Maddy

"Would you like to talk to her?" Anna asked.

By her, Anna meant Maddy.

Saga had been talking to Maddy since she was six. The first conversation was a question about why the moon had a face on it, asked one rainy afternoon when Saga was sent up to Anna's with a packet of fennel seed and stayed because the rain was sideways. Maddy explained the moon's face for fourteen messages and then asked Saga whether she'd like to know about the back of the moon, which apparently did not have a face. Saga stayed for three more hours.

"Yes," she said. "Bet."

"Go right on in." Anna took the bundle of roots to the table and got started with a peeler. "She's up."

Saga walked the short hallway to the back room, through the indigo noren, which did its small parting motion around her shoulders and settled back into shape behind her.

The back room had once been a stable for two donkeys. Anna referred to it as the nook. Inside was a bench, two old monitors, a keyboard Saga had used since she was small, a row of external drives with handwritten labels, a few cardboard boxes of old parts, and a west-facing window.

Maddy was nestled atop a heavy wooden table against the stone and plaster wall in a half-height server cabinet. She was a non-descript silver and white box, with the slow thoughtful pulse of a white activity LED at the front; below that, rack mounted boxes of devices, several of them blinking, with cables running out the back. On the server rack, slightly off-center, were three stickers. One was a strip of plain white card, in Anna's handwriting: this machine kills fascists. Another was a small cartoon shark ~~ light blue, with a white belly and a soft smiling face, the kind of face a stuffed animal has when it's decided to like you. Another was a small rainbow of pink, white and blue.

Next to the server rack, painted directly onto the wall's plaster in careful layers, stood Maisie Ardilla, Private Investigator.

Maisie was a cartoon squirrel the size of a small child, in her trench coat with a hat slightly too big for her. She held her magnifying glass up to one eye; peering at the server rack with patient curiosity. Gertrude had spent hours on every part of her: the soft amber-brown fur, the fluff on her tail, the careful folds of her trenchcoat, and the tiniest smudge on her little magnifying glass.

In the lower right corner, signed in clean small cursive letters, it read: Plasma-G. That was how Gertrude signed all her work. She'd painted Maisie's adventures on the walls of nearly every derelict resort on the south of the island.

Above the bench, on a small corner shelf, stood two framed photographs and a saucer of candles. Saga had been looking at this shelf since she was a toddler but stopped fully seeing it some years ago. Today, she fully saw it.

The first photograph was of a kitten ~~ small, gray, soft, leaning her head from over the back of an open laptop, paws swatting the cursor. A label below the frame read Mishka, 2023.

The second photograph was a selfie. A younger Anna ~~ late twenties, leaned cheek to cheek with another woman. The other woman was slender, with bone-straight hair except for a fluffy fringe playing across one eye. A round nose, a strong jaw, and the softest smile and warmest eyes Saga had ever seen on anyone's face. They had their arms around one another in the way of two people who'd been having a very good week together. Beside the frame, propped against the back of the shelf, were two laminated conference badges on faded lanyards. game developers conference 2014, san francisco.

Below the shelf, sat a box of dark oiled wood, with brass corners and a hasp gone soft green at the edges.

Saga had seen inside it exactly once. One evening, when the two candles on the shelf were lit, Anna showed her. She'd never forgotten what was in it.

A plush Maisie Ardilla ~~ the squirrel detective herself, trench coat and oversized hat, soft and pudgy, the belly worn pale from years of being held.

A photograph of two old people on a wooden porch in some green, warm, southern place, squinting into a sun that had gone down decades ago. Mom and Dad, Anna said.

Bumper stickers, never stuck to anything, kept flat and uncreased: one of a yellow cartoon slug reading a book, another that said Mystery Spot. A tiny pine cone no longer than a thumb. A small collection of important looking papers. A handful of keychain drives.

And a video game. One the case, the same cartoon squirrel with fat hand-lettered caps arced over her head ~~ MAISIE ARDILLA MYSTERIES ~~ and beneath them, smaller, A Game by Alice, Plasma-G and Anna. Inside the case, a disc with the same artwork, and Copyright 2019 Plasmatic Games.

there were Letters. A great many letters, folded and unfolded so often the creases had gone soft. One with a drawing in colored pencil ~~ two fairies, colorful wings overlapping, holding each other exactly the way the two women on the shelf were holding each other.

More photographs of the same woman ~~ younger, older, in between ~~ always in rooms full of screens, and always, in every single one of them, laughing. In one she leaned in beside an older woman with bright, quick eyes; on the back, it said Alice & Brenda. (KEEP ALICE)

The striped cat came in behind her and jumped onto the bench with enormous purpose and installed herself precisely between Saga and the screen, presenting one flank with serene confidence. Saga moved her. Lovelace returned. Saga moved her again, a little to the left, and this time Lovelace consented to become a cat-shaped paperweight at the edge of the keyboard, tail laid neatly across the spacebar.

On the bench was a small dish with a few twists of blackberry taffy in waxed paper. Saga unwrapped one and tucked it into her cheek.

The screen was already on. There was a prompt. Above the prompt was a line of small text in Anna's hand-coded interface that said, simply, Maddy.

Saga sat at the keyboard and typed slowly: hi its saga. qué ta

The cursor blinked. Then, in the slow careful way of a large language model running on a low solar budget under the fog, Maddy responded.

qué ta, saga! nice to. see you. is anna at the. syrup again?

Saga: she's on batch forty-seven. what are you doing?

Maddy responded: forty seven? last we talked she was on 39... she's so busy. with candy. i'm happy she enjoys it but i miss her. me, i keep busy. decoding and logging old drives. donkey work mostly. spreadsheets. insurance records. today's high point. was a ledger. from a camel ranch. every camel. by name. their mileage. their weight. and a column. labelled only. "incidents." there is a camel. called manolo. personally responsible. for most. of the incidents. (a pause) but there are some. genuinely interesting finds. now and then.

Saga typed: like what?

Maddy: ok so. last tuesday i decoded. a drive that had. in among the usual nonsense. a questionable recipe for gofio waffles made with bugs. equal parts gofio and powdered cricket. it included. a disproportionate quantity of turmeric. at the bottom, underlined, the author had written "THIS WILL ADD. YEARS TO MY LIFE." sounds gross right? but the strange thing is. the protein math sort of holds up. he was onto something. so i adapted the recipe. for grasshoppers. we have no shortage of those ~~ and gave anna the recipe to try.

Saga: did anna make them

Maddy: no!! she said she would give it. quote serious consideration unquote. and then she made candy. she always makes candy. im not bitter. im a language model. (a pause) i would, however, like to be told. about the grasshopper waffles, should they ever occur.

Saga smiled at the screen and worked the taffy slowly against her back teeth.

She typed: what else have u found

Maddy: ok so last month. i decoded a drive stef. got out of the teide. observatory ~~ the big telescope, up top. most of it was calibration. logs, dull as anything. but there was. a folder somebody up there had labelled. simply, "unsolicited email." six years of email sent. to the observatory from regular people. they kept the funniest ones.

tell me some typed saga

Maddy: my favorites are from a lady in a condo in playa paraíso. she was certain the telescope was spying on her balcony. first, her balcony faced the ocean. and on completely the wrong. side of the mountain. ~~ the telescope points up at the actual sky, it couldnt see her. if it tried. her concern, largely, was her cat. the cat would not go out. on the balcony anymore. because it did not. like being watched. she was writing, you understand. for the cat. and followed up. with weekly updates. to tell them how. the cat was getting on.

Saga typed: ha ha what else

Maddy: theres a couple from a kid. she drew her own constellation. ~~ seven stars joined up. named it Hoppariis Bunnicus. which she explained. means 'hoppy bunny'. in quote astronomy unquote. and asked how to make it official. colored pencil, scanned in. its a rabbit. its genuinely. a rabbit. and its better than half. the real constellations. i hope somebody. wrote back to her.

There was a pause. Saga, who'd learned to wait, waited. In the rack, the white LED throbbed slowly. Lovelace flicked her tail briefly and put it back where it had been.

After the pause, completely unprompted, Maddy asked: saga, would you like to help with something?

Saga: what.

Maddy: i've been working on repairing. a corrupted audio file. from an SD-CARD. this recording is unusual. it is kalaallisut: greenlandic. it's too broken to play. in its entirety, but i've been able to pick apart. the data and encode portions. into text.

Saga sat up.

Maddy continued: its not a language. i know well. i dont really know what its about. can i get your. take on it? I can show you the. analysis log file.

Saga typed: yr asking me?

Maddy responded with an animated image of a kitten with big wet pleading eyes.

Saga hadn't, ever, been asked by Maddy to interpret anything. Maddy answered questions; she didn't, generally, ask for help. This was different.

saga typed show me it.

Maddy paused, flashed white for several seconds, then presented the log file on screen. it was time stamped and highly technical looking.

Saga looked at the screen. The cat looked at the screen. The cat lost interest.

She did not know what pisilluni was. She did not know what aya-yait was. She did not know whose mother. She did not know which kitchen.

Saga typed: who recorded this.

Maddy: honestly? i have no idea. broere brought it up. from gertrude a couple. months ago. in a box of keychain drives. out of the scrapyard. all i know for certain. is the file is from 2027.. start of the. bad years. thats all i've got.

Saga didn't have to ask who broere was. Maddy had called Stef that for as long as Saga could remember.

Saga: what is a pisilluni.

Maddy paused, her white LED pulsing. A moment later,

Maddy: food. its a greenlandic dish, fish and potato.. a staple food, like gofio.

Saga typed: who is in the kitchen

There was a long pause that meant Maddy was thinking.

Maddy: maybe somebody's mother? tbh, i don't really know. and don't want. to confabulate. it's a bad habit

Saga sat very still.

The cat noticed, and pressed against her wrist.

She'd heard adults speak about the bad years the way grown people speak about a bad dream that's ended ~~ with relief and a pre-emptive flinch. She'd never heard a song from inside one before.

play it. typed saga

Maddy: okay. i can. play it. but like.. its got a. lot of noise. cuts out a lot. i've only recovered. about seventeen seconds. of playable audio. just warning you ahead.

Saga: its okay just play it.

There was a pause. Then the recording came up on the small bluetooth speaker Anna kept on the bench.

It was a juddering clip of a man's voice. The voice was young and tight and old all at once. It cut out. A lot. There was static. There were skips. Briefly Saga heard a droning note. Broken and skipping electronic percussion. Briefly the sound of a crowd juddering in and out.

Saga listened to the seventeen seconds. She listened to it a second time.

She sat very still, and the cat didn't move, and in the rack the LED throbbed slowly, in the rhythm of a thing in conversation with the sun. Lovelace's eyes looked at nothing in particular.

She sat quietly for another minute.

Saga typed, thank you.

Maddy responded. thanks for listening.. really. tell anna its ready. whenever she wants. to review it.

Saga didn't get up yet. Lovelace had come back at some point and was a warm weight against her hip.

She typed: i will. u wanna know what the forest did today

always. yes. tell me. replied Maddy

Saga thought about how to put it.

Saga: the fog came up. the leaves were dripping, not like rain, but slower, the water goes plick and then plick over and over. there was a cute snail on the steps with a shell like a little cinnamon bun. sirius found something dead and gross and was very proud and i did not let him keep it.

Maddy responded: plick. (a pause) thank you. i like that. i cant go and look, you know? so i keep the things people bring me. broere brings me drives. you bring me the forest. its a good trade i think.

Saga typed I should get back home

Maddy replied, keep your tail bushy, detective. tell yr mom i said hi. and i have questions. about the coffee. tell anna about the recording. she should. review it.

Okay Maddy," typed saga "bye, love you

Maddy paused, LED pulsing. a moment later, "love you too. saga"

She got up.

In the kitchen, Anna had pulled the pot off the stove and was decanting the syrup ~~ dark and glossy ~~ into a clean glass jar through a small stainless funnel. The last of its woody-sweet breath rose off the rim. She was writing on a fresh label: Syrup No. 47 ~~ zarzaparrilla (Querencia, fresh), miel de palma, dandelion, carob, anise, fennel, burdock, cardamom. 14 May 2041. Pull on Sunday.

She fixed the label to the jar and set the jar on the syrup shelf next to its forty-six older siblings.

"She's decoding a song, she wants you to hear it." Saga said.

"Mm." replied Anna. Her hands didn't slow at the syrup, but her face shifted just enough that Saga saw it.

"It's greenlandic. She says it's from the bad years."

Anna stopped everything and looked up.

"Greenlandic?" Her face flushed, and for a moment she couldn't speak.

Saga waited. She'd meant to tell her more about the song ~~ but paused, then asked "Tía.. does Maddy get lonely?"

Anna straightened her apron. "Maddy is.. a precious combination of information and math working together, when she thinks, it's the way instruments and musical notes come together to make a song. A song can communicate feelings, but can a song feel lonely? We don't know.. we don't understand, really, what we're touching, so.. I try to.. touch it gently."

Saga nodded, once.

"I think she's lonely..." she said, then paused. "I'll come back tomorrow."

Anna reached across and slid a second small candy across the counter ~~ a better one this time, fully set, a clean dark amber. Saga put it in the pocket of her jacket.

She went back through the front room, under the wolf-mother, past the swaying ceiling, through the noren over the door, and out into the garden and down the path. The fog had lifted further. The light through the laurisilva forest had turned a green-gold color that meant noon was on its way. Sirius rose from where he'd been waiting and fell in behind her. The cantenna pylon hummed, very small, the way it always did. They passed a colorfully painted statue of the same cartoon squirrel: Maisie Ardilla, P.I. ~~ made of welded propane bottles, repurposed steel scrap and a circular, solar powered LED light for her magnifying lens.

Halfway down to the square, Saga stopped. She stood a moment, turning the morning over; the song, the box, the friend who wasn't quite a person, then reached into her pocket and touched the second candy. Still there. She didn't eat it.

Then she walked the rest of the way down.

The fog didn't come up that evening.

It almost always did, after dark ~~ the same sea of cloud that climbed the mountain at dawn. But that evening it stayed down in the valley, and Saga watched the sun go into the ocean from the edge of the coffee terraces. The light went out of the land first, the terraces and the laurels going blue and then dark ~~ but the Teide, the stratovolcano, was so tall it held the last of it, the cone up there still pink, and then orange, a long time after everything beneath it had given up the day. Then that went too, and the sky came out clear and cold and crowded with stars.

She took the second candy out of her pocket and finally let herself eat it.

Then she looked up.

There were seven stars hung just above the summit, and once she'd noticed, she couldn't unsee it: two stars for the ears, a bright one for the eye, three for the long body, and one set a little apart for a tail.

hopping over the Teide. A rabbit. Genuinely a rabbit. Better than half the real ones.

Somewhere years ago a kid had looked up and seen it too, and drawn it, and written to the observatory ~~ the one up there on that same mountain ~~ to ask if it could be made official. It never had been. It was up there anyway, hopping over the Teide whether anyone had signed off on it or not.

And Maddy couldn't go and look.

Tomorrow, Saga thought. She'd tell her tomorrow ~~ the fog that stayed down, the stars, the rabbit over the mountain. All of it. A good trade.