MINUTES OF THE MEETING

Governing Board: Thrillmate, Ltd.

The Governing Board of Thrillmate, Ltd. met at 1:08 p.m. SAST via a private channel as specified in the company’s articles of incorporation. The following persons were present:

Maya Sairo, Company Founder, Chief Engineer, Chief Executive Officer Dr. David Sairo, Advisor, Research and Development

Jakarta Investment Group, major shareholder

Enterpris Afrique, major shareholder

Laurie Imani, major shareholder

1. Agenda Item #1 - Great White Shark Purchase Approval The meeting proceeded directly to the first agenda item, which was approval for the purchase and sub-surface sea freight of 1 x great white shark. The board was reminded that the plans for this purchase had been transferred to them 14 days prior, along with an emergency business case for the proposed race between Thrillmate Laurie Imani and the shark. Maya Sairo informed the board that preliminary audience building for the race had already begun. The appointed representative of Jakarta Investment Group inquired as to how many Thrillmate Subscribers (referred to in the detailed transcript as ‘Skinners’) were expected to consume the event. Ms. Sairo answered the inquiry in reference to projected audience modelling - (included in the appendix). In summary, the race is projected to be Thrillmate’s top grossing skinstream to date and would generate funds to counter the company’s current funding crisis. The purchase was unanimously approved.
2. Agenda Item #2 - Funding Crisis Board members are directed to refer to the appendix detailing current funding shortfalls, notably for current Research and Development projects.

Laurie begins her stream on a cliff above the South Atlantic. She stretches her arms to the sun, hands shining a dark gold, her swimsuit white and tight across her back and slick over her head because she shaved this morning and oiled her scalp. She presses two fingers to the top of her spine and feels the fibrous resistance of her Link. She presses deeper, ready to connect herself to the Thrillmate servers.

”Do you remember what we discussed?”

It is Maya’s voice murmuring in her ear. “When you talk to your skinners, make them feel like they’re working. Make them feel hardcore.”

“Uh-huh.” Laurie hears, through the voice-call, the distant whir of traffic outside Maya’s high-rise window.

“And use more self-improvement language,” Maya continues.

“Uh-huh.”

“We want them to feel healthy, virtuous. You know we’ve got study results showing that an hour of vigorous skinning has cardiovascular benefits akin to a fast walk?”

“Awesome.”

“Yes, it is awesome. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry, I know what you want.” Laurie reaches her hands to the sun once more and blinds herself with a dance of light-spots across her eyes.

“Going online now.”

One thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand skinners join the stream; they pair with Laurie’s body as the neural transfer begins. Sixty thousand, eighty thousand, one hundred and fifty thousand people, each feeling in their own bellies her deep and steady breath, their shoulders rolling with her lazy power. She clears her throat.

“Good morning everyone, are we ready for a dip?”

She has to speak loud enough to hear herself over the brisk ocean breeze.

“It’s a beautiful day here in Seeberg, and we’re about to get the blood pumping, endorphins flowing, all that good stuff.”

She walks a few paces to the edge of the cliff.

“We’re gonna do some sprints today. They’re super fun, and a great way to warm up in the freezing water. Cold swimming has been clinically proven to boost the immune system, improve circulation, and even treat depression — so yeah, it’s real healthy.'

As she speaks, Laurie imagines Maya’s face but can’t decide if the expression across it is imagined pleasure or exasperation. The water below her is deep, dark blue. She breathes once more, four counts in, four counts out. She shivers her thighs. Her stomach contracts with an iron-like snap. Then she bends her legs, stretches from her back, and dives.

“Let’s go!”

Her fingertips pierce the skin of the ocean. She is Laurie Imani, Thrillmate; Lauri Imani, the Lady Dolphin; Lauri Imani — once, the fastest swimmer on Earth.

Afterwards, Laurie floats on her back and stares at the sky. In the corner of her view she tracks the approach of a jet ski that will carry her back to the Thrillmate house.

“That was good.” It’s Maya.

“Oh, you’re still here?”

“Yeah, I stayed on the call — just kept quiet.”

“Did you join the stream?”

“Sure did. That pain in your lower back seems to have gone.”

“Mm.” Laurie moves her arms gently, staying afloat.

“And it wasn’t even that cold.” Maya sounds brisk.

“Should I have done something to make it more ‘hardcore’?”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. It was fine. You almost reached 160k skinners.”

“I usually get about that.”

“On a good day, you do.”

“You have all my stats up in front of you or something?”

The question comes out more annoyed than she meant, but Laurie can see the scene in her mind; Maya walking circles around the faux fur rug in her apartment, rifling through numbers, fingers twitching. ”I did before. I’ve spent the entire day in meetings about the shark.”

“Have you found one?” The self-driving jet ski arrives a few strokes from Laurie’s position. She pulls herself onboard, and gestures to turn up the audio feed of her call. She raises her voice over the roar of sudden acceleration. “Maya?”

“What? Sorry — yes, we’ve found a great white somewhere off the coast of Brazil. Freighting it to Cape Town is ridiculously expensive though, and financing is getting super tight.”

A great white shark. The words send a thrill down Laurie’s spine.

“I hate finance meetings,” Maya continues.

“I’m surprised you haven’t just written some code to stand in for you.”

“Ha! Any logical costing program would probably pull the plug, the hole is that big — what is that weird noise?”

“I’m on a jet ski.”

“Glad you’re having fun.”

“Oh, you expect me to swim back to the house? Save you some cash?”

“Laurie… ” She hears Maya’s breathing, four counts in, four counts out. The controlled air whistles gently in her ear. “I apologise. How are you settling in?” The silhouette of the house emerges from the blur of approaching shoreline.

“It’s fine. I have a big room. I like the pod things by the rink, they’re new since my last visit.”

“Yes. So you’ve got room for the rest of your stuff then? Shall I send it?”

“Sure. Oh — did I leave my razor in the shower? It’s blue.”

“Yes I saw it. But I’ve already sealed up the boxes.”

“Okay that’s fine, keep it there for when I… actually, just trash it.”

“...Okay. I’ll let you go then.”

“Fine. Sleep well.”

“You too. Bye.”

The Thrillmate content house rises on stilts above the erratic waters of Camps Bay, a series of interlocking cubes criss-crossed with protruding balconies and sunken walkways engraved into the limestone facade. When the company had finished the first renovations, a local reporter requested an in-body tour before writing a piece that described the building as “a Playboy mansion where the kink is more than skin deep.” Laurie thinks of it more as a stadium with bedrooms. The patios, lounges, rooms for sleeping and eating — these are all peripheral spaces arranged around an Olympic-sized rink with a concertina roof that opens to the sky. The rink can be iced, grassed, or pumped full of water in just two hours. Encasing it is an insanely twisted jungle gym with fly poles, bungee cords, and four tiers of trampoline. Around the rink’s edge are the muted humps of six shiny-new experience-pods; lightless, soundless, airless (if you like) domes, which can be turned into sensory deprivation tanks, Sahara-hot saunas, outer-space simulators, dens filled with snakes — any feeling that Thrillmate’s paying skinners might want to try.

As her jet ski docks at the pier below, Laurie squints upwards at the patio above her, and picks out the figures of other Thrillmates, streaming, eating, napping in the late afternoon light. She sees the slender, tattooed legs of Pepi, who skinstreams prohibitively expensive benders of fine dining and wellness treatments. The legs (and presumably the rest of Pepi) are arranged across a sun-lounge next to Jai: six -feet tall, hulking, muscled. Jai starves himself for days on end and then offers his skinners the experience of feeling his own specific brand of man-sized hunger. Maya joined Jai’s skinstream after signing him with Thrillmate, and afterwards she ate a cheese sandwich that was apparently the best meal of her entire life.

Laurie tips the jet ski and it zooms itself away. She pads from the pier to a paved platform of open-air showers, where she strips, rinses, and drops her swimsuit onto the tray of a trolley-shaped GoodBot that is waiting, patiently, beside the showers. It beeps, and offers up a fresh towel.

Wrapped, Laurie climbs the stairs to the first floor of the house. As she steps onto the patio, the local house network sends a pounding synthetic beat to her brain. Laurie Imani, welcome home! The automated cry-out syncs with the music. Laurie freezes as if caught in a spotlight and then raises a hand to wave at Pepi and Jai — but they are seemingly too engrossed in each other to notice her. She pads across the patio, a damp ghost. She freezes again on the threshold to the interior lounge; this morning she ate oatmeal in what she could have sworn was this exact room, but the smooth curves of molded furniture have now been replaced with inflatable pools full of… jelly? Laurie goes back outside and takes the long way around, via the balconies. She finds her room where she left it, next to the regular gym, with an expansive view towards Table Mountain National Park.

According to the house network, every bed is currently taken. Regardless of the increasingly tense conversation about shortfalls and investments that Laurie has been hearing now, for months, on the ground there is an application backlog of Thrillmates who have streamed their way up the company’s charts and are now desperate for a chance to come and stay in the house and create skinning content that is ever harder, ever faster, more luxurious, more thrilling.

As she extracts a cashmere wrap from her bag (still half-unpacked) on the king-sized bed, Laurie wonders whose place in the application line she took when Maya made a call and said that if Laurie really wanted to move out of her Los Angeles highrise with its view of Downtown, then she could move here, to the other side of the world.

“Oh, right, I leave you and move instead into your company’s content house?”Laurie remembers the gash of hurt that had cut across Maya’s face.

“It’s more lux than here. If I could afford to give up the spot, then I would move. Plus, as a shareholder and board member, it’s technically your company too,” Maya had said. “Technically.”

Now, Laurie walks onto her room’s balcony and presses her belly against the railing. The sun is setting. She orders coffee with a flick of her fingers. So, Maya has found her a great white shark. Laurie rolls the muscles of her shoulders. Great whites are aggressive, sprinting, cold-blooded killers; the creatures of nightmares — and legends. She holds the picture in her mind: the mess of teeth, the bulk of its fin. On second thought, she cancels the coffee. If Maya has found the shark, then — well, it could be anytime. She has to train. Already, Laurie feels that familiar, smothering sense of powerlessness lifting away. When she succeeds, when everything turns out as planned, then Maya will finally get her money. And there will be a whole lineup of plans and networks and beds that all want her: Laurie Imani, Thrillmate, swimmer, champion.

It’s raining by the time Maya finishes talking to Laurie. Unusually heavy drops tumble from bruised and swollen clouds and leave long streak marks in the dust coating her windows. Maya stares down onto the street below. A woman in a damp t-shirt is coaxing her fluffy pillow of a dog past an autonomous Safe-Nite-Inn. The size and shape of the inn suggests that the vehicle had once been a tour bus. A raggedy figure is crouched in the inn’s back doorway. He gestures at the woman, beckoning her to come closer, but she keeps her eyes on her pet and walks faster. The inn seems to take this as its cue to pull out from the curb and roll its down-and-out clientele away, to somewhere else.

When Maya first developed the neural tech behind Thrillmate, she pitched it to investors as a tool of human-animal communication. Now, three years in, post a seed round, rapid growth, investor fall-off, sleepless nights, nerves pulled tight with caffeine and over-planning; she wonders what kind of person would implant a chip in their brain to smell the shit their dog is sniffing.

She calls a car to take her across town to David’s place. She keeps watching the street as she waits; packs of friends squealing and laughing, GoodBots loaded with bowls of lab-grown ramen and other crap, the occasional vintage car — a real statement item. Maya wonders how much a Passenger Operated Vehicle costs these days; she’d heard the POV insurance plans were pretty steep.

The car arrives.

As it drives, Maya signs off on the minutes from the board meeting and reviews again the projected earnings from Laurie’s race. A few days out from the hype event that they’ve dubbed “the first encounter,” Thrillmates’ skinner subscription base is flatlining. Investors are sending concerned memos from Jakarta and Nairobi. Depressing graphs hang suspended above Maya’s knees — daily expenditure, wages, research funding — all red.

The car comes to a stop beside a flight of stairs that connect the street to the bridges of above-ground circulation. She tips the car.

Maya likes to think that her uncle David invested in Thrillmate because he saw her technology’s revolutionary potential. A professor of sociology, with decades of experience studying virtual presence, David was an early funder, then board member, research consultant, and now, Maya’s closest advisor. For the entire thirty years of her life, Maya has visited David in his apartment in the densely-populated city centre. Over time, every gap in the urban fabric has been filled and tiers of dwellings of every description are now intertwined by sky-bridges, ad-hoc elevators, clip-on staircases and elevated plazas. He needs to move, Maya thinks, as she climbs a salt-rusted staircase clinging to the facade of David’s building and presents her face to the security panel outside the lobby.

She can hear David’s apartment before she’s even halfway down the corridor. Jazz from an antique hi-fi system draws her towards his painted front door, which, just as she arrives, swings gently open to issue forth the smell of buttery garlic. Behind the door she sees the retreating backside of David’s Automated Domestic Assistance Machine. Maya calls out. “Hi?”

“Come in!” David’s voice emanates from inside the apartment. “I believe ADAM recognised you. Did it open the door?”

“Yeah…” It’s too warm in here, she thinks.

David is tucked in an armchair in the middle of the kitchen. Maya stands by the door and waits for her mind to adjust to this current version of David’s space; the one with his ramps, rails, auto-arms and therapy machines. In the months after his stroke, Maya had visited David almost every day, fumbling around his old-fashioned kitchen, making bad soups that he couldn’t keep contained in his mouth, holding his hands, which froze or flailed at random. It took a week for Maya to be sure that he understood her suggested communication system; one blink for yes, two for no. Fortunately, David already had a Link, because he would never have passed Thrillmate’s pre-installation cognitive competency test.

ADAM sidles behind David’s armchair and gently levers him — furniture and all —onto its torso. “To the stovetop!” David calls, and ADAM takes him over.

“I am making you earth-grown mushroom linguine with bio-cream, lactose-free, of course. And kelp salad from a growery. Please be impressed.”

“I’m very impressed.”

David turns his head and grins at her, with the side of his face that remembers how to grin.

They eat at one end of David’s generous wooden dining table. “How did everything go today?”David asks, handing her a bowl from ADAM’s side-arm.

“Fine. Just finance shit.”

“Does Laurie like the content house?”

“Are you really asking if I like Laurie in the content house?”

“I’m old, I need gossip.” David slurps pasta from his fork. “Well?”

“Well… yeah, it’s a weird vibe. I think she feels like I’ve taken some kind of moral high ground for giving her the place, but she doesn’t say anything. She’s a professional, I guess.”

“Mmm…” He makes an intentional pause, leaving space for further venting. He’s good at that; a good listener.

“I told her about the shark today.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think she feels at all nervous?”

“Not nearly nervous enough,” Maya sighs. “I’m sure once it sinks in she’ll start shitting her pants, which would make for an interesting skinstream…” — everywhere she looks are David’s various old-man machines — “...but we really need this to work.”

“Yes.”

“Did you know that the research team” — Maya throws the graphs out onto the table” — is going to run out of money in two months?”

David considers the swathe of red hovering over his meal. “I knew things were tight. I sat in on a meeting yesterday with engineers trying to choose which projects to prioritise: Thrillmate Therapeutics or Thrillmate Empathetics.

“What would you choose?”

“Well… David turns his palms to the ceiling, which was something he couldn’t do before daily therapeutic skinning began to excavate the neural pathways in his brain that had collapsed through time and age; “...I don’t feel I’m an impartial advisor on this one. But they decided ultimately that therapeutic applications are more immediately marketable.”

“Is everything about money?” The question slips out of Maya’s mouth and she feels like a child; a very tired child with a rock of anxiety in her chest. “Sorry.”

“I think you know that very few things are ever about money. But things do seem to turn out a certain way because of it.”

Maya pushes her empty bowl away. “I just didn’t think that developing neural tech would mean…I don’t know, racing my ex against a shark.” She laughs, and David laughs too. “Or watching people willingly starve themselves for days.”

“Hey, we owe Hungry Jai big time. Endurance streams are always trending.”

“Dear, oh dear..."

They sit together in silence. David loads his empty bowl back onto ADAM’s side-arm and motions to be moved to Maya’s side of the table. “Do you really want to do this?”

Please don’t ask me that now.”

“I’m completely serious. There must be other options…

“Well they didn’t manifest quickly enough. I just received a message from the freight company; the shark’s due to arrive in Cape Town in three days. What else are we gonna do with it?”

“But does it have to be Laurie?”

Maya nods slowly. “That’s the scary part; no one else is crazy enough.”

The morning of the first encounter dawns, for Laurie, with a steel-coloured sky. She’d woken to an inbox jammed with preparatory timelines and swirling maps, risk assessments and projections — someone has been very industrious. Now, however, she prefers to contemplate the ocean, the flat blank expanse of aptly named Shark Bay. In downtown Los Angeles, Maya is sitting on her sofa and links into Laurie’s skin just as nighttime security beams light up the street below her windows.

You feel good,” Maya says.

“I had a cup of coffee.” Laurie arches her back and Maya feels the dense layers of muscle, stretching, contracting.

“Are you ready?” asks Maya, more to herself than to Laurie.

“I’m ready.”

“Are you sure you don’t need to…”

“No, I don’t need to pee. You always confuse that feeling with just adrenalin. How long do we have?”

“About twenty minutes.” Maya forces herself to sink back into her sofa. Her nerves feel strung out, brittle and crystalline. She hears — with her own ears — some kind of altercation from the street below. Through Laurie’s ears, she hears the lone cry of a seagull. “I won’t be joining your visuals, is that okay?”

“You’re scared to see it?”

“No — I just need to concentrate.” Maya flicks her wrist and brings up her own copy of the maps. “Have you reviewed the route?”

“Yes.”

“We released the asset about a mile south of a buoy this morning.” Maya feels Laurie shift her weight and twist her neck.

“I see it. It’s orange.”

“Good. Based on its current location and trajectory, that’s where we expect the encounter to trigger. Remember, your skinners don’t know what to expect. We’ve seeded talk that something is happening today, but your socials haven’t made any kind of announcement, so for all intents right now it’s just a regular morning swim. Once you get close, we’ll alert the Coast Guard and they’ll release their usual public warning; at that point, the comms team will start commenting on the feeds: "oh my god there’s a great white shark where Laurie Imani is swimming right now!’ We’re expecting lots of interest but just keep swimming as long as you can. Give people time to join.”

“And you’ll tell me when I’m close to it?”

“Yes. Thrillmate will send you an alert. All your skinners will see that because it’ll come right in the middle of your visual field. So that will be your signal to, you know, do your thing. You’re Laurie Imani. You’re not scared of a shark! You want to take a look at it! Amp them up, get everyone excited so that when we announce the race later this week, it goes instantly viral. You can do this!”

“Wow. You sound like some kind of pep coach.”

“You can do this! Tell me you can do it!”

“I can do this!”

“Yes you can! I believe in you!”

Neural transfers are inherently messy — best for big movements, bright colors and loud noises. But Maya thinks that she can feel Laurie smile. It feels good to smile. “How are you feeling now?” she asks.

“I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“I’m so sure. Fucking hell, Maya, this is what we’ve been waiting for!'

Sand mattes the bottom of Laurie’s feet. A salty breeze slips off the Atlantic and cools the sweat from her head. She rolls her shoulders; they are well-oiled gears. She breathes deep into her belly, then presses her Link. Ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand — Laurie feels the familiar buzz as their minds settle in. Fifty-five thousand. She shakes out the muscles on her butt and thighs. Her heart rate is a deep and steady clap inside her chest. She stretches to the left, obliques tightening like twisted wires. Now, to the right. She walks to the shoreline and lets the sea foam kiss her toes. Her calves sing at the touch of cold water; she pumps breath through her nose to the soles of her feet.

“Hello everyone! We ready for a dip?” She launches her body into the ocean and starts to swim.

David calls. Calm, reassuring, Maya hears him slurping tea. “How are we tracking?” he asks.

“I’ll let you know…” Maya focuses on the map, spread across her floor. She feels salt water in her ears and on her tongue. Her breath is synchronized with Laurie’s. The markers representing Laurie and the shark flash brightly.

“I always did want to work with animals,” says Maya. “Funny how that’s turned out.” She’s trying to joke but even to her ears it sounds weird. She sees that David has joined her view of the map.

“Laurie’s nine minutes in,” he says. “Isn’t that when we should alert the Coast Guard?”

“Mm, but there’s still less than sixty thousand skinners on her stream.”

“Maybe it’ll pick up once the alert goes out?”

“I hope so… I’ve just seen that Pepi is also skinstreaming right now.”

“Would that impact Laurie’s numbers?”

“They don’t usually attract the same kinds of skinners.”

Maya flicks to her view of Laurie’s stats; fifty-five thousand, fifty, forty-nine. Meanwhile, a hundred thousand people are feeling Pepi receive an oxygen facial. The rock in her chest begins to bubble and grow. “We need more…”

“Should we tell Pepi to stop streaming?”

“No, that’ll defeat the purpose; Thrillmate needs a bigger audience overall. But maybe we can piggyback, get Pepi to raid Laurie’s stream and pass the shark along to all of her skinners.”

“Is that possible?”

“We have a beta update for inter-skin raids.”

“Has it been tested?”

“Not officially, but I wrangled most of the coding myself.”

“And you’re confident it would make a difference?”

“It’s worth a shot. Except we need Pepi’s consent and her agent’s a massive pain… actually, do me a favour and contact Pepi directly — just flicked you the details.”

“Maya, this really isn’t my department…

“David, you said you would help me!”

“Okay, okay…” He drops off the call.

Maya switches to Laurie’s visual stream; her apartment, the projected map, the darkened windows — all fade away,replaced with a blur of open water. She turns up the volume of Laurie’s physical sensations, feeling the kick of Laurie’s legs, and the cycle of arms overhead, again and again, not even a flicker of fatigue.

Suddenly, a bright red banner cuts across the grey waves. This is an urgent announcement. A great white shark has been sighted in this area. You are advised to exit the water immediately. The notification speaks calmly in Laurie’s ear. Maya, and forty-eight thousand other people across the world, see it and hear it at the exact same time. Christ, Maya thinks, I thought we were going to wait. Laurie’s heart hammers, her thighs tense, her breath constricts as her adrenalin amps up, powerful, pure. David calls again. Maya dials down the strength of Laurie’s stream.

“Pepi’s been briefed,” he says.

“Great, I’m pushing the update.”

“Have you warned Laurie?”

Laurie screams across the waves, her voice gargling over the foaming water: “Always wanted to see a shark!”

The rock in Maya’s chest jump-starts as it blends with Laurie’s accelerating pulse, the rush of blood to every limb, her stomach clenched in a way that Maya, at the back of her mind, begins to recognise as fear.

“We’re out of time.”

Today, Laurie wishes that the Link really did read minds. The contraction of every muscle, the pump of her breath, the quiet of the ocean; these are the sensations she can pass to her skinners. But what she can’t give to them is her imagined picture of climbing, victorious out of the ocean, on a wave of elation that she just faced a shark, and won. A shark. A great white shark. Fifteen feet. A mouth so big she could stand up in it, with a mess of teeth that will slice her into pieces. Fuck. She treads water on the surface, nearing the encounter zone, as the red banner cuts across her view again :

You are advised to exit the water immediately.

She draws breath in order to shout for her skinners: “What do we think, friends? Shall we go for a dive?” Slowly, Laurie fills her lungs with air. A ripple of power starts in her pelvis and travels up her back, pushing her shoulders, arms, entire body, up, up, and up, and then she dives. Shadows move below her, shapes underwater.

Sixty-five thousand people are now on Laurie’s stream. Maya monitors the numbers climbing steadily, feeling all the while the familiar rhythm of Laurie’s breath.

And then suddenly Laurie seems to falter. Maya jolts upright on her sofa and raises her fingers to the top of her spine, checking her Link. She’s still connected to Laurie, but there’s a seasick rollicking now to her movements — a foreign heaviness and ache in her shoulders. Maya dials up the strength of the neural stream. It feels like…walking. As her brain calibrates to the unfamiliar stream, her mind’s eye fills with smudgy blurs, like mountains in mist. Maya shuts her eyes to better concentrate, as the low pound of a headache begins at the base of her skull. There is a splotchy grey expanse that looks like…concrete, she decides, and then an electronic cry cuts through the neural mist:

“Noodles! Ramen! Hot and salty.” It is the unmistakable voice of a Downtown GoodBot, hawking its wares. This isn’t Cape Town. This isn’t Pepi. This isn’t Laurie. Her new, foreign eyes settle on the GoodBot’s form. They see snugly stacked sets of lab-grown ramen. Maya feels her mouth moisten. Then her tongue sings with the touch of oil and salt and her stomach gurgles in fierce satisfaction as whoever’s body she is riding along scoffs down brothy noodles faster than thought. It has been a minute, maybe. A minute too long; panic jump-starts in Maya’s heart. She jabs at her Link and disconnects — too fast — her head spins in protest. David’s on the line.

“I joined the skinstream.” He sounds deliberately measured.

“I know, something’s really wrong! Is your Link still saying it’s connected to Laurie’s stream?”

“Yes, and I’m guessing she’s not eating noodles out in the ocean.”

“Fuck!”

“So who is this?”

“I don’t know! It’s no one signed with the company — I skin all of them. I think it’s someone in LA.”

“You can track them?”

“No, it was the noodles!”

“The noodles?”

“The GoodBot with the ramen — David, check on Laurie and get the support boat out to her. I’m gonna fix this.”

“On it.”

Maya catches a glimpse of the live dashboard she’d left sprawled across her floor: eighty thousand, one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand…skinners are joining Laurie’s stream so fast that the tracking graphs are a jittery blur. Her only thought: can Laurie still swim? She jabs at the Link once more, and her mind sinks back into the rough mould of the unfamiliar skinstream. The first sensation she makes out is the warm air of Downtown and its end-of-day fug of incense and dog piss. She needs the stream to be stable enough before she can analyse the data packets. Can Laurie wait that long? Her vision re-adapts, and she sees another recognisable form; a Safe-Nite-Inn, looking so similar, in fact possibly the exact same vehicle, to the one that regularly parks on the street below her window.

“Can I check in please?’

Maya hears the voice, feeling intuitively that it comes from the body she’s riding in. The voice is low, polite, pleasant, feminine. Visual information is coming in now, ever clearer. She sees in front of her a dimly-lit interior with rows of bunk-beds. Two gloved hands, her hands, are holding tight a bright yellow backpack, then they are placing it down on a narrow bed with a white duvet, and she feels the relief in her body as she is free from the bag’s weight. She smells artificial lemon. She hears the stranger’s voice humming something tunelessly, and then another voice, from someone unseen or still too blurry in Maya’s brain, asks, “How you doing Esther?”

“Yeah, I’m okay thanks,” the stranger replies.

Esther, her name is Esther. A name is a start.

The data packets should be stable enough now. Maya turns down the volume of the skinstream, and fingers into view the knots of code racing at the literal speed of thought…and concentrates. There is an analytical flow state, if she can just reach it now — it has earned her the titles of innovator, the world’s first stable neural interface, founder of the fastest growing tech start-up, inventor, alchemist.

Skinners continuously log into Laurie’s mind.

Maya swims in code.

Neurologically, she cannot distinguish…

Where Laurie ends…

...and Esther begins.

She throws up the database of ThrillMate subscribers.

There are hundreds of Esthers, in Los Angeles alone. Could the whole thing be a ploy, an attack, man-in-the-middle style? Or an accidental re-routing between two randomly similar Link IDs? Could it be a bit-flip, just a freak cosmic weather event, arbitrary, untraceable — or a bug in the beta update? 

Maya’s stomach seems to drop onto the floor. She feels suddenly nauseous. Then she realises that the churning in her gut is in fact two-fold, and is coming into her body; through the muted neural stream. She dials up the volume.

She needs to pee. Maya was right, thinks Laurie, I should always go before starting a public stream — better safe than sorry. Repeated diving is making it worse; the water pressure clenches her bladder as she ventures again and again below the waves, up and down, up and down. Clouds roll over the coastal cliffs in an avalanche. The water is dark and every shape below looms with ferocious teeth. She’s been diving now for, what, five minutes, maybe? She didn’t check the time when she started but it seems like an age. And her skin feels quiet. Yes, quiet. Neural streaming is a one-way street. Patterning in her brain is tapped and transferred, outwards and away, but over the years she has developed an innate sense for connection; she can feel when other minds are receiving hers. It’s the adrenalin, she thinks. I just need a glimpse of this thing.

She primes herself for another dive when she feels an ache in her shoulders; she feels weak, tired. She can’t kick. Her legs are weighed down, as though she were above water. She tastes salt.

Salt water, it must be that.

But there’s an oily slick on her tongue sending waves of nausea throughout her body and a blurring in her vision that reminds her of the one and only time she got drunk. Maya was furious, it was a few years back, they’d been fighting, she was meant to perform a demonstrative skin stream, did she drink because she didn’t want to do it, she can’t remember. Something is wrong.

I have to finish this. Maya will be so disappointed if I don’t finish this.

Something moves below her, a mound of darkness the size of her torso. It is growing. She needs to move, she needs to swim, she needs to put distance between her and it, so she can see it and not end up inside of it; she knows all this. But she is fighting just to keep her head above water. Fear is bubbling thick and black in her belly. Her skin feels too quiet. The whole world is quiet. Silent grey water, flat grey sky. Darkness below her stretching impossibly wide. And now a fin. That fin; death-dark mottled splotch jagged gash of dried red, like blood, orb of death, so cold, it’s eye is so cold and black and all the light has gone out of the world, teeth untidy and jutting rawly through wads of moist pink gums. Why did I think I could do this?

She feels, dissolving, her last threads of control.

Her bowels open.

She vomits into open water.

Later, someone will tell her that the shark, monitored by a coast-guard drone, lunged towards her puke with such explosive force that she was washed within a metre of the approaching support boat’s bow.

In her body, though, the shark apparently wasn’t interested at all.

X-VENTURE DAILY

Hot Mess at Neural Tech Start-Up Thrillmate

Maya Sairo, founder and CEO of an emerging neural technology company, gave a multi-LAN statement today about an incident that occurred during a recent broadcast by the champion swimmer Laurie Imani. Ms. Imani was the company’s first ever neural streamer (known as a “Thrillmate”) and had been engaged in a scheduled open-sea swim when recipients of her stream found themselves instead connected to an unidentified person broadcasting via their own Link.

Ms. Sairo offered an unreserved apology for the incident and said that it was entirely unprecedented. She said, “It is now the number one focus of our engineering teams, our research teams, and the entire executive team to work out why and how this happened.” She said that Thrillmate service centres would be open 24 hours a day to address concerns from subscribers.

The company’s service centres have also opened a host of new installation appointments, in response to a sudden uptick in user demand. Thrillmate subscriber numbers have jumped 10 per cent in the last 12hours, and although not yet publicly listed, the estimated market value of the company has increased 160 per cent.

This is what Maya remembers: stomach churning, the dim corridor of the Safe-Nite-Inn, the clunk of a door, creamy lighting. Nice, Maya was thinking, I thought a place like this would have ugly lights, but this is pretty. She remembers the cool touch of air against bare skin. She remembers identifying that the bare skin is on her thighs, Esther’s thighs. She remembers realising slowly, too slowly, that Esther is about to use the toilet. And that she and a quarter of a million other people are about to feel her do it. This, as far as she knows, has never been publicly skinstreamed before. She remembers:

push, wet, lip, open, empty.

It is primal, and familiar. And over very quickly. Thank god.

And then there is another familiar sensation.

The first time she was ever horny, Maya was thirteen and reading a downloaded novel. The scene was smut-lite; some heavy petting, probably, she can’t really remember; but what she remembers is the delicious stirring in her pelvis, a dampness in her knickers.

It is obvious, of course. Sex is the mother of technological proliferation. And she is living it.

Maya had felt Esther spread her legs and wrap her hands around her thighs. She had dabbed at her own wetness and stroked her clit with light, electrifying touches. Her erect nipples grazed against the roughness of her shirt. Her orgasm gathered quickly, hurtling through her body; even as it occurred to Maya that she could log into the master controls, find Laurie’s Link and disable it, manually; she knows how to do that, she wrote the backdoor herself.

But for a moment, Maya forgot all that, and she cried out to the walls of her high-rise apartment as an unknown woman named Esther comes, alone, in the toilet of a Safe-Nite-Inn.

Except she wasn’t really alone. Maya remembers remembering that.

Thrillmate INC

INCIDENT REPORT - CONFIDENTIAL

This report is to be completed by employees of Thrillmate Incorporated and any of its representative board/executive team members.

INCIDENT TIMESTAMP: 2392425269

NAME OF PERSON(S) INVOLVED: Laurie Imani

INCIDENT LOCATION: (-32.006111, 18.015930)

INCIDENT DESCRIPTION: After approximately fifteen minutes of standard communications, Ms. Imani’s Link started receiving a high volume of skinstream packets from an unsigned source. Logs show a sudden uptick in the volume of neural packets being handled, with all packets — the unsigned ones and those signed by Ms. Imani’s tap — were forwarded onwards to recipients via the active streaming channel. This continued until the stream was manually aborted by Thrillmate engineering.

FURTHER DISCUSSION LOG:

@David: Have they tried reformatting Laurie’s tap? Or replacing it?

@Maya: That’s the next step. However at this stage, deep packet analysis indicates that the unsigned packets matched Laurie’s own neural packets on a structural level — that could be one reason engineering hasn’t found any evidence of a handshake between the two tap devices.

@David: So replacing the device won’t —

@Maya: It won’t change how receptive her neurotransmitters are to the foreign source. But we can do some tests. Get her to stream on a private channel.

@David: That sounds like a good idea.

@Maya: Yeah. I’ll set it up.

Laurie wakes to insistent, poking fingers of light. She is lying in an unfamiliar bed with an unexpected breeze coming through an open window — the Thrillmate house. Reality drips into her waking mind. This is where she stays now.

She faced a great white shark! She almost died.

Laurie’s body hurts, everywhere, her head feels padded, like a sack of wet socks. Wet socks. She remembers wet socks, and wet towels on the sand, and her mother, insisting, to strangers with pitying faces, that her child, that one, out there in the ocean, would be a winner some day if only someone would train her.

Is this what it feels like, to be old? She squeezes her eyes back shut but still feels unmoored in her memory of roiling grey water. The gash across the shark’s fin had been wide as her hand. One rip, one taste, her body a discarded meat sack in water, flowing out, sinking, past the reach of sunlight. I can’t do this. She hates the fear that is crawling all over her skin.

Maya is calling. Laurie pushes herself up against the headboard of the bed. It’s too big, too wide, too soft; she feels smothered, drowned by it. She places a steadying hand against the wall. Her ringtone continues. She answers; voice only. Her ears are filled with the chirpy buzz of a Downtown bar, happy hour. She hears Maya, laughing. Then — Hey, how you feeling?” Maya switches herself into visual mode: shiny hair, make-up overlay, the edge of a padded booth intersecting with Laurie’s bed, wine-glass jutting into her side-table, Maya’s face, a mask of tender concern.

“Laurie? Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, I really hate this mattress.”

“Okay…I’m sure they could change it. Seriously, are you alright? They said you were unconscious when they lifted you out of the water.”

Laurie Imani, drowning at sea. “How long have I been here?”

“A few days.”

“Right…did I get any visitors? Clearly you’re still in LA.”

“Sorry, Laurie. I’ve been in bumper-to-bumper damage control meetings — we urgently need to sort out this Esther issue.”

“Esther issue?”

“Yeah, Esther — the skinstream imposter…hasn’t anyone told you what happened?”

...Told me what?”

At this point, someone taps Maya on the shoulder, and she mutes the call and holds a hand up over her mouth.

“Maya?” Laurie presses, agitated. “Told me what?”

“Sorry, Laurie. It’s been an insane 48 hours. I guess you were sleeping…

“You guess?”

“I know, I know! My oversight. Look, I don’t know how to tell you

this…but…something went wrong. Your stream was hacked — well, not a deliberate hack as far as we can tell, maybe a bit-flip or some random rerouting that muddled your Link ID up with another person’s…but…no one felt the encounter.”

No one felt it.

“By the time you found the shark, your skinstream was feeding from this Esther person.”

No one felt her fear, her floundering. No one felt her weakness.

“No one felt anything?”

“Up until you started diving and looking for the shark…nothing. I’m really sorry, Laurie.”

“...Right…so…who, who’s Esther?”

Does it matter?

“We don’t know. A regular skinner, maybe. Not a signed Thrillmate.”

“What was her act?”

“She didn’t have one. She was in an emergency shelter. It was…quite personal, that’s part of what I’ve been dealing with; trying to determine if we’ve broken any laws.”

“And have you?”

“We don’t think so.”

“Okay. But that was our last shot, right? Future financing’s down the toilet?”

Well…no, actually. Subscriber numbers have actually boomed.” Maya flutters her fingers, and the range of her projection field expands so that Maya can see David, in a wheelchair, slotted against the booth beside her.

“Oh, hi, David,” says Laurie, mulling over this revelation; boomed, her skin boomed…

“He’s not in the call, he can’t hear you.”

“But you’re out together?”

“Yeah, we’re about to meet a prospective investor from a bio-tech capital fund. They’re suddenly interested in Thrillmate’s therapeutic potential, would you believe?”

“I see, great…so when are we going to announce my race? Take two against the shark?”

Maya’s eyes stretch doll-wide. “Laurie…”

“Oh my god, Maya, don’t you dare take this away from me! I almost fucking died out there and no one even knows what I did!” Laurie’s huddled against the headboard with anger blooming from the base of her spine. It sizzles against her fear, and she welcomes it.

What’s this about, Laurie?”

“Don’t fuck with me, Maya, you know damn well what it’s about! My career as an athlete is over — athletes are over. This is my last chance to do something. You might think it’s vanity but…

“Hey, I’ve never said that and I don’t think that about you, I just — you’re already Laurie Imani, the fastest swimmer in history! Isn’t that enough?”

“Not for me.”

They sit in silence, nine hours, 16,000 kilometres apart. David has found a table. He’s calling Maya over, muted. Laurie hears Maya breathe four counts in, four counts out.

“Let’s put a pin in this until we run some tests,” Maya says. “We need to make sure your Link isn’t going to cross-channel with Esther again.”

“Can’t we just find Esther and…I don’t know.”

“We are looking for her, but we have to do it quietly. It’s not like I can just put her in a box; it wasn’t her fault this happened.”

“And whose fault was it?”

“Let’s continue this discussion another time, I really do have to go now…

“Maya!”

“I’ll call you later.”

The Downtown bar is noisy and overfilled with eclectic furniture in children's candy colors. David’s ADAM, configured for the outside world with an attachable mobility chair, has already been confused by the bar’s soft lighting and unfamiliar forms and attempted to jam David into a mint-green side-table. Maya hangs up on Laurie before joining him. She orders cocktails, but then has to clamber out of the booth to collect them from a pink-haired artisan mixologist from behind the bar. Weaving back to their booth, around pastel bubble-gum ping pong tables and baby-blue armchairs, she sees a sleek-looking woman, seemingly her own age, approach and greet David with her hand outstretched. He manages to shake it, seemingly effortlessly.

“Sadie Velaquez,” Maya hears her say. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise.” David replies. He tweaks the position of his chair to better face Sadie as she slides gracefully into the end of the booth where Maya had just been sitting. “Thrillmate’s founder, Maya Sairo, is just… “

“I’m here. Hi. Thank you for meeting with us. Can I order you a drink?” Sadie’s nails, Maya notes as she shakes the other woman’s hand, are real-painted, rather than colored with digital overlays. They are light green, well-matched to the general hue of the bar.

“No, thank you, I’ll grab one in a bit. Please, sit down.” ADAM manages to let Maya slide past without bumping David into any more furniture. By the time Maya is seated, Sadie has created a shared view of Thrillmate’s public finances and subscriber numbers.

“I don’t want to waste your time,” Sadie begins, “and from what our organisation has put together with public data, you don’t have that much of it left. From a funding perspective.”

Wow. Efficient.

“Would you say that your main expenditures are research related?” Immediately, Maya regrets buying herself another drink. She pushes her glass out of reach.

“Um, yes, currently. Installations and tech-support are pretty much funded by subscription fees. And we have a light staff, just communications and engineering. I lead the engineering team.”

“What about the content house?”

She’s done her research.

“Oh, yes. That was expensive to set-up. The funding came from a South African investment group, hence why the house is in Cape Town. We keep running costs low with robo-staffing — lots of GoodBots and the like. And every Thrillmate who stays there pays a usage fee.”

“Even Laurie Imani?”

Maya keeps her gaze focussed on the data visualisations that Sadie has created. “Sure. Although Laurie’s only just arrived there, so I don’t think she’s made a payment yet.” Now she meets the other woman’s eyes, and Sadie smiles. She looks genuinely curious, engaged.

“I understand,” Sadie says. “So tell me about your R&D. How widely applicable do you think therapeutic skinning could be?”

David, in response, motions for ADAM to reverse away from the booth. The chair stops about ten metres away. David stands up.

“Two years ago,” says David, “I couldn’t feed myself. This was a terrible pity because I love eating and I am, unfortunately, the best cook that I know.”

Maya realises she is holding her breath. She didn’t know David had progressed to standing. She notes, in awe, that he is holding his full cocktail glass, and holding it steady.

“It took two months of skinning for eight or ten hours per day for my brain to remember where my mouth is. Another month, and ADAM here, he pats the chair affectionately, “could drive me around the kitchen and I could point at things and communicate somehow how much of what should go in where, for the benefit of my dedicated — if gastronomically under-developed — prodigy.” He beams at Maya, shiny-eyed. He’s going to cry, she thinks, then I’m going to cry.

“I would skin Thrillmates performing ordinary life — eating, talking, taking a shower. Feeling other people do these things helped remind my brain that it once knew how to do them, too. Last week, for the first time, I stood up, just like this.” Slowly, carefully, he steps away from his chair. He takes another step, wobbles, then seems to gain speed and confidence, and strides quickly across the floor towards them and sits down, hard, in the booth next to Maya.

“David, you didn’t tell me…” Maya, as she predicted, has tears on her face. With practised social ease, Sadie reaches across the table and squeezes David’s arm in warm congratulations.

“That was incredible,” she says. “I am really, really happy for you. Why isn’t everyone using your technology this way?”

Maya wipes her eyes. She decides that she does want a sip of her drink, after all.

“Because,” Maya replies, “not all neural patterns reliably regenerate another person’s brain pathways. It’s like… sure, you can put on any outfit, feel the fabric, admire the colours, but not everything fits — for reasons we still don’t fully understand.”

“So David is a special case?” asks Sadie.

“No, there’s a small skinning community who subscribe to Thrillmate because they use our taps for neurological therapy. But it’s trial and error, user-guided discovery. I’m constantly monitoring David’s Link, re-running its learning to adapt to his changing brain pathways, seeing which skinstreams seemed to ‘fit’ better. There are models that I can send you — in fact, I think we might have already sent them to you or someone else in your organisation because we enquired about venture capital months ago. We just need time, and more researchers, more test subjects, more…”

“...money.” Sadie finishes.

“Yes. We need more money.”

Maya’s turn for a Sadie arm-squeeze.

“If we’ve overlooked you before,” Sadie says, “it’s not because of your research. Clearly it’s revolutionary,” she nodsto David, “but the investors in our fund needed assurance there would be lasting engagement. Considering recent events, Thrillmate is now a good proposition. If you’re still willing to accept financing for company shares, then…” — Maya’s a dizzy combination of booze, nerves, and tears — “...we’re in. Without a doubt. You can review the per-share price to ensure it covers all you wish to do with Thrillmate Therapeutics. I want this to work for you.”

I should call Laurie, Maya thinks, until she remembers where they left things. “Thank you,” she says, “I’m proud of what we’ve built so far, but this…”

“I know. Now you’ll be more than just an entertainment company with a shiny new way to get people’s rocks off.”

Maya feels herself blush from the balls of her feet to the tip of her nose. “I assume you saw my statement this morning to X-Ventures.”

“I did.”

“Rest assured, we’re investigating the incident. Confidentially, the most likely causes are a bit-flip, in which case it’s almost certain to never happen again, or a device-address mix-up. If it’s that…then I feel I really should tell you, it could re-occur.”

“I understand.”

“I’m planning to schedule some tests with Laurie Imani personally,” if she’s still cool with that.“She wants to try another round with the shark, but obviously that isn’t going to happen.”

“Why not?” Sadie asks, as if it were a pointedly obvious question.

“Um, well…my priority is protecting our Thrillmates and skinners from non-consensual incursions.”

“Sure, that’s fine. But no one was hurt last time, were they? If I recall the streaming numbers for the day, it was one of your highest skinned events to date. Certainly the highest Laurie Imani has ever achieved. Was she alright, afterwards?”

Yeah. I mean, a bit thrown around but…”

“Well that’s promising, isn’t it?”

“I guess…” Maya trails off. She senses, rather than sees, the gradual stiffening of David’s spine.

“I think what you’re saying, forgive me, Sadie, for putting it bluntly, is that your fund has no issue with a potential repeat of yesterday’s incident?”

Sadie inclines her head. Then she flashes a smile at the pink-haired mixologist who has just approached their booth and placed a sparkly drink down on the table in front of her. How come her drink gets hand-delivered? What kind of drink has sparkles in it?

“At this moment,” Sadie says, “Thrillmate is, from our perspective, in a uniquely strong position. Laurie’s race seems primed to attract a strong audience who are about to receive a valuable and thrilling experience; whether that be facing down one of the most terrifying predators on Earth, or taking a little wander around the social underbelly of Downtown LA. Either way, it’s a win-win. Funny how these things can turn out, isn’t it? You build a product with a certain purpose in mind, then the market almost always finds another use for it. Who would have thought there’d be a skinning market for poverty porn? Wild.”

“What about Esther?” David’s voice has grown cold.

“Esther?”

Maya butts in. “The young woman whose skin was accidentally streamed to Laurie’s feed.”

“Go out and sign her! Give her a contract with Thrillmate. She’ll have a guaranteed audience, especially if you maintain the voyeurism angle — maybe even bigger than Laurie’s.”

Maya doesn’t remember finishing her drink, but her glass is empty. She wants another one. She stares at the table. “I mean, yeah. Possibly you’re right…”

Sadie’s green fingernails creep back onto her arm. “Maya.” Her eyes are very clear — brown, thick-lashed, beautiful. “No one is asking you to do anything wrong. You should definitely conduct those tests and make sure that Laurie’s Link is secured. And I’m sure something can be worked out with this Esther. As for your skinners, look…” She enhances one of the data visualisations on the table: available Thrillmate installation appointments. They seem to be booked out for the next two months. “Demand is up! And your company valuation, according to our fund’s calculations, has increased by another 120 percent. Thrillmate has just - yes - about twelve minutes ago, become the world’s first neural unicorn.”

If she sold the company right now, Maya would be, well, not one of the richest people in the world, but certainly up there.

“All we want,” Sadie continues, “is some kind of guarantee that this momentum will continue, for a bit longer. You could announce Laurie’s race, for example.”

“Before we finish the tests?”

“Let’s say in the next 24 hours. How does that sound?”

David’s glass is also empty. He has it balanced on ADAM’s side-arm and is twirling its stems between his fingers. It’s a degree of fine motor control that Maya had at one point assumed he would never be capable of again. But he’s doing it now, thoughtlessly, broodingly.

“I’ll have to take it to the board. The whole investment offer, I mean.”

“Of course. We expected that.” Sadie drains the last of the sparkles from her glass. She flutters her fingers, and Maya hears the message received ping in her inner ear. “I’ve sent you our terms sheet. As discussed, come back with whatever price you need to fund Thrillmate Therapeutics. After all, you’re a unicorn now.”

As soon as she activates her Link, Laurie feels someone else; a silent otherness in her ear, across her skin, like listening to the darkness of a house at night to sense if you’re the only one awake…and realising no, I’m not alone. She’s sitting on the balcony outside her room, gazing at a swollen grey sky over swollen grey water…but when she relaxes her gaze, she sees in her mind’s eye — a corridor. There’s a shine coming off the floor as if it’s all hard surfaces and reflected lights; nighttime city lights, seeping through a gap in the wall that is probably a large window. And the sound of a bird. Just one, outside but not far away, calling out a single high-pitched note. So this must be Esther. The other skinner. The imposter. As far as Laurie can tell, she isn’t moving; simply standing and listening to the bird’s clear song. Here, here, you, you. An owl maybe, or a dove. She knows nothing about birds. Laurie feels the muscles in her chest soften, her heart keeping time. Here, here, you, you. It feels like joy. This is cross-continental communion on a Sunday afternoon.

And then it is gone. Maya is calling, and simultaneously requesting to join Laurie’s skin. Laurie waits for a heartbeat, sensing, skin-listening; now she feels that she’s alone. So she consents to sharing over a private channel and Maya is suddenly there with her, inside of her, like they used to be, really not so long ago, when Thrillmate was just a proposal and Laurie so in-love with its brilliant visionary that she’d put her body on the line as an early test case of next-gen neural software. In those days, Maya couldn’t get enough of this — Laurie’s skin. They’d spend all day hooked up to each other, every movement a new wonder. Laurie misses that.

“Hi,” Maya says. “Sorry - got delayed.”

“Should we do this later? You sound stressed.”

“I’m fine. I’ll feel better after we run these tests.”

Laurie still has questions, but she knows she’ll have to wait. Break the ice first. That was always her role after a fight.

“How was your meeting?” She feels the soft vromph that Maya’s sofa makes when she flops herself into it. Maya sighs.

“We have an offer that’ll fund Thrillmate therapies for at least the next two years. The board has to approve it. Check your inbox.”

“That’s amazing news…isn’t it?”

“Ha. The thing we’ve been missing falls into my lap, only it's an ethical clusterfuck. I can’t pause our skinstreams, or suspend just you, or even set the damn shark free because apparently that would ‘give the wrong signals.’ So if we want the money, we have to go ahead with the race, and you might drown while this Esther girl gets non-consensually skinstreamed. So, obviously, I’m ecstatic.”

“Why would you think you could suspend me?”

“Um, because it’s my company! Laurie! It should be my call!”

“It’s your call whether or not I go swimming with a shark?”

“Essentially, yes! If Thrillmate hosts your stream...sorry, this is all coming out wrong. I just don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

“Especially if it ruins your investment deal.”

“Okay, that’s unfair.”

“Is it untrue?”

Maya sighs a hard puff of frustration. “I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere with this conversation. Let’s just do these tests because if there’s no skin-cursions, then things will be easier. Has anything felt strange in your body since you woke up? Any anomalies?”

“No,”' she lies.

“Good. I’m going to start routing your stream through different servers and analysing the data-packets. Let me know if you feel or see or hear or taste anything unexpected. Apologies in advance if I become a little unresponsive, I just need to concentrate…”

They sit together in silence. Grey sea, grey sky. Cool breeze across her forehead, salty-air smell, someone laughing brightly from around the corner, the beep of a GoodBot. Laurie’s legs start to ache in the way that says get moving, you’ve been sitting still long enough. It's a feeling that Maya didn’t understand until she spent hours in Laurie’s skin. You can’t keep a dolphin in a cage, it loses its mind. Slowly, Laurie stands up and stretches, left hamstring, right. Maya doesn’t say anything, so she pads around the corner of the balcony to find Pepi, sprawled across a sun lounge, her feet enclosed inside a GoodBot. She sees Laurie and waves.

“Hey!” Pepi calls out. “Good to see you’re up and about. Don’t worry, you’re not interrupting; I’m not streaming.” Laurie watches Pepi’s gold-streaked mane of hair glinting in the sun. She really is gorgeous, she could probably be convinced to pay for time in Pepi’s skin. “Just testing something for later.”

“What’s it doing to your feet?”

“It’s called vasodilation. You heat an area and the blood vessels expand and get in more oxygen and nutrients. It’s super energising.”

“Right.”

“Yeah, you should try it,” Pepi beckons sweetly. “How are you doing anyway? I heard the whole shark stream went a bit..." She pulls her mouth into a cat-bum and opens her eyes wide.

“Yeah, there was a slight hiccup,” Laurie replies, “I should actually tell you that I’m skinstreaming at the moment, with Maya. She’s running some tests.”

“Oh, about the update?”

“...What update?”

“The beta one for inter-skin raids? David asked me to send my audience over to you the other day. You know, for numbers. They had to push some update that’s still in beta so for now it’s only you and me that have it. Software sisters - oh, my feet!” She extracts herself from the GoodBot and examines her ten perfect, glowing toes. Maya, in Laurie’s ear, stays quiet.

“Hmm, I guess Maya is probably investigating her update. Actually, Maya’s just asked if I can go inside for a bit…enjoy your foot thing, Pepi. Stay…energised.” Pepi blows her a kiss and reclines back on the lounge, lacquered legs catching the sunlight.

“What the fuck Maya, when were you planning on telling me you’ve been running code experiments in my brain!” She’s hissing behind her hand, heading back into her bedroom.

“Relax, Laurie it wasn’t an experiment. The raid update is no different from the hundreds of others you’ve absorbed.”

“Except this one’s still in beta!”

“Only because we hadn’t live-tested it yet. Code review, simulations, bug-fixes: all complete. I’m looking at the test results now — it’s working fine.”

“Fine? I almost drowned in the ocean while perfect Pepi’s posse and a hundred thousand more skinners had a wank in a homeless shelter! Yeah, I found out what happened online, again no thanks to you.”

“Laurie, you know I’ve been preoccupied precisely because I’m taking the Esther incursion so seriously. Fixing it is my highest priority.”

“I’m gushing with confidence…”

“What else can I do other than reiterate that I’m sorry! Sorry, sorry, and sorry again! But maybe just take a second to think about what’s really going on here. The skinners weren’t coming, Laurie. They weren't interested. Okay, so I went off book with the beta raid, but it worked didn’t it? You’ve got a captive fan following — just what you always wanted. You win, Laurie.”

Somewhere out there, in the ocean, a great white shark is sniffing around for blood.

“I should have told you about the update,” Maya says, “and I don’t mean to minimise that, but I’m being totally honest with you; as far as I can tell, it had nothing to do with the incursion.”

“You didn’t know that at the time, Maya.”

“…That’s true. So I owe you one.”

Maya always knew how to say the right words in the right order, as though crafting an apology was a puzzle to be solved, the absolution of her guilt the eventual prize.

Whatever,” says Laurie, hardening. “So did you find anything useful?”

“Not yet. I’ve cycled your skinstream through our other servers to simulate other skinners joining and leaving, up to a million people. I’ve got learning models and the entire engineering team re-running analysis on the data-packets; so it’s not just me. But there’s no evidence of alteration, or re-routing, or cross-channeling…you’re sure you haven’t felt any strangeness, at all?”

Laurie closes her eyes and sees herself, as if from above. Head, shoulders, legs, the hyper-lean engine of her heart. Still, she can do this, she has to believe.

“Laurie?”

“No. Nothing strange.”

“Then I guess we can announce your race…I’ll ask one more time, in case you’ve finally come to your senses: you still want do it?”

“Yes.” She makes herself remember the living-dead void of its eyes, the rude wound of its gashed flesh. Don’t fear, anticipate. “And this will be the last time I swim for Thrillmate.”

“When did you decide that?”

“Just now. I won’t be the fastest forever, then someday I’ll be nothing…I just need to know I can do this, and then…” Then she’ll grow into the life that awaits her, next.

“I understand.”

“Yeah, I know you do.”

They are quiet together, just the two of them, in perfect empathy. Maya says: “If you need my help. If you want it. I’m here for you.”

“Thank you. I don’t.”

“Okay…I’ll greenlight the announcement. Just let me know if you feel…anything.”

“Sure.”

THRILLING AND SKINNING

PUBLIC BOARD

Active today

Most recent post:

THIS OUT JUST NOW!!! Laurie Imani is racing a shark! She’s upping her game after an encounter with the great white off the coast of Cape Town last week — with the race scheduled for 6:00 CAT

Thursday, October 7, Thrillmate LAN L-I-001. Indicate HERE to subscribe and reserve your spot.

Discussion:

@deepdive: reserved my spot already!

@thrillrz: fastest swimmer in hERstory!!!!

@elsie: Yeah…human history (herstory?)

@notyourmum: Have to pay me a lotta coin to miss this one @pt3: nope. don’t feel like dying. you guys have fun though.

@deepdive: There is ample peer-reviewed evidence that skinning is perfectly safe and even high-stress events have no adverse consequences due to the state of the art cortisol buffers that Thrillmate developed along with their proprietary neural technology.

@pt3: Kill the bot. Kill it with fire.

@thrillz: WE LOVE YOU LAURIE!

@elsie: She knows how fast a shark can swim, right? @notyourmum: Just gonna leave this here:

'Laurie Imani returned from international competition having beaten every speed record ever set - by anyone. While her days of medal winning are behind her, the athlete says

that she’s fitter than ever and still running on pure adrenalin from her brush with the predator. ‘It just occurred to me - what would it feel like - to take on that challenge, and win?’

@Katz: Why are we all still pretending this is about the shark?

@thrillz: When I connect to Laurie’s Skin, my inner power comes to light. I feel like I could do anything.

@Katz: I didn’t even know what that shelter place was. Anyone else have an interesting learning experience?

@sami-a: I used to watch my sister on the toilet through a crack in the doorway. Even when we were older. I never told her.

@pt3: until now.

@sami-a: and 'pt3' is your actual name right?

@pt3: fair. so who do we think she is?

@sami-a: ‘Esther’? Some friends and I have geolocated the street to central Los Angeles. But that place she went into is a Safe-Nite-Inn, which is a chain of emergency shelters that autonomously move guests about. So she could be anywhere.

@kk42: Yeah but they don’t actually go that far. Each inn has a radius of 10 miles so unless she was trying to get someplace and kinda hopped between them she’ll be somewhere in the area.

@marina-del-queen: I’ve run a public records search for women named ‘Esther’ registered in Los Angeles county. But even in the age bracket 18-40 there are soooo many…

@pt3: Newb question - can you snapshot visuals from a skinstream?

@sami-a: No. The data you’re seeing is going straight to your brain, not via any visible light waves that you can capture.

@pt3: Gotcha. But we know she’s white, right? Can we filter all your search results @marina-del-queen for photos matching white women in that age bracket?

@marina-del-queen: I’m not sure we actually know that…anyone else remember seeing skin? She was wearing white gloves

@sami-a: Everyone is welcome to add to the 'Finding Esther' memory crowd-sourcing project that I’ve set-up [indicate HERE]

@dogsbreath: do you think she somehow sensed something was up?

@candyboy: what's she doing in a shelter anyways if she’s got a Link? They don’t hand them out for free.

@justpete: Maybe that’s her kink. Wanking in shelters. @sami-a: It felt more like a 'wind-down' wank to me

@marina-del-queen: Agree. Otherwise there would have been more build up. She was more excited about the noodles.

@dogsbreath: OMG the noodles though

@marina-del-queen: Haha anyone else immediately order noodles after?

@thrillz: WE LOVE YOU LAURIE!

@sami-a: I reckon Esther is single. Like lonely-cat-lady single. It was just the WAY she did it

@marina-del-queen: true. I mean if someone can be that happy about noodles…

@pt3: Just saying folks…it can’t be that hard to find her.

@marina-del-queen: I dunno. if she’s staying in that kind of place she’s not likely to show up on residential records or have a public employment history or anything.

@deepdive: A friend just told me HALF the skinner spots are ALREADY BOOKED!

@sami-a: go away bot. pretty funny if she was just a total nobody and now a million people have felt her on the toilet.

@pt3: got a thing for toilets don’t you?

@angie: @pt3, @sami-a, where abouts are you located, physically? I’m in LA. We could go out and look for her?

<discussion has been closed by the moderator>

For the hundredth time, Maya thinks that she should just stake out the network of Safe-Nite-Inns herself. She could go undercover as a prospective resident. Or pay someone else to do it. Was that allowed? She didn’t know, she hadn’t properly considered it, she just hadn’t had time. In six minutes, the Thrillmate board was meeting to vote on the investment offer from Sadie’s fund. In thirty-six hours, Laurie was set to swim again, against that monstrous shark.

Really, Maya thought, she should be grateful that a first name, a city, and a handful of disputable physical details hadn’t yet been enough to turn up Esther in person. She never looked in the mirror, never showed her face. Walking circles around her faux-rug, Maya keeps glancing out her window down onto the street, searching for the inn that had seemingly been there so often that she’d stopped noticing altogether; until now, when she had reason to rush the front door and ask — what? Do you know Esther? Already, the network operating Safe-Nite-Inns had declined to provide any useful information. No, the location of their facilities was not available in real-time on a publicly accessible interface. No, there was not an open-sourced database of past residents. Was she law enforcement or next of kin? Was the person of interest somehow at risk? Was she? For the 101st time, Maya reads through the code of the inter-skinning update. Nothing. She checks, again, the trackers she’d scripted for Esther-related alerts on the public skinning boards. Just chatter so far, idle, mostly light on details, but generating peaks of message-board activity that a week ago would have made her founder’s heart sing. Did Esther even know that she had a fan club? Would she care? Since her meeting with Sadie, Thrillmate’s subscriptions have kept rising and the company’s value has kept pace, continuously climbing. As if summoned by the thought, a message from Sadie pops into Maya’s view. Seems like the unicorn is getting shinier… Through the alchemy of speculative markets, Maya’s share of the company alone is now apparently worth more money than she’s contemplated in her entire life. She has never felt less magical.

One by one, the Thrillmate board members join the call. David appears in his armchair, a corner of ADAM, on stand-by, visible in his projection. Laurie maps in from her balcony in the content house, her face lit by bright Capetown sun. Next, Jakarta Investment Group, then Enterpris Afrique — represented, as always, by generic humanoid avatars; algorithmically programmed to vote with the money. She remembers Sadie’s real-painted nails gripping her arm.

No one is asking you to do anything wrong.

Then why do I feel so nervous?

David calls the meeting officially to order. He speaks cooly. They haven’t talked, properly, since their meeting with Sadie in the overstuffed bar. Now, he reminds them that the terms sheet is in each board member’s inbox, and that the deal, at Thrillmate’s current valuation, would be sufficient to fund their therapeutic research into the foreseeable future.

“Why aren’t you happier about this?”

Maya’s not even sure she’d said it out loud until David blinks at her, before responding calmly: “Please record in the minutes that we are opening the matter for discussion…”

David looks to Laurie, then to the avatars of Jakarta and Enterpris.

Maya continues, “The others all have their reasons for wanting to go ahead, but I’ve realised that I don’t know which way you’re going to vote. Surely you, out of all of us, see the potential of Thrillmate therapeutics?”

David opens his mouth, considers, seems to think again. Finally: “I’ve no doubt as to the positive potential of neurological therapies, but I fear that we are embarking on an unreliable exercise in human-value accounting.”

“That’s not an answer. Do you think we should take this offer or not?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because its terms disregard an individual’s right to dignity and privacy.”

“We ran the tests. Laurie hasn’t experienced another second of cross-channeling. It was a random fluke.”

Laurie remains motionless, eyes downcast.

“We should take more time,” says David, “to be sure.”

“If we take more time, then we’ll be out of time. Guaranteed. I’ve already had calls about selling the content house.” Maya registers a look of hurt flashing across Laurie’s face. “And what about all the people that we could help? I know it feels gross to do the ‘human value accounting’, but how can we pass up the opportunity to allow another person to walk again? Or see? Or talk to someone they love?”

David remains stern, inscrutable. “But is it worth the risk of another violation? Or Laurie near drowned again?”

“It would be different if there’d been any sign of recurrence,” says Maya.

“Enough to not go through with this?”

“Well, yeah! Recurrence would indicate a deep systems issue that we currently have no control over, which would be the most likely to surface when the system substrate — in this case, Laurie’s brain, is under maximum stress. As it stands…the risk seems…I actually don't know how to quantify it. But everything has risks. Esther may be vulnerable still, but I’m willing to take personal responsibility for that; whatever it is she went through and might go through again, however unlikely; that’s on me.” Yet you haven’t tried anywhere near hard enough to find her, she thinks.

David turns to Laurie, who does not return his gaze. “Forgive me if this question sounds patronising but I am genuinely asking: do you truly understand what you are undertaking?”

All the years that Laurie has been intertwined in Maya’s life, she and David have never truly connected. Watching her pulse visibly beating in the side of her throat, Maya thinks, at first, that Laurie has been aggravated, talked down to. Again. By the scholar in his tower.

“It has happened again,” Laurie says.

“What?” Maya’s voice constricts, tight.

“Just before you ran those tests, I felt someone else…it felt like her.” She appears vacant, as though staring out to sea. Maya feels something hot and frantic clawing in her chest.

“The one thing I asked you to do was tell me.”

“I know.”

“So why…?” The hot thing is devouring the brainspace she needs, to use words.

“Because you would have cancelled the race,” Laurie replies, “and everyone thinks I can’t do it. Even you.”

“I don’t even know what to say to you, that’s just so…selfish…”

“No shit it’s selfish, Maya! But is it any more selfish than putting some girl on the line because you’ve decided it’s fine? Or…” She pivots to David, eyes narrowed, “...to make an amazing recovery and then go ‘nah, you know what, my high and mighty ethics give me the right not to share this? We’re all being selfish!”

The avatar representing Enterpris Afrique raises its hand. “Could you inform us when the vote on the deal is going to take place?”

A message from Sadie: Everything good?

Maya wants to get away from them, all of them. The street below her window is blushing golden sunset. She speaks with her back turned, talking to the GoodBots, the POVs, the people out for a nice evening. “I need a…need a break. Come back in…”

“Two hours?” David says.

“Fine. End call.”

Fury throws Maya across downtown, past interweaving lattices of skybridges and staircases, new-build towers and vintage skyscrapers writhing together in an architectural orgy. All she ever wanted to do was make something clever, make something good, but that is too much to ask, too hard, too selfish, how is it selfish, we’re all being selfish. Her body is filled by a greedy black creature that eats with each step all Maya’s memories of everything she has poured into Thrillmate, into the world, into Laurie, into David, hours and days and months and years of work, working — alone.

The word is a slap in her brain. A cold word. All alone.

Those first investors had asked her: who would put a chip in their brain to smell the shit their dog is sniffing? Now she knows. It’s the person who wants so badly to be connected that they put a chip in their brain to feel another person take a shit. As the smog of her rage condenses and sinks, Maya sees she is atop a hill on the edge of the city. Ten million people call this place home. The world as a whole — have we reached nine billion? She can’t remember. Life is a messy condition; a mulchy grossness of moist need, flowering pleasure, tendrils of curiosity holding everyone together in some common basket of identity: what you are, I am too. Let me live part of my life through you. In all that noise, what is one person, getting off in a bathroom? 

She hears a notification, a single note. New alert, chat tracker: Y’all. I’ve found her. The real Esther. Upper and Sixth. Come and join the party. It’s gonna be wild.

Suddenly, Maya knows what she needs to do. She runs. Through plazas and under bridges, around corners, downhill, flying, ast a huddle of GoodBots; she leaps into an alleyway and then recoils, immediately, a near miss from the reversing backside of a stout white truck, overlaid with imagery of coffee and sandwiches. A short man in a beanie leans against a light-post and frowns at her critically.

“Sorry, this truck is stupid.”

“That’s…fine…, I’m just looking for…” Gasping, she sees that the light-post marks the corner of Upper and Sixth. She pulls up her chat-tracker. Nothing new. Should she call someone, an authority?

“They said it could avoid objects as small as a Chihuahua. But it’s like blind or something.” The beanie man is still talking. “Look,” he steps behind the truck and it keeps reversing towards him. “I’m bigger than a Chihuahua, no?”

“Yes. You are.” Would a crowd tracking down Esther in person count as a threat that anyone would take seriously? Maya’s heart is hammering in dread; but the street is still. Well aside from the truck, which is still moving. “Um, should you…get out of the way?”

With half a metre to spare, the man steps out of the path of the vehicle’s generous behind. He raises his eyebrows at Maya, as if expecting some acknowledgment of his escape. “What did I tell you?”

“Your truck is undoubtedly defective.”

“What?” The man shakes his head. ”No, no, no, this isn’t my truck! I just make the food for those moving shelters, you know? It’s their truck; it drives me to all the different locations.”

“Uh-huh. Wait…what shelters?”

“You know Safe-Nite-Inns?”

“Your truck works for Safe-Nite-Inn? You make the food. Really!?”

“It’s not my truck.”

“Oh, of course, sorry! It’s just — do you know any of the people who stay in those shelters? I’m looking for someone, a woman. Named Esther?”

The truck still hasn’t manoeuvred itself out of the alleyway. “Idiot truck!” He shrugs in Maya’s direction. “What you gonna do? Esther. Yeah, I know an Esther. Why?”

Holy Christ, I could still be the first to find her. “There’s a…possible…chance that she’s in trouble,” says Maya, trying her best not to sound in any way suspect or unhinged, “but I think I can help. Did you happen to see anyone else gathering around here, just now?”

“Maybe. Esther wouldn’t be at a shelter tonight, though. She has a show at Little Poet. Been doing that for years.”

“Oh, my god. Amazing. Is Little Poet a bar? Actually it’s fine, I’ll look it up.” Her feet skitter, ready to run. Should she call for back-up? How many skinners were on the hunt? Who could she call?

“If you need to get to Little Poet,” the beanie man says, “just come with me. It’s where I pick up the cheeses. They grow in the basement. It’s better for the amoebas, or the microbes…or something. Anyway, I’ll take you there. When this truck learns how to drive…oh, finally!”

The journey to the Little Poet lasts exactly two minutes. When they arrive, Maya throws herself from the cabin of the truck, and leaps down a flight of rickety stairs to the open door of a cool, dimly-lit room. There’s a scattering of chairs around a small stage, all hemmed in by a cluster of stainless-steel vats. Presumably they house the milk-producing bacteria. In the precision-fermentation process now globally used to create dairy products, genetically-modified microbes are mixed with liquified plant sugars. For several days, the mixture bubbles away, its belches contained by airtight vats, sold off-the-shelf to standardised metrics and controlled by a simple UI. The costs of production are space, and the time and energy to really care about cheese. David has all of these things. A murmur of voices wafts over to her, from the shadows.

“We just want to know.”

“We’re fans.”

“How’d you get a Link, Esther?”

Padding softly towards the vats, Maya counts the backs of twelve people. No — maybe twenty. A small crowd, gathered like storm clouds, around an unseen figure.

“Is this really where you hang out, in here?”

“How long have you lived in a shelter?”

“I’m just here to do my show…”

“Oh, we know what sort of show you do.”

“As if it wasn’t on purpose!”

“I don’t know what you mean…”

Maya runs a scan for connected devices. The vats are on the Little Poet’s private network. And their passwords are alpha-neumeric, not biological. Sub-optimal security is a price some choose to pay for the convenience of granting access to a rotating crew of cheese-collecting -truck drivers. She identifies a vat mid-way through its fermentation process. Sulphur with a hint of chili. Onion and old socks. Compost on a warm day. The flatulent scent of working microbes is wondrously varied.

“I just saw an alert about a toxic leak in this area!” Maya’s exclamation comes out squeaky, which is probably appropriate. The storm swivels towards Maya and stares. “I can actually smell something…” Twentyish noses crinkle.

“Yeah I smell it too.”

“Are we safe here?”

Already the crowd, distracted, is losing coherence.

Maya says: “You should go up to street level where there’s fresh air.”

Fortyish eyes find the exit, bodies start to move. Maya pushes past the escaping skinners towards a woman still standing stationary around a collection of overflowing bags. She’s thirtyish, maybe forty, hard to tell in the dim light, white hair piled in a bun, yellow backpack in her hands.

“Esther?” Maya softly takes her hand. “My name is Maya. Don’t worry, the smell’s just cheese. There’s a vehicle outside where you can gather yourself.”

“I have a show…”

“I know. I’m sorry, this won’t take long. Your bags will be safe here.”

“Heya, Esther, are you alright?” The man in the beanie is by the doorway, arms laden with boxes of wrapped spheres. “That’s quite a crowd you’re pulling!”

“They said they were here for me,” Esther speaks shyly, with a tinge of hope, “they said I was a Thrillmate.”

Maya releases Esther’s arm so she can climb the stairs. She’s forty something, Maya determines as they come onto the street.

“Would you like to be a Thrillmate?” It wasn’t the first thing Maya had planned to say. And she hopes that she doesn’t sound condescending, as though she’s expecting to be treated as some sort of saviour.

Esther replies with clear eyes and a flickering smile - no hesitation: “Well yeah, obviously…sorry, who are you?”

When she thinks about it, the solution was under her nose, in her meeting with Sadie. Maya’s shares are sold on the public market at the peak valuation the company had ever achieved. Maya loses all formal control of her company, whilst a few hundred new micro-shareholders pad out the Thrillmate structure, which also scares Sadie’s fund back to the financial drawing board. But it doesn’t matter, because the proceeds from Maya’s sale, donated to the research and development team, are enough to fund Thrillmate Therapeutics for at least the next two years. After that, whatever they achieve will have to speak for itself.

Maya’s final act as a board member was to sign Esther’s Thrillmate performance agreement, and to book Esther, Laurie, and Pepi with the engineering department for a full reconfiguration. Whatever happened to cause the cross-channeling incident, turning the thing on and off again (figuratively speaking) should fix it. Surely.

Three weeks later, Maya logs into Laurie’s skin. She stands on a cliff that juts above the South Atlantic. Laurie stretches her arms to the sun, and Maya feels the glide of Laurie’s swimsuit against her back, and slick over her freshly shaved and oiled scalp.

Laurie brings to her belly deep and steady breaths. She rolls her shoulders, gathering her own lazy power. She shivers her thighs. This is Laurie’s final swim for Thrillmate; out to open water towards a cold-blooded predator that she will race alongside for almost a mile, and then climb, victorious, out of the ocean and into her new life.

Maya loses herself in the sunspots dancing across Laurie’s eyes. Her stomach contracts with an iron-like snap. She reaches her hands to the sun once more. Two hundred thousand people feel, in their own skin, her every movement, her every breath. We don’t understand each other, Maya thinks.

At least I have given my best to this. A wild attempt, to get out of our own way. She sinks back into her sofa. She closes her eyes. Laurie dives.