I'm seventeen. Rose is fourteen. We have hugged and cried all we can (it is no longer such a strange sight, for those not in the sphere, to see me rocking and weeping and embracing empty air), and now we're watching the waves come in from the lake. Rose used to make fun of those waves; we had been to surfing beaches near LA AFB, seen breakers on the Jersey shore during a summer at McGuire. To Kieran, when Rose was breathing, they were tsunamis. Now he likes to swim out to the buoys that tell the boats where they must stop their engines.

"What is it like," I ask, "when you're not here?"

"Nothing," she says. "You guys get into the car, and I wave and walk back into the house, and then..." She shrugs. "It's hard to explain. There's a little while where I'm not exactly anywhere, but I feel like I should be on the beach. And then I remember what happened on the beach, and I get scared. But then you guys sort of take shape in my mind, and I remember what I am, and I'm not afraid any more."

"So you're not afraid of what happens when they—" I fumble for a politic phrase. "Can I say 'switch you off'?"

Rose giggles, and I reach over and stroke her hair. I have grown cousins with little kids, too young for Rose to have met; that's what I do with them, in rare moments of peace. She leans into my hand and looks up at me. "I'm afraid of what happens when they switch me back on," she says softly. "You could forget me. You could be married, with kids; I might not even know you. You could be dead."

"Is that such a bad thing?" I ask, trying to sound like I'm joking. "In your experience."

Rose shakes her head. "Fees are going up. People want this too much. I was basically a guinea pig—me and a few hundred others. We're grandfathered in for a while, I guess." She turns, looks up the beach toward the boardwalk. "Maybe."

I follow her gaze. Dad's charging down the sand, or trying—he's not fit enough to run the distance without sucking wind, so he's walking with these long stiff strides, pumping his arms furiously. His arms and legs are skinnier than they once were, his belly bigger. We used to make fun of beachgoers built like that, Rose and I.

"You won't see Mom, then," I say. "Or me or Kier. After we die."

"I guess not." Rose smiles a little; the sphere obligingly simulates reflection, refraction, surface tension, and all the relevant connections between body, brain, and mind, and small sparks of bright water spring into her eyes. "Unless you make yourself indispensable. There's already legislation in the House to psychive everyone at the highest levels of the government."

I nearly don't register how strange it is to hear this from Rose of all people; when I do, I need a moment to blink and stare. "How do you even know that?"

She shrugs. "You hear things."

"You've only been conscious for nine months of the last nine years, and you've spent the whole time on summer vacation. What do you hear?"

"I have to do something when you guys are asleep."

I begin the interrogation in my mind—What do you mean, do something? What do you do? Who do you talk to? How do they know? But Dad is getting closer and I look in Rose's eyes, watching him, and I see something I've never seen because I've never looked for it. Love, no doubt, and yearning; but not that of a little girl scared for her family, the axis of her universe.

Mom has a sister, Aunt April. She came to see us, not long after the diagnosis—we aren't easy people to visit, and Aunt April has a family and more obligations than means, but she figured out the bus from Vegas to Indian Springs and found us. She and Mom embraced, of course, and when they were done Aunt April took her hands and squeezed them and looked into Mom's eyes, and I saw the look that Rose is giving Dad now. The look you give someone when you love them, and you don't want to lose them, but you know you'll carry on when they're gone.

I look down the shoreline, scanning for the biggest crowd where I can make out individual people. Then I turn the sphere off. A heavyset woman in a flower-print muumuu disappears. From the next largest knot of people, two fit white girls in showy bikinis. They aren't dead, necessarily; they might be here "in sphirit," like the kids say, visiting family and friends for a few hours. I've even heard of constructed personalities, good enough to simulate real human interaction for at least a brief conversation. (I try not to assume anything about the bikini girls.) The point is that they're in the sphere, and if they are, so is everyone they're with.

Dad gets close enough to yell, and commences, and Rose can't help but smile at the Dadness of it. I hate Rose in that moment; but I think of the future, when Mom and Dad and Kier and I and our kids and grandkids are all gone and Rose remains, and I am happy for her too.