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“Are you a programmer?”

She leans back in her chair, crosses her arms. “Yes.”

“What do you work on?”

“Me?” Nadia frowns. “The Interstices, mostly. Nick and I work on overlaid reality.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s the new augmented reality,” Nadia says.

“Um, when you called Nick just now, were you using the Interstices?”

“Yeah.”

“I haven’t seen anyone use it before. How does it work?” I don’t believe in suppressing my curiosity for the sake of looking fake-cool.

Nadia opens her mouth to answer but then stops. “How much time have you got?”

“I don’t need to know how to build it from scratch. I was wondering what you did just then to make the call? Do you think the words call Nick? Or do you have to remember a number, or visualize his face?”

“You just have to want something. So if I wanted a pizza, in about fifteen minutes the doorbell would ring and there would be a pizza.”

“So if I wanted world peace . . . ?”

Nadia chuckles. “No.”

“What if you wanted Chicago style and thin crust showed up?”

She frowns. “It knows what you want. So far it hasn’t made any mistakes.”

“What was it like getting the hardware installed?”

Nadia gathers her almost-dry hair and pulls it aside to show me the base of her skull. The little red-lightning-bolt-inside-a-blue-circle logo I see everywhere lately is tattooed there. The tattoo is still fresh enough to be slightly puffy. “They went in here,” she says, pointing to a tiny barely healed scar just above the tattoo.

“Did it hurt?” I am a real coward about medical stuff; I can’t imagine volunteering for brain surgery.

“It wasn’t too bad,” Nadia says, and laughs when I cringe. “It felt weird for a few weeks, while the implant was expanding, but now I don’t even notice it. And it’s interesting to have all these new abilities.”

“Like what? Can you fly, or become invisible?”

“Not superpowers, just perceptivities. You can become your avatar—everything looks better, smells better, you can see in the dark, all the empty places are full of things and people again. You can hang out with people who’ve died, or are far away. The best thing is being able to travel without leaving home.”

“So, you mean virtual reality?”

“Yeah. If you get the implant you can live in the Interstices whenever you want. So, I told you we live in a massive abandoned warehouse that used to be a bookstore, but none of us are carpenters or plumbers, so all the repairs we’ve done are kind of amateurish and not up to code or maybe downright dangerous, but now that I have the implant it looks much glossier, you know, more maintained. I’m very fond of my comrades in their ordinary bodies, but now that we all have the implant they look like old film stars or cute animals. It makes the workday go a lot faster if you can hang out with Brad Pitt and an otter.”

“Well, sure. What’s your avatar?”

She names a gay wrestler/porn star, renowned for his ferocity; when I smile, she says, “It’s very practical, no one messes with me now.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You better not. I’ll call the police,” Nadia says. I just roll my eyes. There’s no way Nadia Kendrick of all people is going to risk calling the police. “Anyway, Nick knows I’m with you.”

“Understood. Why didn’t you call him earlier, by the way?”

Nadia hesitates. “I don’t know—I sort of remembered you? You seem all right?”