4

Once Upon a Future in the West

Daryl Gregory

The Country Doctor

The Doctor’s perpetually short on sleep, so she’s not happy to be woken up by the rumble of the garage door. That’s an alarming sound for a woman who lives alone with a kid too young to drive. She lurches groggily to the window, looks down. Her car, a white Audi, glides out of the garage, its high beams diffused by the smoke.

She shouts, wide awake now, and throws herself down the stairs. Gets stymied for a moment by all the locks on the front door. Why did she install so many? Finally she’s out, the dry grass pricking her bare feet. The taillights are moving away through the gritty smog. The car’s going slow, obeying the neighborhood speed limit. She runs after it, shouting. The air rasps her throat, and the campfire smell fills her nose. She shouldn’t be out here without a mask, much less be sprinting. Or what if the robbers decide to shoot her?

The car reaches the intersection, pauses cautiously. She’s going to catch it! Then it turns left and accelerates away.

There’s no one behind the wheel. The Doctor screams a few curse words.

She goes back inside, slams the door shut, then coughs and spits ash. The campfire smell is in her nostrils. The AQI seems worse than yesterday. She tells the house to turn up the air purifiers and call the police.

The 911 bot asks her what her emergency is. She tells it she needs to contact police, human police, live police. Her car’s been hijacked.

The chatbot apologizes. “All of our officers are busy helping other customers. The wait to speak to an officer is currently . . .” The slightest pause. “Indefinite. If you have a premium customer code, speak it now.”

“Fuck you,” the Doctor says. This is not a premium customer code.

The Doctor’s daughter comes downstairs, still in pajamas though she looks like she’s been awake for some time. The girl starts to list all the major fires currently burning in Northern California.

“Not now,” the Doctor says. The girl isn’t wearing her Miss Mote glasses, so there’s no app to tell her that the expression on her mother’s face is a mix of worry and frustration, on top of the usual layer of long-term anxiety and low-grade depression—and no app to prompt her to say something kind. No, it’s Doctor Soothe Thyself time, and the Doctor’s not sure she’s up for it. Too much is happening, all at once: the divorce, the move south to this suburb of a suburb, the new job, all in the middle of fire season. Her daughter needs to be in her sixth-grade class in ten minutes, and her patients are waiting for her. She needs her fucking car!

Her daughter’s staring at her. The Doctor feels bad for snapping at her. “Audi Murphy’s been hacked,” the Doctor says, using the name the girl’s other parent gave the car. “Either that, or it’s decided to run away from home.”

“This isn’t home,” the daughter says.

The Last Cowboy

The Last Cowboy noses his truck forward, toward the dozen or so protestors blocking the farm gate. He’s barely moving but he does not stop completely, and soon he’s surrounded. They’re waving their umbrellas and chanting about sentience and complicity and suffering. The faces on the umbrellas are also chanting. The roar of his air conditioning is drowning out a lot of the words, but it seems they also do not like his truck, a gas burner.

He keeps his eyes straight ahead, nursing the brake, and his right hand rests on the butt of his pistol. A pair of women who look like twins in their white shirts and matching sunglasses stand their ground, their backs to the metal gate topped with razor wire. That metal surface is glowing like a stove in the bright sun. The Cowboy has no respect for the virtual protestors on the umbrellas, but he’s got to tip his hat to these in-person folks braving the 125-degree heat.

A minute into this slow-motion confrontation, his grill’s practically touching the women, their heads looking at him over the hood. He squints and nudges the vehicle forward. The gate starts to swing open behind the women, and the farmer is there, holding a shotgun. The women can either back up onto the farmer’s property—a risky move—or get out of the way. One of them slams the hood of his truck and shouts something about his parenthood. Then they move aside.

Once the gate’s closed behind him he lets the farmer climb into the cab. The Last Cowboy asks her, “That happen every day, or did they know I was coming?”

“Every damn day,” the farmer says. She’s a clear-eyed woman with a ruddy face. She directs him down a long road through empty, grassy fields that once fed thousands of cattle. She complains about taxes, especially the carbon impact tax and the new one, the suffering tax. “What about my suffering?” the farmer asks.

“I hear you,” the Cowboy says. He eases the truck into the barn. The farmer hops out to close the doors behind them, to give them privacy from telephoto lenses and protestor’s drones. The farmer wants only her own barn cameras to document this moment.

Two huge electric coolers sit on the floor, already loaded and sealed. The Cowboy asks to open them; he likes to set eyes on what he’s hauling. She presses a thumb to the first cooler’s lock and pushes up the lid.

The beef carcass is a big ’un, seven to eight hundred pounds hanging weight, and gorgeous. Fresh pink muscle, white marbled fat. Worth $30K, unprocessed. The second carcass is just as big and just as pretty. The farmer shakes her head. “You know my kids won’t even eat real meat? Not that I can afford it. But they won’t even try.”

The Cowboy agrees that this is a damn shame.

“I just don’t know how it all changed so fast,” the farmer says. “I ate meat every day growing up. Sure, there were vegans and vegetarians, but most people loved a good steak or a chicken dinner, but now . . . ?” She shakes her head. “I think it’s the schools.”

The Cowboy has had some variation of this conversation with every rancher he’s worked with. It’s the schools, or the government, or the media. Maybe all of them. One day not long ago, more people started eating soy meat and potato meat and lab-grown abominations than the real stuff—and then that’s all people were eating.

“Thank God for the billionaires,” the farmer says. “If it wasn’t for them, this whole way of life would be over.” The Cowboy’s aware of the cameras and wonders if she’s performing for her clients. Was this really anything like the old way of ranching? Bespoke beef, each steer as fussed over as a child star, filmed nonstop from birth to death, the videos and copyright part of the purchase price.

The farmer climbs into a forklift and loads the coolers into the bed of the Cowboy’s truck. The vehicle sinks low on its shocks, very near its max payload. The Cowboy throws a tarp over the coolers, and they stack up crates of carrots around them as a disguise.

The farmer wants to make sure the Cowboy can make it to the meat processor by end of day—the contract depends on it. To complicate things, the processor’s up north, near the forest fires. “You catch on fire, we’ll both be toast.”

“I’ll get there,” the Cowboy says. “My word is my bond.”

“No,” the farmer says. “Your bond is your bond.”

The Cowboy forces a chuckle. He doesn’t mention that he can’t afford insurance anymore. He’ll be dead broke if he loses this load.

“One question,” he says. “You got another way off this farm?”

The Prospector and the Gambler

The Prospector and the Gambler are long-time partners who’ve made a lot of money together over the years. Like a lot of partners, they quarrel constantly. Most of the arguments boil down to attention management. What should they pay attention to, and when? Money. Safety. Love. Health. The usual.

They are also reconciled to the fact that they’re stuck with each other. The Prospector and the Gambler are two modes of thought, two sets of ingrained habits, and two genders, inhabiting one person. They share a brain, a set of hands, and an ass that spends too much time in a chair. They are not insane. They know that biologically and legally they are a single individual, albeit one who prefers to think of themselves as a multiple and use the plural pronoun. The Prospector, however, has argued that since they started spending all their time alone these past two months, they’re certainly flirting with crazy.

The Prospector is the practical one. Fiscally conservative, hardworking, unafraid of commitment. They also make most of the income, that’s just a fact. It’s the Prospector’s efforts that fund the activities of the Gambler, a financial daredevil whose exploits sometimes pay off in spectacular fashion, but often go up in flames.

The Gambler, however, has more fun. And it’s their turn in the chair this morning, so sit down and shut up, Prospector, it’s playtime.

Oh, but what game to play? The options are endless. In the past hundred years, humans had turned every material and immaterial object into both a stock market and a futures market. Want to encode your own genome into the blockchain and sell it to pharmaceutical companies? No problem. Want to own shares in a million other people’s genomes? Knock yourself out. If commodities weren’t your thing, you could bet on events, anything from a soccer tournament to a political election to the date when the Greenland ice sheet calved from the Arctic. (Too late on that one, but you get the idea.) New commodities and events were invented all the time.

Take NFT ponies. The idea is decades-old: virtual horses, represented as unique variations of an algorithm stored in a blockchain, could be bought, sold, traded, “mated” with other algorithms—and raced, of course.

The track software simulated a thousand races between a set of contenders to develop the odds. Say that a horse named Nature’s Miracle won two hundred of those sim races, making it a strong favorite. The track would then randomly select one of those thousand races to be the “real” race. But of course the track had an 80 percent chance of picking one of the eight hundred races Nature’s Miracle didn’t win. A bit of pari-mutuel fun. Years ago the Gambler spent a couple months developing statistical models that averaged a 4 percent monthly ROI.

At that point the betting became suitable for automation, and therefore a job, and therefore boring. The Gambler turned it over to the Prospector. The Prospector’s job? Keep mining that seam until it tapped out—which indeed it did a few years later. A bunch of AI-driven smart money apps had jumped into the betting pools, shrinking the Prospector’s share. The ROI went negative, so the Prospector pruned the project from their portfolio and moved on.

But while Gambler and the Prospector weren’t paying attention, the digital thoroughbred game evolved into something positively baroque. The horse algorithms had been upgraded to full genomes, some based on real-life horses, which could be grown in virtual wombs, cared for in virtual barns, trained by either AIs or actual human beings, and then put out to stud. They’d even built a market for virtual jockeys. In short, the number of variables had exploded to the point that it had become a whole new game. In any betting environment this complicated, there’s a preponderance of chalk players—bettors who merely accepted the track odds and bet on the favorites—and outright suckers. Their dollars swell the pari-mutuel pools and entice sharks.

Sharks like the Gambler. They’d woken up with some ideas for new atomic statistical terms that might play well with their old models. They demanded the chair from the Prospector and set to work.

The Gambler’s elbow-deep in the code when Arty, their helper AI, makes a polite coughing sound.

“I told you, no interruptions, no exceptions,” the Gambler says.

“My apologies,” Arty says. “But you did say I should tell you when the nearest fire was less than ten miles away. The Belden fire just crossed that mark.” The AI then spews details about wind speed, wind direction, and rate of progress.

“Let us know if it gets to five miles,” the Gambler says, and keeps typing.

“There’s one other thing,” Arty says. “You asked me to monitor blue-chip stocks on the reputation markets.” The Gambler thinks, we did? They don’t remember it, but it does seem like something the Gambler would ask for. “One of the highest valued persons is the subject of a video posted on Chateau Marmont—and has seen extremely high engagement for the last fifteen minutes.”

“Who?”

“Trading symbol THX.”

“Well now.”

Last year the Gambler had paid the monstrous subscription fee to get into Chateau Marmont, an exclusive social network popular among Hollywood types and tech billionaires. The celebrities there assumed they were talking amongst themselves, though the juiciest items always managed to leak to the public networks eventually. The key word is eventually. The Gambler had set Arty to lurk there to find actionable information, early.

“Fine, we have to pee,” the Gambler says. “Put the video on in the bathroom.” On the other side of the dark room, the bathroom light turns on. The work wing of the house was custom designed for efficiency. The 1,500 square feet are windowless, the walls thickly insulated, the air cool and pure. There’s no sound except the murmur of the computer fans and the hum of the HVAC. The solid-state batteries in the floors make no noise. The fiber lines below the batteries ferry silent photons back and forth to a level 3 hub five miles away, a fat pipe with such low latency that the Prospector and the Gambler can do high-frequency trading with all the big exchanges—New York, London, Japan—all while keeping in constant communication with Arty. No human voices disturb them when they’re working, not anymore. The Prospector has been morose about that, but the Gambler has argued that it’s been great for their productivity. Look, they can pee and work at the same time—without even closing the bathroom door.

The Prospector and the Gambler sit on the perfectly warmed toilet seat and Arty lights up the wall. The video:

An old white man stands in a dimly lit kitchen. He’s in his nineties but spry and handsome. You can see the movie star still in him. He walks over to a long countertop, where the body of a dark-headed younger man, in his thirties or forties, lies on his back, his face slightly turned away from the camera. His skin is blue-tinged, the lips washed out. The old man reaches into a drawer and takes out a kitchen knife. Shows it to the camera. The twinkle in his eye is familiar from dozens of movies. Then he plunges the knife into the young man’s chest.

The Gambler and the Prospector yelp.

Over the course of four minutes, the old man proceeds to do severe things to the body. Near the end of the video, someone offscreen, probably the person holding the camera, laughs. The old man smiles his famous smile: bemused, almost a smirk.

The Prospector and the Gambler realize their heart is racing. They’ve never been good at parsing their own emotions, but they do recognize shock. They grew up watching that old man. He’s widely regarded as the most beloved man in Hollywood.

“Arty, is this real?” they ask.

“Analysis so far reveals find no artifacts or evidence of manipulation.”

“And it’s really him?”

“Multiple facial, gait, and body recognition systems concur.” Arty isn’t one program, but a loose confederation of dozens of core services—natural language parsers, data miners, weather monitors, statistical analysis engines—each with their own dependent services handling many smaller, more specific jobs. (And each one consuming a tiny fraction of a dollar from their account every second it runs.) The thing the Gambler and the Prospector call Arty is an orchestrator who manages context and memory and mood modulators. It had turned out that AI orchestras fared much better with their own analogs to mood. “Fear” and its compadres—concern, doubt, outright paranoia—were useful inputs for all risk calculations. As was confidence.

“So you’re sure,” the Prospector says.

“Very close to sure,” Arty replies. “The person in the video is almost certainly the person who matches trading symbol THX, who has one of the top moral ratings for the last five years.”

“Holy shit,” the Gambler and the Prospector say as one.

Tom Hanks is a cannibal.

The Country Doctor

The police are supposed to call the Doctor back when they’re free, but she can’t waste any more mental energy worrying about the car right now—school’s in session and her patients are waiting. She hands her daughter her standard breakfast, toast with olive oil and Manchego cheese (a concoction she’s insisted on eating every morning since she was six) and sends her up to her room to change clothes and turn on her cameras—one before the other, please! Thank goodness the girl’s twists are tight and she looks presentable.

The Doctor, however, is definitely not presentable. She throws on yesterday’s top and last week’s salwar, then runs to the living room and logs in to work.

The calendar starts a session with her first patient of the day. He/him, sixty-five, Huntington’s disease, living in Modesto, fifteen miles from here. He’s one of her few patients who can go outside on his own, even do his own shopping, but nobody’s going out in this smoke. The room behind him looks clean and tidy. She asks how he’s feeling and he says, “Just fine, Doc.” She doesn’t correct him. Stopped trying weeks ago. Legally she’s not a doctor here—she’s still waiting for her California Physician’s and Surgeon’s License—but she’s the only medical professional her patients see on a regular basis. All the clients the insurance company has assigned to her have some type of dementia—Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body dementia, Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, FTD, CJD, NPH . . . the rainbow of cognitive disorders. If calling her Doc or Doctor reassures the patient, she’s not going to take that away from them.

For a while, she forgot she was a doctor herself. Back east and twenty years ago, before she got married, and became other things. A ranch owner. A mother. A woman who had time to crochet. This VHV job’s not close to perfect, but it’s something. She likes being of use. What she doesn’t like is starting the day so overwhelmed.

She runs through the checklist with the patient, covering everything from movement symptoms to mood. He has difficulty with words but manages to answer all her questions. Then he says, “How are you doing, Doc?” There’s concern in his voice.

“Fine,” she lies. “Thanks for asking.”

The Doctor gets off the line three minutes early. She finds the Audi app, but it doesn’t recognize her face, retina, or skin—and refuses to open. What the fuck? She’s seen her ex use the app, and knows there are all kinds of useful widgets in there—Find My Car would be especially handy right now—but she’s never had a reason to try them before now.

She’s out of time. She visits the next patient, and the next. Then it’s on to one of her favorites, Colleen: she/her, eighty-two, Lewy body dementia. She’s the only patient who lives in the Doctor’s town.

Colleen is not waiting in front of the camera. The Doctor clicks through the alternate views, and can’t see the woman in any of them. She calls out, “Colleen! Are you in the bathroom?” It’s the only room without a camera. The Doctor puts in a call to Audi while she waits. It’s the same automated hell as it was with the cops: The bot can’t help her, no one’s available, would she like someone to call her back?

Colleen still hasn’t appeared. The Doctor calls up the tracker. The woman’s wristband is supposedly in her bedroom, but it’s not visible on the camera. Did she somehow manage to take it off, or is Colleen hiding in the closet or something? The Doctor hopes the device is still on her body. Colleen’s prone to both hallucinations and wandering. Several afternoons she’s attempted to walk back to her old office at Indiana University—2,000 miles east. What if she’s gotten out again? The Doctor calls her name for another minute, with no response.

She checks the map. Colleen’s apartment is 1.4 miles away. If it were twenty a visit would be out of the question. If it were two blocks it wouldn’t even be a question—the Doctor would just pop over. But this middle distance, in this weather, is simply questionable.

Legally the Doctor is not allowed to make non-virtual home visits—that first V in VHV is strictly enforced. The Doctor certainly won’t be paid for any. If she believes a patient is having an emergency, the protocol is to call 911. Police and medical service providers who respond to the call will bill the insurer, who is also the Doctor’s employer. Employees who call 911 do not stay employed.

Colleen has still not appeared on camera.

Okay, maybe the Doctor could zip over there and zip back. The only bus service in town runs to Modesto, so she starts checking on-demand cars—and is reminded why she took the Audi in the divorce. The rental prices are astronomical. Worse, the shortest estimated wait time right now is over an hour. How is an hour “on demand”? That’s like walking into an Italian restaurant and demanding a cold lasagna.

She’s going to have to walk.

Fuck.

And the Air Quality Index is 180.

Double fuck.

The Doctor jogs upstairs. She changes into more professional clothes, grabs a filtered mask, and slaps a screen on her arm. Then she walks into her daughter’s room to tell her the situation—and sees that the girl’s not in class. Her screens show only weather maps and live feeds of forest fires.

“Hey!” the Doctor says. Her daughter does not look away from the fire. “Put on your glasses and look at me.”

The girl sighs, slips on the Miss Motes. Looks her mother up and down. “So,” she says. “You’re angry.”

“You bet I am.”

“The Mods are in danger,” the daughter says. Mods is her name for her other parent: Moms or Dads, feminine one moment, masculine the next, always plural. The girl’s never been good at reading human faces for emotion, but she’s always had an instinctive understanding of her parents’ flexible pronouns.

“I’m sure they’re on top of it,” the Doctor says. “Did you message them?”

“I didn’t get a response.”

“What a surprise,” the Doctor says.

“Sarcasm,” the girl says.

The Doctor feels bad about talking down her ex, especially in front of her daughter. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t do that. “Listen, you get back in class. I’ve got to go take care of something. I’ll be back in an hour. Maybe two.”

“You’re leaving the house?” Her voice rises.

“You’ll be fine,” the Doctor says. “The fires are two hundred miles from here. It’s just smoke.”

“No,” the girl says, furious. “I am going with you.” Spitting each word.

The girl has always had problems with emotion regulation. Even in the best of times, alterations to her routine could set her off, but since the divorce and the move she’s been a four-foot-two Vesuvius. The fight could go on all day. The Doctor doesn’t have all day.

“Fine,” the Doctor says. “Get your mask and grab a liter of water.”

The Last Cowboy

The Last Cowboy’s hands are slick on the wheel, and his eyes are itchy. The farther north he drives, the thicker the smoke. The truck’s air conditioner is blasting but particulates are leaking into the cab and he can smell the burning pine. The trusty Ford is laboring as it climbs into the mountains. The load is heavy and the gas tank’s needle is dropping fast.

He gets out his phone, a rectangle of metal and glass separate from all other devices as God intended. He starts scrolling through the map, looking for a gas station along his path. It’s slim pickings. California’s gotten hostile to the old ways, especially NorCal. But he finds a station twenty miles up and not too far off the highway, so he makes it for it.

The smoke blocks the sun and obscures the road—the false twilight of fire season. The Cowboy’s going slow, his fog lights on. Electric cars zoom up in his rearview and zip past him, their radar and lidars and whatnot unbothered by the grit. Reckless, he thinks.

He exits the highway where the map tells him, but sees nothing. Finally he spots the orange sign of the 76 station, struggling to be seen through the ashy soup. The station’s nothing but a tiny store, a single traditional pump, and a mess of charging plates.

He pulls his bandanna up around his mouth and climbs down from the truck. The heat drops on him like an anvil. He keeps one hand on his holster, the other on his phone. Waves the screen at the pump. Nothing happens. Waves it again and a message appears on the pump’s screen.

Hi, this planet-killing poison dispenser has been commandeered by Ethical Earth. Pay $250 now to unlock, and we’ll make a donation in your name to a local charity that supports climate-change refugees.

What in tarnation? “No,” the Cowboy says to the pump. “Hell no.”

He marches over to the little store but there’s no one inside, not even room for an attendant. It’s wall-to-wall vending machines. What’s the world coming to? Outside, a car rolls onto one of the plates, and the plate lights up. Of course those are working.

The Cowboy considers asking for help from the car’s driver. It goes against his nature. But maybe the driver’s a local and knows what’s up. Maybe the Cowboy’s using the wrong app. And he needs the gas.

He ambles toward the car, a white coupe turned gray with ash. He pulls down his bandanna and taps on the driver’s side window. There’s nobody in the front seats. He cups his hand to the window and peers into the back.

The car horn blares and he jumps back. The headlights flash.

“God damn it, I’m not trying to steal you,” the Cowboy says.

The car lurches off the plate and flees toward the exit, skittish as a colt.

The Cowboy’s alone at the station. He looks at the gas pump. Pictures shooting it.

He gets back in the truck, fuming. Scrolls his phone for more gas stations. There’s another one forty or so miles down the road. He might could make it. Or he could get there and the pumps could also be locked up with ransomware.

A man can’t be expected stand for this, the Last Cowboy thinks. It’s literally highway robbery. But he can’t risk running out of gas. He has meat to deliver.

He steps out to the truck and waves his phone at the pump.

Welcome back! The minimum donation is now $400. You should have paid the first time!

The Prospector and the Gambler

“Do you want me to play it again?” the AI asks.

Of course the Prospector and the Gambler want to watch the video again, but there’s no time. Footage like this will leak to the public networks any minute. If they’re going to act, the Gambler thinks, they have to act now.

The Prospector has doubts. Even if the video is unaltered, what if it’s just for some movie? What if the body’s a prop?

If it is, the Gambler thinks, it’s a fucking realistic one. The body had depth. Bones. Congealed blood. Removable organs. The question, the Gambler argues, is not whether the video or the body is real or fake. The question is whether it’ll affect THX’s reputation. A real video can look fake and do little damage. A fake video, even a crude fake, will cripple a sterling reputation if it confirms something the public already suspects. The Gambler believes that in this case there are two dueling beliefs in play. It’s Tom Hanks Is a National Treasure versus All Celebrities Are Depraved. The reputation markets exist so you can bet on those beliefs like they’re boxers.

But is this how we want to make our money? the Prospector asks. We like Tom Hanks.

Of course we do, the Gambler retorts. That’s beside the point.

The Gambler changes tack. Look, this film is getting out, no matter what we do. Somebody is going to make money from the almost-sure drop in reputation—why not us?

But it’s just not believable, the Prospector says. Hanks is too beloved for anyone to doubt him for long. And he has all his old charisma. Once he gets back in front of the cameras to explain himself, he’ll win the doubters back. There’ll be a rally, and his reputation will be right back where it started, maybe higher.

Ah, but the gap! the Gambler says, triumphant. Just give us a couple hours. A couple hours to work the doubt, and we’ll make a shit ton of cash.

We’re sure?

Almost certain.

The Gambler lives in almosts. They make money in the tipping points, when Almost Definitely So suddenly becomes Almost Definitely Not, and Not becomes So. The trick is spotting the shift and knowing when to jump sides. Most people pick a side and cling to it. This thoroughbred is unbeatable. California real estate always earns out. You will never leave me. They hang on until popular opinion shifts or their lives are in tatters. Most people, in short, are chalk players. Outright suckers.

The Prospector finally raises their figurative hands in surrender. Fine. Risk our hard-earned money.

The Gambler whoops in excitement. “Arty, what’s the current price on THX?”

“853 per share, down from 858 a half hour ago.”

“Borrow fifteen thousand shares, wherever you can get them,” the Gambler tells the AI. “Then sell them all immediately.”

Arty does not execute the command, but instead expresses concern, per the emotional settings the Gambler and the Prospector specified long ago. “That’s nearly 12.8 million dollars,” Arty says. “Do you really want to do this?”

The Prospector is distressed. If the stock goes down, they’ll make a profit, yes, and if the stock goes up, they’ll lose money—but there’s no limit to the upper price of a stock. If it goes way up, they’ll lose their proverbial shirt, and perhaps also pants and underwear—the entire proverbial wardrobe.

Arty makes a polite throat-clearing noise.

“Confirmed,” the Gambler says. “Let’s short America’s Dad.”

The Country Doctor

The Doctor fights the urge to hold her daughter’s hand as they walk. The girl’s never been a fan of physical contact, but if she were a couple years younger the Doctor would have held onto her just to keep her on the sidewalk. The smoke has become a dense, sandpaper fog. Trees materialize in their path. Ghost houses seem to drift forward like the hulls of great ships, their top floors lost in ashy clouds. The sun’s been reduced to a faint orange haze—and yet it’s still brutally hot.

The Doctor says, “How did it get bad so fast?”

“Adults ruined the planet,” her daughter says.

“I mean since this morning.”

“The wind’s shifted. The Belden fire’s just joined with the Meadows fire.” This is a weather report from two hundred miles north. The girl’s wearing her Miss Motes above her filter mask, but the Doctor suspects she’s keeping them on not because she wants to engage more effectively with humans but so she can watch the screens while she walks. She’s inherited an obsessive streak, and today her monofocus is trained on the forest fires burning near their former home.

“Don’t worry,” the Doctor says. “Fire season comes every year. The Mods will be fine.”

She wishes she felt as confident about her patient, Colleen. If the woman is out in this heat and smoke, it could kill her.

The Doctor’s shirt is ringing. She flicks the sleeve and a voice too soothing to be human thanks her for calling Audi-Volkswagen-Tata. The bot wants to know why she contacted the police first. The Doctor’s annoyed that they know this. Does the police AI gossip with the Audi AI? Or are they one and the same?

“My car’s been stolen,” the Doctor says. Her voice is a little muffled by the mask. “I want to stop it.”

The bot explains that for safety reasons they cannot stop the car while it’s moving, but the primary owner may control many car functions through the app, such as flashing the lights, beeping the horn . . . the list goes on for some time.

“Fine, let me do that, then.”

“Only the primary owner of the car can use those functions.”

“I am the primary owner.”

The bot explains that while she’s a registered owner, she’s not the primary one.

“What are you talking about? I own the title. It’s my car.”

Yes, she owns the physical car, the bot explains, but not the car’s software subscription. And no, the car does not function without a subscription, and the transfer to a new subscriber cannot take place without the consent of the previous owner.

The Doctor screams, hangs up, and screams again.

Her daughter regards her through the Miss Motes.

“That’s an appropriate response to tech support,” the Doctor says.

“The glasses can’t tell if you’re making a joke.”

“I’m dead serious.”

“Noted.”

The Doctor doesn’t believe her ex deliberately sabotaged the car. Her former partner is many things, a lot of them contradictory: brilliant yet obtuse, obsessed with work yet eager for new experiences, emotionally distant yet suddenly effusive, hypercompetitive yet disdainful of status. They were a loving parent except when they forgot they were a parent. The one thing they’re not is deliberately cruel. If the Doctor called them (and managed to get past their fucking AI butler) their ex would no doubt help her out. But Jesus Christ, during the whole damn divorce, they couldn’t remember to turn over a fucking login?

The Doctor needs to calm down, but it’s hard to take a calming breath when she’s wearing a mask and the world is on fire. She walks in silence until the map shows that they’ve reached Colleen’s apartment building. The ash is crusting her nostrils. She takes a long swig of water, then makes her daughter do the same.

“Ready for some old timey doctorin’?” the Doctor says with forced good humor. She hopes the glasses can’t pick up on the falsity. “We’re about to make what the history books refer to as a house call.”

“Yee haw,” the girl says.

The Last Cowboy

The Cowboy’s behind schedule, and he’s pushing the truck hard now to make it to the meat processor before closing time. The engines rev up the mountain. Headlights plow the smoke. He’s mad at himself for driving so cautiously through the valley fog early in the day—that smoke seems like nothing now that he’s in the mountains and hitting the thick stuff. He’s mad at himself for paying the ransom, though he doesn’t know what he could’ve done different. And maybe he’s mad that he took the job at all.

The processor is in a tiny town called Belden, high up on Feather River Highway. The two-lane road’s winding and narrow, sheer, dynamite-blasted rock on one side and a wall of pines on the other. He can’t help but see the trees as latent fuel. California, he suspects, is itching to turn him and his sides of beef into barbecue.

What in hell is he doing out here?

This isn’t the life he wanted. Everything’s too complicated, changing too fast. He was born in the first pandemic and missed most of high school because of the second. Maybe that’s why he never cared for people much. His dad was an HR benefits specialist and his mom was a brand consultant. They were happy, but their lives weren’t for him. He longed to live back in the days of his grandfather, in the 1980s. Grandad had two acres, a gas lawn mower, and three channels on the TV. A man didn’t need more than that.

A shape rushes through the smoke from his left. No, many shapes.

The first body hits the side of his truck. He stomps the brakes and a mass of fur and antlers tumbles over the hood and smashes into his windshield. The airbag explodes—knocks his hands from the wheel, presses him back into the seat. The road drops away under his front wheels and the truck plunges down, then tilts sideways.

The Cowboy’s head strikes the side window, and then there’s a tremendous bang. The truck has smashed into something solid—a tree? Boulder? He stares through the starry windshield. The animal he struck has slid off. He can see nothing but trees and smoke. His ears are ringing.

The driver’s door is jammed, but he climbs up and out through the passenger side. The heat has gotten worse. There’s a sound in the air, a distant roar, like radio static. The sound of a forest burning.

He’s standing in some kind of depression, not quite a ravine, deeper than a ditch. The truck’s leaning on its side. One of the coolers sits ten feet away, ejected from the bed. The lid looks secure.

Well, shit.

There are headlights on the road above him. A car has stopped. A voice calls, “You down there! Is everyone okay?”

The Cowboy starts climbing up the bank. It’s not easy. His eyes are blurry and he’s pulled a muscle in his chest. A trim, white-haired man wearing a mask extends a hand and helps him up.

“A whole herd of deer,” the Cowboy says. “They came out of nowhere.”

“Running from the fire I expect,” the old man says. “You all right? You bumped your noggin.”

The Cowboy touches his forehead, and the fingers come away bloody. He’s coming to terms with new facts. The fire is close, closer than he knew. And his truck and those coolers are not coming out of that ditch without a tow truck.

“Huh,” the Cowboy says. “I guess I’m screwed.”

“You’re still breathing,” the old man says. “Though we should probably get a move on.”

Inside the car, the old man takes off his mask. He’s older than the Cowboy expected, eighty at least. The electric car’s not new, either, but it’s American-made. The old man does his own driving. They head south and downhill, away from the fires. The man tells him his house is the nearest place to stop that’s out of the fire zone. They can patch him up there, and figure out how to get his truck. The Cowboy’s not one for accepting charity from strangers, but this man has a kind, open face, and seems oddly familiar.

The old man turns off the highway onto a one-lane road that snakes down through the trees. He asks where the Cowboy was headed in this weather. The Cowboy’s usually reluctant to talk about his work. There’s a lot of anti-meat sentiment out there. But the driver seems like someone who respects tradition.

“Guess you could say I’m on a cattle drive.” The old man is interested, and asks intelligent questions. The conversation keeps coming back to the Cowboy’s dismay at how fast the old ways have disappeared. Hundreds of years of eating meat, now suddenly it’s a social crime?

“That’s the way it always is,” the old man says. “When I was a young man, there wasn’t any gay marriage. People thought it would never happen. A boy in a dress was something to laugh at on TV. Then suddenly gay folks getting married is not only inevitable, it seems obvious.”

“Well of course anybody can marry anybody else,” the Cowboy says. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Okay then, marijuana. Psychedelics. Assisted suicide. Nobody in my day thought those would be legalized, certainly not in every state.”

“But those are just . . .” There’s a headache growing behind the Cowboy’s eyes, and he’s having trouble ordering his thoughts. “Those are just common sense.”

“It always seems that way after the turning of the tide.”

“I’m talking about something spiritual.” He’s surprised to hear those words come out of his mouth. He’s not the poetic type. “It’s sacred, one life giving itself to feed another. People don’t understand what we’re losing. Plant meat, lab meat, it ain’t the same. It’s soulless. I can sure taste the difference. I bet you can, too.”

The old man gives him a long look. Turns his attention back to the road. “Maybe so,” he says. “Maybe so.”

They’re on an even smaller gravel road now. The Cowboy hadn’t noticed the transition. The drive ends in a large, empty field, the brown grass cut short, smart for fire season. In the center of the field is a sprawling ranch house guarded by a wide apron of cement. The smoke seems thinner here. The afternoon sun a little brighter, hurting his eyes.

At the door the old man says, “I do have some house rules.” He nods at the holster on the Cowboy’s hip. “If you don’t mind.”

The Cowboy doesn’t like this. But a man’s home, and so forth. He surrenders his piece, and the old man puts it in a large plastic box full of gardening tools. Closes the lid.

“I hope you’ll excuse the mess,” the old man says. “I’ve been living alone for a while.”

The Prospector and the Gambler

“820,” Arty says. He’s under orders to call out the THX price every time it changes.

It’s an hour into the game of chicken: the Prospector and the Gambler versus everyone else in the reputation market. The Gambler’s in the chair, watching the big screen, hands gripping the armrests. No way he’s going to touch the keypad early. The Prospector sits in the mental passenger seat, covering his eyes.

“819.”

The Prospector’s sure something is wrong. The price has dropped thirty-four dollars since they sold, but most of that change was in the first twenty minutes. The last forty have been creeping down, sometimes by pennies. The video, it’s clear, is not going to make a difference. Who cares about viral videos anymore?

Arty says, “The county has issued an evacuation order for this area.”

“Never mind that,” the Gambler says. There was an evac order twice a year. “Is the fire more than five miles away?”

“Yes, just barely. However, wind speeds and shearing have increased significantly. Also, the latest THX price has moved up to 825.”

The Prospector yelps. It’s going back up! We hit bottom. Buy back!

Calm down, the Gambler thinks. If they unwound their position now, bought back all the stock they’d sold and returned it to the owners, they’d only keep about $500K of the 12.8 million. The Gambler didn’t make this move to make a lousy 4 percent ROI.

The Gambler asks Arty about the spread of the video, and they’re relieved to hear that it still hasn’t hit the public venues. All this price movement is just the rumor mill getting cranked up to speed. Word’s spreading there’s something up with Tom Hanks, but nobody’s sure what it is. Nobody but the folks in the Chateau Marmont, and they’re not telling the commoners.

“Hold steady,” the Gambler says aloud.

But the Prospector can’t stop worrying. What if Hanks or his handlers know about the video, and take steps to get ahead of it? A preemptive press conference would wipe out all their gains.

These constant interrogations and arguments were exhausting, but it was the only way the Prospector and Gambler had found to manage doubt and anxiety. They’d always had trouble in that department, and the emotional responses of other people were a constant source of confusion. Unfortunately they’d passed this deficit to their daughter. They didn’t necessarily want the girl to go plural, however, so they’d assembled several of Arty’s subsystems and installed them into a pair of glasses—a kind of emotional support AI. Did she still wear them? Did she think of the Mods when she wore them?

“815,” Arty says.

The Gambler’s attention snaps back to the task at hand.

“I just found the video on two public social networks,” the AI says. “And the price just dropped to 792.”

The Gambler whoops. They’d just made another $300K.

“Also,” Arty says, “the nearest fire line is now four miles away.”

“What? You just said it was five!”

“There’s been a sudden increase in—”

The walls beep. The house has just switched from the grid to battery power.

“—wind speed.”

What the hell. They lean back in the chair and look at the ceiling. Come to think of it, there’d been noise leaking into the work wing for the past hour or so. That was unusual, because the room had been aggressively soundproofed. The design goal was to make the world outside their work become invisible and unheard.

And how well has that been working out for us? the Prospector asks snarkily.

“We’re leaving the wing,” the Gambler tells the AI. “Keep giving us updates. We’re not unwinding yet.”

Arty doesn’t answer. The Gambler and the Prospector hurry down a short hallway lined with foam baffles and push through the padded door, into the kitchen. It sounds as if the house is coming apart. The cabin timbers are creaking and moaning. The copper-bottomed tops hanging above the stove clang as if sounding the alarm. The kitchen’s south-facing windows rattle in their frames.

Beyond the windows, the backyard is remarkably clear of smoke, though everything has taken on a yellowish cast. The trees, some of them over thirty feet tall, seesaw violently in the wind. The sky above them is gray with smoke, but tinged red.

The Gambler and the Prospector walk to the living room, and stop in shock before the bay window. The tree line is a wall of flame. The sky above has been transformed in a way that’s difficult to process: the colors and the scale of what they’re seeing seem deeply wrong. They go to the front door and touch the handle. They think: This isn’t smart. But we have to see.

A new mountain has appeared. An inverted mountain, half a mile wide at the top. A thick, churning cone of fire and smoke. The fire seems to be thrashing itself into a frenzy. It’s capped by a huge, dark cumulous cloud that cuts off all the light behind it. Lightning flashes inside it.

They hear a rending sound, and jerk back. The roof of their garage suddenly rips free. It’s hauled into the air, flapping, shedding pieces of itself. Then it’s sucked away over the burning trees, into the whirling, fiery mass.

The Country Doctor

The door to Colleen’s apartment is unlocked—not a good sign. The Doctor calls the woman’s name several times, gets no answer. She steps inside, and her daughter follows her.

The living room is a warm space the Doctor’s appreciated in the virtual visits. The bookshelves, she can see now, are filled with biophysics textbooks, Colleen’s former profession. A foldable table is set up in front of an armchair, on a plate are the remains of breakfast sandwich. She’s still feeding herself, so that’s good.

The Doctor tells her daughter to wait here. The girl’s staring at her feet—which means she’s really staring at the inside of her glasses. Her hands are clenching and unclenching, a sign of anxiety.

“Don’t worry,” the Doctor says. “This will just take a minute.”

The Doctor walks to the bedroom, still calling out Colleen’s name. She doesn’t want to spook her. The bed’s unmade. The attached bathroom is empty. She spots Colleen’s blue wristband in the sheets. It’s designed to be very hard to remove. She pictures Colleen outside, in the smoke, trying to make it to the university in time for her class.

She hears a splash. “Colleen?”

She walks into the bathroom, pulls aside the shower curtain. Colleen’s sitting in the tub, water up to her chest, watching a video on a tablet. The old woman looks up. “Did you see this thing with Tom Hanks?”

The Doctor kneels beside the tub. The water’s cold. “How long you been in here, honey?” She helps the woman up, dries her off. Then she finds clothes and underwear in the dresser.

Colleen smiles apologetically. “I’m sorry, I can’t quite recall your name.”

“We talk on screen every week. You call me Doc.”

“Oh! MD or PhD?”

As the Doctor helps her into her clothes, they chat about Colleen’s “current” research, which concerns fusion proteins and something called onco-condensates. The Doctor wonders why Colleen left Indiana and decided to retire out west. Why is she living alone? Who’s going to take care of her? The progression of dementia is not linear, and Lewy body dementia attacks both the mind and body. She could be fine one week, and three days later be unable to feed herself. The collapse—and there was always a collapse—never failed to surprise the family.

The Doctor is pulling socks over one of Colleen’s blue-veined feet when the woman says, “Oh, hello there. Are you all right?”

The Doctor’s daughter is standing in the doorway, glasses and mask still on. Her hands are fists. Tears run down her cheeks.

The Doctor goes to her. “What is it? Tell me what happened.”

“I’m too late,” the girl wails. “I’m too late.”

“What are you talking about? Too late for what?”

The girl takes off her glasses. Her eyes are filled with tears. She shows her mother the insides of the glasses.

The Doctor stares. “What is that?”

“A tornado,” the girl says. “A fire tornado.”

The Last Cowboy

As they enter the old man’s house, a telephone is ringing. It sounds like the phone in the Cowboy’s granddad’s house, the metal clanging of a real bell. The old man ignores it, says they’ll call back if it’s important. The ringing stops and the Cowboy’s grateful. He’s feeling woozy.

The old man moves some books from a long couch and tells him to take a load off, don’t worry about bleeding on the cushions. A joke. Then he walks through a doorway at the end of the room and pulls shut a pocket door. The door’s painted a lustrous red.

The Cowboy’s head falls back. It’s a big room, with a high, peaked ceiling and exposed timbers. Shelves line every wall, and many of them hold typewriters. There must be thirty in the room. Small electrics in pastel colors. Big clunky manuals with round keys. One of the machines sits in a wooden box, hinged open; it looks like some kind of mechanical computer, with exposed gears and dials. The air is cool. He wonders how rich this old man is.

The red door slides open. The old man walks out holding a tray. He sets it on a table, closes the door, and picks it up again. An awkward, slow dance. Then he carries it to the coffee table beside the couch.

The tray holds a pitcher of iced water, a glass, and white plastic first aid kit. The old man pours the glass full. The Cowboy downs it, though the cold makes his skull ache. The old man laughs and refills the glass.

The Cowboy asks if the man has a dog.

“Pardon?”

The Cowboy nods at the red door. “I used to have to do that. Keep the door closed to keep the dog in.”

“No.” The old man frowns. “That’s just . . . habit.”

The phone starts ringing again, in some far room. “Only a couple people have this number,” the old man says. “I suppose I better take it. You sit tight, okay? I’ll be right back.” The Cowboy realizes that the old man must have an actual landline, with a receiver that sits in the same place all the time.

The old man takes his time. It’s another five rings until the Cowboy hears him pick up the receiver. There’s a pause, and then the old man says something, his tone disbelieving. The Cowboy can’t catch the words. Then the old man’s voice turns angry. It’s the first hint of grit in his affable demeanor. A moment later a door shuts, cutting off the sound of the conversation.

The Cowboy gets to his feet. Steadies himself. He’s still light-headed, but the water has helped. He looks at the red door. Glances back. There’s no sign of the old man.

He walks to the door and slides it open.

It’s a spacious, old-fashioned kitchen. The air smells of something dank, and fruity. The only light coming from the window over the sink. There’s something large lying on the countertop, under a tablecloth. It’s long and thick as a quarter of beef. But the shape is all wrong.

The Cowboy bunches the tablecloth in his fist and pulls it off.

It’s a human body, carved apart. The Cowboy’s not a squeamish man. He’s worked a slaughterhouse, and walked the floors of meat processors. But he’s never seen this. His stomach threatens to expel his lunch and he puts an arm across his mouth.

The chest has been sliced open, and the flesh has fallen away from the ribs, exposing white bones of the ribcage. Most of the organs have been removed.

The Cowboy hears a sound behind him. He reaches for his holster, then remembers that the gun is outside.

“Well,” the old man says. “This is awkward.”

The Prospector and the Gambler

The Prospector and the Gambler stare out their front door, paralyzed by the undeniable fact of the firestorm. Then push the door closed. The wind tries to shove it back open.

The house isn’t built to withstand a tornado. Certainly not one burning at 2,000 degrees and spinning at 150 miles per hour. There’s no basement. No Aunty Em cellar. And the shallow crawlspace is crammed with house batteries and cables.

They need to run, but there’s also no car—that left with their wife and daughter months ago. It was on the to-do list to buy a new vehicle, but they hadn’t felt the need for one. Groceries were delivered weekly. Every other material need was brought to them by FedEx and UPS.

The Prospector and the Gambler shout, “Arty, call 911!” There’s no answer. “Arty?”

They run to the nearest screen, which is built into the armchair. The screen is live, so the electricity is still on, but there’s no connection to the internet. What the hell? Their fiber line runs underground. Did the firefighters cut it while making a firebreak? Or did the entire hub go up in flames?

It’s the Gambler who remembers that they haven’t unwound their position. They’re still on the hook with fifteen thousand borrowed shares.

The Prospector tells them to shut the fuck up. They’re in this mess because they weren’t paying attention to the right things. Have you never heard of Maslow’s hierarchy? The Prospector grabs control of the screen and tries to switch over to wideband cell coverage. There are towers on the other side of the ridge, so surely one of them has survived being incinerated . . .

But no. No bars.

Reception has always been shitty here in the hills, but with the fiber line there was never any need to rely on wideband—or satellite backup, or microwaves, whatever carrier pigeon technology the locals used to rely on.

This no time to panic, the Gambler thinks.

There’s no better time! the Prospector answers. We’re going to die here!

Something heavy crashes through the bay window. Glass explodes across the room. They throw up their arms, too late, and when they bring them down their wrought-iron patio table is in the room with them.

Maybe if we can get to the road, the Gambler thinks, we can pick up some bars and call for help.

The tornado is heading straight for us. We can’t outrun that.

Do you hear . . . a beeping?

The Prospector and the Gambler look around. Is it the smoke alarm? No. It’s coming from outside. The sound is very insistent.

They walk hesitantly to the front door, which is shaking in its frame. Amazingly, the doorbell cam is still working. On the small screen, they see that a white car has pulled up onto the lawn. It’s only six feet from the front door, and its headlights are flashing on and off. The horn blares for three, maybe four seconds. Then three quick beeps. It’s as if it’s talking in Morse code.

The Prospector and the Gambler think, Is that Audi Murphy?

The Last Cowboy

The old man puts up his hands and takes a step forward. “Easy there, big fella. It’s not what you think.”

“Stay where you are,” the Cowboy says. He’s pretty sure he can take the old man. Unless he’s hiding a weapon.

“Take a close look at that thing,” the old man says. “Remind you of anybody?”

The Cowboy doesn’t want to turn his back on the old man. But he steps to the side so he can see the corpse’s face. The young man does look familiar. Even dead, there’s something about those eyes, that curly black hair.

“Holy shit,” the Cowboy says. “It’s the guy from Bosom Buddies.”

The old man winces. “That’s what you remember? Never mind. You can see it’s me, right? Somebody sent it as a joke.”

“Why’s he holding a statue?”

“That’s an Oscar. It’s not real. The whole thing’s not real. Look—” The old man steps toward the counter and the Cowboy makes a fist.

“I’m going to move slowly,” the old man says. “Which means pretty much my usual speed.” He reaches for the hand of the corpse, pulls up one of its fingers, and bends it back. It breaks free with a snap.

“Stop that!” the Cowboy says.

“Watch.” The old man puts the finger in his mouth and bites down.

The Cowboy shoves the old man against the wall, and grabs the corpse finger from him. It’s cold.

The old man’s in pain but trying to speak. The Cowboy takes out his phone and says, “I’m calling the police.”

“It’s vegetables,” the old man says.

“What?”

“Take a bite. It’s supposed to taste like meat, but you can tell the difference.”

The Cowboy looks at the finger. The end, where it was snapped off, is pink with a white bone protruding. He sniffs it. It doesn’t smell like any kind of meat he knows of.

The old man nods. “Go on.”

The Cowboy bites down. Chews. “God damn,” he says. “Tastes like ribeye. Ribeye and . . . celery.”

“I know, right?”

And then the Cowboy bursts out laughing. “I thought you—I thought you was a—!”

And now the old man’s laughing too. “You aren’t the only one. It’s all over the internet.”

The Cowboy reaches into the body cavity. “May I?”

“I can’t finish this all this myself.” And that starts them laughing again.

A bit later the old man asks for a favor. His publicists are mad, and really want him to address the so-called controversy ASAP. Would the Cowboy mind using that phone there to take a video? He really needs to address the public.

The Cowboy says, “It would be my honor.”

The Country Doctor

The Doctor’s daughter is pacing Colleen’s bedroom. Things have been happening fast for the last half hour. Finally the girl lets out a long “Yesssss,” which is her version of her other parent’s we-just-scored whoop.

“Are they okay?” the Doctor asks.

“The Mods just got into cell range. They’re calling. Hold on.” The girl’s wearing her Miss Motes.

Colleen says, “I don’t know what’s going on.” She’s said this several times.

“My daughter hacked my car,” the Doctor says. “And sent it to rescue my ex.” The Doctor doesn’t try to explain the plural pronouns.

Her daughter says, “Don’t worry, Mods, I already put in the route. It stays clear of the fire.” A pause. “Well, here. Where else would you go?” Another pause. “That’s okay. Mom has a job. She’s good at it.”

“Who are the Mods again?” Colleen asks.

The girl looks over the top of her glasses at her mother. “Okay, they’ll be here in a couple hours. They’re broke now.”

“What the what?”

The Doctor’s daughter continues to talk to the Mods while the Doctor makes some faux chicken salad for Colleen to eat for supper. Then they put on their masks, and Colleen insists on shaking hands with the daughter. “Thank you for visiting,” the woman says. “Come back any time.”

The smoke is just as thick on the way home, but the day seems to be cooling off. Still, they’ll both be sweaty messes. And the Doctor has a dozen VHVs to get through before the guests arrive.

Her daughter says, “You still love the Mods, don’t you?”

The Doctor sighs through her mask. “I’ll always love them, I suppose.”

“Will you get back together?”

“No! Definitely not.”

The girl stops walking. She adjusts her glasses and says, “Look at me. And take down your mask.”

The Doctor rolls her eyes, but does it.

The girl says, “Definitely not? Or almost definitely not?”

The Doctor thinks, if there’s one thing she’s learned from her ex, it’s that there’s no such thing as definitely. Definite is for chalk players and outright suckers.

“Very close to almost definitely not,” the Doctor says.

The girl listens to a murmur in her glasses, and tilts her head. “I’ll take it.”