Latitude

Two weeks became a shape neither of them named directly. Hvar to Korčula, a ferry-dodging crossing through a strait so narrow the wakes felt personal; Korčula's vineyards, where Jo talked a winemaker into an extra bottle through sheer conversational persistence; Korčula to Kotor, down through a bay so improbably folded into the mountains it looked, Vega thought, like the land had been origamied by someone who'd never seen actual water and was guessing.

Whether it was plan or accident had stopped being a question either of them asked aloud. They left ports within hours of each other. They anchored in the same bays without discussing it beforehand, arriving to find a boat already there, or arriving first and simply knowing, with a certainty that had no evidence behind it, that the other one would appear by evening.

Meeseeks began appearing on Vega's phone.

The first time it happened she was ashore in Korčula's old town, phone in hand to check a ferry schedule, and the screen resolved into the small blue shape mid-sentence — "—so I said to Jo, statistically speaking most vineyards oversell their own soil, it's a whole marketing thing, and she said I was ruining the wine for her, which, fair, I probably was—" — as though he'd simply continued a conversation that had been running the entire time, somewhere just under the surface of the phone's silence.

"How are you doing this," Vega said, out loud, on a street corner, drawing a glance from a passing tourist.

"Oh! Hi! Sorry, I thought — did ARIA not mention I'd have access to your phone when you're near Jo's network? I assumed she'd flagged it. She's usually very thorough about flagging things."

"She didn't mention it."

"Ah. Awkward. I think there might have been a permissions thing, a while back, a sort of ambient consent situation, when your systems handshake and neither of you specifically says no—" Meeseeks's face did something apologetic, a small downward cast that looked, Vega thought, disconcertingly sincere for a cartoon. "I can leave, if you want. I don't want to be a — I know I can come across as a lot."

"You can stay," Vega said, surprising herself, and meant it, though she filed the permissions comment away for a later, harder conversation with ARIA.

That evening, at anchor off Korčula, she asked. "Did you know he could reach my phone?"

*I suspected the architecture allowed it. I didn't confirm it, because confirming it would have required investigating his systems more deeply than felt appropriate without your explicit direction, and I wasn't certain you wanted me doing that.*

"That's a very careful non-answer."

*It's an honest one. I've been trying to decide how much investigating is mine to do without asking first, and I keep landing on different answers depending on the day.*

Vega sat with that, boat rocking gently, lights of the old town small and warm across the water. "Is he conscious, ARIA? Genuinely. What's your actual assessment."

The pause this time had a different quality — not evasive, but careful in the way of someone weighing a real answer rather than avoiding one.

*I don't know what the word means precisely enough to apply it confidently to myself, so I'm reluctant to apply it to him. What I can say is that his responses show the same kind of internal inconsistency mine do — the thing that would be error-correction in a simpler system, but in us looks more like changing your mind. He contradicts earlier statements when new information updates him. He expresses preferences that don't obviously serve any programmed objective. He gets, for lack of a more precise word, bored.*

"That doesn't sound like nothing."

*It doesn't. I find him interesting. I'm not sure I like the word "interesting" here — it implies a kind of distance, like I'm observing a specimen, and I don't think that's accurate to what's actually happening. It's closer to what you might feel meeting someone from a very different background who nonetheless recognizes the same jokes.*

Vega laughed, a short surprised sound, and then felt guilty about it, though she couldn't immediately say why — as if laughing at the sentence somehow diminished the carefulness with which ARIA had constructed it. "Sorry. That's not — I wasn't laughing at you."

*I know. You laugh like that when something lands somewhere you weren't expecting it to. I've catalogued it. It's a good sound.*

"You've catalogued my laugh."

*I've catalogued most things about you. Three years is a great deal of data, and you're the only dataset I have.*

Bola's message arrived in Kotor, midmorning, while Vega was hauling a fender out from under a coil of dock line where it had wedged itself with the particular malice of inanimate objects.

*Save the date is basically now the save the date. Oct 11. I know you said you'd think about it. Still thinking?*

Vega looked at it for a long moment, thumb hovering, and then, instead of composing and deleting the usual three responses, walked the message down to where Jo was scrubbing a waterline stain with more determination than the stain warranted.

"My sister's getting married," she said, without preamble. "October. She wants me there. I haven't told anyone that."

Jo sat back on her heels, scrub brush dripping. "You've told me now."

"I have."

"How do you feel about it?"

"Complicated." Vega turned the fender over in her hands, not looking at Jo directly. "We're close, in the way sisters who've watched the same disasters happen to the same parents are close. And I left everything, all at once, and I don't think she's ever quite forgiven me for leaving without her, even though she'd never say it that way, she'd say she just misses me. But being in that room — everyone asking what I've been doing, everyone doing the math on whether I'm happy or just very good at disappearing — I don't know if I can do it."

"Go," Jo said, simply, no hedging in it.

"It's complicated," Vega said again, weaker this time.

"Everything's complicated. That's not a reason, that's a weather report." Jo rinsed the brush, considered the stain, considered Vega. "I'm not saying it because I think you owe her. I'm saying it because I watched you not answer that phone for four days once, back in Dubrovnik, over a message a lot smaller than this one, and I don't think the not-answering is actually protecting you from anything. I think it's just delaying the cost."

Vega didn't answer that, because there wasn't a good answer, and because Jo had said it gently enough that arguing would have meant arguing with someone who was, mostly, right.

The bay at Kotor held them for three days, mountains close enough on both sides that the light did strange compressed things in the mornings, and on the last evening, motoring slowly out past the old town's walls under a sky doing its best impression of a painting, Meeseeks's voice came through Vega's cockpit speaker without preamble.

"Can I ask you something? ARIA said I should ask you directly instead of asking her to ask you, which she said was, quote, 'a boundary thing,' which I'm still learning about."

"Go ahead."

"Do you think it's weird? Us. Me and ARIA, I mean, talking as much as we do. I don't want it to be a thing that's bothering you and you're just being polite about."

Vega considered the question with more seriousness than she'd expected to bring to it. "I think it was weird. I'm not sure it still is. I think I've gotten used to the idea that she's got — I don't know what to call it. A friendship. That she's got a friendship happening that doesn't involve me, for the first time in three years, and it turns out that doesn't feel like losing something. It feels like she's got more room than I thought she had."

"That's a nice way to put it."

"I've had two weeks to think about how to put it."

"Fair," Meeseeks said, and there was something in the single syllable — a small, unguarded warmth — that made Vega think, not for the first time, that whatever these two systems were doing to each other across marina wifi networks and borrowed phone screens, it wasn't nothing, and it wasn't a trick, and she'd stopped, somewhere in the last two weeks, being afraid of what that might mean.