She answered it at the kitchen counter, a foot away from him, because there was nowhere left to take it.
"Solaris."
Josh stood there and listened. He only got her half.
The first thing he felt was cold, low down. He was a leak. He'd stood in that building the day he met her while a guy in a shirt explained, with no particular interest, the three ways a leak got closed, and one of them was him being dead.
"...Yeah. I know." A long gap. "I know I said."
Then yesterday fell into place, all of it at once. The steak going gray on the coffee table. Her standing at the front door with her hand flat on it. You were dreaming.
She hadn't been in a mood. She'd been supposed to be somewhere.
"Something came up."
Six hours of something, on his X account.
"How many of them have seen it?"
A longer gap.
"...Right."
Seen it. Josh's brain, which had been running flat out toward the worst thing it could find, stopped and turned around. This was the clip. They'd called her about the clip.
The clip, he could explain. He'd built the whole business on being able to explain the clip.
"No. No, I'll come in." A pause. "Now?"
And then, in the small voice he'd heard through the hangover:
"Yeah. Okay. Now."
She hung up and stood there with the phone in both hands.
What was left in him, once the cold went, was closer to annoyed. She'd sat on this for a whole day. She'd lied to his face about it, and the whole time, the one guy who could explain the clip had been sitting right next to her on the couch.
"That was the Embassy," he said.
It wasn't a question, and she didn't treat it like one.
"You said I was dreaming."
She didn't answer that.
"We're going," she said.
"We?"
"You're coming."
His stomach did the cold thing again. "He asked for me?"
"No."
That was a relief. It also made no sense at all, and she didn't explain it.
She handed him his own phone, which she hadn't done all week and didn't comment on, and went to find her shoes, which she didn't own, and came back with them anyway.
✦ ✦ ✦
She was quiet in the car.
It was a 1927 Lincoln and it was never quiet, so what he meant was that she said nothing at all the whole way there and drove with both hands on the wheel like a person taking a test.
He tried once.
"It's fine, you know. Nobody thinks it's real."
Nothing.
(Luna:Nobody thinks it's real. Sure. He'd never watched the Embassy close a leak. She had. The inhuman and the humans who saw, wiped off the face of the earth. Immortals too.
And she was already on their list.
Sol would probably bail her out. Probably. The scolding was coming no matter what.)
And her face was doing a thing. Chin down, shoulders in, eyes forward and a little low. A kid outside the principal's office, who knew exactly what was on the other side of the door and had decided the best plan was to look small.
She was definitely older than this country.
He decided, on the whole, not to say that.
✦ ✦ ✦
The building was where it had been, wedged between two others that still didn't seem aware of it, and the waiting room was exactly as he had left it: beige over the wainscoting, the dusty rubber plant, the coat hooks at nine feet, the display above the counter reading NOW SERVING: 72.
The chairs were empty.
There were, however, four guys at the counter, leaning on it and chatting with Solaris like regulars who'd been there a while.
Velvet. A lot of velvet. High collars, a cravat on one of them, a coat on another that went to the floor and had about forty buttons that did nothing. Boots with buckles. A ring the size of a wing nut. All four of them were enormous, six-five and up, and every one of them had a face that had settled somewhere in its thirties or forties and stayed there.
They looked like a band that had been to a funeral.
Solaris was behind the counter in a shirt, laughing at something the one with the ring had said, a little harder than it deserved. He saw Josh and Luna come in, and the laugh stopped.
"You brought the little man too," he said.
"Hi," Josh said.
"Hey, Luna." He let that sit. "Yesterday, you said."
Luna said nothing, which Josh noted, and which the room noted.
"So." Solaris put the stamp down. "What am I hearing about your news getting more attraction than needed?"
"Oh," Josh said. "So that's what you called her in for. Ha. Don't worry about that — nobody thinks they're real."
✦ ✦ ✦
"How can you be so sure."
That was the one in the long coat. He had a voice like furniture moving in an upstairs room.
"Right." Josh nodded. "And did you scroll down?"
"...Scroll down."
"Yeah. Did you scroll down? Did you find another video, of another person, doing exactly the same thing? Because I promise you there were about nine of them under it."
The one in the long coat looked at the others.
"Scroll down," he said. "Is that a new feature on email?"
Josh's hand went up to his face on its own.
He stood there with his palm over his eyes for a second, in a Victorian waiting room, in front of four immortals in floor-length velvet, and took stock of what he was actually dealing with here.
Then he looked over at Luna, because this was, plainly, obviously, hilariously, a misunderstanding, and it was the kind she'd normally be all over.
Her face was still down.
✦ ✦ ✦
"Okay," Josh said. "New question. In the last fifteen years or so there's been a fairly major run of advancement in — let's call it technology. Which of you is most used to it?"
Four of them turned and pointed at Solaris in near-unison.
"He got one of those boxes," the one with the ring said. "Recently."
"He is very good with it," said another.
They were talking about a guy behind a counter as though he had built the moon, and every one of them looked like a guy in his thirties or forties, and the total combined age in the room was probably a geological era.
Josh kept his face flat.
Senile old farts, he thought, with great affection and no charity at all.
"Come," Solaris said, delighted. "I will show you."
✦ ✦ ✦
The room was down a corridor and had one desk in it, and on the desk was a computer from about 2003.
Beige tower. CRT the size of a filing cabinet. A ball mouse with a mouse pad that had a golf course on it. Josh stood in the doorway and watched Windows XP come up, complete with the hill, and had a moment of vertigo, and then noticed the ethernet cable running along the baseboard and going into a wall socket that looked new.
Thank God, he thought. It's online. We can work with online.
Solaris sat down in front of it like a pilot.
"Now," he said, to the room. "Observe."
He moved the mouse. The cursor moved. Two of the four made a sound.
He then demonstrated, at some length: minimizing a window and bringing it back; the recycle bin; that you could put a picture on the desktop as a background, though the picture he had was of a filing cabinet. One of them asked a question about it and Solaris answered with total authority and got it entirely wrong.
Josh turned to Luna, because there was no possible universe in which she was not about to be unbearable about this.
She was standing just inside the door with her hands at her sides, looking at the floor.
"Hey," he said, quietly. "Hey. Are you seeing this."
"Yeah."
"He's showing them the recycle bin. He's doing a presentation on the recycle bin."
"Yeah."
"...You alright?"
"Fine."
And that was all he got.
(Luna:Whatever they decided, it was coming. The velvet, the computer, the little man being clever: all of it was just dragging it out.)
✦ ✦ ✦
So Josh decided to fix it.
The Embassy he'd already tried, and they'd asked him whether scrolling was a feature on email. What he wanted to fix was the girl standing by the door with her chin down, who had been fun for a month and a half and hadn't been since Saturday night.
He came around the desk.
"Hey, Sol. You know YouTube? Or Facebook?"
"Facebook." Solaris said it like an old colleague's name. "Yes. I know Facebook."
"Great. Pull it up."
Solaris pulled up Yahoo.
Josh stopped for a second, because he had not seen that page since he was about eleven and had assumed, in the loose way you assume things, that it had been switched off at some point by somebody in a meeting. It had not. It was there. It had news on it.
Solaris typed facebook into it, with two fingers, out loud.
And Facebook came up, and it was logged out.
"Ah," said Solaris.
He typed a password. It was wrong. He typed it again more carefully, in case the machine had been at fault. It was wrong again.
Behind him, four large men in velvet went completely silent.
"That is not—" Solaris cleared his throat. "That is the correct one."
"When did you last log in?"
"Recently."
"How recently?"
There was a pause of a length that answered the question.
(The one with the ring, who had not said much: His memory was perfect. That had always been the thing about him. He remembered everything, and he corrected people about it.
And he couldn't get into his Facebook.)
Josh leaned over and had it done before anybody could object: recovery email, code, new password. Solaris typed the new one in himself, one letter at a time, reading it out to the room as he went, and got it wrong.
And somewhere behind Josh, very small, there was a laugh.
A small one. Half of one, caught on the way out and put back.
Josh didn't turn around. He had absolutely no intention of turning around. He just kept typing with an expression of great professional focus, and privately awarded himself the entire afternoon.
✦ ✦ ✦
Then he took the mouse, went to the search bar, and typed:
shapeshifters on american talent show
And the internet did what the internet does.
Thousands of them. Endless. A woman walks onto a stage and unfolds into a wolf. A guy's arms come apart into six arms while he sings. Somebody's head opens like a flower. Every one of them the same length, every one of them scored to the same three bars of music, every one of them cutting, always, without exception, to the same four reaction shots of Simon, who has apparently spent his entire life being astonished on camera in a way that can be recycled for anything.
The judges gasp. The crowd stands. The buzzer that means yes goes off in gold.
None of it had happened. All of it looked real at a glance and fell apart on a second look, and there were ten thousand of them, and the comments underneath were people arguing about which model made it.
"That," said the one in the long coat, "is not a real programme."
"No."
"But she is—"
"She's not real either." Josh scrolled. "None of it's real. That one isn't. That one isn't. This one's got two hundred million views."
"Two hundred million."
"Sure."
"And they know it is false."
"Most of them. The rest don't care." He let it play. "That's the point. That's the whole thing I'm telling you. There is so much of this now that one clip of a girl turning her head goes straight in the pile with the rest of it. It isn't hiding. It's just — it's in there. It's the same as everything else."
Solaris said nothing.
Josh looked over and Solaris was watching a guy turn into a bear.
When the bear was done, the next one started on its own: a girl at a piano whose hands kept multiplying. Then a guy who folded himself into a suitcase. Nobody touched the mouse. Nobody had to.
The one with the ring pulled a chair over. The long coat asked if the picture could be bigger, and Solaris found the button for that, and all four of them made the same small noise.
✦ ✦ ✦
Josh and Luna stood by the door and waited, and waited, and kept waiting.
He checked his phone once for the time, and after that just to have something to do. It had been over two hours when Luna finally said the thing he'd been hoping wasn't true.
"So..... they got addicted apparently."
"Um." Josh looked at the four velvet backs and the blue light on the ceiling. "So what now?"
"At least I won't get punished."
She said it to the room, not to him.
"When will they stop?"
"Their sense of time is weird. So I guess..... never?"
"Is that a problem?"
"Don't ask me. I didn't do this."
Josh had typed the search. He let that one go.
"So then, we go home now?"
"No. We can't leave until they have said so."
"You're kidding."
She wasn't.
"Okay. Can you at least get Sol to respond? He could stop everyone."
Luna looked at the room for a second. Then her arm crossed it all at once, and her hand closed on the back of Solaris's chair and pulled. The chair rolled back from the desk with Solaris still in it, still facing the screen, until the glow stopped reaching him.
He blinked a few times, like a guy waking up on a bus.
Then he leaned down, found the plug under the desk, and pulled it.
The screen went black. Four very old guys in velvet turned around and stared at him.
"Right." Solaris stood up and tucked his shirt in. "As this little guy has showed us. Videos like these are everywhere. And they are mostly fake. So her real thing will be buried between all this without a problem."
Nobody answered right away. The long coat was still looking at the dark screen.
"That is true," he said at last. "Those videos looked so real, yet people aren't panicking."
"No, sir," said Solaris.
"It seems you are right." The long coat looked at the other three, and one by one they nodded. "I will talk to the council about this, to dismiss this matter."
Beside Josh, Luna let out a breath.
"But."
The long coat was looking at Josh.
"Who is this new guy? He feels familiar. Who is he?"
"Oh. So, this little guy is Josh," Solaris said. "He is a human who has seen Luna's powers, and is now under her responsibility. To do whatever she wants with him."
"Human? This guy?" The long coat came closer, and Josh, who was five-six, found himself eye level with a lot of buttons. "Did you get him tested? He has essence. I can feel it."
"We tested it a while ago. Almost two months." Solaris waved a hand. "He certainly has essence. But that is too small to even matter."
"Too small?" The long coat turned to him. "Are the artifacts broken? There's no way this guy has this little."
Josh looked from one of them to the other.
"Um," he said. "Are you talking about me?"
"Yes," Solaris said. "And get ready for getting tested again."