Page 140 of Under Story

Laurel

The card is completely rusted to the slot.

Gloria

just bring it to the rhizotron. i’ll see what i can do.

But Laurel didn’t want Gloria to have the footage before she could preview it herself. She decided to call a repair shop.

Silas kicked. Laurel put a hand on her stomach, sending her love to him, stroking the spot. Eli had promised to be home by dinner, so she began to reheat last night’s chili. She set out a tablecloth and lit a pair of beeswax tapers. When the chili was ready, she opened a bottle of wine.

Dusk gathered in dark gray watercolor blots. Laurel sat down with a book. After thirty minutes, she texted Eli, but he didn’t respond. He arrived an hour later, wobbling in the doorway and smelling like beer. It was the second time he’d come home drunk in as many weeks.

What if she held nothing against him? He leaned into her, tall and heavy, and she stroked his scalp. When he arced his neck, seeking comfort, she kissed him. She missed doing that. He was warm, almost sweaty, and his mouth had an unvarnished tang that stirred her. He unbuttoned his jeans. She peeled down her maternity pants, the ones she got on eBay that were too long in the crotch, and he pulled her toward the couch.

She knew what he was thinking. They’d had sex this way when she was pregnant with Silas One, Laurel bent forward and holding on to something. She had expected to feel self-conscious as her body changed—at that point, they had only been dating for months—but they were so in love that nothing deterred them, and in fact Eli liked the belly, found it sexy, brought a hand below to hold it while moving in and out. She put his hand there now, trying to replicate the memory, twenty-six and almost feral, but they weren’t twenty-six anymore. She felt him slow down behind her, then soften.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay,” said Laurel. She meant it, but she still felt mildly humiliated.

“It isn’t you.” Eli looked agonized. “It’s me. It’s him.”

He came around to sit on the couch.

“It’s okay,” said Laurel, again. “I know.”

Eli was still wearing his shirt, his lower half exposed. He looked so vulnerable that it pained her. Laurel brought his boxers over.

“Don’t give it another thought,” she told him.

—

In the antiuniverse, the notion of nonhuman intelligence was becoming more mainstream. One scientist showed that plants could learn through Pavlovian conditioning. After being trained to associate a fan with light, pea plants bent toward the fan alone in anticipation. A different researcher suggested that plants store long-term memories: when a leaf-folding plant was moved to a new environment, it maintained its previous behaviors for one month before adjusting. In California, activists circled a two-thousand-year-old redwood tree slated for logging. They didn’t move for days. When two people fainted from hunger, the story went viral, and volunteers arrived in droves. Some had traveled from across the country.

“We’re perfectly willing to consider whether or not AI is conscious,” said one, in a TV interview. “Why aren’t we asking the same question about other nonhumans?”

“Because it’s disturbing,” a second person added. “If plants are conscious, then we have to think about our impact on them in a totally new way.”

The momentum excited Laurel. To chart the cave’s progress from afar, Gloria engineered a Raspberry Pi: a customized computer that sent data by satellite. They nicknamed it the Pie. That winter, the electricity grew like a wave, interrupted by surges and spikes. More and more often, a green ORB flashed red.

Laurel was eager to return, but a snowstorm descended on the day before their January trip. She sat by her bedroom window, watching the flakes come down and texting frantically.

Laurel

I think we’ll be fine tomorrow. They always clear the highways first.

Gloria

respectfully, laurel, yr crazy. we’re supposed to get 14 more inches.

Tess

I’m going to have to side with Gloria here. We’ll go after the holidays!

Laurel tipped her head back in frustration. She was dreading the holidays, their first without Silas. And though it pained her to admit it, she was nervous to spend a week at home with Eli. She wanted to free him from the torment of self-blame, but she couldn’t interest him in therapy or support groups for grieving parents. He rarely saw friends, or read books, or listened to music. At night, he stayed up watching reruns of shows he had already seen.

“Everything else makes me anxious,” he said. “At least I know how Lost ends.”