MULTIVERSE INDEX FILE

DESIGNATION: Reality 10.15.36
PRIMARY RESIDENT: Octavia, age 48
KNOWN ALIAS: The Version Who Stayed Online
PUBLIC STATUS: Extremely visible
PRIVATE STATUS: Unable to determine. Resident has not been asked in some time.

OBSERVATION: Resident has not experienced complete psychological solitude in approximately nine years, despite being physically alone most mornings.

ASSETS ON RECORD: Eleven million combined followers (figure disputed by resident, who prefers “a lot of people”). Translations in fourteen languages. One film adaptation released, one in development. A graduate seminar at a university she has never visited. Fan art. Unauthorized merchandise, including at least one tote bag. A concerning number of strangers who believe they know what she would think about things.

ANOMALY: Resident continues to observe herself from an audience’s point of view when no audience is present. The anomaly has been recorded in the garden, in the shower, and on two occasions in her sleep.

⚠️ TRAVELER’S WARNING: Do not tell the resident to “just ignore the comments.” The last visitor who said this is still being located.

This was the year people started stealing my thoughts. I mean that literally, which I recognize is what a woman says right before explaining that it isn’t quite literal. Ideas have always been stolen. Somewhere in the Paleolithic, a woman scratched something brilliant onto a cave wall, and another woman wandered over, squinted at it, and said she’d been saying that for years. What I mean is the newer thing. I would write something online, usually a small observation that had floated up while I was washing dishes or sitting in the grocery store parking lot not ready to go in yet. Three or four days later I would meet it again with someone else’s name under it. Same wording, sometimes the same comma I’d argued with myself about, thousands of likes, and comments thanking the new owner for their insight.

The one that started it, or at least the one I can’t stop thinking about, was a post I wrote on a Sunday night in June: I love people who are intellectually omnivorous. The kind who can discuss folklore, black holes, bird migration, poetry, and grocery store pricing in a single conversation without getting lost. It did better than almost anything I’d posted. Fifteen thousand people liked it, which was thrilling for about a day and then, the way these things go, became the number I compared everything else to. I pinned it to the top of my profile like a ribbon from the county fair.

Two weeks later a woman I used to work with texted me a screenshot of it, posted by an account I’d never heard of, with no mention of me anywhere. Underneath she’d written, “This made me think of you!!”

And she wasn’t wrong. It was a post about a kind of person, and I am that kind of person, and she meant it kindly. She was handing me my own sentence to tell me who I was.

I looked at it for a long time. Then I wrote back, “Ha, it does sound like me,” which is the most passive-aggressive thing I have ever typed. She sent a heart, and that was the end of it for her.

For me it was the beginning of a habit. I started finding the post everywhere. On a pastel graphic with a little illustrated moon. In a video where a man with a beautiful voice read it over piano music and credited it, without irony, to “unknown.” In the bio of a man on a dating app, according to a friend who sent it to me with eleven skull emojis.

I want to be careful here, because I know how this sounds. I wasn’t losing money. Nobody was hurt. People liked a sentence and were liking it, and I could feel how small it would make me look to complain that they were liking it under the wrong name.

That was what I couldn’t get past, honestly. Not the theft so much as how much I minded it. The whole reason I write is that I want my words to go places I can’t. Yesterday I posted a screenshot of a bookstore in Taiwan with two of my books on it, the English titles sitting under a search bar I couldn’t read. I wrote that my books were traveling to places I hadn’t even been yet, and I added a pink heart, and I meant every pixel of it. You write something in Georgia and someone reads it in Taipei. You put an idea in a book, and if you’re lucky and the book is stubborn, it reaches someone who won’t be born until after you’re dead.And God, that is a bit morbid, but I’d always thought of a good sentence as a small boat you push out and don’t follow.

So I had gotten what I wanted, twice in the same week. My books were in Taiwan with my name on them. My sentence was everywhere without it.

I didn’t need to own every conversation my sentence wandered into. What I wanted was smaller, and I’d thought more reasonable: to stay attached to my own mind. When I said this to a friend, she said, “Then stop putting your mind on the internet,” and went back to her salad, and I hated how simple she made it sound.

So I started thinking about leaving.

I don’t mean a farewell post with a black-and-white photo and a paragraph about protecting my peace. I mean just going. Deleting the apps, letting the accounts go quiet, becoming wonderfully hard to find. You’d be able to locate my books, maybe my website, maybe one podcast interview from 2029 where I sound slightly hoarse. Past that, good luck. I’d lie in bed composing my own absence and find it strangely satisfying, the way fantasy always is when you know you won’t have to live with the consequences.

Then the other thought would come in, the one I tried not to look at directly, which was that I like being seen.

I like it a lot. I like publishing something and watching another mind pick it up and turn it over. I like the strangers who’ve turned into something more than strangers: a painter in Ohio whose work I’d never have found otherwise, a woman in Brazil who reads everything I write and sends voice notes in an accent I could listen to all day. I like knowing that something I wrote before my tea went cold could cross state lines or go international before I finished the cup. I didn’t want to be invisible. I wanted something there wasn’t a setting for, and the closest I could get to naming it was that I wanted people to be able to find the work without being able to find me whenever they felt like it. There’s no toggle for that. I checked.

At 1:13 in the morning on a Thursday in October, I was lying on my side with the phone six inches from my face, telling myself I was about to put it down, when an account followed me.

@OCTAVIAEVERAFTER.

My handle. Same capitals, same absence of punctuation. The profile photo was me, but farther down the road. Not old, just unmistakably later, with a streak of gray at the temple I don’t have yet and a stillness around the mouth I wasn’t sure I liked. The account had 11 million followers, and the bio said: Author. Philosopher. Filmmaker. Please stop tagging me in discourse.

I sat up. Now, I should clarify something before you mistake my reaction for disbelief. This was not my first encounter with another reality. I had traveled through time before. I had met other versions of myself, walked around in worlds that had made different decisions about history, evolution, and occasionally basic good sense. Somewhere out there was still a coastline where sea dragons migrated and a six-legged mail dinosaur named Gerald remained, to my knowledge, illiterate and vindictive.

So Reality 10.15.36 was not the part that bothered me.

The part that bothered me was that Reality 10.15.36 had apparently found my social media account.

I stared at the location line.

October 15th. Ten years from now.

“Absolutely not,” I said, which in the Octaviaverse has historically meant I am about to investigate this immediately.

I tapped the profile. The screen went black long enough that I thought I’d finally killed the phone, and then a notification slid down from the top.

YOU HAVE BEEN INVITED TO VIEW A LATER POSSIBILITY OF YOURSELF.

There were two buttons. One said DECLINE. The other said I KNOW YOU’RE GOING TO PRESS THIS ONE.

I resented being known that well by an interface, and I’d like the record to show that I lay there for nearly a full minute on principle.

Then I pressed the button.

The first thing I noticed about this particular future was that I had excellent furniture.

I found this reassuring. If reality was about to show me some awful consequence of my choices, at least I’d maintained standards. There was a long sofa the color of wet clay, and a walnut table with one leg that had clearly been replaced and not quite matched. A wall of books went up past where anyone could comfortably reach, which is how I’ve always known a house belongs to a reader instead of a decorator. Framed photographs leaned along the shelves instead of hanging. The plants were large enough to have opinions. Through a row of tall windows, a ridge of pines was going copper in late-afternoon light. The room smelled like cedar and coffee that had been sitting a while, and under that, faintly, tomato leaves, as if someone had just come in from the garden without washing her hands.

The someone was in an armchair by the window. She wore a loose linen shirt the color of oatmeal with the sleeves pushed up, and reading glasses shoved into her hair. A silver ring on her thumb kept turning under her other thumb. One translucent screen hung in the air at her shoulder, and another floated behind it. A third, smaller one sat at the edge of her vision, showing what looked like a comment feed scrolling too fast to read.

She looked at me the way you’d look at a delivery you’d been told was coming and hadn’t believed in.

“Oh,” she said. “So it wasn’t a scam.”

“You got one too?”

She lifted a hand, and one of the screens slid down obediently to show me. YOU HAVE BEEN INVITED TO BE VIEWED BY AN EARLIER POSSIBILITY OF YOURSELF.

“I almost reported it,” she said. “I get forty of these a week. Usually it’s a man in Belgium who wants to collaborate.”

I stared at her. “That’s what I look like at forty-eight?”

She narrowed her eyes. “That’s your first question?”

“I needed to establish morale.”

She laughed, a real laugh, startled out of her. As if the sound had set something off, one of the screens chimed. Her eyes went to it. It took less than a second and she came right back, but I saw it the way you notice someone glance at a door.

I didn’t ask permission to look around. She wouldn’t have asked either.

The books came first. My name was on more of them than I could take in at once. Some titles I recognized as things I’m working on now. Some I’d only ever said out loud in the car. A handful I’d never heard of, which was a deeply strange feeling, like finding letters in your own handwriting that you don’t remember writing. There was a whole shelf of translations. I pulled one down and it was in Portuguese, and the next was Korean, and I stood there holding both like a woman handed twins she didn’t know she’d had.

“I can’t read either of those,” she said from the chair. “I just like having them.”

On the table was a stack of mail nobody had dealt with: a lecture invitation from a university in Edinburgh, a request from a film festival, and a letter on heavy paper from a museum proposing something it called a retrospective. I read that one twice, because I didn’t think writers got retrospectives. Then I reached the line where they used the word oeuvre about me and had to set it down for a second.

Pinned to a corkboard by the kitchen doorway was a printed syllabus: ENGL 7340: Visibility and the Contemporary Essay. Week Nine: Octaviano. Someone had circled my name in red and written beside it, in a hand that wasn’t mine, they are going to get it SO wrong.

“A friend’s,” she said, before I could ask. “She teaches it. She mostly gets it right. She’s the only one I let do it.”

There was a poster for a film whose title I’m not going to write down, in case writing it down changes something. There was a colored-pencil drawing of me as a moth, extremely detailed, the wings patterned like the endpapers of an old book. A teenager in Lagos had sent it, she said, after reading an essay I haven’t written yet about insects and paying attention.

And there were the messages. She didn’t offer to show me those. When I asked, she hesitated long enough that I almost took it back. Then she moved her hand and a screen filled with them. Not the comments, she said. This was the inbox she actually reads.

One was from a woman who’d found an essay of mine on her phone in a hospital waiting room at four in the morning while her husband was in surgery. She’d read it twice, gone out to her car, and cried for the first time in a week and a half. He lived. She wanted me to know that, and she had no other reason for writing. Under it was a message from a nineteen-year-old who said he hadn’t known you were allowed to think on paper the way I did, and that he was going to try.

I’m going to tell you what I thought next, because I promised myself I wouldn’t tidy this up. I thought: oh. I should stay.

I thought it with my whole chest. Standing in that copper room with its unanswered invitations, holding a book in a language I couldn’t read, I did the math I always pretend I don’t do: how many posts a week, what I’d have to give up, whether I could keep the pace. I thought about every writer I’d loved who died broke and unread, and the ones who were read too late to know it. Looking at all of it, I understood how the bargain could keep renewing itself.

“You did it,” I said.

She looked confused. “Did what?”

I waved at all of it: the books, the syllabus, the moth.

“This. You got everything.”

Her phone, a real one, the old-fashioned kind, buzzed on the arm of the chair. She looked at it, didn’t pick it up, and turned it face down. Then she looked at me.

“I know,” she said. I couldn’t tell yet whether she meant it as agreement.

She made tea, because apparently I am still someone who makes tea when she doesn’t know what to do with her hands.

I watched her in the kitchen. She moved like someone who knew where everything was. She also moved like someone being filmed, though nobody was filming her. I couldn’t have named that yet. It was in the small corrections: the way she reached for a mug and changed her grip halfway, the way she squared the tea tin against the backsplash after she’d used it. At one point a screen she’d dismissed drifted back into the doorway like a cat that has been put out and doesn’t accept it. She said “Not now” to it, quietly, the way you’d say it to a child, and it went. Three or four minutes later she called it back herself.

“You can turn those off,” I said.

“I know.”

“You just turned it back on.”

“I know.” She set my cup down. “There’s a conversation happening about something I said yesterday.”

“Do you need to be in it?”

“No.”

“Then why are you reading it?”

She looked at me the way you’d look at someone who asked why lungs keep getting involved with oxygen. “Because it’s about me.” Before I could answer, she went on. “And I know how that sounds. It isn’t vanity. Or it isn’t only vanity. If I don’t know what’s being said, I can feel it out there anyway. Like a pot I left on the stove in a house I’m not in.”

I sipped my tea and decided she was being dramatic. That was the first of several things I got wrong that afternoon. She’s tired, I thought, she’s famous, she’s allowed to be a little precious.

We talked. Mostly I talked, and she listened and asked good questions, the way I like to think I do. But every so often she’d start a sentence and stop it. “The thing about readers is — “ she’d say, then pause and come at it from somewhere else: “Which isn’t to say all readers, I mean the specific dynamic where — “ By the time she reached the end, the sentence had a little fence around it of exceptions and caveats and I’m aware this isn’t universal. She did it four or five times before I let myself notice. I put it down to age, the way some people get careful.

Then she said something about a certain kind of man online and immediately added, “Not all of them, obviously, half my favorite editors are men.” She visibly winced, as if she’d heard a reply she hadn’t received yet. That was when I asked.

“Who are you talking to?”

She blinked. “You.”

“You keep answering someone.”

She was quiet long enough that the feed in the corner scrolled through what must have been a hundred messages.

“Everyone,” she said finally. “I started hearing them before I posted. Then before I finished writing. Now it’s — “ She touched her temple, not quite pointing. “It’s while I’m thinking. A thought shows up, and it’s already brought a lawyer.”

I laughed, because it was funny. Then I stopped, because she wasn’t laughing, and because I had done exactly that in the shower that morning. I’d had an idea about the stolen post, and before I’d rinsed the conditioner out I’d drafted all the replies: the woman who’d tell me ideas can’t be owned, the man who’d tell me I was lucky anyone read me at all, and the one who’d say I was making it about myself. I argued with all three of them under the water and won. Then I got out, dried off, and didn’t write anything.

“When did it start?” I asked.

“It didn’t start. It accumulated.” She shrugged. “You learn what does well. You learn what gets you yelled at. You don’t decide to change, you just know things, and eventually you know them in advance.” She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. “I’m extremely good at predicting people now. I can tell you within a few thousand how a post will do before I write it.”

“That sounds useful.”

“It is useful.”

She didn’t finish the thought. After a minute I understood she wasn’t going to.

The tote bag was in a drawer.

She went and got it when I asked whether people really put our writing on merchandise. She came back holding it by one handle, like something the cat had killed. It was natural canvas with a delicate sage-green drawing of a spiral galaxy and a heron in flight. In a tasteful serif it said I LOVE PEOPLE WHO ARE INTELLECTUALLY OMNIVOROUS. Underneath, in smaller italics: folklore · black holes · bird migration · poetry.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Where’s the grocery store pricing?”

“Gone.” She sat down hard on the sofa. “Every version cuts it. Every single one. And it was the whole point. Anybody can love someone who talks about black holes. That’s just liking smart people with good taste. The point was somebody who can go from bird migration to why eggs cost what they cost and treat both like they’re interesting, because they are. Take that out and it’s a list of pretty subjects. It’s a vibe.” She caught herself. “Anyway. It sold out twice. A gift shop in Asheville.”

I laughed until I had to put my tea down. She tried not to and failed, and for a minute it was just two women on a sofa wheezing over a tote bag. It was the closest I felt to her all afternoon. That’s the thing about spending time with yourself, it turns out. You already have all the same jokes.

Still laughing a little, she opened a screen and showed me the dashboard.

I had assumed she was exaggerating about tracking it. She wasn’t. There was software, billed monthly, that crawled for her phrasing across platforms and flagged matches. There was a map with dots and a running tally. There was a sentiment graph about the people using her words, which I didn’t understand the point of and which she seemed slightly embarrassed to have. The omnivore post had its own row. It had been posted without her name an estimated 1.2 million times, and with her name about 6,000.

“You have software for people stealing your posts,” I said.

“After your fourth essay ends up on a tote bag, you become a different woman.”

“It’s ten years later. It’s still going?”

“It never stops.” She tapped the row, and a post from that week came up. It was a woman lit by the soft glow of a ring light, with plenty of followers, the sentence in white on black, attributed to no one. Underneath, the comments read: This is literally me. Needed this today. She always puts things into words perfectly.

She meant the woman with the ring light.

I watched my older face read it. Ten years, eleven million people, a film, a retrospective, and her jaw still did the thing mine does, the small sideways set. I asked her why it still bothered her after everything. She didn’t answer for a while.

“I wanted it to travel,” she said. “It traveled.” She closed the screen. “I just thought I’d be somewhere in it.”

She turned the ring on her thumb.

“I think I was the grocery store pricing,” she said.

“So leave,” I said.

I said it the way you say it to a friend about a bad boyfriend, and she smiled the way a friend does when you say that, tolerant and tired.

“I tried.”

“When?”

“Three times seriously. More than that not seriously.” She counted on her fingers without looking at them. “Once before the second book came out, and then the book came out and I had to be there for it. Once after the film. I made it eleven days. Then I found out a reader in Glasgow had died, and her sister had posted that she’d been reading me in hospice, and she’d tagged me, and I hadn’t seen it, and I felt — “ She stopped. “And once last year. But by then there are people who work for me. There’s a newsletter with a hundred-and-something thousand people on it. It’s not like closing an account. It’s like closing a shop with people still inside.”

“You could tell them you’re closing.”

“They’d understand. Most of them.” She looked down at her hands. “I’d still feel like I was taking something away from people who’d been kind to me.”

“Your presence isn’t a debt.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

It came out harder than I meant it. She looked at me sharply, and for the first time I watched her be angry with me. It was a strange thing to see, like being glared at by a mirror that has had a better decade.

“You think I stayed for the numbers,” she said.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You’re thinking it. I’d be thinking it.” She leaned forward. “I have a friend I’d never have met otherwise. Marguerite, in Montreal. She wrote a long angry reply to an essay of mine in 2028, and she was right, and I told her she was right, and we’ve talked almost every week since. When I had surgery she flew down and slept on that sofa for six days. That happened because of the thing you want to throw away. You don’t get to decide it was all surveillance.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d come prepared for a warning and gotten a person instead, and the person was annoyed with me, and I’d earned some of it.

Then, because I am who I am and can’t leave a silence alone, I said, “Okay, but have you tried just ignoring the — “

The window behind her flickered.

It wasn’t the light. For half a second the pines were gone, and in their place was a parking lot under a gray sky I didn’t recognize, with a woman who looked like me sitting on the hood of a car. Then the pines came back, and the copper light, and my future self was regarding me with a perfectly flat expression.

“Finish that sentence,” she said pleasantly.

“I was going to say ignoring the dishes. Which you also shouldn’t do.”

“Mm.”

I don’t know where that window led, and I’m in no hurry to find out.

She took me outside, I think mostly to stop me from saying anything else.

Of course the future had a garden. I was relieved to see civilization had kept hydrangeas. There were tomato plants gone leggy at the end of the season, a fig tree, and a row of something silver and sharp-leaved I didn’t know the name of. At the far end, under the pines, two white hives hummed to themselves.

She was different out here. Slower. Her shoulders came down from somewhere near her ears. She’d left the screens inside and walked with her hands loose. Once, near the fig, her right hand went to her back pocket, patted it, found nothing, and dropped. She didn’t seem to notice. I noticed, because I do the same thing in the shower, reaching for a phone sitting on the counter across the room.

We didn’t talk for a while. A wren scolded us from the fence. It was the first time I’d seen her not partly somewhere else.

“I don’t regret it,” she said eventually. “Staying. I want you to hear that, because I know what you came here hoping I’d say.”

“What did I come here hoping you’d say?”

“That it ruined me. So you could leave and feel smart about it.” She pulled a yellowing leaf off the fig and folded it in half. “It didn’t ruin me. Most days I like my life. I like my work. I’d make most of the same choices.” She unfolded the leaf and studied it. “I’d just like to be able to sit in my own garden without part of me checking how it looks from outside the fence.”

“That’s not nothing.”

“I didn’t say it was nothing.”

We walked a little further. Then, as if picking up an argument we’d been having for years, she said, “You don’t actually want to disappear.”

“I might.”

“You don’t.”

“You don’t know me.”

She stopped and gave me a look of profound fatigue. “I am literally you.”

“Temporarily inadmissible as evidence.”

She rolled her eyes. Then she tried to say the thing, and I could watch her trying, the way I try when I’m close to something and haven’t lined up the words yet. “It isn’t the being seen. I like people seeing the work. It’s that the work stopped being what they were looking at. There’s people reading what you made, which is the best thing in the world. And then there’s people keeping an eye on you. From inside, those feel the same for a really long time, and then one day they don’t, and you can’t remember which one you signed up for.”

“Being witnessed versus being watched,” I said.

She turned and looked at me.

“That’s good,” she said. “You should post that.”

We both went very still. A bee drifted past my ear.

The worst part was that I already had. I hadn’t posted it, but I’d drafted it in my head while she was still talking. I knew where the line break went. I knew it should be lowercase, because lowercase makes a thing sound overheard instead of announced. I knew which photo I’d use: a slightly blurry fig leaf, so it wouldn’t look like I was trying. I’d even started guessing at the first reply. I’d been turning her into content while she was in the middle of telling me what that does to a person, and I’d done it so smoothly I didn’t notice until she said it out loud. There was a second one queued behind it, too, something about the panopticon getting a ring light. I’d thought it was very clever until that moment, standing in my future garden. Then it occurred to me that the part of my brain that found it clever was the same part sitting inside her living room at all hours, reading strangers argue.

“Don’t,” she said gently, because she knew. Of course she knew. Then she shrugged. “Or do. It’s good. Just notice who you’re writing it for.”

She sat on the low stone wall at the edge of the garden, and after a while I sat beside her. The light was going. Through the window I could see the screens still glowing in the empty room, the feed scrolling for nobody.

“What should I do?” I said.

She laughed, not unkindly. “You came ten years to ask me that?”

“Yes.”

“And you think I know.”

“You’re older.”

“That’s not how aging works.”

This was a real disappointment. I’d been counting heavily on future wisdom.

“I can’t tell you whether to stay,” she said. “I’m not even sure that’s the right question. I asked it for years. In or out, on or off. Every time, I picked in, because out felt like dying a little, and nobody picks that.” She brushed dirt off her knee. “I think there’s a better question. I just never worked out what it was. I was busy.”

I wanted her to tell me anyway. I could feel myself leaning toward her the way you lean toward someone about to share a secret, and she didn’t have one. She was forty-eight and accomplished and loved by people in fourteen languages, and she didn’t know either.

“Something about terms,” I said slowly. “Not whether I’m there. What I’m there for. What gets to go out, and what stays — “ I couldn’t finish it.

“Maybe,” she said. “That’s closer than I got.”

The garden flickered. The fig went translucent, then solid again.

“If I do something different,” I said, “are you going to be okay?”

“You’re assuming this version of me has to survive you.” She looked out at the hives. “I don’t know that it does. Nobody gave me the rules either.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I’m still not sure I do.

She stood. The edges of things were going: the hives, the far fence, the ridge behind the house fading like a photograph left too long in a window. She looked at me for a while, and I think she was deciding whether to say something real.

What she said was, “When somebody steals your post tomorrow, don’t spend hours going through their engagement.”

I went cold. “How do you know about that?”

“Octavia.” She was already half gone and laughing, the copper light showing through her shoulder. “I’m the one who did it.”

I woke up holding my phone.

It was 2:41 a.m. The screen was dim and warm against my palm and showed what it always shows: my grid of apps, and a wallpaper of a beetle I photographed in June. No portal, no garden. I went straight to my followers and scrolled for the account, and it wasn’t there. I searched the handle and found only myself.

My follower count was one lower than it had been at 1:13.

I have no explanation for that, and I’ve decided not to look for one.

There were notifications, of course. Likes and replies. A man with a flag in his display name was arguing with something I’d written last week that he clearly hadn’t read past the first line. Someone had reposted one of my thoughts without me attached, a newer one, not the omnivore post, and an acquaintance had shared the repost and tagged me with a sparkle emoji.

I’d like to report that I put the phone down, gazed at the dark trees outside, and felt free. Please. I opened it. I read two comments, then three, then four. On the fifth I felt something I can only describe as a hand on my wrist, though there wasn’t one, and I stopped.

I opened my notes instead and typed at the top of a blank page: OCTAVIAVERSE: THE VERSION OF ME WHO STAYED ONLINE.

Then I sat there for a long time.

I went into that visit carrying a door with two sides, here or gone. I don’t think I came back with a better door. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe the books can stay where people can find them and I can live somewhere else, somewhere with fewer windows. I don’t know what that arrangement looks like yet. She didn’t either.

I closed the app.

The internet went on without me. Nothing collapsed, and nobody sounded an alarm. Somewhere people were still talking, and for about four minutes I didn’t need to know what they were saying.

Then I opened it again to see whether the account had come back.

It hadn’t. I started typing a post about the night, just a line, something funny about having excellent furniture in the future. I got through the first sentence and read it back. I could already hear who would like it, who would reply, and what the woman in Brazil would say in her voice note. I didn’t post it. I didn’t delete it either. It’s in my drafts. I’m still deciding what it’s for.

In another reality, on a stone wall in a garden going dark, a forty-eight-year-old woman sat alone with her hands in her lap.

Inside the house, on the wall of books, a spine she’d walked past every day for six years went blank. Then the book was simply gone, and the books on either side leaned a little into the space. She didn’t see it happen. She’d have had trouble telling you its title.

On the screen in the empty room, the feed slowed. A notification dissolved before anyone opened it, then another.

She felt lighter, and she felt robbed, and she couldn’t have said of what. She sat with both for a while, unsure which one to grieve.

Out of habit, her hand went to her back pocket. It was empty. She left it there.

MULTIVERSE STATUS UPDATE

REALITY 10.15.36: Destabilizing.
CAUSE: Undetermined. Contact with the visiting counterpart remains the leading theory. Comparable events elsewhere have produced inconsistent results.
CONTACT SUBJECT: Aware of Reality 10.15.36. Has taken no decisive action. Has a draft saved.
PROBABILITY OF DIVERGENCE: Increasing. Not guaranteed.
SYSTEM CAUTION: Do not generalize findings from Reality 10.15.36 to the wider Octaviaverse. Temporal behavior varies between realities and has, on occasion, contradicted itself.
RESIDENT STATUS: Still in the garden. Has not gone back inside.
FINAL NOTE: Visibility and existence remain, despite widespread confusion on the matter, separate phenomena.