Through the windshield, Eureka spotted the neon sign welcoming her into Green River, Utah. Soaked in sweat from driving and eating too many gas station snacks, her temps spiked as her Garmin GPS called out.

  “At the green dinosaur, turn left. Your destination will be on the left.”

  A Sinclair gas station. Eureka sighed.

  Out of awl da places in da world, girleh…

  Pulling up to a pump, she popped the fuel tank door. Eureka hopped out, leaving the swamp of her driver’s seat behind. Old receipt paper curled up on the concrete as it baked in the midday sun. By the store’s door, an empty soda machine hummed.

  Movement. A sliver of a shadow peeked through the glass door before ducking back out of sight.

  Then, the shadow prowled into her blind spot. Click! The barrel of a gun jabbed into the small of her back.

  “Turn around and you’re dead,” a young girl’s voice warned.

  Eureka put her hands up.

  Fahk.

  “Awright.”

  “Answer my questions,” the young girl continued.

  Eureka nodded slowly. A few drops of sweat hit the parched asphalt anyways.

  She hung her head back, angling the brim of her gardening hat towards the sun. “Yew got me dead ta rights. Ask away.”

  The girl paused for just a moment. She lowered her gun from Eureka’s back and sighed, the tension crimping the edges of her breath.

  “Who are you?”

  “Eureka Kishimoto. Krista Kishimoto’s daughter.”

  “Wait. Krista’s daughter? Turn around.”

  Eureka did.

  The girl stepped closer. Close enough that Eureka could see the whites of her eyes. In her pupils, gray lenses zeroed in, peering right back at Eureka.

  “Hmm…” the girl looked down, studying Eureka’s face.

  With her free hand, she tipped Eureka’s chin up. “Krista’s daughter, huh?”

  “Nah, yeah.”

  The girl let go. “She married an Aussie?”

  “She adopted me.”

  The girl’s brilliant gray irises started to darken, her eyelids narrowing. “Explain.”

  “Wot if I told yew…”

  A few seconds passed. “Thet I wasn’t human?”

  She lingered on the last word, probing the girl’s face for a tell. The girl remained still.

  “I know.”

  ---

  Out of all the human functions Tar had programmed for Eureka, sweat was the one she hated the most. Her arms sopped and stuck as she pried them off the laminate tabletop. From above, fluorescent lights shone into her eyes.

  Cold pressed into her dripping forehead. “Here. Drink this. It’s a hot one today.”

  Eureka wrenched her gaze up.

  She took the can of Dr. Pepper. “Thank yew, uhh…”

  “Hannah.”

  Eureka’s eyes widened.

  “With that, let’s get down to biz. Why are you here?”

  Eureka shifted her gaze around the room. The microwave. The coffee machine holding the pot of burnt coffee. The trash cans. The bulletin board with the OSHA posters on them. Finally, the ticking clock. She fidgeted in her chair.

  Ksssht! Eureka opened the can of soda and took a shaky sip, nearly spilling it.

  “Yew.”

  “C’mon. That’s a given. Why?” Hannah replied.

  Eureka stumbled over her answer. “Yer spinal cord… The doctors got yew stable, but—”

  Hannah interrupted her.

  “You must think I’m just some stupid kid,” she said, the skin between her eyebrows scrunching up and her irises turning red. “All this talk about spinal cords and doctors… Pretending to speak to me like I’m all grown up and shit. You’re fake as hell,” she continued, grasping for a name. “Uhh…”

  “Eureka.”

  They sat there at an impasse for a while, the silence punctuated by the occasional sips of soda.

  Eureka spoke up after a few minutes. “Yer right. I dunno what to do.”

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  “Damn right.” Hannah’s trigger finger itched before relaxing again. “Now tell me, who sent you?”

  “I… uhh…” Her answer stumbled out of its starting blocks.

  Hannah narrowed her eyes.

  “I came outta my own free will. Y-yer friends and family didn’t know wot else ta do.”

  The irises of Hannah’s Truthseers clouded into a stormy gray. “Friends?”

  A bitter chuckle from her lips singed Eureka’s eyes. “Yeah, right.”

  “Elaborate,” Hannah commanded.

  Eureka’s eyes took one more tour around the gas station’s break room. Then, she locked eyes with Hannah.

  “Okay. Thet wos da wrong word. I shouldn’t have said thet.” She glanced down, timidly counting the fake tiles paving the floor. “I just meant…”

  “What?”

  A pause.

  “People who… just never left yew.”

  “Then how come I’m stuck in Bumfuck Egypt with no cell reception?”

  ---

  The silence stretched. A rocky arch ignored them as they stepped out of Eureka’s truck.

  “This is the place?” Hannah asked.

  Eureka trudged along the trail towards it, shrugging. “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Dunno. Nevah been here before.”

  Hannah scoffed. “Who vibecoded you?”

  “CG&E. Then Tar bought me through GovDeals. Yew ken guess da rest.”

  “Tar?”

  “Krista. Mum goes by Tar now.”

  Kicking up dust, Hannah stopped in the middle of the path and bored her eyes into Eureka. “Oh.”

  They resumed their walk. Eureka noted the signs along the trail: “Don’t bust the crust!”

  Hannah interrupted her wandering thoughts. “You’re from a future.”

  “Hmm,” Eureka murmured.

  For a blip, Eureka’s NPU spooled up as she considered an endless amount of stories to tell Hannah. She chose none of them.

  Picking a nearby cairn by the wayside, Hannah sat down, fixing her gaze on Eureka once more.

  “Do you even know what’s going on?”

  Eureka stared back in silence.

  “Sit.” Pointing at another cairn, Hannah invited Eureka to join her. She sighed.

  So Eureka did. Hannah watched the horizon, the sun casting a dusky glow on her unreadable face. Then, she ran her hand through the red sand.

  Finally, she spoke. “We stopped for gas and a bathroom break. But when I came back outside the store, my parents were gone. They’d driven off without me.”

  Eureka nodded.

  Hannah continued. “But then…”

  Her senses snagged as she paused.

  “Like, the lights in the store were left on, and the radio still played over the PA, but the other travelers, truckers, and store workers were gone.”

  Hannah glanced at Eureka. Eureka looked past Hannah for a moment, before re-centering her attention back on her.

  “Once I realized I was left alone, I started messing around.”

  “I’m listening,” Eureka said.

  “I’ll admit, it was fun for a day joyriding peoples’ Jeeps around town, eating whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, and having nature all to myself, but…” Hannah faltered, not knowing what to say next.

  “But?”

  “Nobody came back.”

  Eureka cast her gaze away, fearful that she’d see nothing reflected back. She looked back anyways.

  “The second night was harder than the first,” Hannah carried on. “It gnawed at me. Darkness, cold, hunger, things that went bump. Fuck.”

  Hannah’s lenses whirred as if she was recalling her ordeal over and over again behind them.

  “Then I got injured, sick.” Her lips quivered. “But those never quite healed. A twisted ankle. A cough that stuck with you no matter what.”

  Catching her eyes watering, Eureka steeled herself. This wasn’t about her.

  “Eventually, I stopped waiting at the gas station.”

  ---

  The new rules. Eureka pondered them as she beheld the Phallus Pillar from the side of the road. Rationing. No searching for stuff on the Internet to preserve bandwidth. Safe and unsafe areas. Corrected assumptions. Next to her, Hannah squatted, drawing a tic-tac-toe grid on the ground with a stick. She entertained herself, walking through all the permutations.

  “Big dick,” Hannah said.

  “Yes. Big dick,” Eureka parroted back.

  Hannah stood up.

  “Have you thought of something yet, computer lady? I’m bored.”

  “We’re looking at et.”

  “At last, we stand on honest ground,” Hannah said.

  Eureka’s annoyance ticked up a notch before normalizing in her next clock cycle. Hannah was right.

  Hannah walked back to Eureka’s truck. Opening the door where shotgun was supposed to be, she spotted the steering wheel and shut it once again. She moseyed around to the other side.

  “Nothing doing here. Let’s move,” she called out to Eureka.

  Eureka followed her.

  ---

  “Fuck.”

  “Wot?”

  A debris field of belongings lay strewn about the motel room floor.

  “We’re short on food for today.”

  Hunger. Another human sense that Tar had programmed into Eureka for this mission. Her stomach grumbled.

  Eureka remembered all the food at the gas station. “Wot about the—”

  But Hannah stopped her with a firm hand. “That would break not being outside at night. We’re gonna have to spend the night hungry.”

  Contemplating this contradiction, Eureka cross-referenced Hannah’s other rules on the subject. She tapped her feet on the slightly grubby carpet as she sat with her legs dangling off the side of her bed. Hannah sat on the bed next to her, mugging the television permanently tuned to the motel’s welcome channel. Then, she had a moment.

  “Yew know, yer model assumes thet you’re gonna get it right every time.”

  Hannah raised her eyebrows.

  “I’m not entirely useless. Maybe I ken reduce thet variance?”

  The unresolved tension from earlier in the day crept back into the room. Hannah crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes at Eureka.

  “At what cost?”

  “Yew have ta depend on me. Just a bit.”

  Hannah softened her gaze and slackened her arms.

  Under her breath, she whispered, “And what if you’re also wrong?”

  “I’ll leave it up ta yew. I only offer redundancy, not perfection.”

  The muted television flickered across her face.

  “Meaning?”

  “Exactly wot I said.”

  The air became still.

  “You don’t question me.”

  Eureka opened her mouth to speak, but closed it again.

  “Thet’s fine.”