The address Todd gave Lydia is over in the Village, in one of the pedestrianized streets where the buildings have crept forward in recent years, pop-up establishments having opened on the sidewalks and never popped down, eventually becoming incorporated into the architecture. The structures are untidy and feel like they’re just going to grow unchecked and become entangled like ivy.
Lydia has to pass through a shoe shop to reach the apartment block beyond: she fends off an assistant who insists she has the perfect pair for her, then goes through the doorway at the back and into the lobby. The block no longer has elevators—they’ve been removed and the elevator shaft knocked through to create more apartments—so Lydia must climb the stairs to the fifth floor. As she does so she passes a lot of people hanging around in clusters: it’s not clear to her whether they live in the apartments, or in some other place, or on the stairs. Through a haze of cannavape Lydia glances at their faces, trying not to attract their attention, and calls up Jene’s student idee picture, looking for a match.
There’s this one girl slumped in the corner of the hallway on the third floor, eyes closed but not asleep, trying to participate in a conversation between two dudes who are ignoring her. Her hair is longer and messier than in the idee, but there’s something around the shape of her mouth and nose. It could be …
Lydia stops as she passes the girl and leans down. “Jene?”
The girl’s eyes open and immediately Lydia sees they’re more closely set than Jene’s. It’s not her. The girl looks up at Lydia, puzzled. “You talking to me?”
The dudes stop talking and stare at Lydia.
Lydia straightens up. “Yeah sorry, I thought you were someone else.” Before the sentence is finished she’s walking quickly on. As she ascends she can hear them laughing and mocking her accent and asking who the fuck Jene is. Lydia arrives at apartment 23 and knocks on the door, really hoping someone lets her inside so she doesn’t have to walk back past those people: if she can stay awhile they might be gone when she goes down.
The person who answers the door is not Jene either, so that’s not a great start. She’s a young woman about the same age as Jene, a little shorter than Lydia: she has dark bobbed hair and porcelain skin that’s kind of doughy. She wears a flimsy printed-lace cardigan over a minidress and holds a glass of red wine.
“Yeah?” she says.
“I’m looking for Jene Connor—a friend of hers said she might be here.”
“Todd?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a friend of Todd’s?”
“No no,” Lydia says, “I just went to her old apartment at Liberty View and he was there.”
Lydia suspected this was the answer the young woman wanted to hear, and she’s correct. The young woman smirks. “He still lives in that dump?” She speaks with a haughty East Coast drawl. Lydia suspects she might be quite posh, but she’s never quite sure with Americans—posh is different here. (She decides she will record this one for her collection.)
“He seems very unhappy, if it pleases you to hear that.”
The young woman nods. “It does, it does. But I haven’t seen Jene for a few days, I’m sorry.”
“Then she has been here?”
“She’s been crashing here, yeah, more than anywhere else. How come you’re looking for her?”
Lydia considers deploying her story about being from the university again, but something tells her to play this one straighter. This woman isn’t going to be comparing notes with Todd, so Lydia’s free to invent something new. “I’m worried about her. I haven’t seen her for a while and she’s been sending me weird messages.”
A weary look crosses the young woman’s face. “That figures. How d’you know her?”
“From NYNU.” Lydia’s guess is this woman will have gone to a classier institution than NYNU, somewhere they don’t give out degrees to tourists and the professors don’t give interviews to conspiracy theorists. “My name’s Lydia.”
“I’m Ondine. Would you like to come in?”
Lydia accepts the invitation and steps inside. Ondine’s apartment is wood-paneled and the rooms are small and filled with thrift-store junk. Ondine moves a pile of vintage magazines from the ’90s and ’00s off a chair and invites Lydia to sit.
“Can I get you a drink?” Ondine asks, putting her glass on the table.
Lydia accepts, feeling this will make her seem more congenial, but resolves to stop at one. Trying to do stuff while drunk is what got her into this mess.
While Ondine turns to the apartment’s galley kitchen and searches for another glass, Lydia takes a moment to look around. There’s a workspace at the opposite end of the room: a large industrial printer, surrounded by semirecognizable common objects, all of them old-fashioned to some degree and altered in some way. An old laptop computer with a creature bursting from its screen. A chair with human feet. A lamp whose bulb is choked with flowers. When Ondine returns with the glass, she sees Lydia looking and asks, “You like them?”
Lydia’s not a hundred percent sure what they are, but Ondine obviously wants the answer to be yes, so that’s the answer Lydia gives.
“I look for old printplans in archives,” says Ondine, handing Lydia her drink and sitting opposite, “stuff that’s like out of copyright or made by dead companies, and I go into the code and manipulate it, and then print it. And these are the results.”
“Cool,” says Lydia, but now she’s worrying that if Ondine moves in art circles, it’s possible she’ll recognize Lydia: perhaps not straightaway, but it might click for her. Lydia doesn’t remember having met this woman at any openings or art school exhibitions, and certainly hasn’t made a note of her. While Ondine explains about her process and how she destroys all her modded printplans after printing the final copy so each work is unique, Lydia runs a facerec to see if Ondine is in any of her stored images. She’s not there but people can block themselves on those things. Hopefully Ondine is either a complete dilettante or a fierce outsider, entirely uninvolved in the scene.
“So,” says Ondine, “what sort of things did Jene message you about?”
Lydia has no quick answer for this, so she covers by sipping her wine, which is the strong stuff they make over in Jersey: they’d never serve anything like this at the receptions Lydia goes to. She’s missed cheap booze. “Oh, they were pretty incoherent really,” she says, which seems a plausible catchall reply.
Ondine nods. “Sounds about right.”
But Lydia sees she’s missed a trick, and adds: “But she often mentioned the Logi, actually. Like, weird rambling messages about them.”
Ondine nods more vigorously. “She talks about them a lot. There was a stretch a few months ago where she wouldn’t go out, she was convinced they’d hired someone to, I dunno … eliminate her or whatever?”
“Wow.”
“I tried telling her it seemed highly unlikely. Like, she’s not that important? I mean, I didn’t say that but I said it in a, you know, more sensitive way, I forget exactly how I said it.”
“I didn’t realize she’d got so bad.”
“It was hard for me to do my work, y’know, in such a small space, because she was here all the time, just reading and downloading stuff and inking it and leaving piles of it everywhere. I sort of hinted I needed her out of my way for a while. I feel bad, but she needs help. Like, real help.”
“Todd said something similar.”
Ondine rolls her eyes. “Todd doesn’t give a fuck about anything except being right.”
“Where is she now?”
“She said if I needed some space it was cool and she could crash with other friends. Thing is,” Ondine says, rubbing her right eye, “usually I’d expect her to message to ask when she can come back to stay. Seems like she feels safer here, for some reason.…” She throws up the hand that was rubbing her eye, making a gesture of resignation, and Lydia notices how graceful and fluid it is: she moves like a dancer. “Last thing she sent was just a picture of a duck she saw in the park on Saturday morning, and I replied to her like, nice duck!, and I was expecting her to ask if she could come back, but nothing.…”
Saturday morning: the day of the conference. Lydia tells herself this is not, in itself, meaningful. Just because she wants it all to fit together doesn’t mean it does.
“Have you tried to get in touch with her since then?” Lydia asks.
Ondine looks at the floor. “No and I know that’s bad. I’ve been worried but I didn’t want to reach out because if she’s OK I don’t want to bring her back too soon because I need a break. So I told myself she’d be fine, she’s not my problem, she can look after herself.” She taps her glasses. “I’ll ping her now.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“If she responds we can go find her right away. I mean, if you want to.”
“That’d be great. What do you think might have happened?”
Ondine shrugs, picks up her scroll, idly unfurls it and lets it snap closed again. Its back skin is like a black lace handkerchief, the kind of thing a Victorian widow would cry into at a funeral; when she unfurls it a puff of holographic glitter rises from the screen. She opens and closes it over and over for a minute or so before she speaks again, and in that time Lydia learns the value of being silent instead of asking another question, because sometimes people will fill that silence of their own accord. “I don’t know,” Ondine says eventually. “Something stupid. To herself, or to someone else … I mean, she never hurt anyone before,” she adds hurriedly. “I don’t wanna make out she was a psycho or anything. But if she stopped caring about what happened to her, y’know…” She looks down at her open scroll and summons an image from it, then holds up the scroll for Lydia to see.
The image is a loop, showing Ondine with her arm around a young woman with hooded eyes and sharp features: her dark, springy, curly hair half obscures Ondine’s face. The woman is Jene, of course, but Lydia has to look closely to recognize her as the person from the student idee. In that picture she looked plainer and more withdrawn, her hair more wavy and lank, but maybe that was just down to bad lighting or different filters or a hangover on the day the idees were being done, because here Lydia sees an image of someone livelier and more confident. Jene and Ondine are in the park on a winter’s day, the air just about cold enough for their breath to fog, and they’re enjoying the novelty of it. The loop is almost seamless but you can see the join where one breath dissipates and another (in truth, the same breath repeated) begins. They both look utterly untroubled: but then, this is just a moment. Anyone can forget their troubles in a moment.
Lydia doesn’t ask for a copy of the loop—it seems too personal—but she makes sure to remember Jene can also look like this. And Lydia feels she ought to remember it anyway: this is the first thing that’s made her see Jene as a person, rather than an absence, or a puzzle, or a solution.
Lydia hands the scroll back and asks Ondine if she can use the bathroom.
Lydia doesn’t particularly need to use the bathroom, but she wants to have a look around. She’s not sure what she’s looking for: if nothing else it’s fascinating to see an ordinary New Yorker’s apartment, as she never usually gets to go in any. She wonders if Ondine owns this place—if not she’s certainly bedded herself in. Every scrap of wall space seems to be used for storage or decoration.
Lydia enters the bathroom and sits on the toilet. A pile of fruit boxes filled with untidy stacks of white paper has been left in the opposite corner. She recalls what Ondine said about Jene inking things off, and she reaches for the top sheet and reads it.
It’s the press release for a strategy game, like the ones her mum plays: it’s called Take Back the Night and is set in a dystopian future where an entire city has been seized by a criminal gang. You play a member of a civilian defense group sworn to succeed where the authorities failed (it says here) and interact with real players and/or ayaies in a co-op to defeat the gang. The document runs to several pages, and after opening with a breathless description of its scenario and accolades for other games by the same developer, it settles into a dry list of facts and figures about downloads and engagements, game-hours clocked up by players, recognition factor, in-game sales made, etc. The press release is dated six months ago, but Lydia makes a quick search and can find no reference to the game, only a song of the same title by someone called Justin Timberlake.
Lydia peels more sheets off the pile. There’s a lot of this. It can’t have been cheap, inking it all off. Under the press release she finds reams of chat which seems to be between the game’s programmers—far too much to read but lots of it self-evidently mundane, lists of bugs and suggestions for fixes, comments on design and feedback on narrative, discussion of market research …
Lydia stays in the bathroom long after she’s finished using the toilet, lifting each box aside so she can examine the one underneath. The lower ones seem entirely filled with inkouts of raw code. Lydia knows very little about coding—she dropped it after Year 11 and what they taught her is probably out of date (the school’s computers certainly were)—but could this be the code for Take Back the Night, or part of it at least? The complete data for a game like this would be impossible to ink off, with all the art, sound and animation files, but what’s on this inkout could be all the actual code—maybe. She’s not sure.
Why ink it off, though? Why ink any of this off?
There’s a knock on the door.
“You OK in there?” asks Ondine.
“Oh—yes,” says Lydia. “I was just…” She wonders whether to claim she’s suffering from some digestive or medical malady. But it’s reasonable to have some curiosity about this stack of paper, she decides, and opens the door. “I got distracted by looking at all this.”
“Oh god,” says Ondine. “I keep meaning to throw it away. I told her if she wanted to keep it she needed to find somewhere else to put it. It’s not safe, having all this paper around—what if it caught fire? You know buildings used to catch fire all the time?”
“Wasn’t that because of cigarettes?”
“Yeah, but the cigarettes needed something to burn, didn’t they? That’s why I keep all this paper in the bathroom, I figure it’s not gonna catch fire in here and if it does, there’s plenty of water to put it out with.”
“So Jene inked all this?”
“Uh-huh.” Ondine picks up some of the papers and leafs through them.
“Did she ever say why?”
“She just said it was important to keep it all in case it got deleted. But it’s just some junk about a game. I didn’t even know my inker worked, I got it from a junk shop because I thought I could mod it into a shoe rack or something.…”
“I’ve … got plenty of space in my apartment. Sorry, I know you’ve only just met me but—”
“I would be overjoyed if you took it away—I sort of can’t bring myself to do anything with it.” Ondine flips through more of the pages but she’s not reading them. “I don’t think this stuff did her any good. It can’t really be important—can it?”