Mom lives in a little place off the old meat-packing district, the streets full of cobblestones peeking through asphalt as hipsters turn the bones of slaughterhouses into bespoke gin bars. It’s expensive, and her entire apartment could be picked up and put in the middle of my childhood living room with space to spare—but she’s filled her little spot with books and a three-legged cat and an overstuffed armchair, and there’s a good coffee place on the corner that lets her nurse a single cup for hours while she reads.

It’s her idea of heaven, and I used to leave her to it most of the time. These days I’ve been dropping by more frequently with a rum cake from the bakery she likes on the other side of the city, and we spend whole afternoons together talking and drinking coffee and eating cake while I pet Grendel. Almost every time I come there’s a Fairport Convention record spinning hypnotically on the turntable she got herself as a housewarming gift when she moved in and sure enough, there it is.

There’s no sound coming out of it today; not for me, anyway. I ask her what’s playing, and she smiles against her coffee cup and taps her fingers on the ceramic as she sings Meet on the ledge, we’re gonna meet on the ledge in the wobbly alto that used to embarrass me as a kid.

Over her shoulder, through the window, I see a skyscraper turn 8-bit. It looks like a flat sticker stuck against reality, blocky black squares delineating where the edge of a third dimension should be. It reverts a moment later.

I ask Mom about the latest book she’s reading, and take a bite of cake. In another place, the one that’s supposed to be more real, my body is probably salivating in response to the mental stimuli of caramelized sugar and rum. We haven’t managed to make anything like it yet. I’ve got some friends who’ve been coaxing along the tiny mushrooms that’ve started growing in the body-pod vents, though. There was a big party when we found them, and I kissed somebody from an entirely different tunnel, which was almost as exciting.

Mom waves away my question and redirects. “How’s the story coming?”

In the childhood I remember, the one the robots made up, my mom was a writer. Fantasy and science fiction, all the stuff that would prime her for the real world.

When I visit, I tell her I’m a writer too. I can do that; if she checked, all the details would be there. For her, I’ve been working on the same literary drama since she moved into the apartment. A sequel to the first one that she thinks I wrote, the one that made enough to put her up in this place. She knows as well as I do that writing doesn’t pay like that, not usually, but she’s never asked me about it, and she’s never asked for a copy.

At her feet, Grendel’s fur glitches white, subtractive against his rendered background. A second later his fur reverts to its original tortoiseshell, shots of orange and gold running through his darkest patches.

It’s a good sign, everybody says. The glitches. It means the robots are finally losing.

I breathe in. Breathe out. My mom’s apartment smells like coffee, cake, cats, and her. There are dust motes glinting in the summer sunlight coming through the casement windows. Grendel’s purring. “I have something new,” I say. “Something different.”

She settles back in her chair, trying to hide her own relieved look. It’d be pretty funny if she was as bored hearing about my literary plot problems as I was of making them up. She wraps her hands around her own mug and then turns her attention fully on to me. “What’s the premise?” she says, and takes a sip.

It’s time.

“In the story,” I say, “the world isn’t real. Just a collection of ones and zeroes pushed into the minds of about a hundred thousand humans kept alive to compute for robot overlords. I’m one of those humans, until one day I’m freed and see the machines that control it all.”

Our coffee is still steaming. The turntable spins silently. Grendel gets up, stretches, and comes to wind around my feet, mewing for my hand.

“I get assigned to a tunnel agro team until I get my feet under me,” I say, “but I ignore that. I want to search the hives of sleeping bodies, look for anyone familiar. Unplug them. Hug them. The life I had wasn’t real, but maybe the people were. I never find anyone I recognize.

“A couple years in, it finally gets to me, and I join up with the counter-op team that freed me in the first place. I learn enough coding to get myself a regular login to the simulacrum. My record is excellent; every time I visit, the robots’ processing speed takes a dip significant enough to let the others on my team do the real work of dismantling the system. And it’s cumulative, cascading; the robots get slower, the teams get faster.

“Nobody asks what I’m doing, even though they have to know the basics, but—it’s all about creating lag. Taking up working memory. Making things inside the system that are detailed, complex, and interdependent, but also so small and unimportant that we hope the robots won’t know to flag it as an error.

“I don’t think they will, though. The robots don’t know what’s really important. They’re busy protecting the telecoms, and financial models, and power grids. They don’t realize what you can do just by finding someone you care about and creating a little world just for them, as detailed as you can make it, and then. Letting them live in it. A small, constant drain, increasing with every adjustment, dilating time, and lagging the system. All because robots don’t understand how important simple things like cake and coffee can be.”

The cat steps out of reach, done with my hand. Mom is quiet. Out the window, a portion of the sky has turned to static and hasn’t reverted back.

“First person,” Mom says at last. “An oldie but a goodie. It goes with the character-driven plot.”

“I don’t think I actually mentioned a plot,” I say, and she smiles at me, pleased, and my eyes hurt.

She waves a hand. “You can backwards-engineer that from character work. You have a problem with your worldbuilding, though.” She puts down her coffee, laces her fingers together over her stomach. “You said there were only about a hundred thousand people in the real world, but here there’s . . .” Her eyes scan the ceiling, lightly irritated. She always thought she was bad at math. “Four billion? Four billion people. That means nearly everybody you meet has to be part of the simulacrum instead of a real person.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I thought of that.”

“So what happens,” she says, musing and distant, working through the puzzle, “if the person you care about isn’t real?”

Mom’s eyes are a bright brown, and her hair is dark with strands of silver picking through it. She’s mother-fat and slim-wristed, and I remember what it felt like to hear her wobbling voice in the nighttime, singing nightmares away. “I’m not sure it matters,” I say, and there’s something in the way I say it that catches her attention. I put down my cup. It disappears. Her eyes track the space where it was. “Let’s say the person I found was you. And I had no way of knowing if you were some stranger in a pod out there or a human-farming algorithm in here. It wouldn’t matter. You’d still be you. And I’d still love you. I’d always love you, for as long as I could keep you—until the humans killed the simulacrum, or the robots killed me.”

The wall behind her flickers. Mom’s knuckles are white. I sniff a little. “I think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever written,” I say, and try to smile. “I’m going to stick with it until I know it’s done.”

Mom looks away, unclasps her hands to pick up her coffee again. It’s gone. She lowers her hand slowly. “However long that is?” she asks, blinking hard.

“Yeah,” I say. “And longer.”

She makes a noise then, and opens her arms, reaching out. I nearly break my neck falling forward into them, breath ragged. I’d worry that I was hurting her, but she holds on just as tight.

She’s here. For now, she’s here, warm and alive and my mother.

“I’m so proud of you,” she whispers. I close my eyes, the sunlight still bright behind them.

For the first time today, I think I can hear the faint strains of music from the turntable. But it might just be Mom singing again, quietly, for both of us.