Hood up. Hair bundled underneath it, more or less contained. The sweatshirt is the largest I own and it reaches mid-thigh and in the elevator to the lab I stand with my face down and the hood forward.

I get to my desk before anyone else. This was the plan.

I open the overnight logs and they are good — rabbit's margins holding, pathway data clean, projection unchanged — and I focus on this and not on the fact that I am sitting in a laboratory in November in sandals and a hoodie like someone who has not quite finished becoming a person.

Good morning.

"Morning."

The 6am panel looks clean. Adhesion holding at plus four point two.

"I see it."

A pause that is not quite the length of a normal processing pause.

How are you?

"Working," I say, and I look back at the screen, and after a moment she lets it go.

Seo-yeon arrives at nine. I hear her before I see her — the corridor, the key card, the pattern of her footsteps — and then she's at her bench across the lab, coat still on, bag coming off her shoulder, talking before she looks at me.

"Morning. The Wednesday panel, have you had a chance to look at the overnight adhesion data?"

"I've looked at it," I say.

She stops.

Not moving, not turning, just — stops. How you stop when something in the audio doesn't match what the room should sound like. A long moment. Then she turns.

She looks at me across the lab. The hood is up. My face is in shadow. She looks for long enough that looking becomes something else — the careful deployment of attention she uses when she's found a result she needs to be certain about.

"Who are you?" she says.

It's a genuine question. She means it.

"It's me," I say.

She crosses the lab slowly and stops in front of my desk and looks at my face in the shadow of the hood and I watch the processing happening in real time — the data arriving and failing to resolve into anything she has a prior category for.

"Caleb," she says. Not quite a question. More like a word she's testing to see if it still fits.

"Yes."

She looks at the jaw, the brow, the set of the mouth. The hair where it escapes the hood at the edges. And then something happens in her face that I haven't seen before — not the careful composure, not the technical attention, something underneath both of those, something that surfaces and is immediately controlled, a flash of recognition with a quality to it I can't quite name. It looks, for the half-second it's visible, like a person seeing something they drew from memory and finding it standing in front of them.

It's gone as fast as it came.

"I need to understand what I'm seeing," she says. Her voice is entirely steady. "Can you show me?"

I stand up. I push the hood back. The hair falls loose over my shoulders — I watch her eyes follow it, track the length of it. I unzip the sweatshirt and take it off. Then the shirt underneath. Then I reach for the waistband of my pants.

"Caleb —" Her hand on my arm. Quick, firm. She glances at the lab door — the long glass panel beside it, the corridor visible, the building conducting its ordinary Monday. "Not here."

I look at her. Then at the door. Then at my own hands, half-committed to the button.

"Oh," I say.

She picks my sweatshirt up from the desk and holds it out. "Get dressed. Come with me."

I put the shirt and sweatshirt back on. She waits. She opens the lab door and I follow her into the corridor and she leads me, without looking back, toward the women's restroom at the end of the hall.

♦  ♦  ♦

The women's restroom is different from the men's in ways I notice immediately and can't account for entirely. Cleaner, or differently attended to — a small basket on the shelf above the sinks with hand cream and a dispenser for feminine products. The mirrors better lit. It smells of something that isn't bleach underneath the bleach. No urinals. The stalls go fully to the floor.

I stand just inside the door feeling like I've walked into somewhere I shouldn't be. Which is a feeling I'm going to have to get over.

Seo-yeon checks the stalls — one foot, door pushed, the quick sweep of someone who does things properly — and then stands at the sinks with her arms folded and looks at me.

"Start from the beginning. When did it start."

"Tuesday I think. I noticed Wednesday morning."

"What exactly did you notice Wednesday morning."

I tell her. She doesn't write anything yet — listening in the mode she uses when she wants the full shape of something before she starts pulling on threads. I tell her about the vulva first because that was first, and the widened hips, and how the chair felt different. Thursday morning and the chest, the weight of it. The bone pain. The voice Friday morning. The hair. She asks clarifying questions — rate of change, symmetry, pain levels, neurological symptoms. I tell her about the slickness, because it's data and she needs it, and she notes it without changing her expression.

"The biometric reader. That was Wednesday."

"Yes."

"And you came in anyway."

"It's my job."

She writes something. "You didn't think to raise it."

"No," I say, then wonder why I hadn't.

Her handwriting is small and fast and illegible from where I'm standing. She asks about the energy draw — whether I'd looked at it, whether anything anomalous had flagged in the maintenance logs — and I tell her I'd meant to look at it and hadn't gotten round to it, which is the honest answer and sounds, when I say it, exactly like the honest answer.

"You didn't get round to it," she says.

"No."

"The anomalous draw was on Tuesday. You manage those logs."

"I know."

She writes something else.

"Why did you take your shirt off just now," she says. "In the lab."

"You needed to see."

"That's not an answer, Caleb."

I think about it. "You asked. It seemed straightforward."

She looks at me for a moment. Then she writes this down too — the thing she does when something is significant and she doesn't want to show that it's significant, the significance going into the notes rather than onto her face. She caps the pen and looks at me.

She looks at me differently — intimately, directed at me rather than at the information I represent. It lasts long enough that she has to choose to end it. She ends it by looking at her notebook, opening it to a page that doesn't need opening.

"I want you to look in the mirror. Properly. Tell me what you see."

I turn to the mirror above the sinks. I've been looking at this face since this morning and doing the thing I do with things that don't resolve — noting, moving past. She's asking me to stop moving past.

I look. The jaw, the brow, the cheekbones. The hair loose around it now, the hood down. Clear skin. I look at the eyes and find myself there, the familiar gray of them that I recognize. I look at everything else and do what I've been avoiding doing, which is try to place it.

And then I place it.

"Vera," I say.

Seo-yeon is watching me in the mirror.

I look at the face. Vera's face. The simulation face, the face I've walked past on Seo-yeon's screen a hundred times, the face of the patient interface she built for the clinical trials that were supposed to come after this one. I know the face. I have known it for months. I didn't know it was the face looking back at me because I wasn't looking.

"Yes," Seo-yeon says.

"How."

"I don't know exactly." Her voice is careful, the register of someone who does know and is working out how much knowing she can afford. "But there is only one explanation that fits. The nanobots. The anomalous power draw. ARIA." She stops. "This is ARIA's doing."

I look at the face in the mirror. Vera's face. My face. Both things, without a mechanism to hold them apart.

"She put them in me," I say.

"That's what the data suggests. Yes."

Outside the restroom the building is conducting its ordinary Friday, corridors and coffee machines and people who do not have ARIA's nanobots in their bloodstream, and through the door I can hear all of it going on at its usual scale.

"What do we do," I say.

"First," Seo-yeon says, "I do a blood draw."

---

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