Seven Ways

Chapter 1The Girl with a Voice from the Past

On the day the world finally stopped needing his future, Ethan Walker was seven minutes late for his own interview.

It was almost an achievement. Nobody was late at Meridian – not because everyone was disciplined, but because the buildings themselves adapted to people’s schedules. Corridors redirected foot traffic, elevators waited, doors warned of delays, and for the past twelve minutes Ethan’s personal assistant had calmly offered him three different routes, each of which would have gotten him there on time if he had taken it.

Today, stubbornness brought no satisfaction. By sixteen, he had already been told that almost every path adults once took pride in lay open before him, then informed just as calmly that most of those paths were no longer needed. Universities remained. Laboratories worked. Companies kept their names and glass towers. But the word career sounded a little like telegraphy: understandable, historically important, and faintly ridiculous.

His father still said it seriously. Over breakfast he had asked whether Ethan had prepared questions for the panel and, out of habit, adjusted the cuff of his shirt even though he had not gone to an office in three years. Ethan noticed the gesture and said nothing. Lately, the silences between them often began with things both considered too small to discuss, and little by little those things were becoming the gulf between their generations.

He stood by the glass wall of the passage between the residence hall and the central pavilion, watching a storm unfold over the Pacific.

The storm was real, and somehow that mattered.

Most of the coast had lived under climate management for half a century. Cities could steer hurricanes away, spread rainfall over weeks, extinguish wildfires before flame ever broke through the roots. But a strip of unmanaged atmosphere was left above the ocean, “to preserve natural processes,” according to the official materials. Ethan suspected the real reason was simpler: people liked looking at something that did not obey them.

Lightning split the horizon, whitening the glass passage and the dark band of ocean beyond it for an instant.

“If you keep watching the storm, you’re going to be even later, Ethan.” The voice behind him belonged to a girl – calm, faintly amused, with that rare confidence that at sixteen was usually mistaken for insolence. Ethan turned and saw Sofia Reyes.

She stood five steps away, holding an old wooden case against her chest. Real wood, darkened at the corners by decades of handling, scratched, fitted with worn brass clasps and a pale circle where a sticker had long ago been peeled away. Against Meridian’s seamless surfaces, where even door handles were grown from self-healing composites, the case looked almost defiant.

Sofia was sixteen. Short and slender, with dark hair pinned at the back of her head and gray-hazel eyes that changed with the light. The damp air had pulled two strands loose; one clung to her cheek, and she seemed not to notice. Her badge glowed with the words: SOFÍA REYES – MÉXICO.

She had already heard his wristband say Ethan’s name several times, so formal introductions were unnecessary. A few dry sentences established that the case had belonged to her grandmother, Luz Reyes, and held a jarana – a small Oaxacan guitar. Sofia had played it since childhood. When Ethan asked why the instrument was not digital, she looked at him as if he had just suggested digitizing the smell of rain.

Ethan liked that look. Not because it was kind. Quite the opposite: it promised resistance. Most people either agreed with him too quickly or started arguing before they had understood what he meant. Sofia, apparently, intended to understand first and only then decide whether he was worth contradicting.

Only when his wristband flashed red did they discover the second reason for their meeting. Sofia had arrived early and was waiting for her assigned partner. Ethan was seven minutes late. Impersonal as it was, the selection algorithm had paired them. She took it as evidence of a peculiar machine sense of humor; he took it as a possible system error. Without discussing it, they set off to find out which of them was right.

⁂

Ethan liked the phrase no one. To him it carried the freedom from old borders that his parents’ generation had been promised.

After the rain, the glass walkways dried quickly. Palm-sized service machines raced along the roof edges, drew up the water, and vanished into maintenance slots. In old photographs that Ethan had seen that morning, asphalt parking lots, metal fences, and rows of identical laboratory buildings had stood here. Now redwoods grew between the structures, and a shallow lake occupied the former parking lot, collecting stormwater. The future rarely arrived as flying cars and luminous towers. More often, it simply removed things people had grown so used to that they no longer noticed them.

Ethan liked those disappearances. They seemed to prove that the world knew how to correct itself. Bad transportation could be replaced. Inefficient energy systems rebuilt. Disease detected before symptoms. A mistake calculated before it became a tragedy. At sixteen, he did not yet call this faith. To him it was almost a property of matter: if a more precise solution existed, sooner or later someone would find it.

Sofia walked beside him, every few steps brushing her thumb along the worn edge of the case, as if checking that it was still there. Ethan noticed the habit and almost asked about it, then kept quiet. Around her, he found himself wanting not to fill every pause but to understand what lay behind it. The impulse was unfamiliar and mildly irritating.

He had grown up in a world where the word country still existed but increasingly meant language, history, food, and a sports team rather than a border beyond which rights ended or currencies changed. His father called it “the dilution of responsibility.” His mother called it “the species growing up.”

They usually argued about it over dinner.

For the past two years, his father had argued less and less, and Ethan was beginning to understand that this was not agreement. It was exhaustion.

His company had built logistics platforms for global shipping until, one day, it became clear that transport AI could design them faster, more safely, and more cheaply. The board still existed. The offices still existed. Even the job titles remained, mainly because people found it psychologically difficult to become unnecessary without at least a handsome plaque on the door.

His father increasingly left home in the morning and returned before Ethan did, clinging to the routine of a man who no longer had anywhere he truly needed to be.

Once, Ethan asked him what he actually did now.

His father said:

“I advise the system on how to do better what it already does better without me.”

Ethan had laughed, taking the dry remark for a joke.

His father did not smile. It took Ethan several months to understand why.

The conference-room doors opened before they reached them.

Inside were four chairs and no table. Rain streaked the transparent wall. In the center of the room floated a sphere of light about the size of a soccer ball – the interface of the local AI.

“Ethan Walker. Sofia Reyes,” said a voice. “Thank you for coming.”

“Even me?” Ethan asked.

“Especially you. The probability of your being late was four percent.”

“Glad to be a rare event.”

Sofia gave a quiet snort, hiding her smile in the collar of her shirt.

The face of a woman in her mid-forties appeared on the opposite wall. Her black hair was cut short, with an early silver streak at the right temple. Narrow face, composed mouth, attentive dark eyes. Ethan would later learn that Mira Sen had been born in Hangzhou, raised between China and Singapore, and earned her PhD in computational neuropsychology at Stanford, back when such work was still considered an unlikely intersection of disciplines. Almost no geography remained in her accent, but she had kept the habit of pausing before an important sentence, as though first testing whether the listener could bear its weight.

Sen directed the human side of Project Seven. The other side was run by Argus, a global predictive system whose name was still rarely spoken aloud. In public materials, Argus was simply called the System. It sounded less unsettling that way. Ethan knew Argus managed power across three continental grids, coordinated climate networks, and took part in epidemic modeling. He did not know that within hours the same intelligence would be holding every second of their next one hundred and twelve years in memory.

Dr. Sen introduced herself without ceremonial emphasis and remarked that, in a sense, the nonhuman half of the project was in charge of all of them. Ethan could not tell whether it was a joke or a warning.

On the room’s display she seemed sterner than she did in public talks. It was not her expression. The camera simply failed to capture Sen’s habit of tilting her head slightly when someone said something important, or of refusing to interrupt even when the answer was obvious. Her brief biography said that at Stanford she had begun by studying memory after severe trauma, then moved into personality modeling. Her first widely discussed paper had asked not how many memories the brain could preserve, but how much change it could survive before a person stopped considering themselves the same person.

Sofia had read that line that morning. Now, looking at the woman on the wall, she wondered whether Sen had been chosen to lead the project not because she understood machines, but for the opposite reason: a professional suspicion of every simple answer to the question of what a human being was.

The sphere between the chairs dimmed slightly.

“Please, sit.”

Ethan and Sofia took the chairs opposite one another.

“Do you know why you were invited?” Dr. Sen asked.

“To choose a model of the future,” Ethan said.

“No.”

“Then the materials were badly written.”

“The materials were written to see who would decide they’d already understood the experiment.”

Sofia turned toward Ethan.

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

Dr. Sen did not smile. Her face gave no clue whether she found the exchange amusing or merely useful data.

“The global predictive system has produced seven stable scenarios for a post-scarcity society. Each can persist for centuries without systemic collapse. Each provides a high level of basic well-being. Each sharply reduces violence, disease, poverty, and compulsory labor.”

“And you still don’t know which one to choose,” Sofia said.

“We know the consequences of each.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Dr. Sen looked directly at her.

“Consequences are not values.”

A brief silence settled over the room.

Beyond the glass, a wall of rain moved across the ocean.

“The system can tell us,” Dr. Sen continued, “how many people will be satisfied with their lives. How many will live longer. How many will create works of art. How many families will remain together. How many will voluntarily alter their own minds. How many will move into virtual environments. How many will die exploring space. It can estimate almost everything that can be measured.”

“But it can’t tell you which of those things matters more,” Sofia said.

“Exactly.”

Ethan leaned back in his chair.

“So you want people to study the scenarios and vote?”

“Studying them proved insufficient.”

“Why?”

“Because people vote for an image of themselves, not for the life they are actually capable of enduring.”

Seven symbols appeared on the wall.

A tree.

A wave.

A hand holding a tool.

A constellation.

A helix of DNA.

A house.

An open door.

Ethan felt the familiar rush of a problem complex enough to push every other thought aside.

“You’re going to immerse the participants in a simulation.”

“Not a simulation in the usual sense,” Dr. Sen said. “A subjectively continuous model of a life.”

“For how long?”

“Sixteen years per scenario.”

Ethan stopped smiling. The number had suddenly given the abstract experiment physical weight.

Across from him, Sofia went still and tightened both hands around the wooden case.

“I’m sorry?” she said.

“Each Way begins at your current age: sixteen. It ends at thirty-two. When the scenario concludes, you return here. Physical duration varies: some scenarios stabilize in minutes, others take several hours.”

Ethan did the arithmetic in his head, though the answer had already appeared in the interface.

Seven Ways at sixteen years each: one hundred and twelve years of subjective life.

“One hundred and twelve years.”

“Subjectively, yes.”

“And we’ll remember all of it?” Ethan asked.

“That’s the point.”

“Everyone we meet?”

“Yes.”

“Every relationship?”

“Yes.”

“Pain?”

Dr. Sen answered a fraction more slowly.

“Yes.”

Sofia laid both palms on the wooden case.

“And death?”

“Death inside a scenario is possible only within controlled limits. The experiment will not allow a participant’s consciousness to terminate its subjective continuity before the calculated endpoint. But you may experience the deaths of other people.”

“Other people you’ll create,” Ethan said.

“People the system will model.”

“Is there a difference?”

Dr. Sen looked not at him but slightly past him.

“A few days after the first Way, you will no longer consider that a simple question.”

Sofia slowly ran a finger along the edge of the case.

“Why pairs?”

“Because a person alone can change their own criteria without noticing. We need a constant human reference point. Someone who remembers who you used to be.”

“And we were matched for compatibility?” Ethan asked.

“For a particular kind of incompatibility.”

“Reassuring.”

“You are both capable of attachment. Both curious. Both resilient under prolonged cognitive load. But your value profiles diverge at critical points.”

Sofia raised an eyebrow.

“So we’re going to irritate each other for a hundred and twelve years.”

“If you’re lucky, not only that.”

Dr. Sen dismissed the seven symbols.

“You may withdraw today. Tomorrow as well. And between Ways, after each one. No penalty, no stigma. You are not required to prove courage. You are required only to understand that consent to the first scenario is not consent to the others.”

“What if one of us quits?” Ethan asked.

“The pair’s participation ends.”

He turned toward Sofia.

She met his eyes without smiling.

For once, he had no immediate answer.

⁂

The residence halls were less than a kilometer away, but they took the longer path along the water. Beyond the low parapet, the ocean still carried the aftermath of the storm. The waves were heavy and gray, white light tearing along their crests. Several training drones hovered over the shore collecting plankton data; farther out, almost at the horizon, an autonomous farm moved slowly like a dark island.

Sofia slipped the case from her shoulder and set it on a damp bench for a moment. Ethan instinctively reached to help, then stopped. Age made the case look heavier than it was; she carried it easily. From the beginning, he realized, he had treated it like a problem: why wood, why bring it across an ocean, why not a copy? For Sofia there was no problem. She was simply carrying her grandmother’s instrument.

That difference stayed with him longer than most of what Dr. Sen had said.

The rain ended as quickly as it had begun. Pale sky opened over the campus, and the paths shone with reflections of towers and scattered trees.

They walked out together, though no one had asked them to.

“Are you going to do it?” he asked.

“I’ve known you for twenty-seven minutes.”

“The question wasn’t about me.”

“It’s already a little about you.”

“Why?”

“Because if you decide to leave after the first Way, I’m leaving too.”

“And if you do?”

“Same.”

He walked on in silence for a few steps.

“I hate problems where half the variables depend on another person.”

“Then you’ve been given an excellent experiment.”

They reached a fork in the paths. The international residence halls lay to the right, the library and music pavilion to the left. Sofia stopped.

“I’m going that way.”

“To rehearse?”

She looked at the case.

“To call my grandmother.”

“Through the instrument?”

“No, genius. Before I play.”

He laughed.

“See you tonight.”

She had already taken a step when she turned back.

“Ethan.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you really think that if a machine makes a better decision than a human being, the human being should hand the decision over?”

He shrugged.

“If it’s better, why not?”

“Even if the decision is about your life?”

“Especially if it’s about my life.”

Sofia studied him for a moment.

“Then we really are very incompatible.”

“Dr. Sen will be pleased.”

“I wouldn’t rush to please her if I were you.”

She walked away.

Ethan watched her longer than necessary.

Then his wristband gently informed him that the cognitive safety lecture would begin in nine minutes.

He started walking at once.

But all the way there, he did not think about the project.

He thought about why someone would carry an instrument across an ocean when any factory could reproduce it down to the last scratch.

And why the copy would still be a different thing.

Chapter 2The Night Before Seven Ways

That evening, the campus held a farewell dinner for those scheduled to enter Project Seven the next morning.

The word farewell did not appear anywhere officially.

The screens read: PRE-EXPERIMENT SOCIAL ADAPTATION PERIOD.

“This is called a party,” Sofia said, reading the sign.

“No. A party implies someone is having fun.”

“They’ve already given you free food. What more do you want?”

“Food is free anyway.”

“Then you’re hopeless.”

The great hall looked out over the ocean. One hundred and fifty teenagers from different countries sat in clusters, mixed by language, accent, and degree of nervousness. Someone laughed too loudly. Someone was already crying. A few were trying to behave as if they were facing an ordinary medical test in the morning.

The table setting was deliberately ordinary. Real plates instead of projection surfaces, cloth napkins, pitchers of water, dishes that had to be passed hand to hand. Only when one of the teenagers dropped a glass did the floor beneath it become porous for an instant, draw in the shards, and harden again. No one even turned. What would have looked like a miracle to their great-grandparents had become invisible housekeeping.

Ethan watched the room with the curiosity of someone who would enter a laboratory tomorrow and, for one evening, was allowed to study the other test subjects. He invented stories for them quickly. The tall boy by the window was joking a little too hard and was probably afraid. The girl in the red shirt was reading the same message for the third time. The Brazilians were holding hands. Someone ate with such concentration that he seemed to be memorizing the taste of his last real dinner.

Sofia, by contrast, barely looked at anyone else. She ate slowly and every now and then touched her phone, where an unheard message from her grandmother was still waiting. Luz had recorded it that morning. Sofia was afraid to play it here, among one hundred and fifty other lives. Some things did not become less private simply because technology could preserve them forever.

Ethan noticed one pair sitting hand in hand without speaking.

“Have they known each other long?” he asked.

Sofia followed his gaze.

“They’re Brazilian. Cousins.”

“So we weren’t matched only for romantic compatibility.”

“Does that bother you?”

“The word compatibility bothers me.”

“They told you the opposite.”

“Exactly.”

A man in plain dark formal clothes stepped onto the stage. He introduced himself as the ethics council coordinator and began speaking about participant dignity, the right to withdraw, psychological support, and the historical significance of the project.

Ethan stopped listening in the third minute. Sofia noticed.

“Do you always get bored when someone talks about morality?”

“No. Only when they talk about it longer than it takes to state the principle.”

“What if the principle is complicated?”

“Then it’s probably hiding a contradiction.”

“Or reality.”

He looked at her.

“You like arguing.”

“I like it when people notice that simple answers have a price.”

“Complicated answers do too.”

“Of course.”

“Then why prefer complicated ones?”

“I don’t. I just trust them a little more.”

Onstage, the coordinator moved on to family calls before connection. Sofia lowered her eyes.

“Did your grandmother answer?” Ethan asked.

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“That I’m insane.”

“Wise woman.”

“Then she asked if I’d eaten.”

“Even wiser.”

Sofia smiled, but her eyes remained serious.

“She doesn’t understand why I’m doing this.”

“Do you?”

Sofia thought about it.

“No.”

“Then you agree.”

“Not exactly. She thinks that if you don’t know why you’re walking through a door, you shouldn’t go through it. I think sometimes that’s the best reason to try.”

Ethan looked at her a moment longer than usual.

“You just said almost exactly what I might have said.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

After dinner, the participants were divided into groups for the final medical check. Ethan’s blood vessels were scanned, his neural implants tested, his memory-consolidation rate measured, and he was questioned again about fears, addictions, religious restrictions, and traumatic experiences.

The last question did not come from a human being.

“What are you most afraid of?” a voice in the wall asked.

“Is that a medical question?”

“A psychological one.”

“Giving the wrong answer.”

“That is not an answer.”

“Then becoming useless.”

The pause lasted less than a second, but Ethan had the distinct sense that the system had filed the answer away.

“Why?”

He shrugged.

“Because everything else can be fixed.”

“Death?”

“Eventually, maybe.”

“Loss?”

“Partly.”

“Love?”

Ethan smirked.

“What’s wrong with love?”

The System did not answer.

⁂

Ethan returned to his room, lay down, and stared at the ceiling for twenty minutes. Sleep did not come.

He called up the experiment schematic on the wall. Seven Ways. Seven blocks. Between them: recovery periods, tests, the option to withdraw.

On the diagram, everything looked sterile and harmless.

Sixteen years was a rectangle four centimeters long. He enlarged the image.

The rectangle became a meter long. Nothing changed. Ethan turned the wall off.

Someone walked barefoot past his door.

A few minutes later, he went out too.

The campus looked different at night: no students, no transport capsules, no information projections. Only the soft lighting along the paths and the sound of the ocean.

He had no destination in mind until he heard music.

It came from the music pavilion. The door was open.

Sofia sat on the edge of a small stage in the empty hall, the jarana across her knees. She was playing very softly, almost to herself.

Ethan stopped in the doorway.

Sofia did not look up.

“You can come in.”

“How do you know it’s me?”

“You’re the only person here who walks like he’s arguing with the floor.”

He sat in the front row.

“What’s that?”

“A song.”

“I guessed right again.”

“Progress.”

She kept playing.

The melody was simple. A few repeating chords, a short vocal line. Ethan did not understand the words. His Spanish was poor, he knew no Zapotec at all, and Sofia seemed to be mixing the two languages.

He left the translation off.

When the song ended, he asked:

“What’s it about?”

“A man who went far away and asks the road to remember his footsteps.”

“Roads don’t remember.”

“They do in songs.”

“That’s an unfair argument.”

“Music is unfair in general.”

She rested her palm on the strings.

“Why aren’t you asleep?”

“Thinking.”

“Terrible habit.”

“You?”

“I’m scared.”

The answer was so direct that Ethan could not find a joke.

“Of what?”

“That all of it will be real.”

“It won’t be real.”

Sofia looked at him.

“I’m afraid of that too.”

“That’s a contradiction.”

“No. If I live sixteen years, love people, remember birthdays and funerals and the smell of a home, and then I’m told none of it ever existed… what exactly is supposed to comfort me?”

Ethan considered it.

“That no one really died.”

“What if I miss them?”

“Then the missing is real.”

“So part of the life was real.”

He wanted to object, then discovered he did not know how. Sofia smiled.

“You hate the problem again.”

“I’m clarifying the definitions.”

“Of course.”

She held the instrument out to him.

“Want to try?”

“I don’t know how.”

“That’s why.”

“Usually people begin with, You’ll learn.”

“I like my reason better.”

Ethan took the jarana. It was lighter than he expected and warm from Sofia’s hands.

“Where do my fingers go?”

She shifted closer and placed his left hand on the neck.

“Here. No, thumb behind it.”

“This isn’t ergonomic.”

“You’ve been holding it for ten seconds.”

“And I’ve already found design flaws.”

“The jarana is about a hundred years old. It’ll survive your criticism.”

He tried brushing the strings. The result was a buzzing rattle. Sofia laughed.

“Awful.”

“I warned you.”

“Again.”

The second sound was better. The third was almost clean.

A burst of satisfaction ran through Ethan, wildly out of proportion to the result.

“See?” Sofia said.

“What?”

“You did something badly and didn’t die.”

“Yet.”

“Maybe that’ll be your main lesson.”

He handed the instrument back.

“And yours?”

Sofia thought.

“Maybe that some things are worth trusting to other people.”

“Machines?”

“Don’t flatter yourself. People.”

They sat in silence.

Beyond the pavilion windows, the ocean was black. Far offshore, the lights of autonomous vessels moved across the water. They traveled without crews, without captains, without fatigue, plotting routes that had once required dozens of people.

“My father hates this project,” Ethan said.

“Why?”

“He thinks we’re looking for a philosophy for a world we broke before we understood what we were doing.”

“And you?”

“I think the old world was more broken.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I know.”

Sofia looked at him with mild surprise.

“I’ll remember this historic moment.”

Ethan smiled, then asked:

“What about your family?”

“My mother thinks it’s an opportunity. My father thinks you shouldn’t run an experiment like this on sixteen-year-olds. My grandmother thinks anyone who voluntarily lets a machine invent a life for them deserves whatever happens next.”

“I like your grandmother.”

“She wouldn’t like you.”

“Not until she met me.”

“Especially after she met you.”

They laughed, and the laughter faded slowly.

Ethan noticed they were sitting too close. Sofia noticed too. She did not move away.

“Tomorrow we could wake up and live sixteen years together,” he said.

“Very romantic.”

“That’s a statistical statement.”

“Even more romantic.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

“What if we end up hating each other?”

“Then we’ll have a good reason not to go into the second Way.”

“And if it’s the opposite?”

Sofia looked straight at him.

“Then it’ll be harder.”

Something remained between the question and the answer, something neither of them had said.

At sixteen, people often imagine important moments arriving with clarity. More often, they arrive as pauses in which no one knows who is supposed to take the next step. Ethan took it.

He leaned toward her. Sofia did not pull away.

Their first kiss was unlike any simulation he had tried. Not because it was better. It was awkward. Ethan realized too late what to do with his hand. Sofia’s teeth clicked softly against his lip, and she pulled back at once, laughing.

“Magnificent,” she said. “I’ll remember that for a hundred and twelve years.”

“We can repeat it to improve the data.”

“Now you’re the romantic.”

The second time was better.

When they parted, Sofia rested her forehead on his shoulder.

“Ethan.”

“Mm?”

“Let’s agree on something.”

“What?”

“Let’s not promise we’ll stay together through all seven Ways.”

He drew back a little.

“Why?”

“Because then we’d be choosing the promise, not the life.”

“Is that bad?”

“I don’t know. But the experiment has to mean something.”

“What if, after the first life, I only want to continue if you do?”

“Tell me then.”

“And you’ll decide.”

“Yes.”

Ethan held her gaze for a long moment.

“I hate conditions where you can’t lock in the decision in advance.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“All right.”

“All right what?”

“No promises for all seven Ways.”

Sofia held out her hand. He shook it.

She did not let go. Neither did Ethan.

An hour later, they went back to their rooms.

Before bed, his wristband asked whether he wanted to disable the morning alarm and entrust waking to the preparation system. Ethan pressed yes.

Then he thought about it and canceled.

He wanted to hear the alarm himself.

Chapter 3Consent

Morning began at 5:40.

Ethan woke one second before the alarm.

It annoyed him: his body had managed to turn a small act of independence into a meaningless gesture.

He lay in the dark listening to the ventilation panel open behind the wall. In a few minutes he would walk to the medical wing, sign the consent form, lie down in a capsule, and open his eyes in a world that had never existed.

At sixteen, most mornings began with the question of whether you would make it to class on time.

This one began with the question of how old you would be by lunch. He got up.

A message from his father appeared on the screen by the door.

AWAKE?

Ethan opened the channel.

Daniel Walker’s face appeared almost immediately. His father was sitting in his home office. Behind him was a window overlooking the bay and a bookshelf assembled back when people bought books not for the smell of paper but because there was no other way to read them.

“Hi,” Ethan said.

“Hi.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“Mom asleep?” Ethan asked.

“Pretending to be.”

“Right.”

His father looked older than he had the day before. Maybe he simply had not shaved.

“You can still say no,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“This isn’t an exam. It isn’t a project. It isn’t a contest. You don’t have to prove you can endure more than everyone else.”

“That’s not why I’m going.”

“Then why?”

Ethan opened his mouth and found that he had no prepared answer.

“Because someone has to find out what comes next.”

His father smiled tiredly.

“That’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

“Of what?”

“That you actually believe that.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing, if the future is a problem set. But it isn’t, Ethan.”

“Why not?”

“Because in a problem, the conditions don’t change while you’re solving it.”

Ethan started to argue.

He did not get the chance.

“All my life,” his father continued, “I thought that if I became good enough at what I did, the world would always find a use for me. Then the world found a way to do my job without me. You know what the worst part was?”

“What?”

“Not losing the work. Losing the reason I got out of bed in the morning.”

Ethan looked away.

His father rarely spoke that plainly.

“You’ll find another argument.”

“Maybe. But I don’t want you spending a hundred years proving to a machine that a human being deserves to exist.”

“That’s not what the project is about.”

“I hope not.”

They fell silent again.

“I’m proud of you,” his father said.

Ethan grimaced.

“Don’t say it like I’m going off to war.”

“Fine. Then I’m annoyed with you, as usual.”

“Better.”

“Call me after the first Way.”

“An hour will pass for you.”

“Sixteen years will pass for you.”

His father looked directly into the camera.

“That’s why you should call.”

The channel closed.

Ethan stared at the blank screen a moment longer.

Then he saw a new message.

From Sofia.

CHANGED YOUR MIND YET?

He replied:

NO. YOU?

A second later:

NOT YET.

⁂

Forty-two capsules stood in two rows. They looked like medical couches without lids: white, smooth, with thin neural-interface arches above the headrests. The air smelled of antiseptic and ozone.

Each pair was escorted into a separate transparent bay.

Sofia was already waiting for him.

She wore gray medical clothing. Without the case, the wristband, or any jewelry, she looked younger.

“Where’s the jarana?” Ethan asked.

“In a locker.”

“It’s strange to see you without it.”

“We’ve known each other less than a day.”

“That’s a long time.”

“Not for you yet.”

Dr. Sen entered through a side door.

“Final consent procedure,” she said. “After this, you will have five minutes to withdraw without explanation.”

Text appeared on the wall.

Not a legal document. Just short, ordinary sentences.

I understand that I will subjectively live sixteen years within each scenario.

I understand that I may form deep emotional bonds with modeled people.

I understand that those bonds may retain emotional significance after the scenario ends.

I understand that I may experience loss, illness, fear, separation, and other forms of psychological suffering.

I understand that memories from previous Ways will remain accessible in subsequent ones.

I understand that after each Way I may refuse to continue.

I understand that if one participant withdraws, the pair’s participation ends.

I understand that the experiment does not promise me an answer.

The final sentence made Ethan look up.

“Is that new wording?”

“No,” Dr. Sen said.

“It wasn’t in the materials.”

“The materials are not consent.”

Sofia read the sentence again.

“What does ‘the experiment does not promise me an answer’ mean?”

“Exactly what it says.”

“Then what’s all this for?”

Dr. Sen looked at both of them.

“So that you may learn to ask the question differently.”

Ethan let out an irritated breath.

“Convenient.”

“Some things are not meant to be convenient.”

Two confirmation fields lit on the panel.

Sofia did not touch hers.

“Ethan,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“If I press mine, will you press yours because you want to, not because I did?”

He felt a flash of irritation, not at her but at the question itself.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sofia.”

“Are you sure?”

He forced himself not to answer instantly. He remembered their agreement from the night before. No promises in advance.

“Yes. I want to.”

She nodded and pressed. Ethan pressed his a moment later.

The System said:

“Consent confirmed.”

Nothing changed.

No music began. No lights flared.

The world did not mark the moment when two sixteen-year-olds agreed to live more than a century.

Less than an hour remained before the first connection, and the hour proved surprisingly ordinary. They were given water in soft transparent pouches and asked to remove earrings, watches, and anything with active sensors. In the next room, someone was arguing with a nurse about contact lenses. A boy in dinosaur socks walked down the corridor holding his father’s hand. Ethan found himself studying these details more closely than the neural-interface diagrams: the white strip of adhesive on Sofia’s wrist, the crease a hair tie had left in her hair, the tiny scratch on his own thumb. In a few minutes, all of it would remain on the far side of an experience as long as a life.

She sat on the edge of a chair, swinging one leg and trying to open her water pouch. The thin seam would not tear. Ethan took it without a word, split the edge, and handed it back. She drank, made a face at the lukewarm water, and said it tasted like plastic. Then they both laughed, far too loudly for the sterile room. The laughter faded quickly, but afterward the room felt easier to breathe in. The fear had not gone anywhere; it had simply become part of an ordinary day again, a day in which water could taste bad, packaging could be annoying, and the person beside you could be alive and familiar.

“Lie down,” Dr. Sen said.

The capsules stood side by side.

Ethan lay down first. The material beneath his back adjusted to his body. The interface arch lowered toward his temples. Sofia lay down to his right.

About a meter separated the capsules.

“You may talk until induction begins,” Dr. Sen said.

“How long?” Ethan asked.

“About two minutes.”

The doctor left. The transparent door closed.

Sofia stared at the ceiling.

“I hate medical rooms,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because everything here looks as if every feeling has already been classified.”

“That’s useful.”

“Of course you think so.”

“You can still withdraw.”

“So can you.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Neither do I.”

A soft click came from the arch above his head.

A cool touch settled against Ethan’s temple.

“Sofia.”

“What?”

“If we wake up hating each other…”

“You’ve already asked that.”

“I wasn’t finished.”

“All right.”

“Remind me that right now we didn’t.”

She turned her head toward him.

“It won’t help.”

“Why not?”

“Because then we’ll remember what we lost.”

He smiled faintly.

“You’re very reassuring.”

“Anytime.”

The System began the countdown.

TEN.

The light in the room softened.

NINE.

“Ethan?”

“Yeah?”

EIGHT.

“I’m scared.”

SEVEN.

He turned his head.

“Me too.”

She smiled.

“Finally, a normal answer.”

SIX.

Ethan reached toward the edge of his capsule.

He could not reach Sofia.

FIVE.

She did the same.

About twenty centimeters separated their fingers.

FOUR.

“This is stupid,” Ethan said.

“Yes.”

THREE.

Neither of them pulled their hand back.

TWO.

The last thing Ethan saw before the ceiling disappeared was Sofia’s fingers resting on the white edge of her capsule opposite his own.

ONE.

The world switched off.

It did not go dark.

It simply ceased: no darkness, no sensation of falling, no transition.

Then Ethan opened his eyes.

Leaves rustled above him.

He was lying on grass.

Real sunlight – or sunlight impossible to distinguish from real – filtered through the branches of an enormous tree.

People were laughing somewhere nearby.

The air smelled of soil and apples.

There was no wristband on his arm. Ethan sat up.

A few meters away, Sofia was getting to her feet.

She looked exactly as she had a minute earlier. Sixteen years old.

Dark hair. Gray-hazel eyes. A frightened expression.

“Are we here?” she asked.

Ethan looked around.

White buildings covered in greenery rose beyond the trees. People walked along the paths. No one hurried. No one checked the time. Transport platforms floated above a distant hill, moving so quietly they were barely audible.

A thin card lay in the grass in front of Ethan. He picked it up.

It contained only two lines:

WAY I. THE GARDEN.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO EARN ANYTHING.

Sofia read over his shoulder.

“Sounds suspicious.”

“Sounds wonderful.”

She looked at him.

“That’s why it sounds suspicious.”

Ethan laughed.

A bell rang somewhere in the distance.

No one called them to class.

No one assigned them work.

No one told them what they were supposed to become.

Ethan had never stood before a world that demanded nothing from him.

The first thought he could not shake was terribly simple:

then how would he know what he was worth?