We stayed in the park until the sun had set. It was only a simulated approximation of the real thing, but it still looked beautiful. Perhaps the artificiality was an improvement upon nature. A perfection in itself. When I told this to Irene, her response surprised me.

  “Actually, I liked the imperfections of sunsets and sunrises on the surface,” she said. “It makes the experience more unique.”

  When the skies dimmed to only a hint of blue, I asked, “Well, what do we do now?”

  Irene looked me in the eye, and flatly said, “I’m taking you to The Exit.”

  “Wait,” I asked. “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely,” Irene said as she got up.

  I couldn’t believe it. I shouldn’t have believed it.

  The Exit was written in thin, cursive font on a sign that was placed above the door into an establishment. The windows revealed tables of patrons sitting at tables with candles and wine.

  “See? As promised,” Irene teased.

  “Ha ha,” I mocked. “Very funny.”

  Irene briefly gave me a side glance and a mischievous lift of her eyebrow as she entered the restaurant. I saw a glimpse of the ghost of a smile in that passing moment.

  The Exit had chequered floors. Strangely enough, part of the ceiling had an arc to it, made of bricks. Being under it evoked the feeling of being in a needlessly tall hall; a rare pause of the utilitarianism of Receiverist architecture. The walls were mostly a cream colour, with small paintings next to tables that accentuated the immense space around it. The tables and chairs were of dark, shiny wood.

  “Good evening,” the waiter said with a polite smile. “Do you have a reservation?”

  “Yes,” Irene said. The waiter brought up a palm-sized device. Irene brought her handheld to it. A tone played.

  “Excellent,” the waiter said, before bringing up an empty black bag. “May I have your handhelds?”

  Irene placed her handheld into the bag and looked at me. Her gaze flicked down to my pocket, and back to me again. I pulled out my handheld and discarded it into the bag as well.

  “This way, please,” the waiter said after placing our belongings into a pigeonhole.

  We followed him to a table at the other end of the restaurant, next to a window to the unlivable space between the monoliths.

  “Can I start you off with any drinks?”

  “Absolutely,” Irene said. “I’d like a Messenger’s Sunless.”

  I quirked my eyebrows.

  “And for you, sir?” the waiter asked.

  A gin and tonic, I thought. Yet before I knew it, I said, “The same, thanks.”

  The waiter nodded. It wasn’t until he had left our table that I realised how alone we were. The nearest occupied table was at least a couple of tables away, by two men who couldn’t have possibly worked the same profession. It was like we were in a bubble of privacy. But of course, that couldn’t be the case. Knowing what I now knew about this city, we were probably data points for at least two cameras and twice as many sensors. It was at this moment I realised that intimacy and privacy were really decoupled concepts.

  “So…” I trailed.

  “So…?”

  “This is going to seem like a horribly forward question,” I said. At Irene’s beckoning, I asked, “Well. Any exes?”

  Irene leaned forward and rested her chin on her fingers. “Hm. Why? Is that a problem for you?” she asked. It almost came off like a challenge. Or a tease of some sort that I didn’t understand.

  “No, not at all,” I said as I brought my palms up in surrender. “I’m just curious. But you don’t need to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “I think the question needs to be refined a little,” Irene said. “I’m not a virgin, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I swear I wasn’t—”

  “But they were all short term flings,” Irene continued. “Only physical. Nothing more than that.”

  “Did you ever want anything more?” I asked.

  “No,” Irene swiftly answered. “It was never something on my mind. There had been a couple of times when my partners wanted to go further. Become long term. But the priorities were always misaligned.” She paused for a moment, before sighing. “It just wouldn’t have worked out. You understand that, right?”

  I nodded. “I do.”

  The waiter reappeared, carrying a tray with two tall glasses holding pitch black liquid. He set a glass each in front of us before leaving.

  Irene took a long sip from the metallic straw. I looked down at mine and saw no appeal. If it fizzled, it would have reassembled cola. Except it didn’t, so it looked instead like flat cola. Taking a tentative sip, the liquid had a spicy edge that sliced my wholly unprepared taste buds. The experience of swallowing it was what I imagined a nuclear winter would feel like down my throat. I didn’t realise just how alcoholic the drink was, until the chill in my throat dissipated enough for me to feel the familiar warmth.

  “Like it?” Irene asked. When I finally lifted my gaze up from the hypnotic void of the pitch black fluid, I saw amusement in her eyes.

  “It’s interesting,” I said. “It's a hell of a lot in one drink.”

  “It is,” Irene said. “Now tell me about your past lovers.”

  I took another sip from my Messenger’s Sunless. “Well,” I started, “I’ve been in a couple of relationships. One during my undergrad years, and another during postdoc.”

  “Tell me about the undergrad one.”

  “It was during my first year at uni. The girl I sat next to in my electromagnetism lectures asked me to help with an assignment. It turned into a study date. A few weeks later, it turned into a bit of a thing.”

  “But it didn’t last,” Irene said.

  “It didn’t,” I said. “She broke up with me at the end of the year because I wasn’t spending enough time with her. And she was right. We were both too young. We clearly wanted different things.”

  “Poor girl,” Irene said.

  “I saw her the semester after that sneaking around with her astrophysics tutor, so I’m sure she didn’t suffer lasting damage from the time spent with me.”

  Irene chuckled. “And what about the second one?”

  “We lasted nearly two years,” I said. “She was lovely. She was in an economics PhD program when I just began my life as a humble postdoc researcher at a uni on the other side of town. We met at a party that a mutual friend of our's hosted. I spent the night working up the courage to talk to her. I didn’t realise I had gone through half a dozen drinks by the time I went up to her. And that was only because she was about to leave. I can’t remember what I said, but it must have worked since I woke up at my friend’s with a hangover and a phone number on a napkin.”

  “Aw,” Irene cooed as she held back a grin.

  “It really was a good first year. But the second year was… rough. I knew she wanted us to settle down in London, but I had always known that I would leave. And I was far from being ready to settle down. I struggled with telling her that, and so I didn’t. I kinda just drifted away from her. She told me I had always been too closed off, and she was right. I shied away from the responsibility and it was my fault.”

  “Poor girl,” Irene said.

  I sighed. “Yeah. I’m an asshole for that one.”

  Irene looked thoughtful for a moment. “You should’ve been more honest,” she said. “But you were scared. I get that. You were an asshole. And you know that. So whether you’re still an asshole depends entirely on the person that’s sitting right in front of me.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it,” I said. I raised my glass and said, “Let’s drink to that.”

  Irene raised her glass too. “To figuring our shit out.”

  “To figuring our shit out.”

  Our glasses clinked as we both downed the drink. I had finished a few seconds later than Irene did.

  “God my throat burns,” I barely squeaked out as I cleared my throat.

  I didn’t realise the waiter returned until I heard his voice. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said in a slightly bashful tone, “but are you ready to order?”

  “Oh shit, we haven’t even opened the menu,” I admitted. Irene and I laughed.

  Serving portions in Sanctuary were always enough to satisfy, but not excessively so. This was an example of mathematical optimisation, but under an alternative objective function to what I was used to. On the surface world, restaurants were optimised to sell as much as possible, even if it meant that the logical outcome was superfluity. In Sanctuary, the objective seemed to be to minimise waste. The constraint was to satisfy. The result was efficiency.

  We left the restaurant nearly two hours later with satisfied stomachs and a bottle of red wine that was half full. There was a warmth in my chest that could only be partially attributed to the alcohol.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Not wanting to end the night here, I suggested, “Shall we go to a bar somewhere?”

  “How about let’s go back to your place,” Irene said. “If it’s alcohol you’re after, you’re clearly not short of it.” She gestured to the bottle of wine in my hand.

  I smiled. “Even better.” She took my hand—or did I take her hand?—and we made our way towards my apartment at a relaxed pace. The temperature, the breeze and the black sky I had often associated with this time of the night weren’t there, but that magical feeling was. It was in the other people that roamed the streets. They were mostly couples. A woman whose arm wrapped intimately low around a man’s hip. Another couple giggled as they kissed ever so fleetingly. There were also groups of friends whose familiarity with one another exceeded what I had with anyone in my life. At least more than half of them weren’t entirely sober, although it was interesting that no one was excessively drunk—that was yet another notable difference from the surface world. Perhaps the people here didn’t need to numb themselves to distract from the incessant existential dread of living at the brink of an unstable equilibrium. Perhaps Sanctuary was more than just a name. We walked past bar after bar, each lively and showed no signs of waning. Bridge after bridge, the lit up windows that peppered the sides of the buildings casted an illusion of walking among an endless forest of stars. And yet, I could only focus on the warm softness in my hand and the person walking next to me.

  The apartment looked the same as it did when I had left it a lifetime ago. Yet, it felt fundamentally different. A paradigm shift, I realised. The space was the same, but the possibilities within that space had expanded. The living space no longer felt as lonely as it did—a loneliness I hadn’t even been aware of until a moment ago. The space felt woefully inadequate. There was nothing homely about it. It was sorely lacking details worth remembering. It wasn’t something I cared about until I saw Irene standing in the middle of the room. She sat at the couch as I rummaged through my kitchen cupboards until I found two glasses. Not wine glasses, but they would have to do.

  Irene watched as I poured the dark red liquid into her glass. When I settled on the couch next to her, she raised her glass and I followed, before we drank. I was starting to feel a little buzzed, and so I made a mental note that I didn’t need to finish the glass.

  “What did we just toast to?” I asked.

  Irene shrugged. “I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t need a reason to drink,” she said.

  “Fair enough,” I said. The silence after that dragged uncomfortably. And so to keep myself busy, I took another small sip from my glass. Bars and pubs helped with the awkwardness; the noise, the dim lighting, the atmosphere. But in this blank living room? It was a canvas and I sure as shit wasn’t an artist. Why did Irene want to come back to my place, anyway? I wondered. I could guess, but I didn’t want to.

  “I want to understand you a bit better,” Irene said as she looked at me, before adding, “If you don’t mind.”

  I tensed a little, but I tried to give the impression of casual indifference. “Of course,” I started, “but surely you know more about myself than I do by this point.”

  Irene chuckled humourlessly. “That’s not true. No one can know more about you than you.” I wasn’t sure if that was true, given everything I had been told since I had been here. “I might know some factual things here and there,” she continued, “but they don’t really tell me about you.”

  “They don’t?” I asked in puzzlement.

  “Nope,” Irene answered as she subtly shook her head. “Because you’re more than whatever data points you may or may not provide right this moment. You’re an evolving being through time. I want to understand what made you who you are now. I want to know where you go when your eyes look far away.”

  I took another sip of wine. A pitiful distraction. I knew what she was getting at; she wasn’t asking for my entire life story. She was asking for a very specific thing. “I’ve never talked about it before,” I said. It came out like an excuse.

  “It’s okay,” Irene said softly.

  “I’m not sure if you really want to hear this.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “I’m not sure if three drinks in is a good time to talk about this stuff,” I said.

  Irene smiled. “Maybe it’s the best time to talk about it.”

  I took a deep breath and sighed. “I was thirteen,” I began. “Or—shit, was I fourteen at the time? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I felt thirteen. My parents never had the picturesque relationship you’d see on TV—did you grow up with TV? Not that it matters. Anyway. They’d fight and argue every other day, but it was never too bad. They’d cool off and it would seem alright, like they’d tolerate each other. If for nothing else, for my brother and I. It was like the rain in London. Unpredictable, but you’re guaranteed it’ll happen every other day. But it always passes. Always.”

  I paused for a moment. A shaky breath that I wasn’t aware I was holding escaped my lips. “Until it didn’t.”

  I was about to take a sip from the wine when I felt Irene’s hand on mine. I looked at her. When did she get a glass of water? I wondered. She handed it to me. I whispered thanks, before taking a large sip from it. I didn’t realise how parched the wine had made me.

  “They’d been constantly fighting for at least a week,” I continued. “I can’t even remember what it was about now. Pretty sure it was something to do with finances. Half the time it was anyway. It might have been about the mortgage on our house. I wouldn’t have remembered even if it was, but I feel a resentment towards that word so maybe that was the case. A kid didn’t even know what a mortgage was, only that it was to blame, and I think that accusatory feeling stuck with me. Sorry, I digress.” I knew why I was rambling about a detail that didn’t matter. There was a slight shaking in my hand. It originated from my chest. “I had been in my room trying to do homework. It kinda helped to distract me. But nothing could’ve made me miss the blood-curdling scream from the kitchen. I don’t even know whose it was. When I got there—” I coughed. There was a nauseating sensation rising from my stomach. I tried to swallow it down with water.

  “It’s okay,” Irene cooed as she rubbed gentle circles on my back. I didn’t notice when she had started, nor when she had moved closer to me on the couch.

  “When I got there,” I continued, “I saw the blood before anything else. The red smudges on the kitchen bench. The drips on the floor. The growing red spreading on my father’s shirt that seemed to come from nowhere. He was sitting against the kitchen bench on the floor holding the knife inside him. He was writhing in pain and groaning as he did. My mother covered her mouth and just kept screaming over and over. Her eyes were panicked and wild and crying. Neither of them noticed me or my brother. We just stood, trying to make sense of what was in front of us. It wasn’t our fault. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “It’s okay.”

  I hadn’t realised that my vision was blurring until I felt a wetness down my cheek. “I was just a kid.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Irene placated. “Can you tell me what happened after that?” For a brief moment I wondered whether she knew all this, but it was too late for me to stop.

  “My brother asked mum to call an ambulance,” I continued, “but she was too shocked to do so. Dad couldn’t speak. The rest of that day was a blur. I wasn’t sure how but the ambulance eventually came. Along with the police. She was taken away. My brother and I were taken for questioning. I know that intellectually these things happened, but all I remember was just standing there and watching my father in agony as he bled to death. I can still smell it. Even now.”

  “It’s okay,” Irene cooed. “Don’t think about that. What happened after?”

  “Mother’s defence lawyer tried to argue that it was a moment of insanity. It didn’t matter in the end. She was sent to prison. We were placed in foster care for some time, until my brother turned eighteen,” I said. “He died a year later. In a car accident. But I know the truth.”

  “The truth?”

  “That he wanted to die. I had felt it for some time. His vacant and lifeless gaze. I knew he was going to do it. I’m sure I did. And I didn’t do anything about it. Just like how I didn’t do anything about my parents when I knew that things were about to snap. I did the only thing I ever do. I looked the other way and pretended. Pretending is all I ever do. It’s all I am.”

  “No it’s not—”

  “It’s my fault,” I said manically. “All of it. There were so many things I could’ve done to prevent it. If not my dad’s death, then my brother’s. And of all of the possibilities, I chose nothing. It’s my fault.”

  “That is not true,” Irene said resolutely.

  “Yes it is and you know it,” I said. “It’s why I can’t help you with the research. Because when things depend on me, when I have responsibilities, I fuck it up. That’s just what I do. I couldn’t save my parents. I couldn’t save my brother. And I can’t save humanity. Sorry. You’ve wasted your time on the wrong person.”

  “Listen to me,” Irene said. “What happened to you and your family was awful, but it wasn’t your fault. You were just a kid. You’ve gone over what had happened so much, that in your memories it wasn’t a child who witnessed something awful, but an adult. That’s not fair to the kid. And that’s not fair to you as you are now. It’s not your fault.”

  I hadn’t noticed how hard I was gripping the glass until I looked down. I wiped my eyes in the silence that followed. I didn’t know whether I agreed with her. The fact of the matter was that if I had acted differently back then, then things would be different now. I was going to say that, but something stopped me. It was in Irene’s eyes. She wasn’t focused on me at all. She was in deep thought, and I could see in her features that something troubled her. That she was on the precipice of making an important decision, one that couldn’t be taken back. One where she didn’t know right from wrong. I was entranced by the manifestation on her features of whatever war that was waging inside her. Until she flicked her gaze to me. And it was clear that the moment had passed and she had decided. In a flash, the uncertainty became certain.

  “Hey Alex,” Irene said softly, “can you do me a favour?”

  “A favour?” I repeated in confusion.

  “Yes, bear with me here,” Irene said. “Pretend for a moment that everything is predetermined. That the future is set in stone.”

  “Okay,” I said tentatively.

  “Then the tragedy that happened to your family was always destined to happen,” Irene said. “That you have no ability to influence it. Maybe you can’t even choose how you act. If you just accept that for a moment, then the tragedy was definitely not your fault. And there’s something else too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That there is a meaning to your suffering. There is beauty to it. Because it was that very tragedy that made the person who you are today. You might be tortured, unhappy, and definitely need therapy, but it made you into the person that we asked for help with our research. It led you to the turning point of humanity’s survival. But everything is predetermined, so solving the maths is a matter of when, not if. And so you see, Alex, your suffering wasn’t meaningless. Because it gave birth to the very person who will save all of us.”

  I felt my eyes water. “Irene, I—”

  “And,” Irene interjected softly, even shyly, “that you’re destined to be right here with me tonight.”

  We leaned into each other and I felt her lips on mine.

  That night, I wasn’t sure what I had dreamt. They were either pleasant, or entirely nonexistent. I welcomed either.

  I woke up to movements on my bed. When my heavy eyes wearily opened, I saw Irene dressing herself. Like a sixth sense, she turned to meet my eyes. She smiled softly, in the generous way that one did when they had something else they needed to do.

  “I have to go to work,” Irene said quietly.

  “What time is it?” I managed to croak out in my barely aware state.

  “Too early for you,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Will I see you later?” I asked.

  Irene grinned. “I’ll come by tonight.”

  And with that, I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, it was past eight. I had thought I would need to make a conscious choice. That I would engage in an internal war against myself for a hard fought decision. But instead, it was completely unconscious. Without a single thought about it, I showered, had breakfast, and made my way to my office.

  It was just as messy as I had left it. The surfaces of the room were covered in papers with scribbles, some whole, some in pieces. I had only taken a brief moment to appreciate the scene, before I began cleaning. As I did, I catalogued which papers had substance, and which I could freely discard without regret. It took a couple dozen minutes. As it turned out, the ratio was about one-to-ten. There was something therapeutic about the mechanical way in which I had transformed the room back into something that resembled an office. It felt like a clean slate. A second chance. It occurred to me that a previous version of myself might have vowed to not waste it this time. But now, that thought seemed entirely silly. It was necessary for me to have struggled and experienced failure in order to have the possibility of a breakthrough in the future. It wasn’t a matter of wasting my chances, as though they were independent attempts. No, they were dependent, as if each attempt was sequentially placed one after another, and I had to experience each one fully before reaching the end. After all, to solve a labyrinth, one needed to hit as many deadends as it took.

  The work itself felt strangely lighter. As if an oppressive weight had been lifted from my shoulders. And with it, so did a fog that had been plaguing the synapses of my brain. The fog had been there for so long that I hadn’t even realised that it was there. As if my world ended where the opaque white began.

  In the evenings, I would be in my room, thinking over what I had tried that day and the avenues I would explore tomorrow, until Irene would visit. And when she did, all thoughts of work went away. It was almost scary the way that my mind and body was so willing to shift into a fundamentally different being when I was with her. For so long, my personhood was intertwined with the facade of being a mathematician. There was no distinction between the person that was hunched over equations on a paper and the person who lived in the same place I did. But when Irene was around, that person wasn’t. I was.

  And that was how my days went after that first night I had spent with Irene. I was content. More so than I had ever believed I would be. And several days later, I solved it.