Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea

by Sarah Pinsker

  That stung more than I let on. Nothing fell off my models if they were handled right. My little brother, Tristan, wrecked more than his share, before he wasn’t around to do that anymore, but the fault was never in my workmanship. “We, huh?”

  “We.”

  I stood and poked around the desk until I found the missing shutter amid Eliza’s clutter. Fished among my model supplies for the tiny pin that would secure it back in place. “The other voices are good, but your Lizzie sounds fake.”

  Two weeks later, she updated the base. The house gave a wider variety of answers. She replaced her own voice with someone who sounded more like the accents we heard in Fall River. On spring break, while I was home, she took a bus to Massachusetts with the house on her lap. She sold it to a general store in town for a thousand dollars.

  She tossed the money on my bed my first day back at school. They’d paid her online, but she’d taken it out of the bank in twenties.

  “Gwennie, I need to know if we’re partners in this.”

  “I thought we already were?”

  “We can be. I need you to build the models, but I see a couple of ways this can go. Either we’re partners and we both put up money to get this business going, and we both make decisions, and we split everything fifty-fifty, or you let me pay you for the models, but it’s my business.”

  “How much would you pay me? For the models?”

  “That first one was a work of art. We’ll need a few more like that—I’ve got a list of houses—and then some mini-versions with no frills. No furniture. No working shutters. For the big ones, you’d get six hundred dollars each, plus materials. For the little ones, um, fifty dollars each. I’d pay you for each one, regardless of whether I was able to sell it or not.

  “There’s nine hundred dollars in that stack, for your hard work on the first one. None of this could happen if I hadn’t been able to sell that first one. You can have nine hundred for it if you want to just work for hire. Otherwise I’ll take that money back and invest it in the next step and we’re fifty-fifty partners. Succeed or fail, equal share.”

  I looked at the bills stacked on my bed. I’d never seen that much money in my life, and she knew it. My parents weren’t particularly well-off, and after the police stopped looking for Tristan, they spent every penny on private investigations. Nine hundred would let me buy new tires and a muffler for my car. With more payments like that, I could cover my own fees for the next semester and not need to ask my parents for money they didn’t have. Or I could partner with her. But if nobody actually wanted to buy tiny murder houses with tiny murder voices, I’d be left with said murder houses. Money for work, no accountability, or money for a share, with a stake I wasn’t sure I could afford not to pocket.

  “I’ll work for you,” I said.

  She reached into her bag and pulled out a contract. “Let’s make it official, then.”

  I never found out whether there was a second contract for if I’d answered the other way.

  “People love solving mysteries,” she wrote in her book. “It makes them feel smart.”

  She had a lot of ideas about what people liked and didn’t like, maybe because she saw everybody else as extensions of herself. That part isn’t in her book, of course. That’s my own theory.

  We turned our dorm room into a production factory. When the orders started coming in, she rented space in a warehouse and we moved everything there. It was a sauna in summer and freezing in winter, but nobody complained. She hired other friends to handle different aspects of the business, including a cast of voice actors and a couple of electronics people. Mo Bara painted my models. Samia Gilman built us a website and established a social-media presence.

  Whatever the reason, Eliza was right. People wanted the murder houses. Just a few at first, but then someone solved the Haygood murder of 2021 using our model. Got the case reopened, found a way to prove their hypothesis using the actual evidence, exonerated the family. Senator Haygood even wrote to thank us.

  After that, the orders came in faster than we could fill them. The waiting list only made them more desirable. We offered a range of houses we could assemble in bulk quantities, then another higher-priced tier for custom jobs. We did a Lindbergh, a Ramsey. I saved up enough money to pay my own tuition the next semester, since I was making more than anyone other than Eliza.

  Once in a while I wondered if I’d made a mistake in not taking the partnership. I still wonder. I think I would have enjoyed the houses she built for forensic schools and the FBI, the case-study puzzles they commissioned, like the Nutshell Studies down in Maryland, but with voices and an AI that could follow lines of questioning. I would have been on board with the murder-house owners who paid Eliza for AIs that wired into intercoms or smartphones, so they could charge admission to people walking through the actual rooms.

  Even if we hadn’t fallen out when we did, we’d probably have fought over some of the other commissioned work she took, which I would have refused. Sensationalist TV shows that licensed our houses to provoke and harass people who had long since been acquitted. Dictators, current cases, things that felt too raw to be examined. At the time, my reason for wanting to stay with work-for-hire was simpler. I saw how much time Eliza spent on all the aspects that weren’t craft; I was happy enough making my models and ignoring the business side.

  We probably could have continued that way indefinitely if she hadn’t gone and done the thing that ended our friendship. She didn’t include that anecdote in Talking with Dead People, either . . . In the book she skips from our frigid warehouse space to her dropping out before senior year.

  What she omitted was her present to me on my twentieth birthday. Our birthdays were fairly close to each other, so all three of the Decembers we roomed together we threw a joint party just before winter exams started, crowded and intimate, filled with our friends and business partners, more or less the same people. She drank Genny Light and I drank cider. I even remember that detail, mostly because later that night I got sick to my stomach, and I haven’t been able to touch cider since.

  Anyway, a few drinks in, she stood up on my desk and called for attention. Somebody—Mo Bara, I think, though that part is hazy—somebody handed her a canvas shopping bag. She plugged in a cable dangling from it before she passed it to me. I remember that, too, so I already knew what sort of present it was even if I didn’t know the specifics.

  I pulled it from the shopping bag. With its plywood base two feet by one foot and sewing-machine-sized building, it was much larger than even my high-end models. The details were crude, and it took me a minute to recognize my own childhood home, but when I did, I had a pretty clear idea what she had done.

  In a shaky voice, not yet slurring, I asked the model, “What’s your name?”

  A voice from inside—not mine, since I hadn’t recorded this particular surprise—answered, “Gwen.” I couldn’t tell who it was. One of the acting-school kids we sometimes paid to do the job, probably.

  I looked over at Eliza then. I don’t know why she expected me to be excited that she had programmed my life’s details as she knew them into an AI box. I guess maybe she wouldn’t have minded one of herself, to interrogate and get her own answers back, so she didn’t understand how I wouldn’t feel the same. But I looked at her, and in that moment I think she realized that maybe it had been a mistake. I glared until the smile died on her face.

  Too late, though. People were already pushing past to ask the fake me questions. Did I sleep with Caz Mendelson last year? What about Samia? Did I really flunk Ethics in Engineering? The answers were eerily correct. No. Yes. No—I got an extension to finish it over the summer because I’d been too busy making murder houses, and the professor said I could turn in an essay on the ethics of making murder houses, which I did. These were all things Eliza knew about me from two and a half years in close proximity. The voice, though not my own, carried my speech
patterns, my inflections.

  The questions took other turns. I waited for the voice to make a mistake, to prove it wasn’t me, but it knew my home address, my parents’ names, the name of my favorite teacher in high school. I pictured Eliza secretly reaching out to my family, my online friends, asking them if they wanted to be in on a birthday surprise. I’ll bet if anyone said they didn’t think I enjoyed surprises, she probably just fed that information into the AI, too.

  “How many siblings do you have?” somebody asked, and I think I stopped breathing. They were just asking random questions, I told myself.

  “None,” the AI said, then paused. “None anymore.”

  I grabbed my backpack from under my bed, made sure I had keys and wallet and computer, and walked out the door. I could have stayed and kicked everyone else out, but I left them interrogating me. All I knew was that I had to go before I heard any follow-up questions, or worse yet, answers.

  I tried knocking on some doors to find a place to crash, but everybody was either at our party or gone from campus already. Freezing rain fell as I headed for my car, but it wasn’t unbearably cold. My father made me keep an emergency blanket in the trunk, and I pulled my arms and legs up into my clothes. I woke up once in the middle of the night to vomit by my back tire, slipping on the ice that had accumulated and nearly wiping out in my own sick.

  I stayed in other people’s rooms for the rest of the exam period and applied to move over the winter break. The school assigned me to another junior whose roommate was studying in Rome for the spring.

  I knew I was leaving the company in the lurch in terms of models, but at that point I didn’t care. I was done with murder houses. Done with AI voices that knew too much. In my ethics essay, I had justified what we were doing. “In some cases, we’re giving voice to the voiceless,” I wrote. “The AI can represent all the players in the case. There’s no speculation. If it doesn’t know an answer, it says ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t remember.’ And sometimes it makes intuitive leaps that somebody involved in the case should have made but didn’t. It remains to be seen whether any of those inferences can be proven, but the possibility of serving justice is exciting and may outweigh any moral or ethical qualms.”

  I drove two hours up to Rochester on Christmas, in order to pack up my stuff at a time I knew she wouldn’t be there. We had cleared all the Christmas orders before the party—yes, people buy each other murder houses for Christmas—and everyone had been rewarded with two whole weeks off. I was pretty sure she was in Barbados with her family.

  The room looked exactly as it had when I’d left, minus the people. Red plastic cups and beer bottles everywhere, along with a yeasty smell that said they’d been left where they fell and not rinsed out.

  My so-called present was on the desk where I’d abandoned it. Still plugged in. I shouldn’t have asked, but I was the only one in the building and I had to know.

  “What happened to your brother, Gwen?”

  “I don’t know,” the House of Whacks said.

  “But you were watching him that day?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happened?”

  “He was playing in the yard, and I was playing a game on my phone. And then I went upstairs, and he was gone.” My words in the police report, verbatim.

  “You didn’t hear anything?”

  “I told the police ‘no.’”

  “Repeat that answer, please,” I said.

  “I told the police. No.”

  I didn’t know if I’d imagined the different inflection the first time. Terrifying how that nuance changed my words’ meaning. Its words. What line of code made the difference between the two? I had one more question.

  “What video game were you playing?”

  The machine paused. That information had never been in any articles.

  “I don’t remember,” it said at last.

  That “I don’t remember” kept me from smashing the thing, though I probably should have. I had been playing Karmic Warrior. My highest level yet. My highest level to date, I should say, since I never played it again. The machine wasn’t me. Eliza hadn’t re-created me. It was just an approximation.

  It didn’t know Tristan had begged me to teach him how to play Karmic Warrior. It knew he was wearing his Tyrannosaurus T-shirt and jeans with a torn right knee and sneakers that were starting to pinch his toes—he’d complained about them just that morning—because I told the police exactly what he was wearing. It knew he had a tiny white patch of hair at the crown of his head where he’d earned eight stitches on the corner of the coffee table the year before, because that had fallen under “distinguishing marks.”

  It didn’t know he snorted when he laughed. It didn’t know he ran like a tiny drunk, weaving and listing. Nobody had told it about his strange fascination with bees, which he captured gently but sometimes accidentally set loose in the house, and that he had gotten all of us stung more times than we could count. It didn’t know I had been chasing my high score in Karmic Warrior and told him to get lost. Those exact words, “Get lost,” and I never saw him again.

  Before I made my final trip across campus with my final box, I unplugged the Gwen AI. I was halfway down the hall when I changed my mind and went back. There was a screwdriver in the top desk drawer; I flipped the model over and unscrewed the base. Removed the chip, shoved it in my pocket. Stopped in the kitchen on the first floor to microwave it. Didn’t stick around to see the fireworks.

  That party was the last time I ever spoke to Eliza. She tried calling several times, but I didn’t answer and eventually she gave up. Going by what I heard from Samia and a couple of the others who were still on the HoW payroll, she couldn’t understand what had offended me, which told me I had made the right choice. To Eliza there was no difference between Lizzie Borden and the Haygood scandal and Tristan’s disappearance. We were all just mysteries waiting for her to solve us.

  — The Sewell Home for the Temporally Displaced —

  Judy says, “It’s snowing.”

  I look out the window. The sky is the same dirty gray as the snow left from last week’s storm. I stand up to look closer, to find a backdrop against which I might see what she sees. The radiator is warm against my knees.

  “You don’t mean now.” It’s not really a question, but she shakes her head. She looks through me, through another window, at other weather. She smiles. Whenever she is, it must be beautiful.

  “Describe it for me,” I say.

  “Big, fluffy snow. The kind that doesn’t melt when it lands on your gloves. Big enough to see the shapes of individual flakes.”

  “Do you know when you are?”

  She strains to catch a different view. “1890s, maybe? The building across the street hasn’t been built yet. I wish I could see down to the street, Marguerite.”

  Judy isn’t supposed to leave her bed, but I help her into her yellow slippers, help her to her feet. I try to make myself strong enough for her to lean on. We shuffle to the window. She looks down.

  “There’s a brougham waiting at the front door. The horse is black, and he must have been driven hard, because the snow that’s collecting elsewhere is just melting when it hits him. There’s steam coming off him.”

  I don’t say anything. I can’t see it, but I can picture it.

  “Somebody came out of the building. He’s helping a woman out of the carriage,” she says. “Her clothes don’t match the era or the season. She’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”

  “A Distillers T-shirt,” I say.

  “Yes! Can you see her too?”

  “No,” I say. “That was me, the first time I came here. I didn’t stay long, that first time.”

  I hear the creak of the door. It’s Zia, my least favorite of the nurses. She treats us like children. “Judy, what are we doing up? We could get hurt if we have an episode.”
r />   She turns to me. “And you, Marguerite. We should know better than to encourage her.”

  “Your pronouns are very confusing,” I tell her.

  She ignores me. “Well, let’s get down to lunch, since we’re both up and about.”

  Zia puts Judy in a wheelchair. I follow them down to the dining room, slow and steady. She pushes Judy up to the first available space, at a table with only one vacancy. I’m forced to sit across the room. I don’t like being so far away from her. I would make a fuss, but I try to tell myself we can stand to be apart for one meal. I keep an eye on her anyway.

  Judy isn’t fully back yet. She doesn’t touch her food. Mr. Kahn and Michael Lim and Grace de Villiers are all talking across her. Mr. Kahn is floating his spoon, demonstrating the finer points of the physics of his first time machine, as he always does.

  “Meatloaf again,” mutters Emily Arnold, to my left. “I can’t wait until vat protein is invented.”

  “It tastes good enough, Emily. The food here is really pretty decent for an industrial kitchen in this time period.” We’ve all had worse.

  We eat our meatloaf. Somebody at the far end of the room has a major episode, and we’re all asked to leave before we get our jello. I can’t quite see who it is, but she’s brandishing her butter knife like a cutlass, her legs braced against a pitching deck. The best kind of episode, where you’re fully then again. We all look forward to those. It’s funny that the staff act like it might be contagious.

  I wait in Judy’s room for her to return. Zia wheels her in and lifts her into the bed. She’s light as a bird, my Judy. Zia frowns when she sees me. I think she’d shoo me out more often if either of us had family that could lodge a complaint. Michael and Grace are allowed to eat together but not to visit each other’s rooms. Grace’s children think she shouldn’t have a relationship now that she lives in so many times at once. Too confusing, they say, though Grace doesn’t know whether they mean for them or for her.