"I have never claimed to be normal."
"Everyone here knows."
That time, he laughed properly.
The sound rippled outward, small but stabilizing. Staff who had been watching them too carefully returned to their screens and conversations. The room found its rhythm again, though it was no longer the rhythm of ordinary monitoring. It had become the rhythm of people inside a machine that had discovered it could fly.
At the twenty-minute mark, the number crossed seventy million.
