepped closer and pushed up her sleeve to reveal the bracelet around her wrist, barcode shimmering. “Then you’re free.”

“All my debts are cancelled?”

“The Lord relieves them through the agency of the Church.”

“Sounds too good to be true.”

“You learn, here, that the world’s much bigger than we imagine.”

“How’d that work out for Job?”

“The Lord restored his fortunes, in the end. And gave him twice as much as he had before.”

“Was that what happened to you?”

“Twice nothing,” she said, “is still nothing. But I was Redeemed.”

“To tithe and serve?”

“The tithe is a symbol of our new life, our new bonds.”

“Ten percent is ten percent.”

“You try finding a card that offers ten percent these days.” She shrugged. It was a good movement on her, and she knew it. “When you’ve wasted more than you can ever make back, you know that if you were free, you’d just do it all over again.”

“I’ve been there.”

She looked me over, slow, ankles up, just with her eyes. “I see that you have.” It wasn’t a line the lens had fed her—the copilot flickered blue as it tried to bend the conversation back toward saving my soul.

“What’s your name?”

The lens flashed with alternatives. She turned it off. I saw the depths of her brown eyes. “Susan,” she said. “Park. What’s yours?”

I didn’t want to do the next part. “Susan, I was hoping you could tell me about Maria Haddid.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it, then looked away.

• • • •

Susan walked me out behind the church’s main auditorium. The sun was red from fires up in Canada. Workers were repaving the parking lot with that solar blacktop that smells like lilac and everyone hopes will save the world. I hear it doesn’t work, but I hear lots of things. It’s just that the ones that get me down tend to stick.

The workers wore gray coveralls with an eagle-winged cross on the back, and gas masks because you don’t want to breathe in that pavement before it sets. Heat waves from the baking blacktop made them into ghosts, not quite there and not quite gone. Baptismal bracelets glittered beneath their gloves.

“So you’re a—what do you call it? A dick?”

“I don’t. Gives people the wrong idea.”

“Do you really work for a robot?”

“I wouldn’t call him that. Robot means worker. Al doesn’t work. Not like people do.”

“And why does he need you?”

“Used to be, things like Al could just read what people wrote, and get . . . better. But then there was nothing left to read, and most of the new stuff out there was written by things like Al. They started getting artifacts. Copies of copies of copies. Train models on that and they go bad fast. Al needs more new writing, so he can get better than the other models. And people need witnesses, because you can’t trust anything anymore unless a human sees it. So clients pay people like me to find things, and Al pays me to tell him stories afterward.” I shrugged. “It’s a living. Few enough of those out there.”

“Did the kid tell you to talk to me?”

“No. I asked him for her friends, contacts. He gave me lots of names. None of them was yours.”

“It’s a big church.”

“You worked in her office for a year and a half, according to her files. But the kid doesn’t want me to talk to you.”

“He wouldn’t.”

I liked that, and I liked the way she said it more. All I had to do now, was keep her talking. “What does he have against you?”

She glanced across the pavement, but the workers were too far away to hear. Civilians worry more about being overheard than they do about mics and bugs. That used to be naive, but it’s come back around to smart again now that any child can fake a video confession with three minutes and an app. These days a witness matters more than a recording. That makes my job harder, but it also makes my job necessary. “She needed an assistant. That’s what the kid said, when I started. I was flattered that he asked, that he knew who I was. But she didn’t need me. She was just lonely. She wanted someone to walk with her as she drank coffee. Wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t on the other end of a phone.”

“You were the kid’s spy.”

“She didn’t know our ways. We didn’t know hers. She didn’t need redemption, not like I did. She’d worked for BlackRock and Berkshire Hathaway and places I’ve never heard of, places where people throw staplers at your head. She missed that life sometimes. I understood that. There were days in the beginning when I missed . . . well . . . before.”

“Sensitive job for an outsider, handling all that debt.”

“You’re here.”

“Because the kid asked me. That seems to happen a lot.”

“He’s the boss.”

“Not the old man?”

“Pastor Ralph is the head of the Church. But he doesn’t give much thought for things of this world anymore.” She glanced over her shoulder. “What Maria did with money, I could barely understand, even when she laid it all out for me in small words. But she liked me. And I liked her.” She clasped her hands in front of her, tight.

“You were close.”

“It’s not that,” Susan said, too fast. “I brought her to my prayer group and she listened, even though she didn’t believe. She didn’t care about what we could do for her. She wanted to know where we came from. What we’d been before we were Redeemed. What redemption meant to us.”

“The kid mentioned heretics.”

“Some people who don’t realize how good they have it here. They think Maria’s work cheapens the faith. They rant about golden idols.”

“You don’t agree.”

“If faith could be cheapened, it would have been already, being held by sinners like us. But God can grace even meat and spit and teeth. And anyway, the idols aren’t gold anymore. They’re numbers in the dream of some machine, clean as bleach. Eternal.”

“Have you ever seen a man with metal eyes?”

“No.”

File that for later. “Was the kid close to Maria?”

“They worked together,” she said. “On the Rio mission. He shared his visions for the Church with her.”

“Were they sleeping together?”

She glanced back at the blacktop.

“Why didn’t he want me to talk with you?”

“We do good work here. Maria came to believe in it. I think the kid blamed me for that.”

“He transferred you out of the office.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I’m not a cop,” I said. “You could walk away from this conversation right now. But you don’t want to. You want to protect her, and you don’t think you can do it alone. You don’t know if you can trust me.”

“Can I?” she asked. “Do you want to help her? Or are you just running a script?”

I didn’t move. I don’t, when someone slaps me. I let her make up her own mind.

She looked away, out past the workers, across the parking lot to the red horizon. “One day the kid told me to leave the office. He saw me wavering, he said. Such close contact with a nonbeliever—it’s bad for the soul, he said. He’d put me in danger, he said. Failed me as a counsellor and a friend. He could see that she was suffering. I’d made her feel that her work polluted our faith.”

“Was that true?”

“I don’t know.” She knew. She just didn’t want to say. “I work with seekers now. I like the work, and I still see her sometimes. She’s been kind to me. I get the impression she thinks I asked to be sent away.”

I like most of this gig. The paper chase is comforting, I like a good puzzle, and I don’t mind getting beaten up in a parking lot every once in a while. But then you ask a simple question, and the answer reminds a woman that she’s in despair.

It all balances out, sooner or later. You make your choice and pay for it. I have to believe that.

I turned to go.

She caught my arm, her hand like a claw. Turned me around and pulled me back toward her. The speed of it made my ribs ache. “I loved her.” She spat the words. “You might not know what that means.”

“I do.”

I’ve never been able to say that and convince someone.

“She left him. Let her go.”

• • • •

Maria had a place on the Redeemer campus, an apartment with three rooms, any one of which could have eaten my studio alive. The kid had given me the key. He told me he hadn’t found anything when he looked, which meant admitting he had looked. It was good to have a client who didn’t lie about things like that.

That’s more common than you’d think.

To judge from her apartment, Maria was one of those people who kept themselves new in box. Of course, it also might be that whoever was responsible for Maria’s absence—the heretics, the man with the metal eyes, Maria herself—had cleaned up. Or the kid was lying about what he had found, even to me.

I didn’t think so, though. The details were too perfect. No books, no games, not even a flat-panel. Unused stove, kitchen cabinets with four good pans and factory-sharp knives, four plates, four bowls, four glasses, four sets of flatware. The bedsheets were good high-thread-count cotton, hard to find since the blight. There were clothes in the closet, in the dresser: upscale stuff, blacks and grays repaired with gold thread the way folks do to show they bought something that could last long enough to justify repair.

This looked like the place where the HR-photo Maria would live. The Maria who screamed lived somewhere else.

I did my due diligence before I left. I’d had a hell of a morning, and Maria’s room was private enough. I checked my clothes, turned out my pockets, found a tracking tag stuck to my coat. Baldie and Blondie? But I’d changed after our little conversation, and though it was the same coat, I would have noticed a tag. So: playing rough, Ms. Park.

The tracker raised interesting possibilities, but I wanted to know more before I followed up on them.

On the way out, I taped the tracker to the wheel well of the kid’s sky-blue Mustang. Might as well keep Susan guessing.

Across the county line in Brainerd, I’d found a speeding ticket for Maria’s electric-mod Cadillac, so I checked Brainerd’s registry of deeds. I found nothing in Maria’s name, but there was a small house in the woods purchased by a Signal LLC a year before. On paper Signal was a standard small-time REIT, but it only seemed to own the one property hereabouts. Those firms tend to buy up whole towns at a go.

In person, the Brainerd house looked like the kind of place a person might go to get murdered: a tall-roofed shack with dark windows overlooking a serpentine drive and neighborless woods. No lights clicked on as I approached. Good and bad: I wasn’t announced, but the same would be true of anyone else. I’d have to count on the gravel to be my alarm. I parked my car around back and shimmed the lock on the garden doors.

Someone had tossed the place.

It had been nice enough: decent unmatched estate-sale furniture, a jar of preserved lemon in the fridge, chili flakes in the spice drawer, clean dishes in the dishwasher, boxes of cereal, a bag of rice. A low pine bookcase that once held outdated banking manuals and the kind of thick old novels people tell themselves they’ll read when they have time. The books lay broke-backed on the carpet between slashed couch cushions and mounds of foam stuffing. The chairs were upended, broken, save one, which was set up by the table, facing the garden doors. In front of the chair sat a picture frame, two inches square: a snapshot of Maria, smiling, in a lemon-print dress.

Two fist-sized holes punctuated the realtor-gray drywall. I judged the size of the fists.

The safe had been drilled, inexpertly. The bed was slashed, gutted, closets and dressers open. In a pile on the floor I found some colorful femme street clothes, hanging-around-the-house stuff, cute. I didn’t see the lemon-print dress. There were also some clothes I wouldn’t wear outside, unless it was to a big-city Pride. There were some straps and some cuffs and some implements, nothing shocking.

I heard footsteps on gravel.

It’s always a pleasure to work with amateurs.

Amateurs like front doors. I waited in the bedroom, which had decent angles on the front door and, thanks to the hall mirror, the back. Because you never know with amateurs.

But this one tried the front knob twice. Then they punched through the window. It took them a few tries. When they finally made it through, I heard a curse, which told me they’d forgotten about glass being sharp. They fumbled, bleeding, for the lock. As they stepped inside, I ran up and hit them in the face with the door.

They went down. I got my knee on their chest and a shard of glass up to the stubble under their jaw, and I kicked their fallen gun to one side.

The beard didn’t look any better in person than it had in that photo of Maria screaming. His clothes were rumpled and his hair matted, and he smelled like he’d been sleeping in his car for a week. He wasn’t used to having an edge against his throat, so he cut himself a little as he tried to speak. His eyes were blue and terrified.

“Where is she?”

“I just wanted to talk to her,” he said, through a nose that would need setting later.

“Then why’d you Leeroy in here? And why the iron?”

“I’ve been out there for a week. Waiting for Maria to come back. I saw the kid come and I saw him go. The gun—I just—” He looked confused by the question. Some men are, when you ask them why they need a gun.

“You’re alone?”

“Just me. Jesus. I did something to my arm.”

I put it all together. Or I guessed. It’s hard to tell sometimes, even from the inside. “You’re a heretic.”

“I’m a man of God.” It sounded noble when he said it. I took the glass from his throat, but I kept it where he could see. I sat back on my heels and waited. “The Church promises salvation, but they just sell us to the same people who had us by the throats. At a markup, with a finder’s fee. They call it baptism, but it’s just another bond. What they offer’s not redemption. It’s a payment plan. They get rich and we give ’til we’re dead. And after.”

“The kid brought Haddid in to manage the scheme. So you decided to take her out.”

“No. She came to us, to our group. If we could have anything, she asked, if we could remake the Church, what would we do? It didn’t sound like a what-if. It sounded like she could do something about it.”

“And you told her.”

He glanced down at the glass blade, then back at me. Making himself brave. “We want a gathering of the faithful, truly free of all chains. We were promised forgiveness, but we have been sold once again. We want the Church to live its message. To be an agent and instrument of grace.”

I tried to imagine what that would sound like to a woman the kid had hired away from the big banks. “So she left.”

“She was taken. The kid took her.”

“News to me. He hired me because he wants her found.”

That shook him, but only for a second. “Then he’s lying. You’re here to cover his tracks. I thought . . . I thought I could make you tell me where she was.”

“You seem so sure it’s his fault. What did you see? What did you hear?”

“I followed her when she left our prayer group.”

“Out of the goodness of your heart.”

“He was waiting in her apartment. The kid. He shouted at her—vile things. He said he thought she was different. She said she didn’t understand why . . . why he couldn’t believe. I heard glass break. A slap. She ran out crying. I would have gone to her, but I was afraid. I thought I’d see her again, but that was the last time. I swear on my soul. Please.”

Everyone has a line. When you cross it, they’ll tell you whatever they think you want to hear, but if you cross it, you’ll never get a straight answer from that person again. I met those blue eyes and took the glass from his throat. “Bad idea, hauling iron for no reason. Someone might get hurt.”

His eyes went wide again. I wondered if I’d crossed the line, but he wasn’t looking at me this time. He was looking at the hallway mirror.

Professionals don’t make noise.

I dove for the gun. There was a blur of charcoal gray, then two hundred pounds of metal landed on my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I fired twice and the bullets made sparks. In the muzzle flash I saw the open jaws of a waldo dog—and then they found my throat.

• • • •

I woke on a limo bench seat, real leather, across from the man with metal eyes. He sat in the middle of the seat opposite, with his arms draped over the seat back, his head tilted up, his legs apart, his face relaxed and easy, like he was high listening to a symphony and getting head and I wasn’t even there.

I tried to move, but the dog was pressed against my chest, its teeth featherlight against my neck. It didn’t look much like a dog now. Its ribs had blossomed into a cage, anchored to the vehicle frame through gaps in the leather seat.

You don’t see the dogs as often as you used to. Turns out the boxes inside them can dream, too.

The dog’s indicator lights blinked yellow and green, reflected in the man’s chrome stare.

“Down, Bosco.” The man didn’t move when he spoke, except for the minimum shift of his mouth. He wore a suit like he’d been born wearing one. I couldn’t see a trace of mending. At his command, the dog’s grip eased.

“You know how to make a person feel welcome,” I said.

“Where is Haddid?”

“The question of the day. What’s she to you?”

“What she is to me could buy you and everyone you’ve ever fucked.”

“You have a high opinion of my body count.”

“These god-botherers and hicks, they think this is a simple fucking thing, like running out on a bar tab or stiffing a dealer.” He said the word fuck without emphasis or emotion. “They have entered serious territory with this nonpayment shit. There are derivatives, and the derivatives have derivatives, and they are based on a schedule of payments, and that is not just a convention of man, it is the law of the Lord your fucking God and if they think they can just close their eyes and it will go away the ground beneath their feet will open its fucking mouth to swallow them.”

“They owe you.”

“Fuck yes they owe me. They owe me, and they owe the FSB, and the Liaos, and the Sultan of Fuckistan. Maria thinks she can hide from that? Fucking illogical, is what it is. But: Women, am I right? Present company excepted. Or not? What do you call yourself anyway?”

“I am about to call you some bad words.”

“Oh yeah, fucking scared I am of you, tied to the car. She thought she could pull this. Again. On me. Again. I cannot believe the audacity, shit, and now here we are, me with Management on my ass with their teeth out and their dicks ripe, and Maria gone.”

“Like last time.”

“Sure. As if you know anything about it.”

“I know kids who come out of the Westchester Relief camps don’t walk away from the kind of jobs Maria had just because someone threw a stapler at their head.”

“You think this was my fucking fault? Mister fucking know-it-all tough mug?”

“At least I know what I am.”

It’s not best practice to bait someone whose dog has you by the throat. But this guy was a particular kind, one you see a lot in this job. They need to know you understand. Not because they care about you—more like the opposite. What goes on in their heads doesn’t feel like thinking to them. It’s just the truth. The way things are. It has to be true for everyone. If it’s not, they start to itch.

“Maria couldn’t take a joke, fuck, buttoned up ice queen bullshit, bad for the brain. You have to be an animal to do what we do, man; have a fucking animal spirit, primed to rut. She ran off, but she couldn’t stay out of the game, not with a taste like she’d had. Disrespectful, just panting after it.”

“And when you bought up the Church debt, she didn’t like that.”

“Fucking right. Tried to tell her this was good. We could work together. Like old times, baby. But now she’s missing and Management has a hard-on for Yours Truly; and is that fair, I ask you? No, it is not, but we make do because we have no other choice and because someone has to be the fucking grown-up. Debts get paid.”

“And they’re not being paid now.”

“Fuck no. You’re not going to follow this but, fuck, I’m going to try anyway because look how much of a nice guy I am. When the rubes take their little fucking dip in the magic water, the Church buys up their debt. The rubes think they’re off the hook except for the tithe and in a way they are. But where does the Church get the money to buy it up? Nobody stiffs God—particularly not with a blockchain-official auto-tithe wage garnish contract squatting over their bank balance—and all those tithes from all those souls make for good collateral. You know how rare good collateral is these days? Used to be they thought a house was a sure thing, can you imagine? But God, the big man, the immortal G—to a believer, that’s everything. That was Maria’s innovation. Buy souls, borrow against those souls, buy more souls and repeat the process. And then I bought their debt, traunched it, resold it. Beautiful fucking thing. She was a twist, but she was a genius twist.”

“You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“My mother was a vat in a lab, you reject, and how about when you have my ass tied to a chair you get to set the linguistic terms of fucking engagement. Now: Maria didn’t have the Church borrow in its own name because she’s not a complete idiot. The debt was incurred by a wholly owned subsidiary. But the Church claims ownership of that entity was transferred in toto, along with all payment obligations, to fucking Maria Haddid. But where’s she?”

“Gone.”

“Fucking gone. Scramzo. Accounts empty except for pocket lint. Church of the Redeemer says, oh, no, we aren’t on the hook for payments on those loans anymore. Lawyers call bullshit, but lawyers take time, and while time passes payments aren’t being made and interest is doing what it does. And the whole fucking tower of guarantees and swaps I have erected to the greater glory of fuck you, it teeters. It twists. It will fall, unless you get me what I want.”

“I already have a client.”

“Fucking fire them.”

“Doesn’t work that way.”

“Right. Fucking tough guy.”

“Something like that.” I said, “What happened to the guy I was with?”

“Hayseed? Bad . . . you know . . .?” A gesture in the beard direction. He talked like he should have been all flinch and tweak and spasm, but that was the first gesture I’d seen him make. I wondered what he could see from behind those metal eyes, and if it was anything like what I saw. I wondered how much of his mind was his own, and how much was autocomplete—if there was anything left of whoever he’d been or if his whole world was the dream of a ghost in a box somewhere.

“He needed a doctor.”

“Car stitched him up. Wonder of modern medicine! Got him on ice. And here I am, in the insurance business.”

“I don’t care about him.”

“Or the sweater girl, either? That the line you want to sell me? I had eyes on you when you were born, tough guy. I saw you in the parking lot. You got your blood up for her—big beautiful heat spike, boom—and she was trembling, nervous, itching for you.”

“She wasn’t turned on. She was upset. I’m surprised a big shot like you couldn’t tell the difference.”

“Oh funny. See me laughing. So what if I lose her in some pigpen somewhere, huh, knock her out and let the piggies root around inside? Have a taste. I can see your little brain: Oh he’s bluffing. Fine. Let’s see.” He tapped the empty seat backs to either side of him and they folded down. Blue light shone from the trunk of the car beyond, and frost chilled me. There was Susan, netted in tubes and wires, and there was the heretic. “Okay, tough guy. There’s my earnest money. Find me the girl. You get me her and I’ll sort this debt shit out and it’s happily ever after. You and the frozen food aisle can rut yourselves raw for all I care. Or it’s the pigs.”

He took a business card from his pocket and flicked it onto my lap. “My digits.”

Then he hit me hard across the face. I jerked against the dog ribs, tasted my own blood. “Leave you something to remember me by, in case you get on any bullshit about this being a dream. Okay, Bosco. Nap time for the tough guy.”

I fought it, but a body is a body and blood is blood.

• • • •

I woke up in the church parking lot by the baking blacktop, my nose full of lilacs and metal-eyes’ business card in my hand. You’d think a business card would have a name, but this one just had a phone number. In the worship hall nearby, a lot of people were singing the glories of God.

Sunday morning. I’d been knocked out the whole night. That’s a hard trick to do with needles, but the dogs are clever at gauging the right load.

My clothes were rumpled but intact. I felt all right aside from my jaw and cheek. Metal-eyes had stopped after that one punch. He just wanted to make a point.

I was mad. I picked myself up and walked toward the hymns.

The auditorium was full, and it was Pastor Ralph’s turn to preach.

His holo strutted across the stage, ten feet tall and Gumby spry, exhorting with hands raised. Real tears glittered in the corners of his eyes. I’d seen him on a broadcast just like this when I was a kid. They let him look a little older now. When he cried, the congregation wept. When he prayed, they cheered. Their voices hit me like the surface of the water when you take a bad dive from a high place. Or maybe that was just the comedown from the goodnight drugs.

I got through the stage door by looking like I knew where I was going. I’m white enough for that, at least. Backstage didn’t look any different from backstage at the opera or a strip show: concrete floors, rigs and wires, techs running, gal with a clipboard calling times. It was easier than I expected to find the door I wanted, because my friends Blondie and Baldie were outside it in bouncer drag, tight t-shirts and earpieces and that cross-armed pose that makes your forearms and biceps pop.

“Hey, boys,” I said. “Long time no see.”

I was mad and they owed me a few hits. I didn’t charge too much interest.

The door behind them was unlocked. Inside, in a nest of mixing boards and screens, sat the old man.

He was old. Really old, not the stage makeup old of the holo. His head and shoulders seemed to be caving into an empty space inside him.

I let the door go. It drifted shut, but couldn’t close. Baldie’s limp arm stopped it.

“They’re nice boys,” the old man said. “Nice boys.”

“They’ll be as nice as they ever were, when they wake up.”

“Good, that’s good. Nice boys.”

“I want them off my back. I want you off my back. And I want answers.”

He saw me, now. “I don’t know where she is.”

“I think you’re lying. But I don’t need you to tell me. I just don’t want to be tripping over your muscle while I do what has to be done.”

“And what is that?”

I was still working on that part.

The screens behind him were high-end performer rigs, the kind you see in studios back west. There was his face as a young man, fifty maybe, the face I remembered from childhood broadcasts. There was a scan of his present features. There was the interpolated model, filtered for compassion, wisdom, virility. There was a language model prompt screen. He’d written “freedom,” and the box had cranked out an exhortation for the masses, to give to charity and the Church. He’d written “death,” and the box promised immortality.

“Did she come to you?” I asked. “Or did you come to her?”

“She found me,” he said. “But I wanted her to find me. And when I dream a thing, here in the heart of the church, it happens.”

“It must feel like hell,” I said. “You spend your life building a place like this, and then you start to believe.”

“I always believed.” He was fully awake in that moment, I think. “But we build in this world, even if we’re thinking about the next. It gets clouded. I dreamed about salvation and freedom. I worked so hard to build it in the world. And when my son stepped up, when he began his ministry with Maria, I praised the Lord that he could see so far and do so much. But then I woke in the temple, chained to its pillars.”

“And you were too damn comfortable to do the next part. Where the walls come tumbling down.”

“I didn’t know how. There were contracts, deals. Chains. I wanted to set people free but I bound them to us, and I was bound in turn. My son did not understand. To him, all that bondage seemed like wealth.”

“But Maria got it. Didn’t she. And she came to you with a way out. A way to break those chains. But she needed your help. Or at least, your permission. You’re still the head of the Church.”

“Yes. And it worked. But my son, he does not see the glory. We will be scourged by this, and freed. He wants to find Maria, to beg forgiveness and go on as we began, to grow and grow as we wrap the chains about us.”

“The kid’s not wrong,” I said. I didn’t like to say it. “He’s scared, and for good reason. The banks are in it now. They have leverage. Not the nice kind.”

“She said there would be battles.”

“Yeah, well. People are getting caught in the crossfire.”

“What do you need?”

Blondie and Baldie were up, behind me, but they were well-trained. Good dogs know when their master wants them to heel, and smart dogs know when they’re licked. “Keep them out of my way. The cops, too.”

“I’ll pray for you.”

“Don’t do me any favors.”

On the way out, I passed the kid, about to go on stage. I slapped him on the shoulder. “Break a leg.”

• • • •

The paving crew attended Sunday service in the secondary outchapel, with the VR rigs. Almost all of them did, at any rate.

When I found Maria, she was kneeling on a pillow in the break room, hands folded in prayer. Her eyes were closed. “You,” I said, “are a hard woman to get ahold of.”

“Not as hard as I’d hoped.” Her voice was rich and steady. “How did you find me?”

“Little things. Finance hired your paving crew directly. Usually that would go through Facilities. Susan Park acted as if she was worried about being overheard—but not enough to choose a place to talk without a crew of believers nearby. The tracker explained that. You’d know better than to trust a digital tag. You’d want to see me for yourself. After that it was a simple paper chase. There was a new convert on the road crew who didn’t really exist. Don’t get sour. It was a smart risk, and I would have found you anyway. That kind of loyalty’s rare. She does love you.”

The knuckles of her clasped hands went white. “What have you done to her?”

“It’s metal-eyes I’m worried about.”

Maria said a bad word. “Adrian.”

“He didn’t give me a name. Just a sock across the face.”

“Sounds like him.”

“He’s got her,” I said. “And another hostage. That’s bad business. But I want to know the score before I get involved.”

“Sounds like you know plenty.”

“I have guesses. I want you to tell me if I’m right.”

She stood. Her eyes were brown and rich and deep.

“You came here because you wanted out of your old life. Away from Adrian.”

“He wasn’t the only reason. But he was a reason.”

“The Church could use your skills. You told yourself you’d be doing good here, helping people. And the kid . . . you understood one another at the start. He grew up here but he didn’t believe, either. Didn’t belong. That’s enough to make two people stick. How’s the tale sound so far?”

“Familiar.”

“Maybe you started listening to the services because you wanted to know the kid better. Or maybe it was Susan who got you in the door. But you started to believe, in a way that maybe the kid never could.”

“He can’t,” she said. “This place, it’s home to him. It’s normal. He’s spent his life playing the role. Has to be the big guy, carry the Church on his shoulders. That’s what he thinks.”

“Is he wrong?”

“I wanted to set him free,” she said. “But he couldn’t take the necessary step. You have to die to live again.”

“You used tithes as security to borrow more money to grow the Church. But that turned the Church into just another bank. Buying and selling souls.”

“I’ve worked through worse hypocrisies.”

“But then there was Adrian.”

I was guessing, like Old Al guesses, or Susan’s lens. When you’re in the work, you feel the shape of it. Even a wrong guess is enough to make a person jump, and you can tell a lot from which direction they choose.

But when you guess right, they tend to go still.

“I’d like to tell myself he had nothing to do with it,” she said. “Maybe he was looking for me. Maybe he ended up managing our portfolio by chance. Maybe the models pushed for it. They always liked us together.” She sounded like she’d had a bite of something she wanted to spit out. She swallowed. “The thought of him, of that thing that used to be him, getting richer just because we told these people they were free . . . I couldn’t let it happen. Or maybe I couldn’t let him win.”

“So you changed the game.”

“I took on the Church’s debt. More or less. The loans were based on smart contracts, anchored to a Church subsidiary. But smart contracts aren’t that smart. Pastor Ralph passed the subsidiary to my wallet. They zeroed me out and that was it. No more payments. No more Maria Haddid.”

“Can’t the banks go after the Church?”

“Sure. But they’ll have to go in with lawyers, the long way round. It takes time and they don’t have time. Adrian was too greedy. His bosses are looking at a margin call.”

“What did you do with the token?”

“It’s out there, in a flash drive. Baking under the new tar in the parking lot.”

“And now he has Susan.” I pinched my nose. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

• • • •

When the man with the metal eyes pulled up to the Brainerd house, I was waiting. His wheels whispered over gravel. For all the car’s black mass, it might not have been there at all.

The rear door winged open, and the dog stepped out. Its eyeless head swiveled on its prehensile neck, shining radar into the forest dark. Then came Adrian.

It was strange to see him move, like seeing a dead man walk. “Good work,” he said. Made me feel dirty. “Glad someone’s been fucking reasonable. Didn’t take you long, either. Fucking professional. Love to see it. She’s in there?”

“She’s in there.” I didn’t like the way he smiled.

“Pleasure doing business.”

“What about the girl? And the”—what had he called him?—“the hayseed?”

His head twitched back toward the car. “On delivery. Don’t get your junk in a twist. Can’t be sure you won’t make the mistake of trying to fuck me.”

“Can’t imagine I would.”

A curl of his upper lip bared teeth. “Bosco waits with you.” Metal dogs don’t preen. “We’re on a clock here. Can’t waste time. Don’t want you fucking around.”

Don’t think of Adrian as a man, she’d said. Think of him as an interface. A kind of prosthetic. He thought of it as a trade back at the beginning. For the big systems to compete on math and speed, they need more qubits, bigger iron. Expensive. The profit margin is in people now. Adrian needed to be faster, bigger, smarter, and the boxes needed his chemical stew of terror, anxiety, horndog desperation, and fashion drugs. He made a deal. Now the boxes see the world through him.

“She’s waiting in the kitchen.”

More teeth. He cracked his knuckles. “We won’t be long.”

The front door hung ajar. Glass crunched under Adrian’s leather soles. I waited in the dark, with the car and the dog. They watched me, and I watched back. An unfair match. I have to blink.

The woods pressed close. The night sky was a narrow road of stars, its pavement cracked by bare branches. The car made no noise. The dog made no noise. I breathed. The silence unfurled into the pulse of crickets and tree frogs and wind.

The dog twitched, then sprinted toward the house, a streak of metal. It jumped. Then the explosion knocked me on my ass.

It wasn’t the compression wave of the blast that got me—if one of those hits you hard enough to knock you down, you’re not getting up anytime soon, no matter what you see in films—but the surprise. Even if you know more or less what’s coming, there’s an animal in all of us that gets spooked by light and fire and bits of burning roof.

I scrambled to my feet, jumped into the car before it could move, and shanked the steering column as the thing jerked me around the driveway and plowed a tree through the windshield. A branch skewered the driver’s headrest, where my face would have been if I wasn’t down in the footwell stabbing the motivator box with a screwdriver.

Disabling the car was easier than I thought. It had a standard steering column interlock and basal ganglia interface—a few sharp hits were enough to do it in. I climbed out—flopped really—onto the gravel, leaking a bit from splinters of glass and wood. Over me, I saw Maria’s outstretched hand.

Here’s what I figure happened inside.

Adrian went in. He saw Maria handcuffed to the stove. Maybe he said something crude. You’ll have to imagine it. I like to think he stepped toward her. I like to think he tried to grab her body, and his hand passed right through.

Say what you like about the Church of the Redeemer, but they did not skimp on holo-Jesus.

I don’t think Adrian understood in time, but one of the boxes did, maybe the one in him, or the one in the car, or in the dog. He found out when the timed spark set off the gas from the stove.

I got the trunk open. It was a big space, what with the empty cradle for the dog, and the trauma beds with Susan and the heretic. I pulled them out. The needles were so fine that the holes they’d made didn’t bleed.

We had just laid Susan and the hayseed on the gravel when I heard something like a roar.

It wasn’t a roar. A dog can roar if it wants—there’s a speaker in the metal horror of its thorax—but usually it doesn’t. It’s not tactically advisable to give someone warning when you’re about to pounce on them. But it’s just hard to carry a limp body over gravel at twenty miles an hour without making a sound.

A couple of my ribs broke when it hit me. It’s hard to fall well with two hundred pounds of metal on you. I put up a fight. The dog’s jaws hinged open, the needles inside wet and ready.

Maria hit it hard in the neck with a tire iron. That bunched some servos up, and changed the math in its threat-processing subroutines. It turned and pounced at her.

I got up and went after it, less gracefully.

I got my arm around its exoskeleton. It bucked and my shoulder joint went pop. But my left hand found the battery release lever on its belly and pulled.

It went down, and I went down on top of it.

When I was good and ready, I found my feet. Maria stood over the body of the man with the metal eyes. “He’s alive.”

We’d hoped the dog would be fast enough to save him. No way to be sure, of course. But then, he had been about to feed a couple people to pigs, so he didn’t deserve that much care.

Pulling a dog’s battery doesn’t kill it. They have a backup. Not enough to move, to fight. But they can listen.

“We’re leaving,” I told it. “You won’t hear from Maria again. We can leave Adrian on the gravel, or we can leave him in that fancy trunk so you can put him back together. It all depends on what your toys are worth to you.”

“What terms?”

The dog spoke with a box voice, a woman’s. They always sound like they’re telling you the weather.

“She’s gone. Her and Susan. That’s all. You and the Church can fight over the scraps.”

The dog doesn’t have eyes, but it can see. I wondered if it saw Maria, kneeling by Susan, hand to her cheek, waiting for her to come round as if nothing else mattered. I wonder if it tried to math that out, against billions that they owed.

“Acceptable,” the dog said. No more.

• • • •

The kid met us at the bus depot.

The meeting was my condition. He’d paid me, after all. But I was around to keep things civil.

The morning was layered in haze, and the air tasted like Beijing, or three packs a day.

I’d never seen the kid outside before. He was still big, but in the parking lot that bigness seemed almost sad. You could see how much of the world he’d never fill.

Susan waited with me. We were far off but within eyesight of the meet. I’m good at reading lips, though, and people always think my hearing is worse than it is.

“You could leave,” Maria said to him.

“I was born here. These are my people. No matter what I believe, I have a debt.”

She didn’t answer that.

“You could stay,” he said.

“I really can’t. And even if I could, I tried that already.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You did.”

He looked away as she left.

“What happens now?” I asked Maria when she got back to me.

“The debt compounds. Balloons. They’ll sue the Church. I don’t think it will work—I did my best to make sure it wouldn’t. They’ll come for me, whatever they promised. They need to set an example. Payback.”

“They’ll find you,” I said.

“Maybe.” Her eyes were wide, and reflected something other than the gray of road and haze.

Susan and Maria walked to the bus depot together. We turned away so we couldn’t see which way they’d go.

“It’s not that simple,” said the kid. “She knows it’s not.”

He walked beside me in the haze. He looked big and sad and alone. I set my hand on his shoulder. He looked at me, then away. I’d never seen that expression on his face on stage. “Thanks.”

Maria didn’t grow up with a thousand people watching her, depending on her strength. Didn’t he owe them something? Or maybe he was just a grifter facing the end of a steady grift, unsure what came next.

She wasn’t wrong. He could set himself free. He’d just have to lose everything to do it, and who would he be then?

I took my hand back, and we walked out through the gray.

---

Based on research by Professor Devin Singh,
Department of Religion at Dartmouth College
religion.dartmouth.edu/people/devin-singh