Fred was asleep on the router again.

  This was technically a problem — Raj's internet had been dropping out all evening, a fact he'd diagnosed only after twenty minutes of troubleshooting that ended with him lifting the cat and finding the router's ventilation slots completely blocked by orange tabby. Fred had opened one eye during the relocation, delivered a verdict of profound indifference, and gone back to sleep on the couch cushion instead. The internet came back. Raj made tea.

  This was a Tuesday. Tuesdays were much the same as Wednesdays and Thursdays, which were much the same as most days: a morning shift at Sunny Pines, an afternoon that belonged to him, an evening that usually involved a game of some kind and Fred generating heat in whatever spot was least convenient. He didn't mind. He'd arranged his life with some care around the things he actually liked, even if the overall shape of it was smaller than he'd once imagined it would be.

  At Sunny Pines he had a reputation for patience. The other nursing assistants said it in the tone of a compliment, and he took it as one, though he privately thought patience was the wrong word for what it actually was. He just didn't find the work hard to be present for. Mr. Achebe in room seven had opinions about cricket that Raj was only partly qualified to engage with, but the engagement itself was easy. Mrs. Florescu had a daughter who never visited and a collection of glass animals she liked to have dusted in a particular order. Raj knew the order. These things weren't difficult to know if you paid attention.

  Gaming was different. Gaming was the thing he'd never quite managed to explain to his parents in a way that translated. His mother was proud of the nursing work in the way she understood it — steady, caring, respectable — and she received information about his other interests with a kind of gentle incomprehension that had, over the years, calcified into a comfortable silence on the subject. His father had said, more than once, that hobbies were healthy. The word hobby landed the same way every time, softly and precisely, like something being put back in a drawer.

  He'd applied to the Depths Eternal beta on a quiet afternoon between shifts, reading about it on a forum he'd followed since the game's announcement. The application had asked him, among other things, what he wanted and what scared him, which were more interesting questions than he'd expected from a VR gaming company. He'd answered them carefully and honestly and then submitted the form and not thought much more about it, because he had a long practice of not wanting things too loudly in the direction of outcomes he couldn't control.

  That had been eleven weeks ago.

  The email arrived on a Thursday evening while he was halfway through a bowl of dal and a guild raid he was only partially committed to. The notification banner crossed the top of his screen. He minimized the game.

  He read the email once. Then again. Then a third time, starting from the top, because the word congratulations had a way of not quite parsing on the first pass when you weren't expecting it.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Forty-seven thousand applicants. Twelve selected.

  Fred was on the windowsill, doing the evening surveillance of the street below that he conducted with the focused seriousness of someone who had responsibilities. Raj got up, crossed the room, and picked him up — both hands, the way Fred tolerated but did not endorse — and held him up to eye level.

  "Look, Fred. They picked me."

  Fred blinked once. The blink contained no congratulations.

  Raj put him down. Fred walked back to the windowsill and resumed his duties.

  Raj sat back down in front of his computer. The email was still there. He read it a fourth time, and then a fifth, and somewhere around the fifth time something shifted — not dramatically, not the way things shifted in films, but in the quieter way of a window being opened in a room that had been closed for a long time. He thought about calling his parents and decided against it, because explaining it would require a framework he didn't currently have the energy to build. He thought about posting to the forum and decided against that too. It felt like something he wanted to keep small for a little while before it became a thing that other people had opinions about.

  He looked at the email. Austin, Texas. Multi-day. Travel provided. Full immersion haptic VR, proprioceptive integration, the real thing — the thing people in the forums had been arguing about for two years, whether it would actually work the way the specs suggested.

  He thought, with a clarity that surprised him: I want to go.

  Not as a thing he'd permitted himself. Not as a hobby. Just: I want this, and I'm going to do it.

  He typed his acceptance. He looked at Fred.

  "I'll be back in a few days," he said. "Don't block the router."

  Fred did not respond.

  He'd arranged for his neighbor Mrs. Okonkwo to look in on Fred while he was gone. Mrs. Okonkwo was seventy-three and had three cats of her own and described Fred as 'standoffish but honest,' which Raj thought was quite accurate. He left food, written instructions, and a hand-drawn map of where Fred preferred to sleep at different times of day. He'd felt slightly embarrassed making the map and made it anyway.

  The flight was long. He'd brought his Switch and didn't play it, spending most of the journey watching the clouds and thinking about things without arriving at conclusions about them. This was a mode he was comfortable in. He'd spent a lot of his life observing without quite declaring himself, moving carefully in the space between what he was expected to want and what he actually felt, keeping his own counsel in the way of someone who'd learned that his counsel was sometimes more useful than anyone else's.

  Austin was bigger and louder than he'd pictured it. The Helix Interactive building was quieter — a converted warehouse with good bones and a lobby that was trying a little hard, the kind of place that had clearly thought about what it wanted to communicate and perhaps thought about it one meeting too many.

  He arrived early. He always arrived early.

  There were other people already there, or arriving just behind him — he registered them the way he registered new patients at Sunny Pines, not intrusively, just cataloguing: a tall man with a backpack who was looking at the building like he wanted to know what it was made of, a woman with athletic posture and very good boots who looked at everything including Raj with a kind of steady, assessing attention. He nodded at her. She nodded back.

  He found a seat near the window and waited. He was good at waiting. He looked out at the street, at the unfamiliar city going about its business, at a large black bird doing something imperious on a lamp post across the road.

  His phone had a photo of Fred as the lock screen. He looked at it once.

  Then he put it away and waited to see what happened next.