His work-release apartment has a kitchenette that overlooks a sun-hammered hillside of rabbitbrush. It’s August and the sky is beige with smoke and everything wavers with heat blurs.
Six mornings a week he rides a self-driving bus to an office park where he crosses an acre of broiling asphalt to a sprawling stucco Ilium-owned low-rise. In the lobby a polyurethane raised-relief Earth, twelve feet in diameter, turns on a pedestal, dust gathered in the clefts of the mountains. A faded placard on the wall says, Capturing the Earth. He works twelve hours a day with teams of engineers testing next-generation iterations of the Atlas treadmill and headset. He’s a ropy and pallid man who prefers to eat prepackaged sandwiches at his desk rather than visit the cafeteria, and who finds peace only in work, in accumulating mile after mile on the treadmill like some Dark Age pilgrim walking off a great penance.
Occasionally he orders a new pair of shoes, identical to the pair he has worn out. Besides food, he buys little else. He messages Natalie Hernandez once a week, on Saturdays, and most of the time she messages back. She teaches Latin and Greek to reluctant high schoolers, has two sons, a self-driving minivan, and a dachshund named Dash.
Sometimes he removes his headset, steps off his treadmill, and blinks out over the heads of the other engineers, and lines from Zeno’s translation come winging back:… Across its surface spread the heavens and the earth, all its lands scattered, all its beasts, and in the center…
He turns fifty-seven, fifty-eight; the insurgent inside him lives still. Every night when he gets home, he boots his terminal, disables its connectivity, and gets to work. Simmering on servers all over the world, the harvest of raw, high-density Atlas images remains: columns of migrants fleeing Chennai, families packed onto tiny boats outside Rangoon, a tank on fire in Bangladesh, police behind Plexiglas shields in Cairo, a Louisiana town filled with mud—the calamities he spent years expunging from the Atlas are all still there.
Over the course of months, he constructs little blades of code so sharp and refined that when he slips them into the Atlas object code, the system cannot detect them. Inside the Atlas, all over the world, he hides them as little owls: owl graffiti, an owl-shaped drinking fountain, a bicyclist in a tuxedo with an owl mask. Find one, touch it, and you peel back the sanitized, polished imagery to reveal the original truth beneath.
In Miami, six potted ferns stand outside a restaurant, a little owl sticker stuck to planter number three. Touch the owl and the ferns evaporate; a smoldering car materializes; four women lay crumpled on the pavement.
Whether users discover his little owls, he does not risk finding out. The Atlas is fading from the company’s priorities anyway; whole regions of the Boise complex are being devoted to perfecting and miniaturizing the treadmill and headset for other projects, in other departments. But Seymour keeps constructing his owls, night after night, smuggling them into the object code, unweaving some of the lies he has spent the day weaving, and for the first time since finding the severed wing of Trustyfriend on the side of the road, he feels better. Calmer. Less frightened. Less like he has something to outrun.
Three days at a new resort on the lake in Lakeport. Airfare, all meals included, any water sports they want—all on him, for as long as his savings hold out. Families welcome. He relies on Natalie to handle the communication. At first she says that she does not think all five will come, but they do: Alex Hess and two sons travel from Cleveland; Olivia Ott flies in from San Francisco; Christopher Dee drives up from Caldwell; Rachel Wilson comes all the way from southwest Australia with her four-year-old grandson.
Seymour doesn’t drive up the canyon from Boise until their last night: no need to upset anyone by showing his face too soon. At dawn he swallows an extra antianxiety drop and stands on the balcony wearing a suit and tie. Out beyond the hotel docks, the lake sparkles in the sunlight. He waits to see if an osprey might come overhead but none do.
Notes in his left pocket, room key in his right. Recall things you know. Owls have three eyelids. Humans are complicated. For many of the things you love, it’s too late. But not for all.
He meets the two Ilium technicians in a hexagonal lakeside room used primarily for wedding receptions, and supervises as they carry in five brand-new state-of-the-art multidirectional treadmills that they are calling Perambulators. The technicians pair them with five headsets and depart.
Natalie meets him there early. Her kids, she says, are finishing lunch. It’s brave of him, she says, to do this.
“Braver of you,” says Seymour. Every time he inhales he fears his skin might unbuckle and his bones will fall out.
At 1 p.m., the families arrive. Olivia Ott has a chin-length bob and linen capri pants and her eyes look as though she has been crying. Alex Hess is flanked by two gigantic and sullen teens, the hair of all three bright yellow. Christopher Dee appears with a small woman; they sit in the corner, removed from the others, and hold hands. Rachel enters last, wearing jeans and boots; her face has the deep-grained wrinkles of someone who works long days under the sun. A cheerful-looking flame-haired grandson trundles in behind her and sits and swings his feet in his chair.
“He doesn’t look like a murderer,” says one of Alex’s sons.
“Be polite,” says Alex.
“He just looks old. Is he rich?”
Seymour avoids looking at their faces—faces will derail the whole thing. Keep your eyes down. Read from your notes. “That day,” he says, “all those years ago, I took something precious from each of you. I know I can never fully atone for what I did. But because I, too, know what it’s like to lose a place you cared about when you were young—to have it taken from you—I thought it might mean something to you if I tried to give yours back.”
From his bag he takes five hardcover books with royal blue jackets and hands one to each. On the cover birds swing around the towers of a cloud city. Olivia gasps.
“I had these made from the translations of Mr. Ninis. With a lot of help from Natalie, I should add. She wrote all of the translator’s notes.”
Next he distributes the headsets. “The five of you can go first. Then everybody else, if they’d like. Do you remember the book drop box?”
Nods all around. Christopher says, “ ‘Owl’ you need are books.”
“Pull the handle on the box. You’ll know what to do from there.”
The adults stand. Seymour helps them fit the headsets over their heads and the five Perambulators hum to life.
Once they’re settled atop their treadmills, he walks to the window and looks out at the lake. There are at least twenty places like that north of here your owl could fly to, she said. Bigger forests, better forests. She was trying to save him.
The Perambulators whir and spin; the grown-up children walk. Natalie says, “Oh my God.”
Alex says, “It’s exactly how I remember.”
Seymour recalls the silence of the trees behind the double-wide as they filled with snow. Trustyfriend on his limb, ten feet up in the big dead tree: he would twitch at the crunch of tires across gravel a quarter mile away. He could hear the heart of a vole beating beneath six feet of snowpack.
Pneumatic motors raise the fronts of the Perambulators. They are climbing the granite steps to the porch. “Look,” says Christopher. “It’s the sign I made.”
In the chair next to Rachel’s vacant one, Rachel’s grandson reaches over, picks up the blue book, sets it in his lap, and turns pages.
With her right hand, Olivia Ott reaches into space and opens the door. One by one the children enter the library.