7

Ayaka's eyes were open, and she wanted so desperately for them not to be. She lay in bed, her arms flat at her side, her hands wriggling restlessly. They clenched and unclenched. They kneaded the topsheet. Her fingers drummed against the mattress. An alternating magenta and cyan glow from the holographic advertising outside seeped in around her blackout curtains and danced across the ceiling. Her clothes itched, a loose t-shirt and cotton shorts that had somehow gotten tangled around her while she'd tossed and turned and now felt suffocating. She'd thought she'd been asleep, at least for a little bit. She remembered having a glass of water and lying down and the comfortable nothingness of a dreamless sleep, but now there was something.

Ayaka shut her eyes against the outside world and took a deep breath. "Relax," she whispered. She tried to imagine seeing herself from outside of herself; her face would be set like steel. Her voice would be firm, resolute, commanding. The things she spoke would become true by force of will. When she said relax, there would be relaxation. She could say, "Sleep," and her body would obey. "Stop worrying," and her mind would let go of all its worldly concerns. That was what she wanted.

What she got was the desperate pleas of an anxious parent trying to reason with a child she had no hope of controlling. "Please relax. Please sleep. Please stop worrying. Please."

But there was so much to worry about. On top of her regular work, she was putting in extra hours each day on Mr. Biggins's "special plan". The time and energy he devoted to it went beyond the care he put into his other projects, but he refused to let anything slip past him. Chad was spending more time in the office, too, in anticipation of the big EV-209 presentation, and they'd run into each other a few times in the elevators now. When they did, he liked to buy her breakfast at the company cafeteria, which was always amazing, and they'd talk about the presentation. It felt good to be trusted and depended on, but it was all just so much.

Maybe a quick check-in with her augmentations would show her the best way to sleep. She tapped her right temple and a flood of information filled her brain. The time was 3:27am. The temperature outside was a crisp 79 degrees Freedom Units. Inside it was 67, the RoboCorp standard for optimal rest and recovery during sleep. She'd been asleep for less than four hours, with 13 periods of unrest. Her blood sugar was low. Her heart rate was elevated.

Ayaka groaned. With vital signs like that, she knew the quickest path to sleep was chemical intervention, and so late in the night, that might mean accidentally sleeping through her alarm and being late for work.

She rolled over. She rolled over again. She kicked her legs and screamed into her pillow, but that didn't even make her feel any better. It just made her worry that she might have woken up a neighbor.

Something would help her sleep. Something had to. Tea, maybe. Some sort of herbal tea with nature-derived compounds that would help her relax and let go of her stress. She swung her legs over the side of her bed, and walked with her eyes half-closed over to her Uroyo Fresh! refrigeration unit. The unit chirped happily and the capacitive screen played a short clip of the sun rising over the city. "Good morning, Ayaka Kaneko! Your Uroyo Fresh! premium subscription allows unlimited opens today and every day. What can I prepare for you to surprise and delight you this fine fall morning?"

"Something to help me sleep. Tea. No alcohol," she mumbled, and turned towards the bathroom. Whatever the fridge came up with would be fine.

"Dim lights, please," Ayaka said, and the mirror around her sink obliged her. She saw her reflection and hissed like she'd just stubbed her toe. Her eyes were puffy and dark, the makeup she'd failed to take off before collapsing into bed smeared and smudged across her face. Her shoulder-length black hair looked flat from being unwashed. She didn't even recognize herself.

Well, she could at least do something about the makeup. She turned on the water, let it run for a few moments to a temperature that would be warm enough. She grabbed a bottle of cleanser and a face towel, and scrubbed away the makeup. She looked at herself in the mirror.

Now she didn't look dirty; she just looked exhausted. Still not herself. How much sleep would it take until she looked like herself?

Back at the refrigeration unit, a mug of nondescript tea waited for her in the in-door drink dispenser. It was a touch cold, a bit flavorless for not having steeped properly. She drank it anyway.

The apartment smelled, she realized, as she leaned against the kitchen counter. But not dirty. Just a little stale, stagnant. She'd been eating all her meals at the office lately, and only coming home long enough to shower, sleep, get dressed, and go back. There was something funny about how little time she was spending here, and how it made the apartment feel like less of a retreat from the outside world and more like a boring cage. She didn't even have any posters or art or anything on the walls.

Ayaka thought about the time. 3:43. It was nearly eight at night in Nihon. She could try talking to her parents. She couldn't remember when the last time they'd spoken was, so she figured she was due. But then she imagined her mother's excited voice calling over her father, the two of them realizing what time it was in Cyber City then chastising her for not taking care of herself. Just the thought of it made her temples throb.

It was all pointless. If she couldn't sleep anyway, she might as well do something productive. She should just work. Mr. Biggins had decided to coincide his big announcement with the EV-209 demonstration, and everything had been going fine so far, but that just meant if things went wrong, it'd be so much worse than before. So she should do something. There must be something she could do if she went into the office and logged into her PlayLand terminal there.

No, it was far too early for that. She'd just wind up getting tired on the ride in, work groggily for a few hours, and then be desperate for a nap just when her coworkers were beginning to trickle into the office. Better to do it here, let her body naturally grow exhausted, and take a time-release stim and a nap before heading in.

Ayaka finished her tea, returned to bed, and put on her sensory deprivation headset. She thought about logging in, and the Broma corporate logo filled her vision, the four-armed four-faced god of creation transforming from an outline into a beatific deity. The logo winked, and then Ayaka was Animar, and Animar stood in the doorway of the cliffhouse, a matching raw linen blouse and pant set upon her body.

She was tempted to go through her whole perfect PlayLand start-up routine: diving into the cenote, drying off, breakfast at the cafe. But no, comfort and pleasure could wait. Instead, she turned and walked into the cliffhouse, past the simple entryway with its stone walls and its packed dirt floor, and into her private office.

The room was a riot of clashing styles and designs: stone and clay architecture, ancient Greek vases, Bantu masks, delicate European tea sets, Asian-inspired indoor water features. Every fun and interesting thing she learned existed or had existed in the world was captured here, studiously recreated and displayed for her to enjoy until she could maybe see them in person someday. At least, the ones that still existed. Or weren't kept under armed guard in the secure vaults of a personal collection somewhere.

Animar yawned, shook her head. "Focus," she said to herself. She crossed to her grand wooden desk with its many drawers, and dropped with a grunt into her office chair with its sleek black industrial design. She gestured, scooping her fingers forward and lifting up decisively, drawing forth a keyboard and monitor from the desk's wooden surface. The ritual was wholly unnecessary, of course. She could simply think and the UI she'd designed would appear before her. But she liked the aesthetics of it all. This was a serious space, where serious things happened.

Like missing anomalous movement alerts from hours ago.

"Fuck," Animar hissed. A blinking yellow exclamation mark filled the center of her monitor. She opened it without reading the summary, her mind aware of the message's contents before her eyes could read it: somebody had been nosing around the warehouse at RoboCorp's off-site campus.

She looked more closely. "Off-hours access, 12:51am: RoboCorp II Plaza - Loading Bay 6. IDs 13091a and 58790b." She cross-checked the IDs and saw that they'd been manually generated and assigned to outside contractors earlier in the week. She pulled up the security feed and played back the tape. Two men in Uroyo Move! uniforms and caps, one of them taller and the other shorter. They passed through the camera's field of view and left.

Animar went through the logs, checked the ID numbers and the security feed. There they were entering the building at 12:45am, the tall one carrying a single small box and heading towards robot storage with it. The shorter one had a hand truck stacked with three identical cardboard boxes. Animar zoomed in and read the labels.

"...Brazil nuts in shells?"

Animar scrubbed through the footage. The short one looked around for a place to drop off the nuts and did so without touching anything else. The tall one walked out of frame with his package and came back without it. Animar clicked through the different cameras and finally found one that showed him setting the small box in the "To Be Installed" section of robot storage. He didn't mess with anything either.

Animar sat back in her chair and stared into space for a moment. She thought it through, and it all made sense: with Mr. Biggins moving up the announcement, Chad's presentation, and the corporate luncheon, there were bound to be last-minute and after-hours deliveries. The badges were legit. They'd probably even been created by an executive, since they had a manual creation signature and not an automatic one.

Maybe even Mr. Biggins himself had made them. She'd seen for herself how hands on he was with the project, after all.

Animar exhaled and rubbed at her temples. So it was nothing. Fine. But how had she missed the alert? It should have woken her up in her sleep. She'd been so thorough in prompting the security system that she'd gotten dozens of these false negatives just in the past 48 hours - weight discrepancies attributable to mice. Motion sensors activated by dust floating in the breeze. Rishab had warned her about this, about going overboard. When she'd described the redundancies and failsafes she'd put into place, he'd just arched an eyebrow at her and shrugged. "If you think it's necessary," he'd said.

Well, maybe it hadn't been. Maybe it wouldn't be. But Rishab wasn't the one that would have to look Mr. Biggins in the eye if something went wrong. That's why she–

She'd turned off the alerts. It was the last thing she'd done before she'd gone to bed earlier that night.

Animar groaned and put her head in her hands. She didn't even bother using the interface to turn them back on. She simply thought and reenabled them, every last one. Every camera, every entrance, every exit. This could not happen again.

Once that was done, Animar went through the rest of the system. First, she checked her messages. Nothing from Rishab or the autopager or Mr. Biggins.

Nothing at all, in fact.

Animar felt a sudden pang of anxiety at that. She typed furiously at her keyboard. The cameras she'd had installed were all fine. The logic that sent messages from the mishmash of communications apps people used directly to her inbox was running flawlessly. She checked the apps themselves and saw little activity.

No unauthorized access attempts in PlayLand.

No unauthorized access attempts in meatspace.

No malware signatures detected.

No surveillance disruptions detected.

No server abnormalities, memory leaks, outage reports. No police bulletins. No reported phishing scams. Even the mentally disturbed man who lived near HQ and shouted, "Give me your fingernails!" at her when she walked by hadn't been around this week.

No one had needed her.

Animar was tired. She was hungry. The world around her was going fuzzy at the edges, the way PlayLand always did when her body was telling her she should log off, even though her mind was still pestering her with questions about cybersecurity, about logistics, about work-life boundaries, about Mr. Biggins and –

She needed sleep. At least a few hours before she had to go into the office, before she had to mechanically eat a calorie cube for breakfast, throw on clean clothes, and stumble into a cab.

Somewhere beyond the simulated sensations of PlayLand, she felt her eyes burning. If it was exhaustion or tears, she couldn't say.

She was just about to log off when a fresh alert popped up on the monitor, but this one wasn't the harsh yellow or red of a work-related notification that demanded her immediate attention. This was the calm, soothing blue of a friend reaching out.

"the_salesman, 3:59am – Hi, Animar! Looks like you're up early (or late!). Would you like some company?"

***

Twenty minutes later, Animar walked down the digital recreation of Mittere Street in PlayLand Prime, taking in the sights and trying to fit the digital cityscape onto her admittedly shaky sense of Old Town's real geography. Large sections of Mittere were flooded in real life, so the digital land here was cheaper. Corporations generally weren't interested in buying out digital property with a worthless corresponding spot in meatspace. Consequently, the digital Mittere had become something of a playground for the avant-garde and the bohemian in PlayLand who didn't mind that their digital real estate didn't come with a physical mailing address.

Most of the avatars on Mittere were unique and interesting to look at, customized beyond the algorithmically generated defaults. They had hand-designed skins and jewelry, hairstyles and makeup and accessories that would be impossible in meatspace. They were even a few fantastical creatures, elves in tactical body armor and vampires in haute couture, scattered throughout. Just walking down the street made Animar smile. Out here, everyone and everything was art.

Animar looked at her reflection in the window of a closed shop. She was dressed almost conservatively in comparison to some of what she saw on the street: dark blue jeans, a black halter top, a leather jacket, light makeup, her hair down to her chest, wavy layers of black streaked with fluorescent green. Her eyes were tired even now, but the rest of her looked exactly how it should.

the_salesman had told Animar to meet him at a bar named Jacks In Hole. She was sure that was some kind of reference she didn't quite get, but it didn't matter; even though she'd only known him for a few weeks, she knew the_salesman had impeccable taste in most things. He was worldly and traveled, a connoisseur of cuisine and culture, that he'd been the inspiration for her to build Café Des Jeux in her own server. Animar told him she could only hang out for a short while, a half-hour or forty-five minutes at most, but he didn't mind. And the thought of seeing him, of just hanging out and not having to think about work sounded sublime, so she'd agreed even though she felt drained.

Eventually she found the building he'd told her to look for. The wall was painted a blue so deep it was nearly black in the dim digital twilight. But there was a royal blue shade that somehow stood out from the rest of the wall in an unmistakable doorway shape. As Animar got close, a small golden image began to appear where the doorknob should have been: a stylized rendition of a hand holding two playing cards, the Jack of Hearts and the Jack of Spades.

Pretty slick, she had to admit.

As soon as Animar stepped through the door, the world went dark. Bass-heavy music pumped into her temporal lobe. The place was decorated somewhere between a nightclub and what Animar assumed a hunting lodge looked like. There was a massive fireplace on one side of the room, where bodies writhed in iridescent colors behind a grate. Lights in every color of the rainbow pulsed over the dancefloor, still quite full for nearly five in the morning on a work day. Most of the avatars communicated in paid private channels, but she could overhear a few snippets of public geosynced conversations.

A waitress walked up to Animar, her eyes encircled by dark makeup that gave off wisps of smoke, her snakebite piercings catching the light and reflecting it back. "Welcome to Jacks In Hole. Free drink, compliments of the house."

"Have you got something with simulated caffeine? I've got work soon."

The waitress nodded and handed Animar a glass. "We also offer individualized soundscapes and environmental reskins for a low price, if you'd like to customize your club experience."

"Not right now, thanks." Animar took a sip of the drink. It was generically sweet, the way these kinds of drinks always were. But she wasn't complaining; it was free, and PlayChems were always easier on the nervous system than real drugs and alcohol. She killed it and handed back the empty glass. "I'm meeting a friend here. He goes by the_salesman."

The waitress nodded. "The old guy? Second story, in the back. The private room." Animar thanked her, tipped her a few bits, and headed upstairs.

It was much quieter up here, the sound of the dance floor artificially muted with distance, and the conversations and handles at the private tables and booths were scrambled into gibberish to anyone not sitting at them. In the corner farthest from the dance floor, warm light seeped out from under a heavy curtain. Looking at it reminded Animar of sunshine, of sitting next to a crackling fire, and she knew that was where he must be. She walked over, pushed the curtain aside, and found herself in a room she didn't quite have a word for. A private study? A miniature great hall? A grand bedroom? Regardless, there was another fireplace (this one with a proper fire), wooden walls, wooden furniture, and an older man stroking his chin as he sat in quiet contemplation of an assortment of black gems on the table before him.

"Hiya, Sal," she said. "Working on something new?"

the_salesman looked up from the table without starting, looked over the lenses of his glasses, and smiled. His face was lined with creases that hadn't quite become full wrinkles, although there were crow's feet at the corners of his dark eyes. His eyebrows and his pencil moustache were salt and pepper, but his hair had largely gone silver and was thin at the temples. His skin was a light tan and his features suggested no particular ethnicity, as if he could walk into a room anywhere in the world and look like he belonged. He wore the same sort of old-fashioned suit Mr. Biggins favored. "Hello, Animar. And, no, actually. I finally decided to try and make one myself. It's still sort of a proof of concept, but I believe there's something interesting here."

The old man loved his puzzles. The day they'd met, he'd walked up to her while she was sitting in Sorrow Creek Park trying to solve one in the shape of a tripartite padlock. The impressive part to Animar hadn't been the suggestion he'd made that set her on the path to completing it; what really impressed her was that he'd even noticed she was there at all given the privacy fields she'd erected around herself. "Looks hard," Animar said.

"It's meant to be." the_salesman gave her a mischievous grin. "Would you care to try?"

She studied the black gems laid out on the table. Perhaps a third of them were touching each other in a way that looked like an unbroken sheet of obsidian, but the rest were a chaotic jumble and it wasn't clear from just looking at them why the ones that were loose weren't joining up with the others. "Where do I begin?"

the_salesman chuckled. "By doing of course." Animar rolled her eyes, and the_salesman chuckled again. Animar reached for the puzzle, picked up a piece, and turned it over in her hands. It was just a smooth piece of polished black glass. There were no marks on it, no differences in texture she could feel. She set it down and picked up another piece just to find it felt identical to the first.

"This is an unusual hour for you to be online, no? Are you finally traveling?"

"No, still in Cyber City."

"I see. Tell me, are you up very late, or very early?"

Animar reached for a third piece, and frowned. That one was the same, too. "Both, kind of. I meant to go to sleep, and it turned into a long nap."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"I haven't been sleeping very well the last two weeks," Animar said. "I got put on a big project at work, and I really want to do a good job with it."

"I see. Please, sit. Tell me all about it."

Animar almost said, "Oh, it's fine," out of habit. Almost.

Instead, she told the_salesman about her meeting with Thaddeus Biggins, about her run-in with Chad in the elevator, the worm she'd purged from the RoboCorp servers, and how all of that had led to her working directly with Mr. Biggins on his special project and the extra steps she'd taken to ensure the grand announcement went off perfectly. Then Mr. Biggins decided that he wanted to make the announcement at the same demonstration as his son's rewilding robot, and her workload had nearly doubled because of the sped-up timeline.

Animar took a deep breath. She meant to stop there, she really did, but once she'd started talking to someone who was actually listening, she couldn't stop herself. She was working 15-hour days pretty much every day, and then more time at home, and she wanted everything to perfect, and her boss Rishab told her she was overdoing things, but Mr. Biggins was working basically just as hard as her and she didn't want to let him down because he said that she could do great things at the company and to be fair he was going to pay her a lot of money when the project was complete and she could send that to her family back in Nihon and it wasn't about the money really it was about proving to herself and to the company that she could do big things that she could be trusted with big things that she could be trusted that she wasn't just a software engineer and oh God why was she crying she was so sorry she just needed a little bit of sleep and she'd be fine and

As she spoke, her attention split between the puzzle pieces and her story, and she began to feel a difference in her hands. One of the pieces felt rough. Another cold. A third almost… furry? Hairy? Mossy? Something like that. Animar looked down at the pieces she held in surprise, and they were once more inert black glass.

She picked up a fourth piece to play with and realized it felt warm in her hands as she thought about today's demonstration. Were the pieces supposed to match up cold with cold? Hot with cold? No. No, they were meant to be placed along a gradient, she was sure of it. Cold to cool to tepid and so forth.

"You're starting to get it," the_salesman said. Animar looked up from the pieces, the two she had fused together, and saw the older man grinning with childlike glee. "It took me nearly an hour to make my first connection. Well done."

Animar smiled. She could feel herself blushing a little. It felt good to hear a bit of praise after the week she'd had, after all the time she'd spent worrying on whether she was doing a good job at work or if her thoroughness was just creating its own set of problems. "Thanks, Sal. So, how are you doing? What brings you to Cyber City?"

the_salesman laughed. "Oh, nothing. I was just feeling a bit nostalgic for home. Thought I'd visit some old friends of mine." He nodded towards the wall where a brass plaque glowed in the light of the fireplace.

Jacks In Hole Founder's Club

GKilroy5 - PeonJoe - Ramiel7787 - Samurai850 - Tyrius7891 - WardyIII

"Oh, wow, your friends founded this place?" Animar asked.

the_salesman laughed softly. "No, that's just a little fiction I tell myself for my amusement. Truthfully, they passed long before Jacks In Hole ever opened. Shortly after Seymour and the bombs and everything that followed. But we all grew up nearby, so this serves as a fine enough spot for a memorial. I make a rather generous monthly donation to the club, and in exchange, they let me customize this space and reserve it whenever I'm feeling wistful."

Animar opened her mouth to speak. She had so many questions, but before she could voice any of them, the throbbing insistence of a security notification filled her head.

"Anomalous movement detected – RoboCorp II Plaza, Loading Bay 6."

"Animar?" the_salesman asked. "Is everything al–"

"One second, sorry, Sal," Animar mumbled. This was it. Those delivery men had come back. Someone was stealing something from the warehouse. A spy from one of the other zaibatsu had infiltrated the warehouse. Something. Animar opened the video feed and saw… nothing. There was no movement at all.

She scrubbed backwards and watched it again. Nothing.

A third time. Nothing.

Animar all but growled in frustration. She went back twice as far, adjusted the contrast and the color, activated an algorithm to put a targeting box around whatever it was that had set off the camera.

Nothing.

She removed all of the alterations she had just made and watched it again, just with her own eyes.

Nothin– no. Not nothing.

The leg of a spider, barely visible in the very corner of the frame.

Animar let out a strangled noise. Her shoulders hitched. the_salesman was on his feet in a moment, his hand on the outside of her shoulder in a gentle and reassuring way. "You're distressed," he said simply. "How can I assist?"

"It's nothing. It's nothing," she insisted. "I just… I've been on edge all week. I just need this presentation to be over so I can be myself again. I haven't gone swimming, or visited the cafe, or anything. I've just been a drone that reviews records and moves around data and does whatever Mr. Biggins needs."

the_salesman said nothing. After a moment, he gently squeezed her shoulder. She looked up at him, and felt a little better just seeing the warm smile he was giving her. "It sounds like work has you really stressed. Would you care to join me for a quick walk?"

***

Out on Mittere Street, Animar and the_salesman walked in relative peace and quiet. the_salesman was a premium PlayLand user, and as long Animar was with him, she was able to enjoy reduced advertising and enhanced privacy. In meatspace, Mittere would already be abuzz with gondolas and people at street level and the roar of VTOLs overhead. Here in PlayLand, with the_salesman's perks, the city still seemed to be sleeping.

They took turns pointing out their favorite buildings, discussing which ones were the same in meatspace and PlayLand, and which ones were wholly different. Animar pointed out a skyscraper made from children's toy blocks, layers of bright primary and secondary colors stacked on top of each other in a haphazard fashion that would have collapsed instantly in a world where physics applied. "The Babel Building's my favorite," she said.

"Oh?" the_salesman asked. "Tell me about it."

"It's owned by these two brothers. They bought the address for really cheap when Broma first launched PlayLand Prime and the Terms of Service wasn't set up to keep people from doing fun, crazy stuff like that. Every month they add another story just because they can." Animar looked up at the building and smiled. "It's just cool that it's something that could only exist here in PlayLand."

the_salesman nodded. "I love a good story like that. And the structure's impressive to boot."

The tower rose skyward for hundreds of feet, pushing past the clouds Broma used to hide the maximum render distance for the server. Beyond the clouds, there was nothing but more tower, as if it was there just to tempt some humorless deity into knocking it down. "Yeah. I heard that they used to let people inside. You could climb the staircase or take an elevator all the way to the top. But they stopped because people would delete blocks, corrupt staircases, leave hidden viruses to mess with tourists. I think the brothers were fine with all of that, but Broma actually could take the land if they created an unsafe environment for other PlayLand users, so the brothers just yanked everyone's access. It's a shame. I'm sad I never got to see the view from the top."

"Oh?"

Animar shrugged. "Yeah. All of that happened before I moved to the city."

the_salesman regarded Animar through his glasses. He turned to look at the tower. He craned his neck as if he could actually see the top of the thing, wherever it was, and then he turned back to Animar and gave her a smile. "Well. Would you like to?"

Animar laughed. "I think Broma would have something to say about that."

"Undoubtedly," the_salesman said with a wink. "But I like what you've had to say more."

the_salesman turned away from Animar and began gesticulating, his hands moving through the air like a conductor waving their baton. Animar knew she was a more than competent evoker when it came to PlayLand; within her private server, she could make precreated objects do more or less whatever she wanted, and she could add new ones or remove old ones without much difficulty. Evoking on a public server was trickier, since Broma wanted PlayLand users to at least abide by certain standards and ideally purchase objects from Broma instead of making their own. There were recipes people shared for making functional objects out of more basic parts, and Animar guessed that the_salesman was about to pop two makeshift jet packs into existence.

Instead, they started floating off the ground.

A wave of emotions flooded through Animar: surprise, confusion, fear, and finally and strongest of all, curiosity. "The server physics," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "Sal, how did you overcome the server physics?"

"Practice," the_salesman said with a smile and a shrug.

"Are we going to get caught?"

the_salesman laughed at that. "I very sincerely doubt it. I've scrambled our IDs and set us to the absolute highest level of privacy. No human user is going to notice us, and if someone or something at Broma looked at the server logs, they'd just see a gravitational error that quickly resolved itself."

Animar had flown in PlayLand countless times, in her private server and in dozens of different RoboCorp instances. But to do it on the Prime server like this (even if they were technically in private) was exciting. Kind of scary, even. This was the_salesman's doing, and she didn't know how he'd accomplished it, or what kind of rules he'd set. How quickly she could accelerate and decelerate, how sharply she could turn, if she would feel the wind stinging her eyes and her cheeks and blowing through her hair, or if she'd simply rise like smoke.

But she couldn't wait to find out.

"Race you to the top," she said with a grin. the_salesman just smiled.

"You're on."

"On three?"

"On three."

Animar began the countdown. A message popped up in her vision and an accompanying image. "Anomalous weight detected – RoboCorp II Freight Elevator A11. More info?"

So that was it. The EV-209 had been loaded in the freight elevator. Animar sighed. Maybe Rishab had been right about her alert settings. If they were telling her that the EV-209 was exactly where it was supposed to be, then the notifications were just a distraction from something potentially serious.

"Do you need to respond to that message?" the_salesman asked.

Animar shook her head. "No," she said firmly, and it became true. She turned and smiled. "No, it can wait."