Internet was the answer. I kept scrolling through the listed names, each with the little grayed-out dot that meant they weren’t available to talk to me. I scrolled faster and faster, past every person I’d ever touched, every person I’d ever made a connection with, every person who might have been able to hear me. There were so many of them. There weren’t nearly enough.
The last name on the list, Ingrid, was the only one with a green dot.
I hesitated, staring at that name, staring at that dot, before finally clicking on it and pulling up a chat window.
What did you do to me? I typed.
The cursor blinked for several seconds before the reply popped up: Sarah?
Yes. This is Sarah. What did you do to me?
How are you talking to me right now? You’re in the middle of your metamorphosis. You can’t be talking to me.
I narrowed my eyes, glaring at the computer screen like I thought she could somehow see it. No one bothered to tell me the rules, so I guess I don’t have to follow them, I typed. Where am I? Why is this happening to me?
Again, the cursor blinked, longer this time. Finally, the response came: You’re going to change the world, Sarah. I’m very proud of you. More proud than you can possibly know. You need to do the math now. You need to solve the problem, so we can move forward.
At least this was easy. No.
You don’t have a choice.
I think I do, I typed. I think I can just sit here and not touch the numbers. I have a computer now. I can look at pictures of cute cats on Tumblr.
Forever?
That gave me pause.
This was my mind, yes, but it was functionally an exercise in solitary confinement at the same time. Yes, I had a computer, with a telepath’s makeshift connection to the illusion of the Internet, and yes, I could call things into being by wanting them strongly enough, and no, that didn’t change the fact that I was alone in here. My family was out of range; the only person I could talk to was Ingrid, and she could just decide to stop talking whenever she wanted to. She could cut me off. She could leave me by myself in this blazing whiteness, until I started doing the math out of the desperate need to get out, to get away.
Maybe. Or maybe this was like a holodeck in Star Trek, and I could start calling people out of my memories of them, using them for company, for stability, for a way to keep myself from doing what the cuckoos wanted from me. Because if there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that doing what the cuckoos wanted wasn’t going to end well. Not for anyone.
“Took you this long to come to that conclusion, huh? Maybe you’re not as smart as you’ve always said you were.”
“Verity!” I looked up and there she was in all her glory—literally. She was dressed like she was heading for a dance competition, wearing heels so high that it seemed impossible she could walk in them and a short, fringed garment that barely qualified for the name “dress.” “Moderately long shirt” might have been a better description. The individual crystals stitched to the fabric gleamed and sparkled in the light, and her short blonde hair had been crimped into perfect finger waves, making her look like the very image of a Gibson Girl.
But her dress was gray, and her lipstick was gray, and neither of those things made sense. I wouldn’t imagine her that way.
“What’s wrong with your lips?” I blurted.
Verity smiled a little. “I can say this because I’m not really me and you know it, which means you know this, and you just never wanted to tell yourself. You can’t see the color red.”
“Of course I can. My favorite sweater is red.”
“And you know that because you’ve seen it through your father’s eyes. You know what red is because you borrow it from the people around you, so naturally that you don’t even notice that everything red is gray for half a second before the color turns on. That’s how it’s always worked for you.”
I looked at her blankly. “What does that have to do with anything? Why isn’t the color turning on in here?”
“Normal cuckoos don’t see the color red. They’ve never cared enough about how humans work to learn how to see it. Biologically, structurally, you can’t see it. It