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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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Lise’s personas have no warning when the XexlCo Construct appears at the gate of her memory garden, smiling cheerfully at each of her personas in turn like a neighborhood milkman making his daily rounds. They watch the newcomer saunter by with open curiosity, moving aside to let him pass as though he’s a regular guest in Lise’s subconscious. There’s nothing threatening about him. He might’ve popped in a million times, the way he behaves.

“Howdy-do!” he says, tipping his hat. Nodding and smiling ingratiatingly, he makes his way slowly through the crowd. When he comes at last to Freddie Mercury, he peers up into the rock god’s face. Mercury looks like he’s doing his best not to laugh at this strange little man. The Construct nods in a decidedly more businesslike fashion, chirps “best get to it, then!” and before anyone can stop him, suddenly gloms onto Freddie’s head with both hands.

Freddie is the oldest of Lise’s personas, as familiar a presence in her head as her own face in the mirror. Lise, her first therapist had said one day, when she was eight years old and her scars were still fresh from the accident and the whole of her seemed a snail-tight spiral with a pulsing ulcer at its center, I’ve got a homework assignment for you. No, no, it’s not that serious! You don’t even have to do it if you don’t want to, but . . . if you feel like it, I’d like for you to go home tonight, close your eyes, and build a part of you that likes talking to other people. Somebody who isn’t afraid of crowds or strangers or people taking notice of them. Who or what might that look like?

For Lise, there had been only one answer.

He wasn’t the real Freddie Mercury, of course—merely a simulacrum of what a traumatized, newly orphaned young girl had imagined he must be like, cobbled together from music videos and concert tapes and old interviews. He had been enough, though. Between him and Captain O’Briers and the Believer and the Skeptic, Lise’s nightmares had gradually lessened, the ulcer throb fading to a dull ache. Now, in the grip of the Construct, that part of her is changing—or being changed. There’s a high-pitched buzzing like someone has just switched on a fluorescent light the size of the Sun. Freddie screams. Captain O’Briers is already coming to his aid, tearing through the crowd in a moth-eaten brown blur, but it’s too late. Freddie writhes as the Construct’s flickerstatic fingers sink deep into his skull.

Captain O’Briers hits the Construct squarely in the chest with the full weight of his furry little body. The force of the blow knocks the Construct’s hands away and sends him staggering back several steps, but it’s too late for Freddie; whatever has been done to him is already taking effect. His outline wavers and warps like the superheated air above a bank of stage lights. His lips move as if he’s still trying to speak, although no sound comes out. The shape of him twists, unravels, changes entirely. His clothes change into business casual—neutral colors, off-the-rack fits. The mustache vanishes entirely.

“There you go!” the Construct says. “That’s a little more palatable for a workplace environment, don’t you think?”

The rest of Lise’s personas stare at the thing and then turn and flee as one, infected with terror. Even Captain O’Briers is swept along. The horror of it scatters them in every direction, wild-eyed and witless.

The XexlCo Construct dusts the paw print off his chest and follows. He doesn’t run; nothing so grossly unprofessional. He’ll get around to finishing what he came here to do soon enough, you can bet your bottom dollar on that.

• • • •

The XexlCo therapist’s name is Dr. Brita Moore. The words compulsory cognitive therapy sessions for pre-employment conditioning had buzzed fluorescent and glinted stainless up at Lise when she first read them in the contract, an echoing white hallway of a phrase lined with the world’s most uncomfortably stylish Scandinavian furniture. Somewhere in her subconscious Captain O’Briers had twitched a long ear in his sleep, smelling hidden traps.

The reality turns out to be much less clinical. Dr. Moore’s office is on the ground floor of a brownstone on a tree-lined block, the interior all polished wood, lamps casting pools of creamy golden light onto antique carpets. Dr. Moore ushers her in personally—there is no receptionist’s desk in sight—and offers her tea from a frankly bewildering selection of oolongs and Darjeelings and loose leafs. Lise’s guard drops ever so slightly despite herself.

“Please, have a seat. Make yourself at home. Was your commute long? You’re coming from South Lostline, aren’t you?”

Dr. Moore has one of those voices that’s a joy to listen to, professionally trained and carefully buffed until it’s black velvet and saddle leather. Lise has been to more therapists in her twenty-six years than most people see in seventy, but municipal funding and bronze grade insurance plans didn’t get you much in the way of polish. Lise’s last therapist had been three stories up an office tower with a broken elevator and a busted toilet. This place, though? There are probably laser turrets hidden in the ivy outside calibrated to go off if a plastic chair or scuffed linoleum floor gets within five blocks of the front door.

When you work for us, the whole thing says, this is how your life will look. No more cracks in the ceiling. No more store brand toilet paper. When you’re an employee at XexlCo, everything’s double-ply and designer label. Only the best. All you have to do is talk to this nice lady with the voice like honey once a week for a month and you’ll be on your way.

Lise is bright enough to see the string, the stick, and the box it props up. Here’s the thing, though: She’s tired of just scraping by. Her whole life since losing her parents has been hand-me-downs out of church donation boxes, kindly but work-worn relatives tolerating her extra spoon in the Hamburger Helper, and scholarships snatched by the barest of fingertips and bleariest of all-nighters. They want to have her go to some new kind of experimental therapy in exchange for never having to look at the price of fruit ever again? Sure. Fine. She’s come too far to get squeamish now.

And if any of this were illegal, somebody would stop it. Probably.

“Lostline, yeah,” she says, sitting down on what appears to be an honest-to-god antique therapist’s couch. “It’s a long trip, but at least the rent is still extortionate.”

• • • •

The terrain of Lise’s internal landscape is an ever-shifting geography stitched together from recollection, mental exercises, and dreams. Some of these places exist in the real world. Others are impossibilities. A few are both, road trip memories fancifully embellished.

The train tunnel is one of the latter. In the world outside Lise’s head, it’s an unimpressive little spur decommissioned when the interstate was built nearby, leading nowhere important. The rusting tracks plunge into darkness with weeds clenched in their teeth and reemerge on a beach hemmed in on three sides by rocky, mountainous bluffs. There’s an abandoned depot at the water’s edge and a platform slowly being eroded from beneath by waves. The tracks continue into the sea and vanish.

This is where a handful of her personas end up finding each other. In ones and twos, they creep back together, visibly shaken and ready to flee at the slightest provocation. Captain O’Briers is already there, scuffling his paws together and swearing softly. He’s a jackalope the size of a small dog, with long ears, a small rack of antlers, and a twitching nose covered in scars. Freddie had been older than him, but only by a month or two. Despite their opposite natures, they had always been close. Now that Freddie has been . . . changed, Captain is the eldest. He does not want to be, does not understand why it has happened, would dearly love to bite something with his long yellow teeth and pummel it with his back legs until things begin to make sense again.

(Lise had been on a kick about cryptids of the southwest when the therapist asked her to give her anger and defensiveness a shape. He could’ve been anything—a dragon or a dog or a great grizzly bear with ivory-tipped claws. Instead, he was a jackalope, tough as nails and forever ready for a tussle. He has served and protected her as loyally in this shape as he could have if he were a Tyrannosaurus rex.)

“Hellfire, is this all of us that’s left?” he drawls, looking around at the little group gathered on the platform. His ears are constantly swiveling to catch the sound of approaching footsteps, nose working to pick up suspicious scents. All he can smell is the sea. All he can hear is the waves. “Has that thing really gotten to that many of us already?”

“Some of them are probably still hiding,” says a redheaded woman in a smart business suit. “It’s highly unlikely that anything could have worked that quickly without anyone noticing. Even with a massive head start—even supposing it has been moving undetected among us—”

“How can you say how quickly it can or can’t move when we don’t even know what it is yet?” counters a rangy, dark-haired man to her left, also dressed in a dark suit. “It could be a mental illness that’s been developing for months, or outside forces. Demonic possession? A brainwashing cult? We may need to open ourselves to extreme possibilities, here.” He pauses and gives the redhead a look, half-pleading, half-defiant. They might as well be the only two personas on the platform, the way they focus on one another. “Look, I know what you’re gonna say, but—”

“Actually? I agree with you. In theory,” she hastens to add, perhaps noticing a dangerous glint in the Believer’s eyes. “Maybe. If this therapist she’s seeing has some reason to—to try and—I don’t know, rewrite certain facets of her personality for the job, whether helpful or harmful, that could certainly manifest as—”

“A creepy flight attendant hunting us down so he can do bad mind-control mojo to our DNA?”

“. . . Yes,” the Skeptic says, after a beat. “I’m not exactly sure what ‘bad mind-control mojo’ traditionally entails, but that more or less sums it up. Thank you.”

A weather-beaten rag doll with red-yarn hair and black-button eyes creeps into the circle. Her painted slash of a mouth is downcast. She’s wringing the boneless fabric mitts that serve as her hands; with no wrists or fingers, it’s more like she’s wringing her entire arms.

“Um. Excuse me,” she says. “Sorry. Sorry if this is a really stupid question, but. Um. Has anybody just tried . . . talking to it? Maybe it can be reasoned with?”

The rest of the group turns to look down at her. She flinches back and hides her face behind her tattered apron but keeps talking, papery whispered words drifting out in a rush. “I-just-think-we-shouldn’t-make-it-mad-is-all! We’ll never make new friends if we don’t try to fit in! Shouldn’t we at least take him to her and see if—”

Captain O’Briers is staring at the doll as if she’s just grown four more limbs and begun scaling the depot wall. His naturally bulgy hare’s eyes seem to protrude even further from the sides of his head. “Did somebody take what little sense you got in that raggedy cotton mouse nest you call a head and replace it with empty air?” he says. “Take them to her? That is exactly the thing we should be avoiding. Sakes alive, I know you ain’t got a backbone, but could you just pretend, just this once?”

The doll flops over with a squeak and contracts into a shivering wad of fabric. The Skeptic and the Believer look vaguely uncomfortable. “She’s just being who she’s made to be, Captain,” the Skeptic says, not unkindly. “Can any of us claim to be any different?”

O’Briers shoots the redhead a scornful look before turning to stare out to sea. His body is hunched and angry.

“He was your friend, too,” he mutters. “If you don’t give a damn about yourself, you could at least give a damn about that. And about protecting her.”

“We do,” the Believer says, squatting down beside him. “And we will. But first, we need to figure out what this thing is, where it comes from.” He looks up at the Skeptic. Something seems to pass between the two of them. “Know thy enemy, right?”

“I’d rather not know the son of a bitch at all,” Captain O’Briers says, grim and gray as a tombstone. “If it’s all the same to you.”

• • • •

“I feel like there are some things you’re still not telling me,” Dr. Moore says. “You’ve still got your guard up.”

That’ll be good old Captain O’Briers watching my back, Lise thinks. He doesn’t quite trust you, so neither do I. She doesn’t say this out loud—that would feel rude, and she hates being rude—but the thought definitely runs through her head. Instead, she pushes back with a question of her own, letting the part of her she calls the Skeptic drive. “I forgot to ask this during our last session, but how long has XexlCo been requiring this therapy?” she says. “I know some people who used to work for them and they’ve never mentioned any of this stuff before.”

“It’s fairly new, implemented last year.” Is that the slightest shiver of irritation in Dr. Moore’s voice, or is Lise just imagining it? It’s so hard to tell sometimes. “If your friends were hired before then, they wouldn’t have been required to undergo it.”

“Yeah, but a year. That’s a long time for nobody to say anything about it in the media, or—”

“Most employees are so satisfied with the results, they don’t feel the need to gossip about it, we find,” Dr. Moore says. If she was annoyed before, the emotion has been swiftly throttled into submission; her voice is once again untroubled and smooth. “I think you may find you feel the same way once everything is said and done.”

Lise doesn’t reply. She’s not quite sure how to, frankly—her usual ability to keep up a friendly back-and-forth conversation has felt a little muted lately. She just nods and lets Dr. Moore guide the conversation wherever she likes.

She does make a mental note to do some digging online later that night, though, just to satisfy her own curiosity.

• • • •

“Frankly, I can’t tell,” the Skeptic says, massaging the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. “There’s not enough research publicly available to give a conclusive answer, and little to nothing about the company’s implementation of this new cognitive modeling in their hiring practices.”

“And it’s definitely not a cult.” The Believer is stretched flat on his back in a sprawl on the ground next to her. They’ve been moving around for what seems like forever. For the moment, they’ve stopped at a campground Lise still vaguely recalls from a trip with her Girl Scout troop. Captain O’Briers wouldn’t let them have a fire—too risky—so they’re seated around a cold ring of ashy stones, staring at the place where a fire should go. Every time something rustles in the undergrowth, Raggedy Arabella gives a little squeak and cowers behind whoever’s closest.

“No,” the Skeptic says, sounding exhausted. “XexlCo is a start-up, not a cult. There’s no evidence of any connections to the Freemasons, the Scientologists, or any government agencies either real or alluded to in pamphlets found in truck-stop restrooms.”

“Pft. Boring.”

“The truth often is.” She sighs disconsolately and pokes at a half-burned log with the toe of one sensible heel. “If we could just get at some academic journals. Tomorrow, maybe. She’s got that one friend in the psychology department, maybe he can loan her his password—”

“Has she reached out to Tamera lately?”

“The girl with the tarot cards? Not in like six years, and I hardly think that’s—”

“If that thing has taken over Freddie,” O’Briers says, waltzing into the middle of their conversation like a moose bisecting a homecoming parade, “and maybe a bunch of others we ain’t even missed yet, what’s to stop him or any of them from already knowing where the Affective is at?”

A long, weighty silence descends as they mull this over. The Skeptic and the Believer share another novel-length look.

“Maybe . . . I don’t know, maybe they have to reach some kind of critical mass before they know enough to gain access to that information,” the Skeptic says. “The Affective is very good at taking care of herself without our intervention. I mean, half the time we don’t even know where she is, right? So—”

“He’s got a point.” The Believer has rolled to his feet. “What if we’re the only ones left and we just don’t know it yet? What if they’re on their way to her right now?”

A dense uneasiness is descending. Even the Skeptic, usually coolheaded and impervious, can feel it worming its way into her bones.

“And while we’re asking questions,” Captain O’Briers says suspiciously, “where the hell did that rag doll get off to?”

• • • •

There had been a real Raggedy Arabella, once upon a time. A family friend had given her to Lise at some point after her parents died. She had found the rag doll’s pleading smile, button eyes, and old-fashioned dress incredibly creepy and had shoved it behind her aunt’s couch at the earliest opportunity, where it presumably bowed and scraped to dust bunnies still. When she later needed something to embody all her weak-willed traits—her desire for acceptance, that gnawing desperation to make everyone like her, going along to get along—the memory of Raggedy Arabella had been swept up out of the darkness and set free to simper and squeak anew.

She was not well-liked among the other personas, but they tolerated her presence; she was harmless and played her thankless role diligently.

Down wet midnight alleyways culled from half-recalled film festivals she slithers, pulling herself along through neon-tinted puddles with a strange rolling crawl like an octopus made of wet dishtowels. She push-pulls herself into a sewer vent, free-falls with a plop into a rush of filthy water, feels a strange sense of expectation as she lets it carry her along. The Constructs will find her if she wants them to. All she has to do is do nothing at all.

And sure enough, after bobbing flotsam-fashion down several twists and turns of a cathedral-like system of underground brickwork (from Sewers of Victorian London, read for a college course), a hand plucks her, dripping, from the murk.

“You won’t hurt her, or them?” Raggedy Arabella whispers. “If I tell you where they are, you’ll let us join you?”

“Mercy, why would we hurt her, or any of you?” The Construct sounds genuinely wounded at the implication. “We’re not here to harm anyone! We’re only here to make Lise’s integration into the XexlCo family easier. All the little snags and jagged bits of her that might not fit, well . . . we’ll make them fit.”

He sets Raggedy Arabella down carefully on the slippery bricks. “And all the parts that are just fine the way they are—like you, for example—well, you’re free to just keep on being the way you are.”

She’s nodding her sodden head to the rhythm of his wheedle. It all makes perfect sense. Who wouldn’t want to fit in? The others were worrying needlessly. They had never wanted it like she did.

They simply didn’t understand the importance of belonging.

• • • •

Lise wakes at 2:00 a.m. with a name ringing in her ears like someone down the hall has just shouted it before slipping out the front door. Todd Kramer. There’s no reason she should be thinking of him—she’s barely thought of him in the six years since they last saw each other—but just like that, she’s remembered he exists, and more importantly that he’s a member of university faculty with access to a JSTOR account.

She rolls out of bed and fumbles in the darkness for a pen and paper. She could grab her phone from the nightstand and jot his name down in Notes, but the last thing she wants to do at 2:00 a.m. is touch her phone for any reason whatsoever. Pen and paper it is, then.

• • • •

The Constructs appear in the campground clearing with the soft pop of a soap bubble giving up the ghost. Captain O’Briers has hopped a little further into the woods, following Raggedy Annabelle’s faint mothball and cedar-chest scent as it threads away into the gloaming beneath the pines. This is what saves him when they come.

Like two arms of the same organism, the Skeptic and the Believer go for the pistols they each carry beneath their coats. Side by side, they track their attackers as they circle. Just as O’Briers had guessed, there are many more now, old friends barely recognizable as the personas they used to be. They look vacant and well-scrubbed, like the actors in an advertisement for tooth-whitening or real estate floating above the heads of commuters on a rush hour train. There’s no spark in their eyes. They all wear the same politely neutral expression.

All except the first, the one who turned Freddie. He looks delighted to see the personas. His perfect grin practically throws shadows across the darkening campground. “There you are! Do you know how long we’ve been looking for you?!”

“Not a clue, but I know how long one of these bullets will take to reach your brain, you brainwashing son of a bitch,” the Believer says, through gritted teeth. “Step away and let us through.”

“Sorry, but that’s simply not possible at this time. We need at least one more of you to reach our quarterly goal.” The circle around the personas tightens. They smell like printer paper and fresh ink and cleaning solvent, uncorked sharpies and computer monitors baking behind gray cubicle walls. The Construct shifts his weight forward. “If you’ll just hang on one second—”

For the barest moment, the Believer hesitates. The Skeptic does not. Smoothly and with brittle focus, she pulls the trigger, a rhythmic one-two-three, like turning a lock in a deadbolt. The pistol coughs fire and clears brass from its throat onto the forest floor. The bullets burrow bloodlessly into the Construct’s face and lodge somewhere inside his skull, like he’s made of ballistic gel. The three new holes in his face don’t seem to give him any pause at all.

He shakes his perforated head ruefully. “There’s really no need to take that tone with me, miss,” he says. With terrifying speed, he slips forward and palms the top of her head, as if preparing to give a blessing or benediction. “Your research skills and your accuracy are assets our organization can use. All it’ll take is a little . . . attitude adjustment . . .”

The Skeptic has a moment, one final precious breath, to lock eyes with her partner. Everything happens so fast that her expression is still halfway through the process of shifting from confusion to fear when the change tears through her small frame, shivering her to static. She doesn’t even have a chance to scream. The Believer does it for her.

They’re outnumbered and outgunned. O’Briers is hotheaded, but not a fool; he knows damn well what’ll happen if he throws himself into that mob. But it’s hard not to help his friends. God almighty, it’s hard. He’s halfway out from under the bush he’s been skulking beneath before he can regain control of himself. Luckily, no one notices. They’re all too busy restraining the Believer as he bucks and plunges beneath their grasping hands.

The thing that was the Skeptic looks back at the Believer blankly. A strained, polite smile haunts her lips, like she’s not sure if she needs to call security. The Construct studies him as well with a thoughtfully furrowed brow. “Mmm. I’m sure your services will be useful somewhere,” he says, finally, stretching the final word out, “but I’m afraid we don’t have any use for you at this time. None at all, actually. Wow, that doesn’t happen very often! You’re a unique case!” The Believer has slumped as if his strings have all been cut. He’s still staring at the Skeptic, whispering soundless words that might be her name. “Well, might as well get this over with and find that Affective.” The Construct steps forward and places both hands atop the Believer’s head. The prisoner barely seems to notice. His eyes never leave his partner’s face. “Have a lovely day!”

Childhood nights spent reading the Fortean Times and books on cryptozoology shrink and crumble, there and then gone. Teenage dalliances with witchcraft, the names of a hundred spots across the United States known for UFO sightings . . . the company has no use for such uncontrolled flights of imagination. The Believer dissolves with a sigh beneath the Construct’s hands.

“Let’s go, people!” the Construct says, turning and dusting his palms off with a flourish. “Brainwaves are burning!”

• • • •

When the alarm shrills Lise awake at 8:00 a.m., she finds a crumpled sticky note with the name of an old college buddy clenched in her hand. Todd Kramer. Why on earth would she have any need to write down Todd Kramer’s name? Some weird sleepwalking quirk? Oh shit, did she call him in some sort of bizarre Ambien fugue state?

She hurls the sticky note away from her like it’s alive and poisonous and frantically checks her outgoing calls from the previous eight hours. Nothing. Thank Christ. With a sigh of relief, she rolls to her feet and staggers down the hallway to get her day started, chock-full of residual mortification adrenaline.

• • • •

The Constructs are in no rush, now that they are so near their goal. Down the dappling quilt-stitch roads of Lise’s memories they meander—now a hallway from a college trip to England, now the highway that ran outside her middle school, now the last street she ever lived on with her parents, well-tended Foursquares lulled into closing their golden porchlight eyes by the lullaby drone of air conditioners and crickets—moving with the air of a group of tourists visiting some mildly fascinating historical site. At the last house on the right, they turn down a cracked concrete path and up a set of cracked concrete stairs, mounting a porch that lists and slants beneath their business casual shoes like the warped deck of a ship. One of the boards judders slightly underfoot, flapping an upper jaw fanged with rusted nails. None of them pay it or the darkness beneath any mind as they mill and tramp onwards.

The front door has a knocker shaped like a hare’s head. They don’t bother using it. Their leader pushes it open unceremoniously and steps inside. There are no rugs on the hardwood floors, no runners on the stairs, no art on the walls or furniture in the corners to muffle the sound of their footsteps. The only light is the ambient glow from a sodium streetlight, falling through the front windows to encase the empty house’s interior in dim amber.

“Lise? Honey?” The Construct’s voice is wheedling. “We’re . . . friends of your Aunt Ruthie. She sent us here to pick you up.”

Silence. The Construct sighs, shrugs, shoots an exasperated smile at his followers. They shuffle further inside and mount the staircase.

A sudden, blinding flare of light. For a split second, the house is warmly lit and furnished. From somewhere on the ground floor comes the sound of clanking silverware, a humming radio, a woman’s laughter. The noises Doppler and fade away. Darkness and emptiness wash back over them like the beam of some temporal lighthouse that has flashed through the windows and swung back out to sea. It happens a few more times as they climb—a muffling of leather soles on hardwood as a runner appears and vanishes beneath their feet, photographs of ghostly faces there and gone, leaving only bare nailheads—but it doesn’t seem to give anyone in the group pause as they make their way to the second floor.

There, on their left, gapes the open doorway of a large master bath. They file inside, sniffing the air delicately. One of them—the thing that used to be the Skeptic, now bland as unbuttered wheat toast—swings the door partially shut, pointing silently to a built-in linen closet tucked neatly behind it. The Construct beams. He squats down on his haunches and slowly pulls the closet open. It’s deep, running several feet back into the wall.

“Well, hey there, little lady,” he says. “What are you doing all the way back there, huh?”

A seven-year-old Lise opens her eyes and stares back at him.

She scrambles to a sitting position and scoots away on her rear until her back is against the wall. The Construct leans in and chirrups as if calling to a small, nervous dog. “Just a liiiiittle closer,” he says through his teeth, reaching out for her ankle. “Just a little—”

Something hits him in the back of the head so hard stars supernova across his vision. He loses his balance and reels face-first into the closet’s maw, nose grinding into the floor. The sounds of a scuffle suddenly thump and thud and crack behind him. A body falls heavily against his legs, pushing him further down and in.

As The Construct scrabbles to shove whoever has landed on him off, he becomes aware of a voice roaring amidst the din.

“You sons of bitches want to tango, I’ll give you lessons, by god! I’ll teach you the goddamn Charleston! Y’all come in here and kill my friends, you tinker with my girl’s good self, and you think I’ll just let you? I’m Captain O’Briers, by god! You think these antlers on top of my head are just there to make me look pretty? Come and take it!”

Something comes at the Construct from the darkness of the closet, clambering over his lowered head and neck while grinding his face even harder into the floor. Rubber sneaker soles yank at his hair. The Affective is scrambling across his back to freedom. He snatches blindly and manages to grab onto her ankle, but she kicks free and slithers away, going, going, gone.

“Go on, girl! Get gone and fight it!” the voice yells. “Don’t let them change who you are!”

Her footsteps pound down the stairs and fade into the distance. Somewhere far below, a door slams. In the bathroom, the fight rages on.

• • • •

The week before her fourth session with Dr. Moore, Lise has a dream.

She’s standing in the front hallway of a house she briefly rented a room in during her sophomore year of college. The carpet had been dingy, the plumbing temperamental. The elderly front porch—facing an empty lot—and back door—looking out on a yard where the weeds had taken the lawn by force and begun their final siege on the cracked concrete patio—had sagged at their posts with obvious exhaustion.

Lise had always been slightly worried that the array of deadbolts would prove to be purely decorative, should anybody decide they really wanted to get in. Which is exactly what’s happening in her dream: Something is shaking the front door down with terrific force.

The plastic venetian blinds on the barred front windows are shut, so she can’t see who or what’s attacking the door, but there’s a little rectangle of chicken-wire-enforced glass high up within the door itself. All they have to do to see her standing there is lean on their tiptoes and peek through. She wants to move—to hide behind the couch in the living room, to duck, to slip away and make sure the back door is locked—but fear has frozen her solid. All she can do is stand there, waiting for someone to look through the window or kick down the door or maybe both. Another blow shivers the rotten, old thing hard enough that the rusty hinges make an unhealthy consumptive sound.

A small hand takes hers.

“C’mon,” seven-year-old Lise says, softly. “Let’s go this way.”

She lets her younger self lead her through the living room and a filthy galley kitchen up to the back door.

“If we go out there, they’ll get us!” Lise says, balking.

Her younger version shakes her head impatiently and gives Lise’s arm another tug. “No they won’t. Captain O’Briers won’t let them. C’mon, we gotta go.”

On the other side of the house, the door finally begins to splinter with a triumphant crack. Seven-year-old Lise yanks the back door open and drags older Lise across the threshold into a vacant office building. The sounds of tearing wood cut off abruptly.

They’re in a large, open room filled with cubicles. Fluorescents hum above their heads like a hive of ghost hornets carrying industrial-strength entropy in their gray stingers. Far away on the other side of the maze, the doorway to a darkened kitchenette gapes. The warm red and blue glow of a vending machine within is the only splash of color visible in the entire place. There are no windows; it could be day or night outside, stormy or sunny, and no one inside would know a thing about it.

Seven-year-old Lise releases her older self’s hand and scampers ahead as soon as they step through the door. She threads through the cubicles at a run, the echoing slap of her Keds on the carpet the only sound aside from the hum of the lights and idling computers dreaming in their stalls.

“Hey!” Lise shouts. The fluorescents seem to buzz louder at this disturbance; it is not a room zoned for things like shouting or running or laughing. Its architects designed it to be an eight-hour-a-day lobotomization of all human passions. Any reminder of the world outside this hermetically sealed canyonland of plastic and steel threatens to shiver the walls down like a house of cards in a wind tunnel. “Wait up! Where are you going?”

“I want a Coke,” comes the distant reply. “Do you have any change?”

Lise sighs and follows at a slower pace.

She finds younger her bathed in the glow of the vending machine, probing the depths of the coin tray with her small fingers in vain. She checks her own pockets and comes up with several quarters; feeds them, clinking, into the slot. Young Lise crows in triumph and hammers the selection button more times than strictly necessary. The machine rattles out a can and she snatches it from the trough. Prize clenched in her hands, she trots over to the only pieces of furniture in the kitchenette—a sad little table attended by two sad little plastic chairs with metal legs—and sits. She pops the top and takes a long swig, sets it down on the table and drums her heels against the underside of the molded plastic seat.

“This is a boring place,” she announces.

Lise flicks on the kitchenette’s overhead light and immediately wishes she hadn’t; another fluorescent. “Yeah. Yeah, it is,” she says. “So why are we here?”

“I dunno. Why are we here?”

“Hey, you’re the one who brought us.” Lise’s exasperation is starting to build. “You tell me.”

“Nuh-uh. That’s bull crap. You brought us. I thought we were gonna do something fun, like wildlife biology or paranormal investigation or being a jockey. Why’d you sign us up for this? They don’t even have any good books or magazines to read here.”

“Paranormal investigators need day jobs. Don’t even get me started on horse racing.” She feels ridiculous arguing with a seven-year-old, but for some reason it feels necessary to convince her that the right choices are being made. “And wildlife biology? You really wanna share an apartment with three other people and live off ramen just so we can catalogue beetles during the day instead of working in an office? I’m doing this for us, so we’re not just scraping by.”

“Mmm.” The girl sounds unconvinced. She drums her heels harder. “But we like ramen.”

“Not for every meal.” Lise sighs and sits down in the second chair. “We’ll have a better life this way. You’ll see.”

Her younger self looks across the table at her. Her eyes are suddenly very old and very shrewd for a seven-year-old’s.

“Yeah, but . . . like, will it be our life?” she says. “Is it worth it if there’s none of the old us left, and the life we get looks like . . . this?” She waves the soda can expansively at the kitchenette, the soda machine, the cubicles and monitors and fluorescent lights. “I mean, just look at you.”

Lise catches a glimpse of herself in the reflective surface of a microwave door. The top of her skull is gone, leaving her brain fully exposed. Copper wires are embedded in the tissue. They stretch up into the drop ceiling above them to where a panel has been pried away, leaving a dark square.

Young Lise takes another pensive sip of her Coke. “Pretty gross,” she says, matter-of-factly.

Lise wakes, heart pounding, frantically patting the top of her head.

• • • •

When she gets up the next morning, the dream has receded to a series of hazy, disjointed images. Only a vague sense of uneasiness and anxiety sticks around, dogging her for the rest of the day. Something about her brain. Something about the new job and her younger self.

October 4: Dr. Moore. She looks at the appointment in her planner and the anxiety whirrs to life in her chest like a trapped grasshopper in a jam jar.

• • • •

The Affective runs into the woods, following the old train tracks behind her aunt and uncle’s subdivision. When they’re done with Captain O’Briers, the Constructs follow.

The railway line had once run beneath a tunnel of trees, through forests and green fields and along the edges of rural neighborhoods where children raced out to wave at engineers as they blasted by on their mysterious missions. The trees wave in a memorial breeze. The sun shines brightly and does not move.

Grasshoppers and katydids whirr sleepily in the long grass on either side of the embankment. Tiny chips of mica embedded in the granite stones between the crossties flash the sunshine back in hot little mirror glints.

As the Constructs follow the Affective along the tracks—she’s barely visible now, a black speck on the horizon flanked by the fluttering plumage of heat miasma—their shoes crunch and clatter on the loose ballast, snapping the occasional twig. When the noise recedes and then stops outright, it’s such a small thing most of them don’t notice it, but the leader does. He makes a curious sound in his throat, but keeps on walking.

Slowly, as if the memory has been sitting in the sun for too long, more things begin to lose their detail.

First, it’s the sounds of the summer day. Birds singing, the breeze rustling, the deafening shrill of cicadas—gradually they fade, like someone is gently turning down the volume. Then the breeze stops. With every step, the tree branches and glittering stones and worn wooden surface of the crossties become less photographically real and more like a painted backdrop. Another half mile and it’s a colored pencil sketch. A full mile and now it’s crayon, sharp black and gray lines beneath their feet, the horizon ahead a blank sheet of white with wavy green lines to indicate hills.

Why won’t you STOP FOLLOWING ME?

The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. The Construct looks up at the blue scrawl of the sky, the frozen yellow cactus of the sun. The smile is still on his face, but there’s something that might be nervousness starting to strain at the corners.

“We just want to help you be a better part of our team!” he shouts. “That’s all any of this is about!”

Liar. You don’t want me to be a part of your team. You just want to make me more like you. The Affective appears a few feet away, her young face furrowed with anger. Her lips don’t move, but the words boom on, petulant and annoyed. Look at what you did to all my friends. I’m sick of you.

“You agreed to this!” The Construct’s voice is getting slightly more desperate. “It was right there in the contract you signed. If you didn’t want us here—”

He takes a step towards her. The Affective’s eyes narrow. She stomps her feet and throws her hands out in front of her in a warding gesture. LEAVE—ME—ALONE!

A shock wave bubbles outwards from her small form and blows everything away—crayon tracks and trees, the crowd of Constructs, all of it. They’re tumbled head over heels into the white like luggage being sucked from the fuselage of a collision at thirty-five thousand feet.

The Affective glowers after them. She blows a raspberry for good measure.

• • • •

Lise’s final appointment with Dr. Moore is scheduled for October 4 at 4:00 p.m. Two p.m. finds her still in her pajamas, when she should be pulling on clean pants and a blouse. She stares at the reminder in her planner for a long, long time, neat blue ink letters jotted down in her own tidy hand.

At 2:45 she’s still on her laptop, when she should be walking out the door to catch her train. She’s reading the contract again, over and over, that faint sense of warning growing stronger with every subsequent pass. It’s the culmination of a week’s dread, gradual at first, but spreading to fill her head while pushing everything else out like a thunderhead or a migraine.

At 3:00, she’s still sitting at her desk with her laptop open, when she should be sitting on the train staring blankly through the person in the seat directly opposite her. She’s writing an email of apology for any inconvenience she may be causing with her abrupt reversal and how much she truly, sincerely regrets not being able to take the position. They’re going to be angry. They’re going to be curt in their reply and call Lise a flake and probably some worse stuff, too. But guilt and anxiety had a shoot-out inside her, and this time anxiety drew first.

At 3:15, when she should be transferring from one train line to another, she picks up the phone to call Dr. Moore. This is ten times worse than sending the email.

At 3:30, she makes the call. She’s so relieved when it goes directly to voicemail that her legs go a little numb.

She can’t stop her voice from shaking as she thanks the doctor’s inbox for her time and wishes her all the best.

At 3:50, she’s got her résumé open in one tab—hello again, old friend—and a site with several job listings open in the other. She feels a little bit better for the first time in a week, but looking at all the blank slots in those applications waiting to be filled feels like pouring salt on her sluggish soul. This used to be easier before. It almost feels like part of her is gone, or at the very least, not functioning as well as it should. Lise closes her eyes and looks inward, but all that greets her is a weird intrusive thought: Reapply and maybe they’ll still take you on. There’s still time.

Around 4:00, when she’d usually be climbing the stairs to Dr. Moore’s cheery brownstone door, she writes an email to her old therapist, the one she used to see before Dr. Moore. She’s got a lot to talk to her about. If anybody will be able to help her figure out what the hell is going on inside her head it’s Dr. Rhimes, busted toilet be damned.

Finally, at 4:30, she puts on clean clothes and her coat and walks to the public library down the street. Lise nods at one of the librarians as she passes the front desk—she used to know the woman’s name, have long conversations with her and make her laugh, but lately, she can’t find it in her to be anything but passively polite—and wanders into the stacks. She’s not looking for anything in particular, hasn’t picked up a book in weeks, is mostly just there because libraries have always felt like safe places to her. Her eyes flick over mountain ranges of spines, searching for something that will pique her interest. She lets her feet carry her haltingly through fiction and nonfiction, biography and history, epic poetry and cookbooks and world religion. Nothing clicks. It feels like defeat, like something has slipped away from her.

As she turns back to the front desk empty-handed, a table full of retired books being sold to clear space for newer titles catches her eye. It’s mostly stuff that’s too old or battered to keep around, a lot of romance novels and histories with foldout maps listing countries that haven’t existed in several decades. Some self-help bestsellers, a couple of trade paperback comic collections, and . . .

Lise comes within a hair’s breadth of missing it. It’s crammed beneath a book on dog training, just the upper half of the dust jacket sticking out. It’s enough, though. Something about the half inch of visible cover plucks at her memory and she pauses, tugging it out curiously.

When she sees what it is, she smiles.

Cryptids of the Southwest, proclaims the title. Beneath the words there’s a lovingly detailed ’40s-era jacket illustration of a desert landscape populated by all sorts of imaginary beasts: hoop snakes, Whangdoodles, an enormous winged cougar. At the front of the pack rears a jackalope with a fabulous rack of antlers and ears roughly the length of its lanky body.

She had owned this book before. Remembers reading it in the backseat of her aunt’s car on a night long, long ago, peering at the illustrations whenever a streetlight threw enough sliding yellow light through the windows to see by. The younger Lise had plucked it from a library sale an awful lot like this one. Her dad had laughed when she showed him the cover and fished in his pocket for a five-dollar bill.

Tears sting her eyes and she’s not sure why. Something stirs inside her, a faint thready pulse.

She tucks the little book under her arm and heads for the front desk.

---

Based on research by Professor Kathryn Lively,
Department of Sociology, Dartmouth College
sociology.dartmouth.edu/people/kathryn-j-lively