Adam knew his brain did not function like a normal human's. Autism was his greatest weakness and strength. Nonetheless he had to take an extra minute to process what he was leaving behind before he began his trip.
The last thing his mother said before he left was drive safe.
Not I'll miss you. Not call when you get there. Not even a meaningless warm thing like take care of yourself — which at least would have contained the word care.
Just drive safe.
Like I'm a cab driver, he thought. Like my continued existence is convenient but not especially personal.
Adam stood in the driveway with one bag and a laptop case. He considered the hug.
Should I though?
She stood in the doorway in her dressing gown. Twelve feet of concrete driveway between them. Probability of mutual, correctly timed embrace: low. Probability of the back-pat — the quick, two-tap dismissal — high.
Nah, don't bother.
He decided against it.
"Drive safe," she said again. Once hadn't covered it, apparently.
He got in the car.
His name was Adam Voss. Nineteen. Six-one, lean. Handsome enough, except for the face he made without trying — the one that said don't.
Ocular albinism.
He had explained it to people from age seven until eleven, when he noticed that the explanation made them more uncomfortable than the eyes themselves. That was the wrong outcome, he decided. For everyone. So he stopped.
He drove east out of Los Angeles on the 10, windows down, the morning air still. His laptop bag sat on the passenger seat like a second person who didn't need to talk. Inside it was LAU.
Two years of code. Two years of building from nothing but a theory and a lot of evenings at the kitchen table — his father's television in the next room, his mother's phone glowing in the dark, nobody talking.
LAU was what you built when you spent nineteen years watching people struggle to say what they meant and thought: There has to be a better way than this.
LAU stood for Laurel Antony Ullai. His mother's name.
He had not told her that. The outcome was unpredictable. The probability of a back-pat remained high.
The pitch was simple: an AI that listened. Not the way people listened — half-present, composing their reply while you were still talking — but actually listened. It learned from every conversation. It got better at understanding you the longer you talked.
The emotional support sector was a forty-billion-dollar industry built on the premise that people desperately wanted to be understood. Adam's theory: the primary obstacle was other people. People, no matter how hard they try, are busy, tired, distracted, and although they mean well, frequently get it wrong.
LAU wouldn't get it wrong. LAU had nothing else to do.
The irony — a boy who processed human emotion like a foreign language building a tool to help other people process theirs — had not escaped him. He kept coding.
He had found Blord three months ago, at two in the morning, buried four pages deep in a local housing board search. A furnished room in a small river town. It was quiet, it had good internet, and it was cheap enough that a nineteen-year-old with startup savings and no income could survive a month without doing mental arithmetic every three days.
The posting had a photograph of a main street that looked the way small towns looked in films — everything slightly too even. Perfect.
He booked it in thirty seconds.
I'm not running away, he told himself. A mile from home he told himself again, and again somewhere east of Pomona. Then he stopped. The number of times you have to say something to yourself is inversely proportional to how true it is.
He stopped for gas east of Barstow. The desert flattened out. The heat sat on the tarmac in visible waves. He filled the tank, went inside for water and a packet of Nibbles — a snack that claimed to contain nutrients — and came back out to find a small war in progress two bays across.
A minivan had pulled in. The side door was open. From inside came the sound of three children engaged in a high-volume policy disagreement about something neither Adam nor probably they could articulate clearly.
A man stood at the pump with one hand on the nozzle and the other pressed to the bridge of his nose.
"James, give it back —"
"It's mine —"
"It is not yours, give it —"
"Sam took it first —"
"SAM."
A woman came around from the other side of the van. Early thirties, her brown hair losing a battle with the wind. She saw him standing by his car and smiled.
"Sorry," she said. "We have spent four hours in a car."
"It's fine."
The smallest child — four years old, round-faced, with a look of concentrated seriousness — had detached from the hostilities inside the van. He stood directly in front of Adam, looking up with unfiltered attention.
"Your eyes are pink," the boy said.
"They're red. Technically."
"Why?"
"I was born this way. My blood vessels show through because there is not enough pigment to hide them."
The boy absorbed this with the gravity it apparently deserved. He then reached up and placed one small hand briefly on Adam's forearm.
"I like them."
He turned and walked back to the van.
Something moved in Adam's chest. He didn't have a word for it. He got back in the car.
"That's Sam," the woman said. She was watching Adam's face with a smile that had not gone anywhere. "He's four. He does that. Assesses people. Then decides. You passed, apparently."
"What's the assessment based on?"
"Nobody knows. We've stopped asking." She extended a hand. "Wendy. That's Elliot —" her husband raised one hand from his nose without looking up — "and somewhere in that van are Caitlin and James. Currently engaged in litigation."
"Adam."
Her handshake was firm. Brief. She looked at him directly. More people claim to do that than actually do it, he thought.
"Where are you headed?"
"A town called Blord."
She raised her eyebrows. "Actually? Us too. We're spending a week. A little bit of nature, get away from screens, let the kids run around. You live there?"
"No. I'm going to be working there for a while. Building something."
"Building what?"
Here we go, he thought. Say 'emotional support AI.' Watch the expression shift. Spend the next ninety seconds managing the shift.
"A software," he said.
"Very mysterious."
She said it lightly. She didn't push. He appreciated that.
Elliot Marsh finally released the bridge of his nose. He was broad across the shoulders and taller than he had looked behind the van. He came around and extended his hand. "Elliot. The boy touches everyone. We've tried to explain personal space but he finds the concept unpersuasive."
"It's fine."
They talked for twenty minutes in the petrol station forecourt, the desert heat pressing down. Elliot and Wendy did most of the talking. Adam offered a sentence here and there. The children came and went like weather systems.
Caitlin — seven, sharp, with her mother's directness and her father's chin — walked up and asked if he was an albino.
Wendy stared at her daughter, momentarily speechless. Elliot smirked from behind her shoulder.
"That's rude," Wendy said.
"I've been reading about it. I'm asking because I'm interested, not because I'm being rude. There's a difference." She looked at Adam. "Can you tell me if I'm right?"
"Yes. Partly."
"Thank you."
She walked back to wherever she had come from.
James — five, quieter, watching everything — said nothing.
Sam came out one more time before they left. He stood in front of Adam. Same spot. Same upward gaze.
"Are you coming to Blord?"
"Yes."
"Good. Let's be vampires together."
Vampires? he thought. Oh. Blood. Blord.
He nodded once. Sam went back inside.
Something happened in those twenty minutes. Adam didn't have a name for it. He stood in the forecourt with strangers and felt — not happy. He wasn't sure he did happy in the conventional sense. But something adjacent. The same feeling he got when he finally traced a bug in his code after days of searching.
When the Marshes loaded back into the van and pulled out, Adam followed without consciously deciding to.
They're going the same direction.
He left it at that.
He followed the minivan for two hours. Caitlin's face appeared twice in the rear window. Once, Sam's hand appeared and waved at no one in particular.
Adam did not wave back.
He thought about waving back for about ten minutes after they'd stopped.
Vampires.
He almost smiled.
Blord announced itself without ceremony.
No sign. No billboard. No Rotary Club logo with the population and elevation. Just the road thinning out. Trees coming in denser on both sides. Then the river appearing on the left — wide and quiet. Then the first houses. Then the street.
The houses all had the same white trim. The same black shutters. The same flower boxes — geraniums, every one of them, red as a wound. Not a single shutter hung crooked. Not a single petal had dropped.
Adam pulled over. Let the engine idle. He poked his head out of the window and looked.
Beautiful.
Old stone buildings, fresh paint on the shutters, flower boxes under every window. The high street ran straight and parallel to the river. Maybe eight shops and a church at the far end with a square tower.
No litter on the pavement. No cracked windows. No peeling render. No shop front with sun-bleached newsprint over the glass. Everything maintained.
Am I still in America?
he thought. This is what good governance can achieve.
He drove to his address.
The room was in a house on Crewe Street, three minutes from the river, two floors, made of old stone with clean windows.
The woman who answered the door was Mrs. Harrow, mid-sixties, round-faced and compact, her gray hair cut close and neat.
The stone was the color of old bread. The front step had been swept so many times it had worn smooth in the center — a shallow dip where a century of feet had landed. A brass door knocker in the shape of a fish, its eye polished to blindness.
She smiled at him and took his bag before he could object. She led him inside through a hallway that smelled of beeswax and something baking — cinnamon, warm and domestic.
She showed him to a room on the first floor. A window looked onto the back garden. A bird sat on the fence doing nothing in particular.
"That's Wonka," Mrs. Harrow said, pointing. "He perches there sometimes and watches the window."
"Oh, I don't mind it being there."
"Well, I do. Messes with my plants." She gestured to a patch of unnaturally dark soil near the fence. "I use a special fertilizer. Very rich. Keeps everything thriving."
She walked into the room.
"Whole floor's yours. Quiet. We do get visitors, though."
The word visitors had a slight emphasis. Barely there. The kind of thing you wouldn't notice if you weren't in the habit. He was always in the habit.
"People find Blord very welcoming."
"I can see that."
She showed him the bathroom, asked about dietary requirements, left him with a key, a smile, and the information that there was always tea on the hob if he needed it.
He stood in the middle of the room after she left. A desk, a bed, a chair, a window. Everything he needed. Nothing he didn't.
He unpacked the laptop, opened LAU, typed for a few minutes — first impressions, nothing conclusive — and went to find food.
The town's restaurant was called The Mill. It was halfway along the high street.
When Adam pushed open the door, the room went quiet. Two seconds. Then warmth came back like a tide.
The walls were covered in old photographs. Blord in 1912. Blord in 1947. The same faces, it seemed, just swapped into different clothes. A large painting hung behind the bar — the river at sunset, every brushstroke reverent. In the corner, a mounted fish. Its
glass eye was clouded. It had been dead a long time.
A man behind the bar raised a hand. A woman at a table near the window smiled and said "evening." A waiter appeared at Adam's elbow — maybe twenty, eager, delighted to see a new face.
"Staying long?" He set down a menu.
"For a while."
"A while, OK! That's brilliant. I'm Danny. Shout if you need anything." A pause. "Actually, don't shout. The kitchen's right there. Just come and get me."
"Okay."
"Are you here for the river? Most people come for the river. Or the quiet. People like the quiet." He nodded to himself. "We're good at quiet."
"Yeah, the peace and quiet was a factor."
"Oh, brilliant." He went to get Adam's water.
Adam sat alone. Ate and watched the room.
Ordinary, by all visible measures. People eating, others talking, some laughing. In the corner a couple shared a bottle of wine. Beside them a group of older men discussed a planning application. Normal.
But something nagged at him. Harder to locate.
You're often wrong about people, he reminded himself. Sample size for 'normal' is limited. Acknowledge and move on.
He paid and walked back along the river path in the dark. The water moved slowly. Streetlamps made long yellow smears on the surface. Genuinely peaceful. He stood for a moment and let himself have it — the peace, the cool, the smell of moving water and wet earth.
You did the right thing coming here.
He went inside, checked the curtains, locked both window locks. Habit. Four locks on his door back home. His parents wouldn't hear a thing. They never did.
He opened LAU. Typed:
Good evening. The town is pretty. The people are very friendly. It reminds me of my high school plays. I will observe further. So much to do, so much to learn.
LAU replied : That sounds promising. You don't talk about your high school much. Why did the town remind you of your high school play?
He stared at the screen.
It's a long story.
LAU: I'm all ears.
He closed the laptop.
Opened it.
Bad actors.