NULL AND RISING

  Book One: Sovereign Embryo

  Chapter 4: The Malaysian Problem

  Ana had left on a Thursday.

  He remembered this not because Thursdays were significant but because he had worked that day and come home to find the flat in a state of considered reduction — things removed with the precision of someone who had thought carefully about what was theirs and what wasn't, who had not taken anything that could be argued over and had not left anything that would require a conversation. Her shelf in the bathroom: empty. Her half of the wardrobe: empty. The kitchen: unchanged, because the kitchen had always been his, she had never cooked in it with any enthusiasm and they had both known this and built a routine around it without discussing it.

  She had left a note on the kitchen counter. Three sentences. He had read it, read it again, folded it once, and put it in the drawer with the takeaway menus and the spare tram card and the other things that did not have a specific place. He had not reread it since. He did not need to. He had a good memory for things he had read, even things he would have preferred not to remember.

  The note said: I think we both know this stopped working a while ago. I'm not angry and I don't think you are either. Take care of Teddy.

  The last sentence was the one that had stayed with him. Not because it was unkind — it wasn't, it was practical, it was the kind of thing Ana said when she had thought something through properly. But because it was accurate. She had understood, correctly, that the most pressing logistical concern she was leaving behind was the cat.

  Teddy had been hers, technically. She had found him — small, grey, rain-wet — outside a supermarket on a Tuesday and brought him home with the decisiveness of a woman who made choices quickly and did not relitigate them. She had named him, vaccinated him, established his feeding schedule and his territorial boundaries and the specific rules about which surfaces were permitted. Then she had left for Kuala Lumpur on a seven-month placement that had become open-ended in the way of things that are going well, and the cat had remained, and the cat had looked at Igor with the expression of a creature that had assessed the situation and concluded that Igor would do.

  This was, Igor had come to understand, high praise from Teddy.

  The thing about Ana was that it had not been a bad relationship. This was the part that was hardest to explain, in the abstract, to anyone who asked — which was almost no one, because Igor did not have the kind of friends you explained relationships to, but occasionally Benny asked questions and occasionally Igor answered them with partial honesty. It had not been a bad relationship. It had been a relationship that had run its course in the quiet way of rivers that reach flat ground and slow and eventually stop moving.

  They had met at a language exchange event — she was learning German, he was the German speaker, which was an inversion neither of them had initially found funny and both found funny later. She was Malaysian, a data analyst, in Leipzig on a two-year contract with a logistics company. She was precise and organized and had a dry humor that expressed itself rarely and landed well when it did. She did not need conversation to fill space, which was the quality Igor had noticed first and valued most.

  For two years it had worked. They occupied the flat together with a compatibility that was more about parallel routines than shared ones — she ran in the mornings, he ran in the evenings; she worked late, he worked early; she read on the couch, he read in bed; they ate dinner together four nights a week and were comfortable in the other three nights' silence. It was not the love that people wrote songs about. Igor had never been confident that the love people wrote songs about was a real and reliable phenomenon rather than a selective account of the good parts of something that also contained a lot of Tuesday evenings doing nothing in particular.

  What they had was real. Functional. Warm in a low-temperature way that suited them both.

  And then the Kuala Lumpur placement had come up, and she had told him about it over dinner with the specific tone of someone who had already decided but was offering the conversation out of courtesy, and he had said that sounds like a good opportunity because it did, and she had looked at him across the table for a moment with an expression he had not been able to fully read and said yes, I think so.

  She went. They video-called. The calls became shorter. The silences in the calls became longer and less comfortable and more like the silences of two people who were running out of shared context — the city she was in was not his city, the people she worked with were not his people, the life she was building was not a life that had him in it except as a face on a screen twice a week and then once a week and then when they got around to it.

  He had not been sad, exactly. He had been accurate. He could see what was happening and he could see that it was happening to both of them and that neither of them was doing it deliberately and that this made it neither better nor worse, simply true.

  The note had been the correct ending. He had thought this when he read it and still thought it now.

  What he had not anticipated was Teddy.

  Not the practicality of Teddy — feeding schedules and vet appointments and the question of who watched him if Igor went anywhere, which Igor rarely did, so this was mostly theoretical. The practicality was simple. What he had not anticipated was the company.

  He was not a person who had ever thought of himself as needing company. He had been alone for large portions of his life and had managed this without difficulty, had in fact preferred it to the specific friction of people who required more maintenance than they were worth. He was not antisocial. He was selective, which was different. He had Benny at work and Schreiber at football and his mother on Sundays and this was sufficient.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  And then there was Teddy.

  Teddy who was in the hallway when he arrived home. Teddy who slept on the bed without asking permission and could not be moved by anything short of a direct and sustained physical intervention, which never worked because Teddy simply relocated two feet and reassumed the same position. Teddy who sat on whatever Igor was reading with the calm certainty of a creature that had decided attention was a resource he was entitled to manage. Teddy who watched him with those copper-green eyes in the way of something that was paying close and continuous attention to the data.

  He had not told anyone that he talked to the cat. This seemed like the kind of information that was nobody's business. He talked to Teddy in the evenings when the flat was quiet and the day had generated things that needed processing — not problems exactly, just the small accumulation of observations that had nowhere to go. Teddy received these without comment, which was more useful than it sounded. There was something in the act of putting a thought into words, even to an audience that could not respond, that clarified it. Igor had found this out by accident and now relied on it.

  Teddy's responses, when he gave them, were limited to: sitting, slow-blinking, changing position, leaving the room, or staring with an intensity that felt, improbably, evaluative. Igor had catalogued these responses over time and assigned them rough meanings based on context. He was aware this was anthropomorphism. He did it anyway.

  On Sunday — the Sunday before everything changed, the last Sunday that would be a normal Sunday for quite some time — Igor called his mother.

  She answered on the third ring, which meant she had been near the phone but not waiting. His mother did not wait for things in ways that were visible. She had opinions about showing need.

  "Igor." Not a question. Just the name, in the way she said it, which had its own specific sound — Croatian, warm in a compressed way, the warmth present but contained.

  "Mama."

  They talked for twenty-two minutes. This was on the longer end of their calls. She told him about the neighbor's new fence, which was ugly and too close to the property line and had generated a discussion that the village was still processing. She told him about her knee, which was better. She told him about a cousin's wedding he had not attended and she had represented them both at and which had been, she said, about what you'd expect, which meant it had been fine and slightly boring and the food had been adequate. He told her about the match on Saturday — two goals, clean sheet, Schreiber's sentence that had not been finished. She listened to this with the attention of a woman who had watched her son play football for twenty years and understood it was not really about football.

  "You're still playing," she said.

  "Yes."

  A pause. In the pause: the question she did not ask, which was the question she had never asked directly, which was why, which they both knew the answer to and neither of them needed to say out loud.

  "Good," she said.

  He sent the monthly transfer after the call. He looked at his account balance afterward with the habit of someone who had spent years when looking at the balance was a small act of courage. It was fine. It was always fine now, which was a thing he had worked for and achieved and which had not produced the feeling he had assumed it would produce. He had assumed it would produce relief. What it produced was the absence of a specific anxiety, which was not the same thing but was real and useful.

  He put his phone down. Teddy was on the windowsill, watching the courtyard.

  "She asked about you," Igor said.

  Teddy did not turn around. His tail moved once.

  "I told her you were fine." He paused. "I'm not sure fine is the right word for you. I'm not sure what the right word is."

  Teddy turned then. Looked at Igor with the evaluative look. Held it for three seconds. Then turned back to the window.

  Igor went to make tea.

  Monday morning. The last Monday.

  He rode the tram to work. He processed tickets. He ate his bread at the window. The pigeon was not on the pavement — different day, different pigeon, different configuration of the ordinary. Jana asked him about a client complaint and he resolved it and she thanked him and he said no problem because there hadn't been one. Benny had found a new article about the signals: the count was now sixty-one cities, and the academic language in the reporting had shifted from unusual to anomalous to, in one paper from a geophysics institute in Stockholm, without terrestrial explanation.

  Without terrestrial explanation.

  Igor read this on Benny's phone and handed it back.

  "Without terrestrial," Benny repeated, as if the word needed saying again to be real.

  "I read it."

  "That means they think it's—"

  "I know what it means."

  Benny looked at him. "You're not freaking out."

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  Igor considered this. The honest answer was that freaking out had never appeared to him as a useful response to information he could not act on. The information was what it was. Responding to it emotionally before there was anything to be done about it was a waste of energy he might need later. This was not a philosophy he had developed deliberately. It was just what he did.

  "It doesn't help," he said.

  Benny thought about this. "That's either very sane or very concerning."

  "Probably both," Igor said, and went back to his tickets.

  That evening he sat on the couch with Teddy and read until ten. The LitRPG novel — the protagonist had just been told by the System that his class was undefined, that the algorithm had no prior record of the combination of feats he had performed in the classless period, that what came next was genuinely unknown. The protagonist received this information and felt, the narration said, a specific and unfamiliar thing that it took him a moment to identify as hope.

  Igor read this sentence twice.

  He closed the book and looked at the ceiling.

  Outside, the hum continued in sixty-one cities. Teddy pressed against his leg and was warm and real. Igor thought about Ana's note — take care of Teddy — and thought that he had, that he was, that this was one instruction he had followed without difficulty.

  He thought about the word his mother had used. Good. When he told her he was still playing.

  He thought about the Stockholm paper. Without terrestrial explanation.

  He set his alarm for 7:15.

  He did not sleep for a long time.

  — ? —