Page 78 of What If It's You?

“Drew?”

“Oh, hey Laurel.” He blinked, clearly surprised to see me. “Did you just get here?”

“I wouldn’t sayjust.” I raised an eyebrow and Drew laughed, sheepish.

“Sorry, you know how I get. Plus, I didn’t really sleep last night.”

“So? Are you going to put me out of my misery?”

“I mean…it works again. Clearly.” Drew rolled his eyes as if that were the most obvious thing in the world, and a flare of the annoyance other-me felt toward him, a sense memory of couple’s fights I had noactualmemory of, shot through me.

But it was quickly doused by a tsunami of relief so powerful it almost swept my legs out from under me.

“What genius move did you come up with to fix it?” I croaked out, pulling a chair from a nearby desk and collapsing into it. Luckily, Drew didn’t seem to notice how shaky I was.

“Nothing.”

“If it’s some state secret, you can just say that.”

“No, I’m serious. Here, let me show you.” He clicked open the program. As it loaded, he turned to me, his bright, eager gaze totally at odds with the heavy dark circles beneath his eyes. “After we talked, I decided to break for dinner and a shower, I was spinning my wheels pretty hard, and I guess I hoped I’d have one of those eureka moments people always talk about?” His lips quirked into a rueful smile. “Spoiler alert, I didn’t. Apparently, after thirty-six hours awake, ‘don’t fall asleep standing’ is as much as my brain can handle.”

“Jesus, Drew.”

“Not the first time I’ve pulled an all-nighter,” he said with a shrug. “Anyway, after the shower I was moving kinda slow, and I decided to take a power nap to see if it would help refocus me—studies show twenty minutes of sleep is actually themosteffective amount for—”

“Drew.”

“Right. Point is I was gone for maybe an hour? And when I got back to my computer the program was just…working.”

“How?”

“Wish I knew. But here’s the weird thing. That unknown user? It stillwasyou. Except…Well, take a look.”

He clicked a few times and a list of registered users appeared. I immediately spotted my laurel.e@pixel handle. But as I moved farther down the list, I saw it.

“Wait…what?”

“Right?” Drew’s eyes were huge with the repressed glee that overtook him whenever he was presented with a particularly interesting puzzle.

And this one was a doozy. Because at the very bottom of the list was a new name.

Lo.Everett

“That’s you, right? People call you Lo sometimes?”

“Yeah,” I murmured, mouth agape as I tried to process what I was seeing. “But how…?”

“No clue. I would have messaged last night but it was really late, and anyway, I had no idea what was going on. And the profile isn’t giving me any clues—all I can see is the name, and the fact that it ran a single sequence that seems to have started sometime yesterday? I couldn’t find it in the back end, but honestly I wouldn’t know where to start looking. We shouldn’t even be able to setupprofiles that don’t attach to a Pixel employee ID. The ramifications for computer learning here are just…” He got a distant, dreamy look, almost like he was having a religious vision.

“And there’s nothing else that can explain the new profile? Where it came from or…you know, what I have to do with it?”

“Nope. I’ve been turning it over all night—I even did an exercise to try to lucid-dream about it in case my subconscious had more information…” I bit back a laugh. Of course Drew had devised a way to workin his sleep. “But all I could come up with is that there must have been some bug that made the program think one of those inflection points during your setup was actually another user? And it was using all that processing power to separate your actual profile from this one.” He clicked a line nestled under the new user name, reopening the sequence, eyes flying over the code on his screen.

But…that didn’t actually make sense. Didn’t solve for the echo chamber effect that had been plaguing computers in both worlds: There were toomanyof me, all of them too similar for the programto tell apart, an interworld shell game it had been trying—and failing—to solve.

“Maybe the whole time I needed to choose a different version of me, not just a different person to be with,” I murmured.

“Sorry, what did you say?” Drew glanced over, already half-lost in whatever secrets the code had been whispering to him.

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