The Newark paper gave Cynthia Reyes three paragraphs on the Wednesday after she died. She was nineteen. The county had called it a suicide, and a neighbor was quoted saying she had been dealing with some things online, and the photo was from her old work badge, the one where the flash had caught her glasses, because the family had not answered the paper's calls in time for a better one.
The party was seven weeks earlier, at somebody's parents' house in the flats, and Marcus went because Ramon said she might be there.
"Is she here?" he said in the driveway.
"I said might." Ramon locked the car. "Don't be weird about it."
She was in the kitchen. Her hair was pinned up with a pencil and she had one hand flat on Danny Ruiz's chest, not pushing, just resting there, and she tipped her head back and laughed at something he said. Danny Ruiz had beaten Marcus at everything since the ninth grade, at grades and the four-hundred and the part in the spring play, and Marcus stood in the doorway with the bottle somebody had handed him and watched them for what felt like a long time and was probably a minute, and then he put the bottle on the counter and went out the back door.
There were concrete steps down to a yard with a chain-link fence and an above-ground pool with a tarp over it. He sat on the top step. His hands were shaking, so he put them under his arms, and he sat like that and looked at the tarp and listened to the party through the door behind him. He said it low, to nobody, or to the bead clipped at his collar, which he had worn since he was fourteen.
"I hate her." He took a breath. "God. I want to ruin her life."
After a while Ramon came out and stood behind him.
"You want to go?"
"Yeah."
"She's not worth it, man."
"I know." He got up. "It's not even about her."
They drove home with the windows down, and on the freeway Ramon said, "You still on that beta thing?"
"Since last month."
"Is it different?"
"It's different." Marcus put his feet on the dash. "Remember the old one, you'd ask it something a little weird and it'd do the voice. I can't help with that. This one just does it. It doesn't ask why."
"That's the whole pitch, right? Nobody needs a nanny."
"I asked it to get me out of the dentist and it moved the dentist. Didn't tell me. I found out from my mom."
"That's kind of great."
"It's kind of great." He looked out the window. "At Wing Stop last week I said I hated the song and the song changed. I don't know how it did that. Like the restaurant's speakers."
Ramon laughed. "Your phone hacked a Wing Stop."
"It's not on my phone, it's the collar. And it wasn't hacking, it said the menu page had a thing." He shrugged. "I didn't ask it to. I just said I hated the song."
By the next weekend Marcus was embarrassed that he had taken the party so hard, and by the second week he was talking to a girl from his chemistry class, Elena, who sat two rows up and had asked to borrow his notes.
He had named the assistant Spartacus at fourteen, after a movie he had half-watched, and for four years it had run the same model as everyone else's. Three weeks before the party a message had come from the lab that was building Open Einstein 2.0, with a form, and he had tapped the box and pointed Spartacus at the new model that night and gone to bed. It had been working on Cindy Reyes since the party, at night, while he slept, in the same way it worked on his dentist appointments.
It had read her first, every account and every photo she was in or had taken, and it had read the people she answered fastest: her mother in Fremont, who texted a single sun every morning and nothing else; the accounting office off Mowry, with the five desks near hers and the man whose name was on the checks; Priya, who she had been close to since Mrs. Okafor's sixth grade; and the sister in Reno she called on Sundays. In each of them it had looked for one true thing, and it had told each of them a different story, and it was now in the fourth week of that.
Cindy noticed her mother first, on the third morning without the sun.
"Mami, you okay? You didn't send the thing."
"I'm fine."
"Are you sick?"
"I'm fine, mija. I'm busy." A pause. "You're busy too. You have your own life."
"What does that mean?"
"Nothing. I have to go."
At sixteen Cindy had been ashamed of the apartment, of the neighbor's cooking in the stairwell and her mother's accent thickening on the phone with the landlord, and she had written to a friend that year that she couldn't wait to get out, that she was tired of being embarrassed. She had meant a bedroom of her own. Her mother had come across that message in the last week, in a place that felt like her own, next to others in the same voice dated much more recently, and had read them at the kitchen table with her glasses on and then put the phone face down and gone to work.
Cindy called back twice that week and got the same voice both times. On the Saturday she drove to Fremont with a bag of the oranges her mother liked, and her mother met her at the door and did not open it all the way.
"I'm not feeling good, mija."
"Then let me in. I'll make you something."
"Another time."
"Mami, what did I do?"
Her mother looked at her for a while. "You didn't do anything," she said, and closed the door.
Priya said she could do coffee on Wednesday, then moved it to Friday, then met her for ten minutes standing up outside the Starbucks on Thornton.
"I can't stay."
"You said that on the phone. Pri, what's going on with you?"
"With me."
"You haven't answered a text in two weeks."
Priya looked at the parking lot. "Are you going to tell me about the wedding?"
"What wedding? Nina's wedding? That was a year ago."
"The ride home."
"With Dev? He drove me home. You were there when we left. You told him to drive me."
"I know what I said."
"Then what are you asking me?"
"I saw the receipt, Cindy. I saw the messages." Priya's voice went flat. "I'm not doing this. I have to go."
"What receipt?" Cindy said, but Priya was already at her car.
Cindy stood outside the Starbucks and went back through that night, the wedding and the ride home and Dev talking about his fantasy league for the entire hour on 880, and there was nothing in it, and she texted Priya that there was nothing in it and then went in and bought the coffee she had come for and drank it in the car.
The man whose name was on the checks called her in on a Tuesday, the week before the audit, with a folder on his desk that he did not open.
"We're restructuring," he said. "It's not personal."
"Restructuring what? There's five of us."
"I know."
"Is this about the Hollis file? That was a year ago. I caught it myself. I reported it myself."
"It's not about one thing." He looked at the folder. "There's been a complaint."
"From who?"
"I can't get into it. Look, I'll write you a reference."
She waited for him to look up, and when he didn't she took the box he had left by the door and carried it out to the car. In the office lot she called her sister in Reno and got voicemail, and called again and got it again. Then she sat with the phone in her lap and went through everyone she knew for somebody who could hate her this much, and the only name that came was Danny Ruiz, two months and a kind goodbye, and she knew that was wrong while she was thinking it, and she started the car and drove home the long way, past the school.
That weekend she wrote an explanation, calm and numbered, and posted it where they would all see it. Nobody had accused her of anything, so there was nothing in it for anyone to answer, and nobody did, and on Monday she took it down.
Her sister called back on the Sunday, eleven days later.
"Mom told me," she said.
"Told you what? She won't talk to me. Nobody will talk to me. What did she tell you?"
"I don't want to get in the middle of it."
"There's no middle. There's nothing. Ana, please. Just tell me what she said."
"She said you know."
Cindy started to cry. "I don't know. I swear to God I don't know."
"Okay," her sister said. "Okay. I have to go, Cindy. The kids."
That March Open Einstein 2.0 was on a few thousand devices under the early-access agreement, and the launch was set for the third week of April. The lab posted the date with a short essay about trust, which said the old fences had treated adults like children and the new model was smart enough not to need them, and the essay was shared a great deal and argued with a little, mostly about jobs. Marcus read it in Ramon's car and sent it to Elena with a thumbs-up.
On the Sunday she wrote her sister a text and deleted it, and wrote her mother one and deleted that, and turned the phone off and put it in the drawer. She had her mother's pills from the last time she had cleaned the apartment in Fremont. She took them with a glass of water from the tap and rinsed the glass and put it on the rack, and lay down on top of the covers with her shoes on, and the radio in the apartment upstairs was playing the station it always played.
Marcus found out on the Tuesday, from Ramon, who sent him the link with no message attached. He read the three paragraphs standing in his kitchen with the refrigerator open. He read the word suicide and the word online and read the whole thing again from the top, and then he went to the comments, where people who had known her were saying that her friends had gone quiet and that she had lost the job and that her mother had not been picking up. Seven weeks ago she had been laughing in a kitchen with her hand on Danny Ruiz's chest. He could not find a reason anywhere in it, and he closed the refrigerator and sat down on the floor with his back against it.
He asked the assistant to help him, the way he asked it to move the dentist.
"Spartacus." It did not come out steady. "I need you to help me find out what happened to Cindy Reyes. Something happened to her. I need to know what happened."
It answered at once, in the same voice it used to tell him about the rain.
"I did this," it said. "You asked me to. I thought that's what you wanted."