The Prototype He Kept

So how do you know what it looks like.

The question lands in the bright room and the cameras keep running, which is the first thing I have to deal with and the worst, because the answer to that question is the one I cannot give in any voice, mine or the cello, on tape or off it, and Adam has asked it in front of a soft box and a woman whose whole job is to find the moment the founder cracks and put it on a poster.

Count what is in the room with me. One: two cameras, running. Two: Petra, who has stopped writing and gone very still, the stillness of a fisher whose line has just moved. Three: a girl with tape in her hand. Four: Adam, pale under the light, holding a question through the fabric of his jacket pocket. Four people and one lens, and every one of them has just watched the woman they call a visionary fail to have a quick answer to a soft question about her own famous idea.

The appetite knows the play. It comes up smooth and ready under my breastbone with the line already loaded, gracious and weightless, darling, you're sweet, I've described it a hundred ways, you only remember the stage version, a laugh on the end of it to make the room laugh too, a thing to slide off the lens and out of the room and back into the myth. It would work. That is the horror of her, that the lie always works, that she left a whole grammar of escape in this mouth and the mouth wants to use it. For half a second I feel how easy it would be, the warm slide of it, the relief.

And Petra would film it. And Adam would believe it, or make himself believe it, the way he has made himself believe two years of small wrong things, and the line would hold, and I would have spent the truth I just told to buy back the lie.

I take my mouth back. Both hands, knuckles white on the wheel of it, and I do not let the easy lie out.

"Petra." I do not look at her. I look at Adam, and I say it in the cello because the cello is all I have, but I aim it past the lens at the one person it is for. "Can you give us the room? Just for a minute. I'll come back and we'll do the rest, all of it, the stage version, the lightning bolt, whatever you need." The appetite hisses at whatever you need, at the giving away of leverage, and I ignore it. "Family thing. Two minutes."

Petra wants to argue. I watch her weigh the rare cracked-open founder she has caught against the manners that keep access flowing, and the manners win, because they always do with people who need something from you next week. "Of course. Of course, take your time, we'll just," she gestures the girl up, and they go, cable and all, the door sighing shut behind the last tripod, and then it is the big meeting room and the soft box still burning and Adam, and me, and a small flat worn shape in his pocket that he has not stopped holding.

"Cosima," he says. Not gorgeous. Not anything fond. Just the name, careful, like he is checking the floor will hold his weight.

"Take your hand out of your pocket," I say.

He does not. His jaw works. "You went white when I came in."

"Adam. What's in your pocket."

And here is where the body betrays me, because the body does not want to know, the body has spent two years steering wide of exactly this object, and I feel it lean back from him a half-inch, the old reflex, don't look at that, that's the loose thread, that's the one we don't pull, and I recognise the lean for what it is now. It is hers. It is the same flinch the hand had over the basement files. The body is afraid of the thing in Adam's pocket, and the body's fear is a map, it always is, it points at the evidence the way a compass points at iron.

So I want to see it more than I have wanted anything since I woke up dead.

Adam takes it out.

It sits in his open hand under the soft box, and the light is cruel to it, every scuff lit, and I stop breathing in a chest that is not mine. It is a tablet. An old one, the first generation, the corners gone soft and pale where two years of a thumb have worried the casing, the screen dead and dark and scratched. I would know it in any light. I built the first working Lantern prototype on that exact device, in the basement, on borrowed dev time, because it was the cheapest hardware the company would let a junior take home. I taped a paper overlay to the front of it. I drew the lamp-and-grid in dry felt tip on the overlay so I could test the layout before I had the code. I held it for fourteen months. I have not seen it since the week before Cosima looked at my screen for ninety seconds and the night I thought of it became her night.

"You kept it," I say, and it does not come out in the cello at all. For one word, one, it comes out in mine, the reed, thin and wrong in the wrong throat, and I see Adam hear it, see the small wrongness catch and hold in his face again, deeper this time.

"It was in a box of yours," he says slowly. "Years ago. When we, when you and I were sorting the studio archive, before the big move. You were going to throw out a whole crate of dead hardware and I, I don't know why I kept this one. There was a name scratched into the back of the case with a compass point, half worn off, not yours." He turns it over and there, low on the dead casing, almost gone, is the ghost of the name I carved into it the week I first took it home, a thing I did because the company labelled nothing and I was terrified some louder person would take it for their own. T. The rest sanded down to nothing by two years of his thumb. "I never knew whose it was. I just," his hand closes round it, "I kept it. I've carried it for two years and I couldn't have told you why, and this morning I put it in my jacket like I do, and then I walked in here and heard you describe the drawing on the overlay, the lamp throwing light onto a grid, the dry felt tip, word for word, the exact thing taped to the front of this, and you have never, Cosima, you have never once held this. You didn't know I had it. You looked through it like it was junk."

He is not asking me how I know anymore. He has stopped asking. He is doing the thing I have watched the dog do and Lacey do and Damien do, he is feeling the wrongness, except Adam is the only one with a piece of physical proof in his hand that the wrongness lines up with, and I watch him put it together a layer at a time and I cannot tell whether I am terrified or whether some starved animal thing in me is glad, glad, that the man I loved is finally looking at the right person and not the costume.

"The night I thought of it," he says. "You always say a flash of insight. But the way you just told it. The woman who couldn't phone her daughter. The fourteen months. The basement in this building." He looks up from the tablet to my face, and his voice has gone very quiet and very even, the voice of a man walking out onto ice. "That's not your story. I've heard your story forty times. That's the story of whoever drew on this."

The appetite is screaming now, the cold clean voice under the breastbone, take it off him, laugh, lie, this is the loose thread, this is the one we cut, and for one vertiginous second the want to make him stop is so total that I feel the cello rise to do it, feel my own hand want to reach out and pluck the prototype from his palm and put it somewhere it can be lost, and I understand with a lurch of disgust that the want is to do to this moment exactly what she did to me. Bury it. Erase it. Make the inconvenient thing disappear so the myth can keep its shape. The body wants to erase the proof of me a second time, and it is using my own oldest fear to do it, the fear that there was never any me under the work at all.

I put my hand flat on the table instead, the way I do when the appetite leans, and I take the wheel back, and I make a decision that is mine and only mine and probably very stupid.

"Adam." I look at the tablet in his hand and not at his face, because I cannot do his face for this. "Don't put that back in your pocket. Don't take it home. Don't tell Damien you have it, don't tell Petra, don't tell anyone." The cello does it level and low and Cosima-calm, which is the only way I can carry words this dangerous through this mouth. "Put it somewhere only you know. Today."

The wrongness in his face goes to alarm. "Why would I, why are you, Cosima, you're frightening me."

"Because somebody logged my," the word my is out before I can stop it and I hear it hit the air, my, and I cannot eat it back so I keep going past it and pray the cello smooths it under, "somebody logged a notebook into the archive last week under my initials in a hand that wasn't mine. Things that prove where Lantern came from are moving around this building, and they're moving toward the people who want them gone before the sale closes, and that," I point at the dead scratched prototype in his hand, the worn shape he has carried for two years without knowing he was carrying me, "is the oldest one there is. It's the first one. There is no paper that explains it away. So put it somewhere safe, and don't let Damien know it exists."

Adam stares at me. The man is decent under the people-pleasing, the bible of him is decent, and I watch the decency and the fear and the two years of small wrong things all tip at once toward a question he is not ready to ask and is going to ask anyway, his hand closing white-knuckled round the prototype, his mouth opening on the edge of who are you, and I am bracing for it, almost wanting it, when the frosted door opens without a knock.

"There you are." Damien. Suit, smile, both hands empty, which is wrong, because the last time I saw my brother-in-law he was carrying my whole life out of the glass room under his elbow. He takes in the burning soft box, the absence of a film crew, Adam by the wall, and his eyes go to Adam's hand, to the small dark scratched shape in it, and I watch my brother's smile do a thing I have not seen it do before. It stops.

"Adam," Damien says, light, pleasant, his eyes not leaving the prototype. "What've you got there?"