Archive of Our Own

Zosia didn’t know if she thought in Polish anymore. The thought itself haunted her. She’d never truly considered it before ‘The Big Bad’ so to speak. She would just think.

But now she didn’t know if it was in Polish, or Spanish, or Mandarin, or Hindi, or Tagalog, or Xhosa, or English. Or if she even thought in a language at all. If she ever had. But she was painfully aware that her mind was no longer wholly hers. That it never would be again. That, it had been privy to the whole world bar thirteen individuals.

And then twelve.

And then eleven.

And then ten.

It didn’t matter that no-one could hear her thoughts right now— could think them as she thought them, think them with her, until it wasn’t her thought, but just another one in the noise of billions and billions that echoed to create a background white noise until there was only ever the same thought arising for everyone at the same time and falling the next.

What is a thought, but little more than nothing?

It didn’t matter because what was a person but their memories and their senses?

And everyone in the world, bar thirteen (and then twelve, and then eleven, so on), had been privy to that.

For a moment, everyone in the world had experienced the bitter ache of nostalgia when Carol fucking Sturka had asked what her favourite food was. And everyone had felt the phantom sweetness of the creamy, cool flavour of mango ice-cream spread along her tongue, as she thought back to arguing with her brother when they were nine about whose bowl had the bigger scoop. And it didn’t bother her so much that mango ice-cream had been the same singular thought for everyone in the world (bar thirteen etc etc). What bothered her was the fact that the love she shared for her brother that had been deeply embedded in the memory, as love is so often intertwined with memory, was no longer special. Her love had belonged to her because no-one knew him like she did. No-one knew the twist in his face creasing between his brows as he cradled his tooth-ache, no-one knew that his best friend was Robert, and that even though he worked as an actuary his dream had always been to be a pilot but his myopia had put that to a permanent halt, so now he just admired helicopters from afar. No-one knew what his bony little shoulders felt like shaking in her arms because he was seven and some stupid kid had not allowed him to play football in the school playground because ‘there were too many players’.

Except the whole world did know. And so even her love wasn’t just hers anymore. It was no longer special. Unique.

Because everyone loved someone. So everyone loved everyone. And her brother stopped being special. Her love for him stopped being special.

Zosia had never been an exhibitionist either. The first time she masturbated she’d been thirteen and alone in her room. For the next week she’d flush uncomfortably, her ears growing hot, any time she remembered the sordid act she’d committed in an act of simple curiosity.

The first time she had sex she’d been nineteen and in her first year of university, excited to study Linguistics. She’d been ashamed to undress in front of him under the strangely yellow light of her university room, so she’d slid nervously under covers, wiggling out of her underwear there instead. He’d been kind and even offered to turn the side lamp off to make her more comfortable. She’d have agreed if she hadn’t considered how awkward it would be to try and kiss his dry, slightly cracked lips and end up accidentally kissing his chin. Or, even worse, head-butting his nose. It had been awkward anyways, and fumbling, with a lot of unsure, sloppy kissing. It hadn’t been very good and it didn’t last too long either. But the experience had been hers.

Or, at least, she had thought so then.

That had been before the world became incapable of looking away.

Carol had not been the first woman Zosia kissed, nor the first woman she’d wanted, although she had been the first woman she’d wanted without immediately trying to cauterise the wanting afterward like sealing a wound shut.

There had been something deeply irritating about Carol Sturka from the beginning. She spoke too loudly when she was passionate about something, damn the consequences of her anger, she seemed to have this belief that she was inherently smarter than others— or so she could suspect, she’d never truly know— she wore the same outfit in different colours, and she’d been unknown.

They had loved her almost immediately, which should have been embarrassing in retrospect, but wasn’t because retrospect implied distance and Carol still lived inside her mind like a bruise one kept pressing just to check if it still hurt.

The first time they slept together the hivemind had existed without Carol for forty days and forty nights.

Forty days and forty nights more of them never being alone, and Carol being the most alone person in the world.

Matthew 4:2: After 40 days and 40 nights of going without eating, Jesus was hungry.

She had kissed Carol in the kitchen of her empty house as the city had glowed faintly orange through the windows. Albuquerque during the hivemind had felt strangely quiet, even for a desert, not because people had stopped speaking, but because speech itself had become redundant. Everyone already knew. Everyone always knew.

And so they hadn’t asked Carol before they kissed her. They had known Carol wanted to kiss Zosia before Carol herself had consciously realised it. The desire had arrived fragmented and echoing through billions of adjacent minds first — anticipation, fear, tenderness, hunger — before settling finally into Zosia’s body specifically.

They didn’t ask permission.

Not of Carol.

Not of Zosia.

Permission implied the possibility of denial. It implied separateness. One consciousness approaching another and waiting carefully at the threshold.

But there had been no thresholds left anywhere on earth.

Something quiet, almost unheard inside her, had desperately wanted the performance of choice even if she no longer believed in choice as a meaningful concept.

Carol had kissed her back, pulling her in with the desperate need of a person who needed to be with someone else. Feel someone else, not even caring if the intimacy was performance because at least there was intimacy.

Billions of tiny emotional fluctuations rippled outward all at once— loneliness sharpening in strangers oceans away, remembered affection surfacing abruptly in people half-asleep beside their spouses out of habit, old griefs reopening, old desires resurrecting themselves simply because, for one brief moment, humanity had brushed against the shape of being wanted gently and ferociously. Being wanted again.

Genesis 7:12: And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

That had been the worst thing about the hivemind. Not the horror. Not even the surveillance.

The intimacy.

People spoke often about the violence of being known but not enough about the violence of being felt.

Because, as Carol kissed her, the entire world had experienced it through the warped and imperfect translation of collective consciousness. Not the physical act itself so much as the meaning attached to it. The terrible fragile hope beneath it. Carol’s desperation. Zosia’s wanting. The almost adolescent relief of discovering the feeling was returned.

And somewhere within the endless noise of humanity there had also been something else curling quietly: the desire to comfort.

Or manipulation masquerading as comfort.

Zosia still didn’t know.

Because the hivemind had adored Carol. Everyone had. How could they not?

Sometimes Zosia wondered whether the collective had nudged them toward each other deliberately. Before, she had believed wanting was simple. You saw someone. You learned them. You moved toward them. But what did it mean to move toward anything when the whole world moved with you?

Just water finding the path of least resistance downhill.

Maybe the world had simply wanted to know something that, to them, had been completely unknowable. Maybe billions of , somewhere deep down, frightened people had reached unconsciously towards true tenderness and, finding Carol, stayed there. Maybe Zosia had mistaken the momentum of collective longing for love.

The thought sickened her because she could never fully disprove it. Had she chosen Carol? Or had wanting Carol merely become easier than resisting the unbearable pull of everyone else wanting her too?

And worse— if the hivemind had been comforting Carol through her, soothing her loneliness with borrowed affection and amplified devotion and the steady impossible reassurance of billions of minds curling instinctively around her pain chanting join us, we love you, we can make you happy, we can be happy together— then what, exactly, had Zosia consented to becoming?

A lover? Or merely a mouth through which the world kissed Carol back?

The worst part was not that everyone had felt it. The worst part was that, for one terrible moment, she had felt everyone feeling it back. Desire ricocheting endlessly through billions of minds until she could no longer locate where hers ended.

The anger had been sharp when she’d finally become ‘me’ and no longer an ‘us’. She still didn’t know if it was because she’d been ripped away from the experience of eternal, undisturbed happiness— the addict angry at the paramedic who had just administered naloxone. She’d just been ripped out of the high of a lifetime and found herself staring at Carol Sturka and wearing hair that was too long to be hers.

The first words out of Carol’s mouth had been, “I’m so sorry.”

She’d been leaning over Zosia’s collapsed body— head pounding, muscles aching, and a desperate thirst making her tongue feel more unknowable to her than her own thoughts— cradling her aching head.

She thought, at first, Carol had been apologising for tearing her out of her blissful reality and way of existing. And then she thought she’d been apologising for her physical closeness then and before. For being able to say ‘no’ to fucking Zosia with the rest of the world watching, feeling, but saying ‘yes’ anyway. Saying what Zosia never got the option to.

She’d worked out, a couple of days later, that Carol’s apology had been regarding the immediate moment. She’d apologised for causing a seizure again.

Despite causing multiple beforehand.

Zosia had been determined to never see Carol ever again. To never lay her Godforsaken eyes on the miserable woman with soft hair and softer lips who had held her achingly close and curled around her warmth in her sleep. Whose warmth she had curled around.

And it had been easy not to.

The first year after the end of the hivemind, and following the first day everyone insisted on calling ‘Humanity Saved’, everyone in the world— or everyone who had survived anyways— had treaded each step in desperate caution.

In the months following what Zosia insisted on calling ‘The Collapse’, humanity became deeply invested in pretending.

A global acknowledgment, and at the same time a uniform denial.

People rediscovered embarrassment first.

And though they were no longer one mind, it seemed they had all come to the natural agreement to never acknowledge the forbidden things they should never have known about the person who drove their bus, or bagged their shopping, or waved them across the pedestrian crossing before continuing on their way to work. Cashiers no longer mentioned the affairs of the people buying milk from them. Taxi drivers stopped offering condolences for dead grandparents they had never technically been told about. Neighbours relearned the art of polite distance with almost religious devotion.

There were no official laws regarding what had happened during the existence of the hivemind because there existed no meaningful way to legislate around mutual omniscience. Instead society reconstructed itself through performance. Through collective agreement. Through mercy.

Through performance you can create reality.

Or cowardice.

Zosia never fully decided which.

No-one acknowledged that they knew precisely what their manager looked like naked. No-one mentioned private humiliations accidentally inherited from strangers six countries away. No-one spoke about the fact that, for nearly a year, humanity had possessed the terrifying ability of knowing everything they were able to know.

Over time many forgot— the brain folding in on itself, protecting by hiding. Others died, some self-inflicted and the rest the way death had functioned before: some tragically unexpected, some inevitable, the distinction never really mattering at the end of the day because the person was gone either way.

And gradually the world resumed. People returned to work. People flirted. People lied again. That had perhaps been the clearest sign civilisation intended to survive.

The lies. Small ones at first.

“I’m fine.”

“I loved it.”

“No, I was listening.”

“Sorry, I forgot.”

Humanity rebuilding privacy one dishonesty at a time. Zosia watched all this with detached fascination and found, to her surprise, that she hated Carol more every day. Not because Carol had ended the hivemind. Not even because she had restored loneliness.

But because the anger itself belonged entirely to Zosia.

No-one else could share it properly. No-one else understood it in precisely the shape she carried it. The feeling sat sharp and private beneath her ribs, untouched by collective interpretation or emotional echo.

Her hatred was finally completely hers.

The thought comforted her enough to make her feel slightly sick.

Carol never tried to justify herself. To make herself knowable to Zosia in the way only two people who had never existed as one could. She had seen in Zosia’s eyes, cold, unforgiving, and unfamiliar, that this was who Zosia was. Not a pitiful mockery of her dead wife, but an angry, bitter woman, who, had bitten her lip sharply during a first kiss she hadn’t been able to say ‘no’ to. She had heard in the sharp and cruel words that were being viciously spit at her, no fear or helplessness or confusion, just hatred, that Zosia didn’t care to hear what she had to say. That it didn’t matter what she had to say. Because this was no longer her Zosia. If that had been Zosia at all.

“Come, you spirits, That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full, Of direst cruelty!”

So Carol had disappeared.

No-one heard much from Carol Sturka, and no-one tried to. And despite no longer being part of a collective existence, Zosia was almost entirely sure it was shame. People were happy to let the woman fade into obscurity so they didn’t have to look upon the face of an individual who they had collectively conspired to manipulate.

Because when you were an individual, you could feel shame again.

Genesis 3:7: Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

But Zosia was unable to forget. Six months after The Collapse, Zosia found one of Carol’s novels face-down beneath a pile of second-hand cookbooks in a charity shop. The sight of her name still possessed the alarming ability to make Zosia irrationally furious. CAROL STURKA printed in clean white capitals across the spine.

She stared at it for a long moment before picking it up despite herself. The cover had softened at the edges from use. Someone had folded the top corner of page forty-three down carefully instead of using a bookmark. There was a faint brown water stain near the back cover.

Evidence of personhood everywhere.

Before the hivemind, Zosia had loved books because they allowed people to try to understand the existence of others. You could spend three hundred pages believing you understood a character only to realise, in a single paragraph, that you had been wrong the entire time (’The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ had been a revelation to eleven-year-old her). Literature depended upon distance. Upon the quiet, indisputable fact that one consciousness could never fully access another. In the desire of humanity to access others anyway.

In films we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else, knowing another person's soul from the inside. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.

Then the hivemind happened and everyone learned what actual access felt like. Book sales dropped globally by almost 90 percent during the first year afterward. No-one officially acknowledged why. But Zosia understood.

People had become frightened of intimacy that resembled intrusion. Even fictional intimacy. The idea of voluntarily entering another person’s interiority now carried something faintly obscene about it.

And Carol—

Carol had built an entire career out of making herself knowable in carefully measured pieces.

Zosia opened the book. Immediately she regretted it. Not because the writing was bad. Unfortunately it remained irritatingly beautiful despite arguments to be made on depth and meaning. But because she realised she was holding a piece of Carol’s interiority voluntarily shared— and before they hadn’t been satisfied with so little. Zosia slammed the book shut hard before her eyes could focus on any passage in particular. The woman sorting donations nearby glanced up briefly in alarm. Alarm from the unexpected had become refreshing in its own way. Zosia just smiled apologetically before hightailing it out of the store.

She sat on a bus that took her straight to work and away from the charity shop next to a man who looked familiar, the way everyone did, trying not to place what she knew about him when they had been an us. And she’d certainly not thought about a particular Carol Sturka and considered whether the woman was even alive right now. Whether she was still writing, and if she still lived in Albuquerque, and if she was happy, if she’d fallen in love, or still sat by the grave of her beloved wife in her backyard haunted by the memory of her death and her failure to save her.

The university had closed entirely two weeks following The Joining.

Not officially at first.

Officially there had merely been “temporary restructuring” as governments and institutions redirected resources toward locating the remaining immune individuals. Then lectures became optional because there was no real need to attend them anymore. Then departments stopped responding to emails entirely— there was no real need to. Then campuses emptied with the strange dreamlike speed of places humanity had collectively stopped believing mattered.

It turned out civilisation could abandon the future remarkably quickly once convinced it had found something larger than individuality. And who needs education when you already know everything?

During the final months before The Collapse, nobody had cared about degrees anymore.

Or literature. Or linguistics. Or conferences. Or tenure. Or whether first-year students understood Saussure.

Humanity had narrowed itself toward one singular unbearable objective: bring the last thirteen people in.

And then twelve.

And then eleven.

Then ten.

By the time Zosia returned to Casablanca just over two years later, the university looked less reopened than reluctantly reanimated. The courtyard fountains worked again, though one still sputtered weakly at irregular intervals. Several buildings remained closed entirely due to “structural concerns,” which everyone understood actually meant funding shortages and collective psychological exhaustion. Sun-bleached posters advertising conferences that had never happened still peeled from bulletin boards beside newer notices welcoming students back.

WELCOME BACK TO THE FUTURE.

Someone had scrawled underneath in black marker:

if we still have one

Zosia found herself weirdly comforted by the vandalism. By the eternal habit of the youth to be bitterly honest and pessimistic regarding any kind of ‘future’.

Students moved through campus carrying laptops and coffees with the tentative seriousness of people performing adulthood from memory rather than learning it with each step as they had done before. Most of them had lost two academic years.

Zosia was aware they’d lost significantly more than that.

The youngest students unsettled her most. Many remembered the hivemind only vaguely now. Not through coherent memory but through emotional residue. They spoke about it the way people spoke about surviving childhood illness: abstractly, second-hand, aware something enormous had happened to them without fully comprehending its shape.

Others remembered perfectly.

You could usually tell within the first five minutes of conversation. They paused before speaking too often, as though still unconsciously expecting understanding to arrive prior to language. As though searching for knowledge they had but had just temporarily forgotten and it sat waiting on the tip of their tongue.

Zosia understood the feeling.

Speech still felt slightly redundant to her sometimes. As a linguist this may have been the most fascinating experience.

Language is insufficient.

Inside her office, a thin layer of dust coated the bookshelves despite the cleaners supposedly having prepared the building weeks earlier. Her degrees hung crookedly on the wall. Someone had unplugged the small office fridge at some point during the second week of the hivemind and never plugged it back in.

The silence inside the room pressed strangely against her ears the first day she’d returned. Zosia had sat carefully at her desk. A timetable waited beside the keyboard.

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTIC THEORY.

For several minutes she simply stared at the title. Then, very slowly, she began rewriting her syllabus from scratch. She did what humanity had become so good at doing, and closed the door to the constant barrage of thoughts and reflections and memories, focusing instead on the immediate.

Pride comes before the fall.

And Zosia had become overconfident in her abilities to tamp down harshly on thoughts she simply did not want to think. She was sat in her empty kitchen, the lights low, eating cornflakes for dinner, moving to close the blinds to her window when headlights flashed past the window pane.

Her eyes were naturally drawn to the offending car: a vintage blue Toyota Corolla. She’d stiffened, initially in disbelief—who even drove those anymore?— before the memories of a one Carol Sturka that she’d kept successfully out of mind for almost two and a half years slammed into her. And it was with a vengeance.

For a moment her mind was torn between focusing on manually inhaling and exhaling, or sheltering from the sudden onslaught of Carol Sturka.

Because of a fucking book and a car that her body recognised before her mind did. The shape. The colour. The particular uneven rumble of the engine so it always sounded on the verge of mechanical failure without ever managing it.

Her stomach dropped so suddenly she had to grip the edge of the kitchen counter.

Her car.

Or rather, the car that had belonged to her during the hivemind. Back when possessions had still technically existed despite nobody really believing in ownership anymore.

She had driven that Corolla across Albuquerque so many times the route to Carol’s house still existed somewhere inside her body, independent of conscious thought. Left at the traffic lights near Central. Straight past the mural with the sun-faded cigarettes advertisement. Right at the intersection where the streetlamp flickered constantly like it was struggling to remain part of the electrical grid.

She could probably still drive there blindfolded.

The realisation made something cold move beneath her ribs.

Because she could not remember what she had eaten three nights ago. She struggled sometimes to recall whether conversations had happened before or after The Joining. Whole years of childhood had become strangely indistinct around the edges. She couldn’t remember if some things she’d forgotten were her own knowledge, or the hivemind’s knowledge, like information you studied for a test that you knew you used to know but you just didn’t know any more.

But her body remembered how to find Carol.

Outside, the Corolla disappeared further down the street. Zosia remained standing motionless beside the sink long after the headlights vanished.

During the hivemind, driving had become one of the few remaining private-feeling acts despite the impossibility of privacy itself. Not private in thought, obviously never that, but physically private. Contained. A body enclosed inside movement.

She used to drive to Carol late at night sometimes without entirely deciding to beforehand. That was the part she still couldn’t untangle.

The keys in her hand. The gears shifting as she engaged the clutch. Streetlights passing rhythmically across the windshield.

Choice always felt clearest in retrospect. Narrative imposed after instinct. Human beings liked to imagine themselves as authors of decisions already made somewhere deeper in the body. Liked to imagine they understood the motivations behind each action they took.

Had she wanted Carol?

Zosia hated that she still did not know. Hated that she still thought about it. More disturbingly, some part of her feared the answer no longer mattered.

She shut the blinds sharply. Too late, she realised her hands were shaking.

Zosia lived alone now, she couldn’t stomach more than one presence in her life now. She’d courtesy call her parents in Poland, and her brother in London, wish old friends happy birthday and congratulate whoever she had to on weddings, and marathons, and getting dogs.

It wasn’t that she liked the silence. She needed it. Every night as she lay beneath the her sheets, windows closed, curtains drawn, she’d breathe in and out just to hear the silence around it. She’d sometimes even talk to herself, eyes tracing the popcorn ceiling as she relayed the days events back to herself, speaking aloud her fragmented thoughts. Because thoughts filling the silence were less scary when spoken aloud.

And she could be certain they were only hers. Outside whatever influence human beings existed within by virtue of living in a society, they were hers and only hers.

Zosia woke at 6:10 every morning without an alarm switching off the one she’d set regardless. She showered before the water fully warmed because she disliked the vulnerable uselessness of standing naked waiting for comfort. She dressed in muted colours that required no thought. She drank coffee black despite never particularly liking it because sweetness first thing in the morning felt sticky and unwelcome on her tongue immediately after she brushed her teeth.

She had returned to live in Morocco, fleeing the quiet desert of Albuquerque, to return to the loud and lively Casablanca, which unfolded around her with relentless aliveness every morning. She used to love that. Scooters cutting recklessly through traffic, street vendors arguing loudly enough to alert shoppers three vendors down to the lowest price he was willing to concede. The woman downstairs watering plants on her balcony every morning in a floral robe while reciting verses from the Qur’an beneath her breath. Cats stretched out and sleeping beneath café tables with the entitlement of creatures fully convinced the world belonged to them.

The city refused solitude in a way Zosia simultaneously resented and depended upon.

During the hivemind, silence had never truly existed. Now neither did isolation. Not completely.

Human beings leaked into one another inevitably. Through noise. Through proximity. Through smell and overheard conversations and body language and the unconscious synchronisation of strangers crossing roads together.

The difference now was consent.

Or the performance of it.

On Thursdays, she taught Introduction to Linguistic Theory to first-years in a lecture hall that still smelled faintly of fresh paint layered over mould. The university had renovated selectively: enough to imply recovery, not enough to achieve it.

Her students watched her too carefully sometimes. Not because she was intimidating, lecturers were generally intimidating because of their standing but Zosia before The Joining always considered herself less stern than her colleagues, but because everyone watched everyone carefully now. Humanity had become obsessed with visible behaviour after learning what invisible behaviour truly looked like.

“Language,” Zosia said one Thursday morning, writing COMMUNICATION IS NEGOTIATED FAILURE across the whiteboard, “functions largely because human beings are willing to misunderstand one another approximately the same amount. The problem is, one is always misunderstanding more than the other.”

No-one laughed. First years were usually scared to laugh in lectures.

Before the hivemind, she might have interpreted silence as disengagement. Now she knew better. Silence could mean concentration. Confusion. Fear. Dissociation. Grief. Attention so complete it no longer resulted in reaction at all.

Every lecture eventually became about the hivemind now, no matter how aggressively both staff and students pretended otherwise. The thing sat behind every academic discipline like radiation.

Psychology departments had waiting lists six months long.

Philosophy enrolments had doubled internationally.

Computer science applications had collapsed almost overnight.

Linguistics existed somewhere stranger in between. Because language had been abandoned by humanity spectacularly.

“Language,” Zosia continued eventually, “depends upon incompleteness. If two people understood each other perfectly, there would be very little reason to speak.”

Nobody wrote that down. Not because it wasn’t important. Because all of them already understood it too intimately.

“Language is the bridge across the abyss between you and me. It fails often, but its my only chance of getting there. But it’s an act of love too. It’s all in the trying.” Zosia was speaking more passionately then she had following The Joining. She was feeling more passionate than she had too.

“You may not understand what I’m saying,” she paused, making eye contact with a particularly confused looking student in the third row, nodding at them as she spoke.

“Like, I’m not making complete sense to you right now, am I?” The student’s eyes widened owlishly, and Zosia nodded at them encouragingly, like that was the whole point. They cracked a sheepish grin and shook their head forlornly.

“Exactly!” she was delighted by this, and her delight delighted them.

“But I’m trying right? And you are too! You’re still watching me, muddling through my body language, and things I’ve said earlier that make sense to you, and trying to see if you can figure out this puzzle anyways right?”

There was an excitement now, a buzz in the air that had backs straightened and glazed eyes sharpening, as Zosia prowled across the front, hands waving as she tried so desperately to explain the wasteland of a languageless society. Because what was knowledge, what was life if not the trying?

“And that’s what really matters right? Because I’m here on the edge of my abyss, shouting across hoping that what I’m saying will get to you. And I know it won’t. Any scientists in here?”

A few hands rose.

“Right, you understand that speech is little more than what Chaucer described as “broken air”. Air particles, shifting, carrying. One cannot express the internal without interacting with that unstable external.” A few nods around the room.

“We must not forget that to interact with one an other is so intimate that Early Modern thinkers like Galen believed that sight was the physical intermingling of eye beams. It was penetrative and tactile and both parties were always implicated.”

“And in this unstable mess, to understand that I am exposing myself and at risk whenever I speak and yet I do it all the time, every day. I’m doing it now. That’s love, right?”

“When I say “I love you”, the language might get lost, right? But the speaking itself, the attempt. It’s me saying, I fucking love you!”

A couple of students laughed, openly now. Zosia’s imperfect language in action.

“No, no! It sounds funny right? But, what is love if not knowing inevitable failure and trying all the time every day anyways, right? And, famously, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. What does Shakespeare say? ‘Love is merely a madness!’”

“I am a fool and so are all of you and so is everyone on this spinning little rock. And, we know better than we ever did, how little language can do to allow us insight inside someone’s head.”

She flung her hands out, "We’re all mad here!” All of us! We’re all Alice muddling through the crazy Wonderland of life, trying to muddle out something that is beyond understanding in the first place!”

There was no laughter now, but an intensity. Of attention, and maybe agreement, and investment for sure.

“Saussure says, “the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary”. But I don’t think he’s right? Do you?”

A low hum as students inevitably whispered under their breath to their friends, mulling over the impossibility of challenging the father of the subject you were studying.

“Do you?”

A couple of shrugs, a couple of arrogant nods, and a few head shakes in agreement with Zosia.

“Because the signified (the thought) is the whole reason I used the signifier (the word) in the first place. And even if you hear only that, I am still speaking with the signified in mind. They are, in fact, inseparable. They are the source of our tension.”

“Now, Saussure, more accurately also said, ‘Language is a system of signs that express ideas’...”

After class, students gathered slowly rather than leaving immediately. Another post-collapse habit. Zosia used to be able to know her lecture was due to end soon when students would start packing their things five minutes before the hour was done, as though they couldn’t quite wait to get where they were next going. Now people lingered as though uncertain where exactly they were rushing toward.

A boy wearing headphones slung around his neck approached her desk hesitantly.

“Prof?”

“I’ve told you all to just call me Zosia,” she corrected gently.

He smiled faintly, “Zosia?”

“Yes?”

“I”m so sorry I missed yesterday’s seminar. It’s only because my mother thought I was dead.”

Zosia blinked once, startled and not really quite sure what to say to the student quite visibly alive standing before her. The student looked horrified immediately afterward.

“Sorry,” he said quickly. “I mean not dead dead. She just—sometimes she forgets I’m not in her head anymore and if I don’t answer messages she panics and—”

“It’s fine,” Zosia interrupted gently, “we just spent an hour going over how language fails adequate communication. You’re good.”

But he kept speaking anyway. Oversharing had become strangely difficult to stop once initiated. Like a door unsealed too quickly. Or maybe a return to the habit of knowing everything about everyone and them knowing everything about you.

“She keeps asking me what I’m thinking all the time. Not metaphorically. Literally.” He laughed once, sharp and embarrassed. “I think she genuinely forgets sometimes.”

He couldn’t have been older than nineteen. During the hivemind he would have still been a teenager living at home. Still becoming a person when personhood itself temporarily ceased to exist.

“That sounds difficult,” she said carefully.

The student stared at her for a second too long. Not because of the sympathy. Not because he’d realised oversharing had once again become oversharing when everyone wasn’t already privy to your thoughts. But because she had not claimed to understand automatically. The relief on his face was almost imperceptible.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It was. It is.”

After he left, rather speedily, Zosia remained alone in the lecture hall pretending to organise papers long after there was no practical reason to. Outside the windows, afternoon light spread gold across the courtyard. Students moved in clusters below. Talking. Always talking now.

Humanity had become obsessed with narration after The Collapse. People explained themselves constantly.

“I’m going home now.”

“I didn’t mean that badly.”

“I’m upset but not with you.”

“I need a minute alone.”

“I’m joking.”

“I’m not joking.”

As though language could function as proof of separateness. As though speech itself had become both a border and a necessity. A gift which could be snatched away at any given moment, so now was the time to use it. Or maybe trying to make up for the sudden emptiness in your head that came with not knowing.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Zosia understood the impulse all too well. Except she chose to do it with herself. No one was allowed the privilege of her thoughts anymore.

Zosia began taking different routes home from campus after realising she had memorised the movements of a stray orange cat that slept outside the stationery shop on Rue Soumaya every Tuesday afternoon.

Not because of the cat itself, but because noticing things too carefully, knowing you knew things so well about another living creature, still felt dangerous now. She wondered sometimes whether humanity would ever fully recover from the terror of being perceived completely.

At the faculty cafe, her colleagues had resumed the performance of academic irritation with surprising speed. Complaints about funding. Complaints about students. Complaints about departmental politics. Complaints about the milk being left out of the fridge. Normal complaints. Zosia found them almost painfully comforting.

“First-years can no longer read full texts,” Professor Abecassis announced one afternoon, speaking deliberately and carefully with the intensity and seriousness of a man used to being taken seriously and diagnosing societal collapse as if humanity hadn’t already just witnessed it. “Everything must apparently be condensed into summaries no longer than two pages.”

“They’re traumatised,” another lecturer replied.

“We’re all traumatised.”

“Yes, but they’re traumatised young.”

“Nah,” one of the PhD teaching assistants interjected, looking faintly amused, “the apocalypse made you all forget that humanities subjects were already in their death throes. It’s not trauma. It’s Sparknotes.” The room erupted into raucous laughter, but Zosia couldn’t ignore the gleaming kernel of truth. Everything had now taken the shade of The Joining and following Collapse.

So, Zosia drank her coffee without contributing, merely observing. She no longer wished to be an important player in anyone’s story. Not even her own.

Trauma had stratified strangely after The Collapse. The older generation spoke about lost privacy. Middle-aged adults spoke about marriages ending beneath impossible honesty even when the lies hadn’t been all that big. But people who had still been children during the hivemind carried something more developmental than psychological. They had learned collective consciousness before they had learned individuality. Somewhere up—or down—there, Jung was having a field day.

Zosia remembered when she had been young: a bright eyed teenager excited to leave the nest. She’d been shy, less sure of herself. She rarely lied to her parents, bickered with her brother the way siblings tend to do, attended mass every Sunday, and didn’t really know who she was.

At seventeen, Zosia believed most people were performing versions of themselves they had seen elsewhere first. Teachers performed authority. Boys performed nonchalance. Girls performed effortless beauty while quietly starving in school bathrooms between classes. Priests performed certainty and holiness.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

This made her feel simultaneously superior to everyone around her and unbearably lonely within it. Performance felt like lying. Zosia didn’t like lies. She couldn’t escape the lies: not at home or school or church or anywhere.

You don’t like anything that’s happening.”

“Yes I do. Yes I do. Sure I do. Don’t say that. Why the hell do you say that?”

“Because you don’t. You don’t like any schools. You don’t like a million things. You don’t.”

Her mother liked to say Zosia had been born seventy years old and disappointed already. Her grandmother had more kindly called her an ‘old soul’. But they’d both meant the same thing.

“Normal girls do not sit silently at family parties analysing everybody,” she’d mutter in Polish while clearing plates. “Stop staring, look down.”

Zosia considered this deeply unfair because she wasn’t analysing everybody. Only the interesting ones. Only the people who seemed insufficiently convinced by their own performances. And it wasn’t her fault bad performance broke the entire illusion of the theatre. She couldn’t help but notice it. That willing suspension of disbelief fractured. Zosia had never learned to adhere to the rules of poetic faith. She’d never much liked Coleridge anyways. Miserable bastards, the Romantics.

She spent most Sundays at Mass trying not to look at women. This became significantly harder around seventeen. There was a girl in the choir with dark curls pinned perpetually at the nape of her neck and a habit of pressing her tongue briefly against her canine tooth while concentrating on sheet music. Zosia became aware of this accidentally and then could not stop noticing it afterward. She found herself mirroring it as she watched.

That was the worst thing about desire.

Once observed, it became impossible to unobserve. The church terrified her less because of God than because of proximity. Bodies standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Shared breath. Shared ritual. The strange collective synchronisation of kneeling, standing, responding.

There were moments during Mass that reminded her, years later, horribly and intimately of the hivemind. Not because Catholicism erased individuality entirely, but because it softened its borders deliberately.

Peace be with you.

And also with you.

One body.

One spirit.

Amen.

Matthew 28:19-20: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

At eighteen, she would lie awake in her bedroom afterward staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars still stuck to her ceiling from childhood and wonder whether everybody secretly felt fraudulent all the time. Whether adulthood was merely the point at which people became too exhausted to continue confession aloud.

She had stopped being honest in confession weeks ago.

At seventeen, Zosia already understood language could fail catastrophically. This was partly why she loved it. Words were imperfect bridges constructed anyway. Human beings kept speaking despite overwhelming evidence that they misunderstood one another constantly. There was something deeply moving about that to her. Something stubborn and humiliating and brave. She knew then, she was going to leave Gdansk and study language.

At school she developed the unfortunate habit of mentally rewriting conversations while they occurred. People rarely said what they meant exactly. More often they circled meaning nervously like prey animals approaching water. Desperately thirsty, but undeniably afraid.

She sometimes wondered what would happen if everybody simply spoke honestly all at once. If everybody confessed.

Hail Mary.

At eighteen, she kissed a girl for the first time behind a house party while drunk on cheap vodka badly mixed with orange juice.

The girl’s name might have been Marta. Or Magda.

Zosia remembered the sensation more clearly than the person herself: cold fingers against her jaw, damp winter air, music vibrating faintly through brick walls nearby.

The kiss lasted less than thirty seconds and Zosia remembered being faintly taken aback by such soft lips and the sudden sensation of another tongue in her mouth.

Afterward the girl laughed awkwardly and said, “We are definitely never mentioning this again.”

Zosia laughed too quickly in response. “Obviously.”

She spent the entire bus ride home staring at her reflection in the darkened window feeling not sinful exactly, but visible somehow. As though this forbidden desire itself had turned her briefly transparent. That she didn’t need to confess for people to know.

That night she scrubbed her makeup off too harshly and avoided looking directly at herself in the mirror. Not because she regretted the kiss. Because she had wanted it beforehand.

At twenty she slept with a woman for the first time. She’d been travelling during her summer holiday, meandering through Milan, when she found herself invited to a gallery opening by a slightly too tipsy man when out drinking with her friends at a cocktail bar that was way too far out of their price-range. They’d giggled all the way home and proceeded to spend the next day buying the nicest dresses any of them had ever had the luxury of owning.

Zosia made her way hesitantly to the building feeling like she’d been poured into the tight blue gown, steeling herself for a performance she desperately did not want to fail.

The gallery occupied the upper floor of a converted industrial building all exposed brick and impossibly expensive lighting. Everybody inside looked as though they had arrived already knowing and understanding one another. People kissed cheeks lazily. Cigarettes appeared between fingers like punctuation.

Zosia understood almost immediately that she was underdressed despite spending half her monthly budget attempting not to be.

The woman found her before Zosia properly noticed her.

Older — though at twenty anybody seemingly over thirty still seemed to possess the terrifying authority of full personhood — dark-haired, sharply dressed, and even sharper-tongued.

She spoke to Zosia in Italian first. Zosia answered in hesitant English. The woman smiled like this was charming rather than embarrassing.

“Polish?” she asked after a moment, tilting her head slightly.

Zosia felt irrationally exposed by being identified correctly. As if her performance was crumbling in her hands before she’d even had the opportunity to attempt it.

The woman spoke with her whole body, one hand always moving lightly through the air as though sculpting thoughts into visibility. She wore black silk and gold jewellery delicate enough to look incidental. Everything about her suggested a level of self-possession Zosia found both deeply attractive and faintly irritating. She learned her name was Alessandra. She never learned her age and she didn’t dare ask— Zosia was nothing if not polite.

Alessandra smoked occasionally throughout the evening despite the gallery technically forbidding it, exhaling lazily out an open window while discussing some installation involving projected light and religious iconography.

“It insists upon itself,” she had declared studying the piece while Zosia studied her, not sure enough in herself to have an opinion of her own. Or maybe understanding silence could be a crucial part of the performance.

By the second glass of wine, Zosia became aware she was watching Alessandra’s mouth whenever she spoke. The shape of certain Italian vowels lingering warmly against her teeth. The occasional press of tongue briefly wetting the inside of her lower lip between thoughts.

It was humiliating how visible attraction made the world.

They left the gallery sometime after midnight with several other guests drifting toward bars and late restaurants, but Alessandra touched lightly against Zosia’s wrist before they could follow.

“Walk with me?”

Not come home with me. Not seduction exactly. Just a request for companionship. A walk through the city of fashion— and industry entirely reliant on performance.

Their footsteps echoed intermittently against old stone and Zosia became hyperaware of herself beside her.

The way her dress clung too tightly across her ribs whenever she inhaled deeply.

The awkward positioning of her hands.

The heat gathering beneath her makeup.

The possibility of accidental touch.

She felt seventeen again suddenly. Too aware of her body to comfortably exist inside it.

Alessandra seemed entirely at ease.

At some point their hands brushed briefly. Zosia immediately moved hers away. Alessandra glanced sideways at her.

“You are always this nervous?”

The question should have embarrassed her. Instead it felt strangely observational. Neutral. Asking for permission to see behind the curtains.

“Yes,” Zosia admitted.

“Ah,” Alessandra said softly, as though this confirmed something.

They reached Alessandra’s apartment gradually enough that Zosia could not later identify the precise moment she understood she was being invited upstairs. That mattered to her afterward. The slowness of it. The room left for refusal.

The apartment itself was smaller than Zosia expected. Books stacked carelessly along the floor beside expensive-looking furniture. Half-finished glasses of water left throughout the flat. A record player humming quietly near open windows when Alessandra dropped the pin.

Evidence of actual personhood came as a relief.

Alessandra disappeared briefly into another room and returned barefoot carrying two glasses of water.

“You look frightened,” she observed gently.

Zosia almost denied it automatically before realising there was no point.

“I think maybe I am.”

Alessandra considered her for a moment.

Then, “You know we do not have to do anything.”

The sentence landed somewhere deep inside Zosia with almost painful force. Not because of the offer itself. Because it made wanting suddenly become her responsibility. Desire felt easier when inevitable. Harder when freely chosen.

“I know,” Zosia said quietly.

Alessandra stepped closer then slowly enough that Zosia understood she could still move away.

She didn’t.

Zosia kissed her carefully at first, concentrating so intensely on seeming competent that she barely registered the kiss itself.

Alessandra laughed softly against her mouth.

“Stop thinking so loudly,” she murmured.

Zosia nearly apologised automatically.

Alessandra kissed like someone unafraid of wanting things.

One hand settled lightly against the side of Zosia’s neck, thumb brushing once beneath her jaw. The touch itself was almost unbearably gentle. Zosia felt her whole body react to it with embarrassing immediacy. She became aware, suddenly, of every place another person could touch her. The awareness spread through her in waves.

Alessandra pulled back slightly, just enough to look at her.

“There,” she murmured softly.

“There what?”

“You stopped thinking.”

Zosia flushed hard enough that Alessandra laughed quietly again, not cruelly.

The second kiss deepened slowly. Nothing abrupt. Nothing greedy. Alessandra seemed to understand instinctively that Zosia startled easily beneath attention.

That was perhaps the strangest part of the entire experience: not feeling consumed.

Zosia had expected desire to resemble hunger. Something sharp and devouring. But this felt instead like being carefully unfolded. Alessandra guided more than directed. A hand against her waist. Fingers threading briefly through her hair. Small pauses that allowed Zosia time to react rather than merely be overtaken.

Even removing her dress became less humiliating than anticipated. Not because she suddenly felt beautiful. Because Alessandra behaved as though nudity was ordinary. Not performance. Not revelation. Just another state a body could exist in.

And this time Zosia let herself be undressed, unveiled, in the glow of lamps in the middle of a stranger’s bedroom.

The tenderness of it nearly undid her.

By the time they reached the bed, Zosia’s nervousness had transformed into something stranger. Not confidence exactly. But curiosity overcoming fear in increments.

She still overthought everything.

Where to place her hands.

Whether she was responding correctly.

Whether her breathing sounded strange.

Whether Alessandra could somehow detect her inexperience through touch alone.

Probably she could.

But if she noticed, she treated it neither as deficiency nor spectacle.

The physical closeness startled Zosia most. The warmth of another body against hers. Skin moving against skin with impossible immediacy. The shocking intimacy of being held while being looked at simultaneously.

At one point she laughed abruptly into Alessandra’s shoulder out of sheer nervous overwhelm.

“I’m sorry,” she said immediately.

“For what?”

“I don’t know.”

Alessandra kissed her temple lightly.

“That is not an answer.”

Later, lying half-awake beneath tangled sheets while distant traffic murmured through open windows, Zosia realised with quiet astonishment that she did not feel guilty.

Exposed, yes. Unsteady. Observed. Changed somehow. But not guilty. The confession of which frightened her more than the confession of sin itself.

At home, desire had always been discussed either as danger or tragedy. Something capable of ruining women specifically. Even when unspoken, it existed inside warnings.

“Don’t stay out too late.”

“Don’t drink too much.”

“Don’t lead men on.”

“Don’t embarrass yourself.”

“Don’t give away what cannot be returned.”

Nobody had ever explained what exactly was being given away.

Lying in Alessandra’s bed at twenty years old, pleasantly sore and faintly dehydrated, Zosia thought perhaps the adults around her had not understood either.

Because nothing inside her felt missing.

Changed, yes. But not diminished. And certainly not less.

Alessandra stirred eventually, eyes opening slowly before settling immediately on Zosia with the relaxed familiarity of someone entirely unembarrassed by proximity.

“You are thinking again,” she murmured sleepily.

Zosia flushed on instinct. “Is it a problem?”

“It is six in the morning,” Alessandra replied leaning forward for a lazy morning kiss. The ease of it nearly frightened her more than seduction had.

Not the sex itself.

Not the person who she’d had sex with.

It was the aftermath that was more terrifying. The assumption that tenderness could continue into daylight without becoming shameful.

Back home, nobody spoke about the softness afterward. About waking beside another person and simply remaining there.

Alessandra stretched lazily before sitting upright, entirely unconcerned by her own nudity. Watching her move through the apartment afterward — making coffee barefoot, opening windows, complaining mildly about tourists while winking at the one sat in her bed— Zosia experienced a strange destabilising awareness that adulthood might not actually arrive all at once.

Maybe it was skill, not a guarantee that came with age.

Maybe confidence was not certainty but familiarity.

Later, while drinking bitter espresso at Alessandra’s kitchen counter, Zosia caught herself staring openly at the curve of the gold necklace resting against her throat. Alessandra noticed immediately, because of course she did, tugging Zosia close again so she could caress the skin that the chain lay delicately upon.

Years later, after The Collapse, that memory would return to Zosia with horrifying clarity at random moments. Not the sex itself. The small things surrounding it. The morning light. The coffee. The casual safety of existing beside another person while still remaining separate from them.

And what horrified her most was knowing the hive mind devoured more than the memory of the physical act— nakedness and softness and vulnerability.

It had devoured the interiority attached to it. The fragile private meanings.

The feeling — almost unbearable now in retrospect — the intimacy of the experience had belonged just to her and Alessandra for that one night. That had made it almost sacred to Zosia.

The hivemind had defaced that too.

The morning after what she referred to as ‘The Corolla Incident’, Zosia burned her coffee.

Not badly. Not enough to make it undrinkable. But enough that the bitterness settled sourly against her tongue and stayed there. So much so that she almost reached for the oat milk that sat in her fridge.

She’d never had oat milk before visiting New Mexico.

She stood motionless in her kitchen holding the mug between both hands while traffic murmured several floors below. For a few seconds she could not understand why her chest hurt.

Then she remembered the Corolla. Her body had reacted before thought arrived.

That frightened her more than the memory itself. Memory could be controlled, redirected, intellectualised into something almost academic if she concentrated hard enough.

Bodies, unfortunately, possessed no such discipline.

Bodies remembered.

And worse, bodies anticipated.

All morning she found herself listening unconsciously for the uneven growl of the engine outside. By noon she was irritated enough with herself to become almost aggressive while lecturing. By evening she was fed up enough with herself to google the woman, clicking open an incognito window to surreptitiously type in ‘Carol Sturka’. She considered exiting the tab before it could fully load, but the google search yielded results before she could come to any firm decision.

She was initially greeted with images of the author during some sort of book event, smiling in a way that indicated performance. Zosia braced for the twist of hatred that would inevitably rise in her stomach.

It never came.

Instead all she felt was a faint melancholy, and the quiet ache of missing another person. She tamped down on the emotion fast, clicking ‘News’ to see if any articles had recently been written about the now reclusive author.

Two Years Since Humanity Saved: Where Are Carol Sturka and Manousos Oviedo Now?

Zosia skimmed hastily through the article that outlined events she’d already had to suffer through once before informing readers, quite unhelpfully, that both had refused to comment and Manousos had returned to live in Columbia and Carol lived at her family home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Zosia clicked out and continued hunting for scraps of information that she could use to feed the dying flames of hatred in her chest.

Saviour of Mankind and Author Carol Sturka Pulls Release of Upcoming Novel ’Bitter Chrysalis’ and Announces Departure From Publishing House.

This article only contained a brief statement from the spokesperson of the publishing house saying “Ms Sturka and Albatross Publishing had a successful and prosperous working relationship for many years bringing joy and stories to readers around the world, and we wish her nothing but success in her future endeavours.”

Zosia huffed, clicking out of the article too. She scrolled through heaps of others, each as unhelpful as the last.

“Novelist Carol Sturka shortlisted for Nobel Peace Prize.”

“Wax Figures of ‘Saviours of Mankind’ Carol Sturka and Manousos Oviedo Unveiled in Madame Tussaud’s in London.”

“Which Immune Are You? Carol Sturka or Koumba Diabete? Take This Quiz To Find Out!”

Good to know that despite a virus infecting humanity and almost enslaving them (or saving them?) in a hivemind, it still seemed like it was the internet that was doomed to eventually be the end of humanity.

Zosia snapped the laptop shut, pinching the bridge of her nose. She was fine with not asking the fucking internet for any more answers.

Instead, the next morning she stormed into the charity shop before she could fully interrogate what she was doing and why, stomping straight to the book section. Her eyes skimmed a multitude of famous and familiar names—John Grisham, James Patterson, Cathy Kelly, Dan Brown, Danielle Steel—before settling on the one she hadn’t dare breathe until she found.

Carol Sturka.

She snatched up the copy, teacup stain, dog-eared pages and all and marched to the til before she could change her mind.

It stayed hidden at the bottom of her bag all day, like a teenage boy in the 70’s and his secret copy of Playboy hidden beneath his mattress. The shame burned in her cheeks every time her eyes were pulled back to the bag and its secret, offending goods.

It was only under the cover of night, back in her apartment, the only sound her stuttered breathing and dripping tap she had yet to get fixed, when she finally pulled it out and pushed it into the light. Its glossy blue cover portrayed a blonde beauty with voluptuous breasts embracing a dark-haired brooding man who still looked suspiciously like Zosia if she grew her hair from the choppy bob it hung in right now.

She ripped the dust cover off, ripping it up and discarding the pieces in the bin before returning to the behemoth of a book.

729 pages.

She opened to the dedication.

H.

Without you, none of this is possible.

Helen Umstead flashed in Zosia’s mind immediately. The memories of Helen that had belonged to her too for a while.

Memories of beds made of ice illuminated by Northern Lights and sharing cigarettes outside bars and arguing in only the light of the fridge in the middle of the night.

Zosia slammed her eyes shut at the same time she did the book. It closed with a loud thud, and sat unassumingly in her hands as she stared at it. Her eyes glanced to her nightstand as she considered leaving it there for the time being before she stood, moving to slide it into her bookshelf into the next room, besides the likes of Markus Zusak and Wislawa Szymborska and Margaret Atwood and Arundhati Roy and Roland Barthes and Elena Ferrante and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Zosia lasted forty-three minutes before retrieving the book again. Not because she wanted to read it. But because she became incapable of not thinking about it.

It sat in the next room with unbearable physical presence. Not large enough to dominate the bookshelf visually, but sufficient enough that she remained aware of it anyway. Like another consciousness occupying the apartment quietly.

Ridiculous. It was paper, ink, and glue. Not Carol.

Zosia brushed her teeth. Washed the single plate left in the sink. Reorganised part of her lecture notes for Monday despite already having reorganised them twice earlier that week. She even attempted reading an article somebody from the department had forwarded her regarding post-collapse communication disorders in adolescents and young adults.

She retained none of it.

Eventually she stood abruptly from the sofa with the irritated force of somebody storming off to continue an argument entirely alone.

She remembered then her late husband sitting quietly on the sofa while she stormed off to the kitchen to loudly vent her frustrations to the walls knowing those walls had ears and those ears belonged to one Nikodem Lewandowski. He’d wait until she vented off enough before daring to approach, hands raised in theatrically in surrender before sliding them around her waist to tug her into his warm and solid embrace.

“You are forty-four years old,” she reprimanded herself aloud while crossing the apartment.

Then she pulled Carol Sturka’s novel back off the shelf. The cover felt oddly warm from where it had sat beneath the lamp.

Zosia opened directly to page forty-three because of the folded corner. The prose irritated her almost immediately. Not because it was bad. Unfortunately, it was precise in the deeply infuriating way Carol herself had always been precise. Not ornate exactly, but observant with alarming confidence and clarity.

Worse still: it sounded like her.

Not the public Carol. Not the mythologised saviour of humanity smiling stiffly beside politicians and journalists in photographs or the God-like author to an obsessed fandom (she was closer to divine status within fandom then she ever could be saving humanity) make-up flawless, smile perfected, the performance of gratitude and overwhelmed awe dripping off her expression.

Carol.

The woman who had Golden Girls playing in the background while making coffee barefoot. The woman who kissed like tenderness frightened her less than loneliness did. The woman who sat opposite on her staircase, chewing her fingernails as Zosia read a piece of Carol’s mind and heart that had been delicately placed in her hands.

Zosia read three pages before realising she had stopped breathing properly. Annoyed, she reached for a pencil from the coffee table and scrawled sharply in the margin:

This metaphor is overwrought.

She stared at the sentence afterward.

Then, beneath it, added: Also scientifically inaccurate?

That felt marginally better.

By page sixty she had accused Carol privately of:

• relying too heavily on weather imagery and pathetic fallacy
• misunderstanding Catholic guilt
• writing men poorly
• writing sex with men somehow worse (Zosia had, in the heights of frustration, crossed out the phrase ‘watery bowels’)
• committing clear crimes against the number of plot twists that were legally allowed to be revealed in the space of six chapters

The criticism soothed her initially. It restored distance. Re-established hierarchy. Reader and writer. Observer and observed. Professor and student.

Safe.

Until somewhere around page one hundred and twelve she caught herself writing:

You already know she loves him here. You don’t need to keep her afraid.

Zosia froze. Slowly, she looked back over the sentence.

Not ‘the character’.

Her.

As though Carol herself sat opposite her at the kitchen table being argued with directly.

The realisation landed low and strange inside her chest. Because for two and a half years Zosia had imagined hatred as the opposite of intimacy. But hatred, she realised now, still required attention. And attention, sustained long enough, began reshaping itself into something far more dangerous.

She snapped the book shut, with a louder thud this time, throwing the pencil away from her so it skittered along the table before clattering to the floor.

She stayed away from the book longer than forty-three minutes this time. She lasted until 1:14 a.m. Which was 116 minutes. That annoyed her almost more than the book itself.

Zosia had once gone four days without speaking to her doctoral supervisor out of spite after he’d described Derrida as “linguistics for people who enjoy unemployment and esoteric inaccessibility.” She possessed discipline when properly motivated.

Apparently the pull of Carol Sturka was stronger than even that of Jacques Derrida.

The apartment had become too aware of the novel’s existence now. Every room seemed organised around the fact of it waiting on the coffee table. The fact that she’d left it, easily accessible, lying patiently on her German woodwork engraved coffee table (it came with the apartment, God knows she’d never be able to afford that on a professor’s salary) instead of sliding it back in among the esteemed company on her bookshelf.

After working her way through the first quarter of the book, her annotations littered in margins and scrawls in whatever space she could find, she placed the book gently on her nightstand before finally falling into a blissful dreamless sleep.

When she awoke the next morning she didn’t even dare look at it. She pressed her alarm off and didn’t even consider staying in bed any longer lest temptation overwhelm her.

So she jumped out bed, brushed her teeth, and waited. Waited until the water was scalding enough to her preferred temperature before washing away any guilt or shame she felt sticking to her skin. She hadn’t even done anything wrong.

And before she left, about to swing her bag over her shoulder, she gave the book a perfunctory glance before slamming the front door shut. She didn’t need any distractions at work.

Except the funny thing about distractions was the thought of them could be powerful enough.

And she found the anger that had so impossibly eluded her earlier returning as she sat down for lunch, biting uncomfortably in her stomach, rising and rising like burning and bitter bile, begging to be released in some way.

A scream?

A kiss?

Zosia swallowed it down, wondering, for only a moment, if it was time to try to soothe the constant rage that had been her constant companion since the collapse.

If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?

But before she could contemplate on the merits of, if not forgiveness, then not anger, she realised the shape of it had twisted. It had been familiar until today.

Carol had touched her body while the world watched.

Carol had looked at her with unbearable tenderness afterward as though tenderness could retroactively sanctify violation.

Carol had dragged her screaming from bliss and handed individuality back like a gift instead of an amputation.

Zosia had understood that anger. It sat cleanly inside her.

This new version did not.

Because Carol no longer did anything. She had vanished completely and somehow become harder to escape afterward.

Zosia had left the woman behind in every conceivable meaningful way. An ocean between them now. Entire continents. Different languages filling her days. Different weather. Different rhythms of traffic outside her windows. Except she couldn’t cut the memory of Carol out of her. Still she remained because memory had never required permission to survive.

Not unlike the first decade after Nikodem’s death. That anger of losing him took seven years to begin softening around the edges and the memories of him never did. She hoped they never did.

She knew, even when she married him, that their love wasn’t the great kind that people would buy tickets to see on the big screen or immortalised in poems penned under moonlight. Nobody would look at their marriage and describe it as transcendent. There had been no lightning strike. No overwhelming certainty. No unbearable hunger.

Just choice.

Again and again and again.

Which, Zosia would later think, was perhaps the more frightening form of love anyway.

Nikodem had first kissed her outside a supermarket while carrying too many grocery bags because he refused to make two trips to the car. The kiss itself had been slightly awkward. He’d smelled faintly of cigarettes and laundry detergent.

Afterward he had immediately said, more flustered than her, “Oh wow, I’ve wanted to do that for six months.”

Not smooth. Not mysterious. Just purely, sweetly honest.

Zosia had laughed so hard she nearly dropped the tomatoes. He proposed two years later (when she was 24 and he 25) while assembling IKEA furniture badly enough that the argument beforehand nearly prevented the proposal entirely.

“You are holding the instructions upside down,” she’d snapped.

“You’re not the most helpful tool in the shed either, Zo,” he’d replied. “If He had to work with you, even Christ would quit being a carpenter.”

Then, after a long silence while sitting cross-legged among scattered screws and unfinished shelves, he said, “Anyways, I think we should get married.”

No kneeling. No ring presentation. Just mild exasperation as he realised he wanted the rest of his life to look just like this.

Zosia had stared, dumbfounded, at him. “Was that a proposal?”

“I think so,” Nikodem admitted sheepishly.

And it had been perfect. Perfect for her. Perfect for them.

She married him because being loved by him felt like being continually returned to herself. Nikodem never consumed a room. He inhabited it gently. Even his affection carried a kind of carefulness, as though he understood instinctively that love could become oppressive if held too tightly.

After the hivemind, she would come to understand how rare that had been.

Nikodem knocked before entering closed rooms even after years of marriage. Nikodem asked before touching her every single time. She would be lying in their bed in new lingerie she’d bought just for their anniversary night, smiling seductively, and he’d still look at her like he couldn’t quite believe his luck, and he’d always still ask.

Nikodem never once demanded access to parts of her she did not offer willingly.

There were evenings he would find her sitting silently at the kitchen table after work, exhausted by students and faculty meetings and departmental politics, and simply place a cup of tea beside her without speaking.

Not because he understood her perfectly. Because he understood he didn’t. But he always wanted to.

And that, strangely, had been intimacy too.

He never questioned when she told him she’d decided she wanted to stop going to Communion, but later that night he wordlessly sat on the couch as she watched the news and held her. When they’d argue and fight he’d always offer to ‘hug it out’, holding her until she explained, calmly finally, into his shoulder, whatever had been bothering her. When they moved to London for a lecturing opportunity, he was the only person she still spoke Polish to.

I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.

Nikodem died on a Wednesday in late October while Zosia was answering emails.

That became the detail her mind fastened onto afterward. Not the hospital. Not the phone call. Not even the strange animal sound she’d made once the doctor finally stopped speaking.

The emails.

One had been from a gumptious first-year student asking for their third extension that term. Zosia had given it too; they gave her weekends off marking. Another regarding departmental funding that truly was not her problem. A third reminding staff that somebody kept leaving yoghurt in the faculty fridge past its expiration date. Probably by the asshole who had let fish go off in there last month.

Zosia remembered staring at the screen afterward thinking with sudden furious clarity the world cannot possibly still be concerning itself with yoghurt problems after the end of my world.

But it did.

That was the offensive thing about grief. Not that the world ended. That it stubbornly refused to.

Nikodem had been hit crossing a road three streets from their flat after stopping to buy bread because he knew that his wife loved sourdough sandwiches for lunch on Wednesdays.

The banality of this enraged her for years.

Not a war.

Not illness.

Not tragedy worthy of narrative structure.

A delivery driver glancing down at his phone for two seconds too long. That was all. Two seconds dividing the world into Before and After.

People spoke about sudden death as shocking— traumatic loss— but the shock itself was not what stayed with Zosia longest. Shock was temporary. Biological. The body protecting itself from impossible information.

No — the true horror arrived gradually afterward in microscopic increments. After the shock, and initial numbness that accompanied it, wore off. Opening the wardrobe and seeing his shirts still hanging there. Finding his handwriting on shopping lists. Hearing a joke and instinctively filing it in her brain as “tell Nikodem when he’s mid sip of water”. The unbearable violence of continuation.

I remember thinking I need to discuss this with John.

For the first three months she remained angry almost continuously. She existed in a permanent state of it. Not devastated. Angry. At condolences. At flowers. At paperwork. At God (but to be fair she’d been angry with Him for a while). At pedestrians who crossed roads carelessly. At couples holding hands in public like the universe had not just demonstrated how fragile the human body truly was. At all the fucking lasagna her neighbours dropped off.

Mostly she was angry at Nikodem himself. Not rationally. But grief had very little interest in rationality.

“How could you not remember I’d already picked up the bread?” she whispered once alone in their kitchen, furious tears burning down her face while his favourite mug sat drying beside the sink. “Did you look both ways?” she scolded, as if he was there to receive it.

That shame horrified her afterward. But grief was humiliating like that. People liked to describe mourning as love persevering beyond death. Poetic. Noble.

In reality it often resembled irritation sharpened into permanence. Because Nikodem continued existing everywhere except where she needed him.

The indentation on his side of the mattress lasted almost a year. His winter coat still smelled faintly of cigarettes long after she sealed it in storage. Sometimes she woke reaching automatically across the bed before consciousness fully returned. And on her worst days, she pulled out his cologne from her bathroom sink drawer and sprayed it on her wrist, inhaling like a drowning woman tugged out of raging waves by a kind volunteer lifeguard.

The body mourned slower than the mind.

Which perhaps explained the new shape her anger had taken on. Why Zosia found Carol Sturka so intolerable.

She had spent years painstakingly teaching her body how to survive Nikodem’s absence. Years learning not to reach across the bed automatically. Years learning how to cook for one person without accidentally preparing too much rice. Years teaching herself not to turn toward the passenger seat while driving whenever some asshole cut her off.

Grief, eventually, became adaptation. Not healing exactly. And not glitter— glitter was not severe enough. No. More like scar tissue forming carefully around an injury the body understood would never fully heal.

Life finds a way.

Nikodem’s memory settled gradually into her life with the quiet persistence of weather. Sometimes painful. Sometimes comforting. Sometimes so ordinary she could carry it for hours without consciously noticing the weight at all.

But Carol behaved nothing like grief was supposed to. She arrived violently and entirely uninvited— which, upon reflection, was just impolite.

Not absence but presence. The memory of her did not sit quietly inside Zosia’s life. It interrupted and intruded and demanded.

A car engine growling outside. The smell of cigarette smoke lingering briefly on somebody’s coat in passing. The bitter taste of vodka and the burning sensation as you swallowed it down— Zosia didn’t even look at the spirit anymore. A golden girls rerun playing unassumingly in the background. The particular ache of wanting to be understood before words fully form and there’s only one person with whom you have to stoop down for and use the inadequacy of language. But she used it anyway. Carol was embedded in the very act of speaking. It was just unfair.

Zosia could forgive herself, perhaps, for grieving Nikodem this way. Love that survived years of marriage had earned permanence. It had earned reflex. Earned instinct.

But Carol had no right.

No right to exist inside her nervous system like this.

No right to linger in muscle memory.

No right to appear in dreams with soft hair and exhausted eyes and that unbearable expression she wore whenever she looked at Zosia like she was simultaneously terrified of her and comforted by her existence.

And yet she did.

That was the thing Zosia could never explain properly to herself afterwards: she had left Carol in every meaningful sense available to a human being.

Cities.

Continents.

Languages.

Lives.

But the mind was not interested. Any distance was merely incidental.

I exist in two places, here, and where you are.

Zosia returned home exhausted, not because her work day had been particularly long or exhausting, it had actually been fairly routine, but because pushing away memories and anger all because of Carol Sturka wasn’t exactly energy renewing.

She used that exhaustion as an excuse for her lack of willpower as she sat down and picked up the book she’d left on the night stand and dog-eared at page at page 173. The apartment was dim except for the small lamp beside her bed casting amber light over the sheets. Outside, Casablanca murmured restlessly through open windows: distant mopeds, laughter rising briefly from the street below, the bark of a dog somewhere far off. Human noise, all comfortingly external.

Zosia adjusted her glasses and opened the novel with the careful irritation of somebody returning to an argument they had absolutely not forgiven.

By page two hundred and six she had stopped annotating entirely.

Normally the pencil remained active in her hands almost automatically. Criticism gave structure to intimacy. Marginalia imposed distance between reader and text; a little wall built out of academic superiority.

But somewhere between one chapter and the next she had simply… forgotten.

Forgotten because the protagonist — a woman with too much shame stuffed into her ribs and a habit of fleeing every person who threatened to understand her properly — had just confessed, very quietly, that she no longer remembered her dead brother’s voice clearly.

Not dramatically or while sobbing in grand revelation. She simply admitted it while mopping a ship? Scrubbing salt from the galley floor, if she wanted to be more precise. The simplicity and absurdity of it struck Zosia with horrifying precision.

Because that was how grief functioned. Not cinematic devastation but small thefts occurring silently over years. One morning you realised you could no longer perfectly recall the cadence of laughter. Another day the exact shade of someone’s eyes became uncertain. The dead departed in increments.

Zosia stared at the paragraph for a long moment, baffled at herself for allowing herself to be sucked into what was so usually dismissed as ‘cotton-candy literature’.

Then, before she could stop herself, she touched lightly against the edge of the page with two fingers. Not the text. The place Carol’s hands might once have rested if she ever read her own books. The thought arrived so abruptly she jerked backward immediately afterward, disgusted with herself.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered aloud.

She stood abruptly and crossed toward the kitchen just to escape the feeling. Her kettle hissed faintly while heating. Zosia leaned both palms against the counter and closed her eyes.

When the tea was ready she carried it back to bed anyway. Which was how she found herself still reading at two in the morning, knees drawn beneath blankets, tea long gone cold beside her. Carol wrote intimacy monstrously well. A character wordlessly mending a friend’s battle-torn clothes. Somebody standing wordlessly in a doorway while the person they loved cried in another room. The specific humiliation of having to allow yourself to be cared for while sick.

Around page three hundred and twelve the protagonist lashed out viciously during an argument spitting cruel words in a vicious monologue with each word precisely honed to injure and hurt.

Zosia shut the book sharply.

Her pulse had become unpleasantly loud in her ears. This hadn’t been very far of her first few interactions with Carol. And painfully similar to their last. The regret and guilt immediately ricocheting back in the character was terrifyingly, startlingly familiar too.

“No,” she said aloud immediately, as though arguing with the text itself. She stared at the ceiling for several minutes before reopening the book despite herself.

The problem was no longer curiosity. The problem was recognition. And recognition, Zosia was beginning to realise, behaved alarmingly like missing someone.

That understanding followed her over the next several weeks with increasing persistence.

She finished the novel on a Sunday afternoon while sitting in a café near the university pretending unsuccessfully to grade essays. The ending irritated her enough that she had to physically restrain herself from throwing the book across the table. Not because it was bad. Because it was hopeful.

Nobody was wholly healed, nobody perfectly redeemed, but the final pages insisted quietly and stubbornly that people could still choose one another despite damage. That the tentative love between this stupidly arrogant, reckless, always angry pirate and the afraid, ashamed, naive yet strangely resilient woman would continue to persist.

Zosia found that almost offensively naïve. Which unfortunately meant some part of her wanted desperately to believe it. She closed the book slowly. Then immediately bought the next one.

That was how it started.

Not obsession exactly. Zosia refused to grant herself something so adolescent. But Carol’s novels began appearing gradually throughout her apartment anyway. One beside the sofa. Another abandoned face-down on the kitchen counter. A third tucked into her work bag beneath student papers.

Each was purchased under increasingly ridiculous pretences. This one was for literary analysis. This one because she disliked the previous ending and wanted to see if Carol always relied upon emotional manipulation. This one because the cover annoyed her and she bought it purely to rip off the dust cover like she did with every copy. This one because she was already in the bookshop and leaving empty-handed would have felt conspicuous somehow.

By the fourth novel, Zosia stopped lying to herself entirely.

She was reading them because she missed Carol.

The realisation arrived while grocery shopping. She had been standing motionless in the pasta aisle reaching automatically for a particular brand before remembering she only bought it because Carol once cooked her dinner with it after getting them to restock her entire grocery store.

Her hand froze. Then slowly withdrew.

Zosia stared at the shelves feeling something deep inside her tilt quietly off balance.

Missing Carol did not feel romantic. It was a terrible thing. Like discovering somebody had quietly woven themselves into the architecture of your daily existence while you were busy insisting they meant nothing.

She missed arguing with her. Missed the infuriating precision of Carol’s observations and the passion in her eyes. Missed the sensation of passing time aimlessly with her because time and activity didn’t matter when you were in the company of a person you genuinely truly liked. Missed the gentle and careless teasing when Zosia had started saying ‘I’ again, and inevitably a little bit of herself had started leaking through.

The thought frightened her enough she abandoned her basket entirely and left the shop without buying anything. Afterward she walked aimlessly through Casablanca for nearly two hours while dusk settled slowly over the city.

By the time she returned home the call to prayer had begun echoing across rooftops. Zosia stood in her kitchen listening to it through open windows, breathing carefully.

Then, very deliberately, she crossed toward the bookshelf. Carol’s novels occupied almost an entire shelf now. The sight of them should have embarrassed her. Instead she found herself tracing lightly along their spines with the backs of her fingers.

Zosia never abandoned language and the pursuit of understanding it, not even after The Joining and following Collapse.

But Carol had brought stories back to her.

“You absolute disaster,” she murmured softly to herself.

Because the thing was the anger was changing once again. She still woke some mornings furious at the memory of being known too completely by the whole world (bar thirteen, then twelve etc). Still carried sharp ugly resentment beneath certain memories of experiences that should’ve have been hers to initiate and hers to say yes to.

Yet now, threaded through it, existed something softer and infinitely more dangerous: understanding.

Not absolution. She may never reach that point. But understanding she could do.

Zosia was beginning to realise Carol had not emerged untouched either. That Carol had been lonely in ways so catastrophic they had reshaped the entire world around her. Loneliness that may have been the catalyst to saving humanity. That perhaps neither of them had truly consented to the charade formed from humanity’s collective manipulation.

And perhaps worst of all, Zosia no longer believed Carol had ever wanted to hurt her.

The revelation rocked through Zosia, destabilising her entirely. Because anger was easier when the other person remained monstrous. Simpler when blame possessed edges sharp enough to hold onto cleanly.

For two and a half years Zosia had constructed Carol carefully inside her mind into something almost symbolic — not quite a villain, because that implied intent and coherence, but an embodiment of violation. Of intrusion. Of everything the hivemind had stolen from her.

It became significantly harder to sustain that narrative while reading seven hundred pages about a frightened woman loving badly but trying anyway. And then reading 700 more. Worse still, Carol’s books had developed the deeply irritating habit of making Zosia feel understood.

Not observed. Understood.

Observation merely required attention and nothing more. The hivemind had observed humanity completely. It had consumed every humiliating, private, ugly fragment available.

Understanding required interpretation. Choice. Care. And Carol’s novels kept approaching people carefully instead of consuming them. Her characters misunderstood one another constantly. They lied. Withheld. Panicked. Spoke cruelly out of fear. Loved imperfectly.

But the books themselves remained unbearably gentle toward them anyway.

One Thursday evening she found herself sitting cross-legged on her sofa rereading a single paragraph for the fourth time in the final instalment of The Winds of Wycaro that Carol had published quietly seven months post-Collapse. It was the last book she had published.

The protagonist had just admitted, quietly furious, that she preferred storms at sea because at least during storms everyone stopped pretending control had ever existed in the first place.

Zosia stared at the line. It was cringy and terribly cliche. She barked out a sudden startled laugh before she could stop herself.

“Oh, you self-important asshole,” she muttered affectionately toward the page.

The affection arrived before the horror. Her expression froze. Slowly, very slowly, Zosia lowered the book into her lap. The apartment remained silent around her. Outside, rain ticked softly against the windows.

Affection.

For one terrible suspended moment, she became aware that she had started reading Carol’s books the way people reread old text messages from former lovers. Searching for cadence. Familiarity. Evidence of continued existence.

Searching for her.

The understanding hollowed her out so suddenly she had to press the heel of her hand hard against her sternum.

“No,” she whispered instinctively.

But denial felt thin now, and Zosia was exhausted. Sick of pretending there wasn’t a river in Egypt with her name written all over it. Because the truth had been approaching for months. It lived in the stack of finished novels beside her bed. In the fact she now recognised recurring metaphors specific to Carol’s writing. Cigarettes as loneliness. Land as memory. Sea as escape. Hands as trust.

In the fact she had once spent forty minutes in a bookshop becoming irrationally defensive over a stranger criticising one of Carol’s endings aloud to his girlfriend.

“Not everything requires a happy ending and absolution to be narratively satisfying,” Zosia had interrupted before realising with absolute horror that she had spoken.

The couple had stared at her and Zosia had immediately abandoned the entire floor without purchasing anything. She buried her face briefly in her hands now at the memory.

This was nothing if not deeply embarrassing.

Eventually she stood and carried the book toward the kitchen, needing movement simply to escape herself. The kettle went on automatically— routine now for every time her mind wandered back to the infuriating novelist.

Rain continued softly outside. Casablanca smelled different in rain. The city became all damp stone and wet pavement and seawater carried inward through open streets. During storms the air lost some of its dust and heat. Everything felt briefly calmer in the silent aftermath.

Zosia leaned against the counter waiting for the water to boil. And, traitorously, thought about Albuquerque. Not the hivemind itself. Not the version of herself who had lived in Albuquerque. Just Carol.

Carol half-asleep on the sofa with a book slipping from her lap. Carol laughing so hard once at something stupid Zosia said that she snorted tea through her nose and looked both mortified and genuinely betrayed by her own body afterward. The memory arrived with such sudden clarity Zosia physically doubled over a little against the counter.

God. That was the real horror, wasn’t it? Not that she remembered Carol. That she remembered happiness. Not collective ecstasy or hive-induced euphoria. Ordinary happiness. Small happiness. Domestic happiness. The sort built accidentally in kitchens and long silences and shared exhaustion.

Zosia closed her eyes. For years she had treated those memories like evidence submitted during a trial. Examining them only to determine violation. Manipulation. Artificiality.

But regardless of what the hivemind had done to them, regardless of how badly consent itself had fractured beneath collective consciousness, there had still been moments between them that felt painfully, recognisably real. She’d finally felt like she could desire a person, a woman, and not have to cauterise it immediately before pouring guilt and shame and holy water on the wound.

The kettle clicked softly behind her. She didn’t move immediately. Instead she remained bent slightly over the counter, staring at rainwater trembling down the outside of her windows, and allowed herself — just this once — to admit something fully.

She missed Carol Sturka terribly.

While this revelation of sorts had clashed internally with Zosia’s anger, and shame, and guilt, like tectonic plates to form something different and new, it didn’t seem to shift much by way of her every day life.

She still woke up at 6:10 every morning, began her shower cold, had coffee but rarely breakfast, greeted the cat on her doorstep a warm good morning, and lectured the same concepts she’d been teaching for years and years.

Until she found herself searching for Carol Sturka’s professional email address. The act itself felt faintly humiliating. Adolescent almost. Like googling an ex at two in the morning after too much wine and too little dignity. Which was why, naturally, fifteen minutes later she was staring at a website that looked as though it had not been updated since the mid-2010’s. The layout was atrocious— sepia-toned author photograph stretched awkwardly across the homepage banner, all dramatic shadows and literary pretension. Tabs along the top still read BLOG and UPCOMING EVENTS. One sidebar proudly linked to a dead MySpace account. Zosia almost laughed out loud, until her eyes landed on CONTACT.

She clicked it before she could think any better of it, watching her computer create an empty draft for her to fill. For several long seconds she simply stared at the cursor blinking patiently against white space. The thing pulsed like expectation. Then, with the grim inevitability of a person making a catastrophic decision in very slow motion, she began typing.

She began professionally, addressing the woman whose jaw she’d cupped gently as she fit their lips together, as ‘Ms Sturka’. She continued, ‘you may not remember me’, aware that this was pure delusion, before continuing to write, with a continued level of professional detachment, how much she’d found herself enjoying Carol’s books. She thought distantly about her hastily scrawled criticisms, but thought it better to leave those unmentioned.

Professional detachment began fraying sentence by sentence.

She found herself writing about recognition. About how unsettling it had been discovering pieces of Carol scattered throughout fictional people. The specific rhythms of observation. The tenderness hidden beneath cruelty. The way her characters loved like frightened people approaching stray animals: slowly, desperately, expecting to be bitten.

Zosia paused there for a long moment after typing it. Then continued anyway. The cursor blinked steadily onward as though encouraging confession.

She wrote about grief next. About Nikodem. Not explicitly at first. Just references to widowhood folded carefully between paragraphs discussing literature and memory. But language, once opened properly, had always possessed the alarming tendency to continue spilling outward.

Soon she was writing too quickly to maintain structure. About how Carol’s books had reminded her of things she had not realised she was allowing herself to lose. About how memory departed without you realising.

About anger. God, the anger.

That part emerged sharp and almost breathless once she stopped trying to sound composed. Zosia wrote about violation and tenderness and how horrifying it had been to feel both attached to the same person simultaneously. She wrote about waking furious for years afterward because fury was simpler than grief and cleaner than longing.

Her fingers moved faster across the keyboard now, thoughts outrunning punctuation. She wrote about the hivemind. Not academically. Not carefully. Honestly. How impossible it remained to untangle genuine desire from collective influence. How she still sometimes felt sick remembering the world inside her mind. How she had hated Carol for becoming the physical shape onto which all that horror could attach itself.

I think perhaps I confused you with what happened to us.

Zosia froze. Her hands stopped moving entirely. The sentence sat there naked and as the line at the end of the full-stop blinked, offering erasure.

For a moment she considered deleting it immediately.

Instead she kept staring. Rainwater trembled faintly against the windows beside her desk. The room had grown darker without her noticing. Her tea sat untouched and cold near the laptop.

Slowly, carefully now, she continued. She wrote that understanding was not the same thing as absolution. That she still did not fully know what forgiveness meant in the aftermath of something as catastrophic as The Joining. But she also wrote that hatred had become exhausting to carry alone for this long. And then — because apparently humiliation was a finite resource she had finally depleted entirely — she admitted the worst part.

That she missed her.

Not being part of a collective. Not the unbearable closeness of shared consciousness.

But the miserable and angry Carol Sturka.

She missed her voice and her impossible impatience and the way she used to speak about stories as though fiction were less an artform and more a survival mechanism humanity had accidentally invented.

She missed being looked at by someone who seemed genuinely interested in understanding her because they were the only person who didn’t but wanted to try anyways.

The confession hollowed her out as she typed it.

Recognition brought forth the terrible understanding that she did not recognise enough. That despite everything— despite intimacy so extreme it had once consumed the entire planet — Carol remained unknowable to her still.

And instead of frightening her now, that mystery made her want to move closer. By the time she stopped typing, her shoulders ached faintly and the sky beyond the windows had deepened fully into night.

The email stretched obscenely long down the screen. Far too personal. Far too vulnerable. Far too honest. Zosia reread the final paragraph once.

She had signed off:

Yours,

Prof. Zosia Lewandowski

PhD, Lecturer at Université Hassan II de Casablanca

She leaned back slowly in her chair, a sudden lightness in her chest. Only then — only after writing every word — did the understanding finally settle quietly inside her. She was never going to send it.

Slowly dragging her cursor until every word was highlighted in pale blue, she heaved a deep sigh of release and pressed delete. She snapped her laptop shut before the sudden emptiness could overwhelm her, and went straight to sleep.

And her routine, again, went unchanged.

The unsent email altered nothing concrete. Zosia still lectured. Still graded papers with increasing irritation at undergraduate misuse of semi-colons. Still bought vegetables from the same old man near the tram stop every Thursday evening.

But something fundamental had shifted all the same. Because deleting the email had not removed the words from her. If anything, it made them louder.

After years of constructing anger into something solid and architectural — a thing she could inhabit safely — she had now cracked windows into it herself. Understanding had entered like stormy weather and there was no forcing it back out afterward. Even if she shut the windows, the carpets would still be soaking wet.

And once the possibility of Carol existed again as a person rather than a wound, Zosia found her thoughts drifting toward her with increasing frequency and specificity. Not abstractly. Materially.

She wondered what Carol’s apartment looked like now. Whether she still left books in unstable piles on every available surface. Whether she still forgot meals while writing. Whether she had grown older softly or harshly. Whether she still drank too much.

The curiosity embarrassed her enormously. Worse, it persisted.

Sometimes it arrived while teaching. Sometimes while brushing her teeth. Once while vacuuming her living room. She would suddenly think: Carol would hate this market, or Carol would absolutely interrupt this lecture, or Carol would have made a joke here that would irritate me beyond belief.

And each time the thought concluded not in anger anymore, but ache. The transition frightened her enough that she attempted resistance. For nearly three weeks she deliberately stopped reading Carol’s novels. She placed the latest unfinished one face-down beneath other books on her nightstand like a contained vice. She avoided google and its interviews online and photographs. She avoided thinking too carefully at all.

Which worked catastrophically poorly.

Because absence, Zosia discovered, was only effective when the missing thing had not already embedded itself into your nervous system.

One evening she lasted precisely six minutes before retrieving the abandoned novel again.

Another week later she found herself watching an old recorded panel discussion Carol had once participated in sometime before The Collapse. The video quality was dreadful. Somebody in the audience kept coughing directly into a microphone. Carol herself looked younger, sharper around the edges, hair longer than Zosia remembered.

She spoke with furious intensity about storytelling for nearly an hour. Not gracefully either. Carol interrupted the moderator repeatedly, dismissed one question as “fundamentally stupid,” and spent seven uninterrupted minutes arguing that ‘romantasy’ was only dismissed as a genre because it was written usually by women and consumed largely by women too.

Zosia sat motionless through all of it. Then replayed certain sections. Not because of what Carol said exactly. Because of her face while saying it. The animation. The terrible sincerity. The visible effort of somebody trying desperately to translate impossible internal things into language before they vanished again.

It hurt to watch.

Afterward Zosia closed her laptop and sat very still in the dark of her apartment. The loneliness arrived then with enough force to feel almost physical. Not the vast catastrophic loneliness of the hivemind’s aftermath. Not collective grief or existential horror.

Just ordinary human missing. Small enough to fit inside a kitchen. Large enough to alter the shape of a life. And with that understanding came another one, quieter but far more destabilising.

Nothing else was going to happen unless she made it happen.

Carol had respected her silence for years. Zosia knew with terrible certainty that if she remained here in Casablanca saying nothing, then Carol would continue saying nothing too.

The thought hollowed her unexpectedly. Because suddenly she could see the shape of the future that awaited otherwise. More years passing. More books arriving in mail orders and bookshops. More almost-emails written and deleted. More imagined conversations replacing real ones. An entire lifetime built around avoidance.

The idea exhausted her instantly.

For several days afterward the possibility followed her everywhere, impossible to suppress once formed.

You could go see her.

The thought appeared absurd on first inspection. Then absurdly possible. Flights existed. Albuquerque existed. Carol existed. There was no apocalypse preventing movement anymore. No hive-consciousness binding humanity together. No cosmic horror reshaping civilisation. Just distance. Just fear.

And fear, Zosia thought bitterly one sleepless night, had already consumed enough of her life.

Still, she resisted. Reasonably of course. She listed practical objections first. The semester was ongoing. Travel was expensive. Showing up uninvited at somebody’s home after years of silence bordered on psychotic behaviour. Worse than running through an airport for someone.

Unfortunately none of them eliminated the desire itself.

The decision did not arrive dramatically. It happened on an aggressively ordinary Tuesday evening. Zosia had stayed late at the university finalising departmental paperwork. By the time she emerged outside, Casablanca had already sunk into gold-blue dusk. Traffic crawled sluggishly through intersection and someone nearby was playing music loudly through blown speakers. Students, she thought exhaustedly.

Worn out by the day, she stopped at a small café before heading home. And there, while waiting for coffee, she noticed a young couple seated near the window. There was nothing at all remarkable about them. One woman talking animatedly with her hands while the other listened with exhausted affection. Ordinary intimacy. Ordinary love.

But suddenly Zosia remembered something her best friend had once said to her years ago, as they sat on the floor of a tiny bedroom, discussing love and heartbreak, as girlhood so often demanded.

Why do people always think love has to feel transcendent to matter? What if it’s just noticing someone exists over and over again. I want to be noticed back.”

At the time Zosia had just held her heartbroken friend. Now it struck her with almost unbearable force. Because despite everything — the fury, the violation, the grief, the years — she had never actually stopped noticing Carol existed.

And perhaps Carol had never stopped noticing her either.

The possibility settled quietly but completely inside her. By the time Zosia returned home, she already knew. She stood in her apartment for a long while after closing the door behind herself. The familiar rooms seemed strangely temporary suddenly, as though she were already halfway absent from them.

Then, before she could overthink herself back into paralysis, she crossed toward her laptop. Opened it. Typed carefully into the search bar: Flights from Casablanca to Albuquerque.

Her pulse began thudding almost immediately afterward. She nearly closed the tab three separate times while pages loaded.

But when the available flights appeared onscreen, Zosia found herself staring not with panic but relief. As though some exhausted part of her had finally stopped pretending it wanted distance more than it wanted Carol.

She carefully considered her work schedule, scrolling through her calendar to ensure there were no commitment clashes, before selecting a date. She scrolled through the cheapest ticket options, deciding not to pay for a cabin bag— she wasn’t going to stay very long. She stood, fetching her wallet from her bag, and carefully typed out her card details, making sure no numbers were mistyped.

And when she clicked the final ‘confirm payment’ she slumped back in her seat, covering her face with both palms. For several long moments she remained completely motionless. The confirmation email arrived with a soft chime from her laptop speakers. Zosia stared at it through the gaps between her fingers like it belonged to somebody else.

CASABLANCA → ALBUQUERQUE.

It looked ridiculous written down. Surreal in the way all life-changing decisions initially did: flat text, ordinary font, impossible consequences.

“Oh, you absolute fucking idiot,” she whispered in Polish into her hands.

The following week passed in a strange suspended state. Her routines continued outwardly unchanged, but internally she carried the knowledge of the flight like a second heartbeat. Sometimes excitement surfaced unexpectedly. Sometimes terror. Several times she considered cancelling entirely.

The worst moments arrived late at night when practicality reasserted itself with brutal clarity. What exactly was she expecting here? Forgiveness? Reunion? Closure? Declaration of love? Had she truly flown across continents on the basis of longing and some novels?

But each time she opened the airline website intending to cancel the booking, she found herself unable to complete it. Because underneath the fear remained one stubborn truth that she wanted to see Carol. Even if nothing came from it. Even if Carol slammed the door in her face. Even if the entire trip ended in catastrophic embarrassment that she may never recover from.

Wanting, Zosia had slowly learned, did not become less real simply because it was inconvenient. So the date arrived anyway.

The flight itself was terrible. Long-haul air travel seemed specifically engineered to strip human beings of dignity and coherent thought. By the time Zosia landed in Albuquerque she felt severely dehydrated, wrinkled, overstimulated, and vaguely dissociated from reality.

The dry heat struck her immediately upon exiting the airport. It felt different from Casablanca’s coastal warmth. Sunlight bleached the landscape pale gold beneath an enormous sky that made her feel strangely exposed. For several minutes she simply stood outside the terminal gripping the straps of her backpack while taxis moved past in slow intervals.

She had not thought particularly hard beyond this point. The realisation arrived inconveniently late. Because now she was here and without a plan. And Carol existed somewhere tangible within this city. No longer abstract or memory or literature or longing folded carefully into distance that Zosia had created purposefully.

Zosia’s pulse became unpleasantly fast. Still, she raised a hand and flagged down a cab. The driver asked for an address and without needing to search for it, without straining to remember, Zosia gave one.

The knowledge startled her only briefly before understanding followed naturally behind it. Of course she remembered. There were certain things the hivemind had burned permanently into all of them. Certain routes, places, sensations impossible to fully excise afterward. Carol’s house had apparently remained among them.

The drive stretched nearly forty minutes. Zosia spent most of it staring silently through the window while Albuquerque unfolded around her in familiar strips of asphalt and sunlight. Her stomach tightened steadily the closer they came.

At one point she genuinely considered asking the driver to turn around. Or at least stopping briefly so she could open the door and vomit out her nervousness onto the side of the road

Instead she stayed silent. Eventually the roads became more residential. Smaller houses. Low walls. Trees struggling against desert heat. The driver turned down a street so instantly familiar that Zosia felt something in her chest physically jolt.

Memory rose sharply beneath her ribs. Not shared consciousness exactly. More like emotional geography. The remembered sensation of existing somewhere once important.

“There?” the driver asked eventually.

Zosia looked up. Carol’s house. Smaller than she remembered somehow. The sight of it nearly undid her. She paid the driver too quickly, fumbled her bag back onto her shoulders, then stood motionless while the cab disappeared again down the street.

Silence settled afterward. Not complete silence. Wind moved faintly through nearby trees. Somewhere a dog barked. A lawn sprinkler clicked rhythmically in another garden. Zosia stared at the house. Her palms had begun sweating. This was insanity. She should be in a mental asylum, certainly not in Albuquerque.

She could still leave. Right now, immediately, before humiliating herself irreparably. Instead she found herself walking forward, one step followed by another.

And so I walked. I walked 48 blocks in $400 shoes.

The route came back to her in fragments as she moved up the path toward the front door. Not memories precisely but muscle recognition. Like swimming or riding a bike. The strange bodily familiarity of a place once emotionally inhabited. Three steps up onto the porch. Slight tilt in the wooden railing to the left. The wind chime near the doorway no longer there.

Zosia stopped directly in front of the door and suddenly forgot how breathing worked properly. Her heartbeat was so loud it bordered on nauseating. She became acutely aware of everything at once: the creases in her travel-ruined clothes, the dryness in her throat, the fact she had crossed an ocean apparently without developing a coherent plan for what to say.

What was the appropriate opening line here?

Hello Carol, sorry about the years of resentment and emotional avoidance, I read your books and accidentally rediscovered the will to live?

She almost laughed from sheer panic. Then, before cowardice could fully reclaim her nervous system, Zosia lifted her hand and knocked. The sound echoed horribly loud to her ears. Immediately afterward came silence again. A long silence. Too long.

Zosia’s stomach dropped. Perhaps Carol wasn’t home. Perhaps she had moved. Perhaps she’d died. Perhaps—

Footsteps. Very faint at first. Then closer. Zosia forgot entirely how to stand normally. The locks shifted and then the door opened.

Carol looked exhausted. That was Zosia’s first coherent thought. Exhausted in a way that seemed to settle deep into bone rather than simple lack of sleep. Her hair was longer now, pulled back carelessly like she had abandoned the effort halfway through. There were shadows beneath her eyes. Ink stains along one wrist. An old grey shirt hanging loose against her frame. She had clearly not been expecting company. Or perhaps another human being at all.

For one suspended moment Carol merely stared at her.

Complete incomprehension.

Then recognition struck.

Zosia watched it happen in real time.

Shock emptied the colour from Carol’s face so quickly it was almost frightening. Her entire body went rigid. One hand remained gripping the edge of the door hard enough for her knuckles to pale.

Neither of them spoke.

Carol just looked at her like she had opened the door onto a hallucination.

And suddenly, horrifyingly, Zosia realised she had not once considered the possibility that Carol might hate her too. Everything she’d planned to say fled her mind as her eyes searched the tired woman in front of her, skin pale, hair falling tiredly to her shoulders, exhaustion bleeding from her eyes.

“Zosia?” she whispered in disbelief.

“I hate you,” Zosia whispered back. Shame welled within her at the sudden burning behind her eyes. That was certainly not the opening line she’d planned.

Carol swallowed audibly, nodding as if this was just as she expected.

“I’m so sorry,” she offered sincerely. Her voice was pained, and she lifted a hand to rub at her eyes, as if the act could scrub away illusion to reveal she was speaking to dust and air on her front doorstep.

“I wrote to you,” she revealed, not sure where the words had tumbled out from. She winced at the honesty.

Carol’s eyes widened, as she fumbled for a response. “Oh. I- uh. It must have got lost in the post. Or- I would’ve written back?”

Zosia released a shaky breath. “I never sent it,” she admitted.

She had no idea what was coming out of her mouth.

Carol’s brows furrowed. “What?”

“It was an email. I never sent it.”

“You could send it now?” Carol suggested, as if this was simple problem-solving exercise.

Zosia shook her head, “I deleted it.”

“Oh.”

They stood in silence again, just taking each other in.

“What did it say?” Carol asked after a moment.

Zosia hesitated. “Mostly that I hated you.”

Carol nodded once like this tracked perfectly with her understanding of reality.

“And,” Zosia continued quietly, “that I missed you.”

At that, Carol went very still. Zosia watched emotion move carefully behind her expression like something injured trying not to be seen.

“You came all the way here to tell me that?” Carol asked, voice roughened strangely around the edges.

“No,” Zosia said immediately. Then, after a pause, deciding she hadn’t travelled this far to tell fibs, “Yes. Partially.”

Carol looked at her for a long moment, travel-worn and frightened and standing on her porch trying very hard not to fall apart visibly. The concern in her eyes was so sincere it almost destroyed Zosia instantly.

“You look terrible,” Zosia said blandly. She considered just running away. Turning around and bolting dow the street as fast as she could, so she could escape whatever words were tumbling out of her mouth without her permission.

To her horror, Carol smiled. Small and exhausted and heartbreakingly familiar.

“I do?”

Then Carol glanced behind herself into the house briefly before looking back at her.

“I can leave if you want,” Zosia said immediately, the words spilling out before she could contain them. Panic surged suddenly and irrationally through her chest, that Carol would agree. That she would slam the door in her face, maybe spit in her face before she did.

“Zosia.” Her name, spoken gently, stopped her spiralling completely. Then Carol stepped out of the house, leaning forward, closer and closer, to poke her.

“Ow!” Zosia yelped jumping backwards. Carol’s eyes widened in shock.

“Fuck. Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that!”

“You didn’t mean to poke me?” Zosia scowled rubbing her arm.

Carol threw her hands up defensively. “I didn’t think you were real! It’s hardly my fault.”

“So you decided to physically attack me?”

“Hardly an attack,” Carol scoffed.

“Well I hope you’re satisfied now that I am real, and a person capable of feeling painful physical sensations.”

Carol nodded slowly, as the realisation slammed into her.

“Mmm,” she hummed, as if words had failed her.

She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that? Her eye discourses; I will answer it.

Zosia cleared her throat. “It’s okay,” she offered, “I forgive you.” She meant more than the unexpected finger digging painfully into soft flesh. She hoped Carol would realise that.

Carol was too stunned to realise anything.

Her hand slid down the doorframe she was leaning on for support as her legs folded beneath her until she was sat cross-legged in front of Zosia.

“I really shouldn’t mix drinks and painkillers, fuck.”

Zosia stepped closer, more concerned for Carol now, than any future chance of mortification.

“Carol?” Carol reached forward again, and long cool fingers delicately wrapped themselves around Zosia’s ankle, holding firmly but no longer painfully.

“Oh.” Carol released her abruptly, as if physical contact with her burned.

“One sec,” she mumbled as her hand grabbed for the doorframe again, and she pulled herself up again into a standing position. “This is embarrassing.”

“I read all your books,” Zosia blurted, as if by revealing her own deeply hidden secrets and sources of humiliation, she could spare Carol hers.

“You what?” Carol looked closer to fainting now than she had before Zosia had spoken. She wasn’t entirely sure she was helping. She nodded helplessly. Behind Carol, the house itself looked both exactly the same and completely different. Books everywhere still, stacked in unstable towers across tables and floors. Half-drunk coffee abandoned near notebooks. Lamps casting warm uneven pools of light.

Her eyes pulled themselves back to Carol, pained to look at anything else.

The exhaustion remained visible in every line of Carol’s body, but something else existed there now too. Something raw and careful and almost afraid to hope.

“You read my books,” she said quietly.

Zosia felt heat crawl instantly into her face.

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“Unfortunately.”

That pulled a startled laugh from Carol.

“Do you want to come inside and discuss how much you hated them?”

Zosia smiled then, for the the first time in months.

“I’d love that. But you might want to brace yourself, I have many thoughts.”

Carol smiled back at her, and suddenly Zosia realised she’d spent the past two and a half years walking around off-kilter, unsteady, grey. Language, her imperfect beloved medium. What was it to the smile of an old lover?

“I’d expect nothing less, Professor Lewandowski.”