Page 26

From the diary of Monica Tsai, backed up on three servers spanning two continents

November 14, 2018 (2018-11-14T15:27:03.

563753)

loc: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

United States of America (42.

3721865,71.

1117091)

I don’t know where to begin.

I don’t even know if I can write this down.

It’s weird and embarrassing.

But if there’s one thing

I need to process, it’s the last few weeks.

Starting with the horrifying conversation I had with grandmother, where she asked

me if I had ever masturbated before.

She said I had to answer honestly if I was ever going to Reforge properly.

I wanted to hide, if not physically, then to at

least not have to speak my answer out loud.

I was still recovering when Louise asked me how my training was going.

I stared at my phone, heart pounding, cursing myself for promising I would tell her everything.

The truth was almost too strange

to put into words.

When I pushed the pencil into my wrist, the world faded, set to a quarter opacity, an image of grandmother overlaid on top.

She was writing with the pencil, and I felt a brief wave of sentiment—hopeful, whimsical—but did not catch exactly what she

wrote.

She had only written a few words.

It was over too quickly, reality returning.

“It’ll be clearer when you Reforge it,” she said.

“Come find me when you do.”

After that, I had a phoenix on my arm.

I would be coding and part of its wing or tail would catch my eye.

I’d hold my arm

up to the light, admiring the abstract, elegant lines.

It seemed to almost pulse.

It was bold, and I would even say—and I

never thought I’d say this about myself—sexy.

When I twisted my arm, the phoenix responded, glimmering, each angle striking.

I wanted Louise to see it, I realized, to trace her finger along its curves and bends.

I braced myself.

did meng tell you about the mechanics of reforging?

I knew it was after volleyball practice for her, when she would normally be hunkered down at her desk for some late-night

studying before bed.

Sure enough, she replied quickly.

I just know she ingests the pencil lead somehow and then bleeds it out

I told her how grandmother didn’t want me to bleed, that there was another way.

oh?

what is it?

I closed my eyes and typed without looking.

to have sex.

But that wasn’t quite right either.

I erased and retyped.

to become really aroused.

Was being aroused enough though?

I didn’t want to ask grandmother for all the details, and when she tried to tell me more,

I shut her down.

I only had one takeaway that grandmother insisted would work.

to have an orgasm

I sent it and stared at the message box.

The indicator that she was typing came up, then went away again.

Was she going through

the same process I had, trying to find the right words?

How do you even respond to something like that?

Would she think it

was my poor attempt at flirting?

Finally, she replied:

wow

I tried to come up with something witty to close the conversation.

I didn’t know what I had hoped to get out of it.

But then she was typing again.

I held my breath as she started and stopped, started again.

When she stopped for more than

a few seconds, I shoved my phone under my pillow and went to the bathroom.

I came back to a stream of messages, all from her, links to websites I did not recognize.

I had to scroll up through the links

to find the reason she sent them.

here is some of my fav erotica, if that helps

I dropped my phone.

By then the messaging service we used would have indexed those links, if not tied them to her or my specific accounts, or

if we were lucky, we were anonymized as links that young women, likely Asian, enjoyed, and shared.

The contents of those articles

had likely also been scraped, the sentences tokenized, topics determined— lust, sex, perversions —and added to the model of things the computer knew about me.

I picked up my phone again, scrolling through, more slowly this time.

None of the domain names were terribly suspicious sounding.

Some of them were from magazines I had heard of before.

Perhaps if I did not click on the link, the app would not bother trying to scrape it.

A mark of disinterest.

But I was not disinterested.

I combed through the slugs of each URL, heart beating faster as I realized I now had evidence

of whatever it was that Louise enjoyed sexually.

A hard lump formed in my throat.

The slugs did not give enough information,

almost always cutting off too early:

/2015/12/a-surprise-christmas-visitor-comes

/women/2016/the-hotel-balcony-and-the-hot

/lit/how-to-stop-screaming-for-the

It would be impossible not to read these.

I crawled to my desk, rummaging through the bottom drawer until I found my first

smart phone.

I had wiped it clean years ago and intended to take it to electronic recycling but never got around to it.

It

didn’t have an account associated with it anymore.

The features were limited—pretty much only a web browser, which was all

I needed.

While waiting for the old phone to charge, I tried to compose a response to Louise.

I had been silent for too long.

wow, thanks!

Add something more, I told myself.

The truth?

Why not, since we’re already this far in.

If I could tell grandmother about

my sexual experience, I could tell anyone.

I’ve never actually done this before.

I’ve been trying this week but no luck.

.

.

She would probably see me as I am—sheltered, antisocial, with not even the most basic sexual experience.

I assumed it was normal for people to have experimented with masturbation at my age, even earlier.

But there had never been any time or desire on my end.

High school was for studying and helping my grandparents.

And college, what little of it I had experienced, had been for studying and trying to make friends.

whatve you been trying?

I typed slowly.

just touching myself.

circular motions?

I think that’s a thing

if your mind isnt in it youll never get there

you sound experienced

lol I dabble

Then another message:

try reading those links, see if it works for you.

then lemme know which ones you liked best

Try something a little flirty, I thought, just a hint, step out of your comfort zone.

We were already in strange, new territory.

thanks for kickstarting my sex life!

I regretted sending it immediately.

Luckily, her reply was quick.

anytime

What followed was one of the strangest weeks of my life.

I would wake up, work through the day, have dinner with my grandparents, during which grandmother would ask about my progress.

“Still working on it,” I’d mumble as grandfather looked away, pretending he didn’t know what we were talking about.

Then I

would lock myself in my bedroom and lie on my bed, pull out my old phone, open an incognito browser (even though I know incognito

doesn’t do much), and painstakingly retype one of the URLs Louise had sent.

I would read, pacing my breathing, my fingers trailing along my body.

make sure youre comfortable.

keep your feet warm.

wear socks if theyre cold

Louise would send me these sorts of messages throughout the evening.

I’d stare at the persistent gray lines on my wrist as

my other hand grew tired and eventually gave up.

The links Louise sent did help.

Sometimes I would feel something building, just like her stories described.

And I would wonder

if that was it—if I had done it.

But always the phoenix was still there, and never did this so-called sense of release course

through my body.

maybe you need to think of a real person.

someone you had a crush on before?

or maybe have one on now?

I thought of her long fingers tracing my body, her lips trailing down my stomach, her eyes glancing up, sly.

A majority of

the stories she sent took place in a hotel room.

So I imagined us in a hotel room, nestled in clean sheets, the heat turned

high so we would not need to wear our socks.

do you have a crush on anyone now?

yes , I managed to type, my breathing shallow.

do you?

you haven’t noticed?

Circular motions.

My typing was slow with one hand, my thoughts muddled for other reasons.

no not really.

you’re always cool and collected

maybe only because you make me feel so comfortable.

.

.

so like myself

I had begun to type, one letter at a time, when she beat me to another message.

are you touching yourself now?

I erased the sentence I had started.

Not even the idea of a machine parsing our conversation and trying to learn more about

us could have made me stop typing.

yes

k im gonna join you.

which story are you reading?

What was happening?

That was the only question I could think of as I read her text, half aware that I was supposed to reply.

I glanced at the other phone I had pushed to the side and read the title.

the hotel manager’s suite

ooh when she opens up the gift bag in the room and there’s fried chicken in there.

.

.

unff

She didn’t bring up the other unmentionables in the bag.

I picked up where I left off in the story, my mind hardly on it anymore.

There was only a seed of a thought, one planted when

she said she would join me.

mm, I needed this

For the first time, I was able to block out my childhood bedroom, the thought of my grandparents right downstairs.

I imagined

my hands not on my own body, but on hers instead, after a long day where she was tired or sad and this was what she needed,

what my hands, my body could provide for her.

I increased the pressure and varied the motion, speeding up.

are you close?

What was happening?

I wish I was with you right now.

id get that reforging right out of you no problem

It started off—and this is going to sound lame, but I’ll say it anyway—not so different from a coding high.

Then it kept building, like all the stories said it would, and suddenly it surpassed anything coding-related at all, and she was part of it too, her coaxing words, her teasing ways.

I could almost feel her next to me, smiling at me with that wide mouth, doing more with that mouth.

Wave after wave of pleasure.

I certainly had not felt this before, did not know there could be anything like it.

I dropped the phone and was gripping my sheets.

I could not clench my fist hard enough.

Eventually, my limbs relaxed, my mind slowed.

The stories often described a relaxation afterward, partners holding one another,

safe in each other’s arms.

I became aware of my bed again, my room.

Just when it felt like my mind was returning, when I thought

to check my arm for the phoenix, the room faded again.

My arm pulsed once.

But this time I was back with grandmother, who

was writing at grandfather’s table.

She wrote in Chinese, in the script I couldn’t read.

It didn’t matter, because I felt her words in a way that reading alone

would never have allowed, and the feeling transcended all languages—Chinese, English, emojis—an overwhelming love and pride,

and finally I could see the words she had written— let’s get ice cream —and I smiled and was pulled back into my room and curled into myself, hugging my arm close to my heart.

Eventually, I picked up my phone and typed carefully.

did you only say that to push me over the edge?

Her response was slow.

did it work?

I took a picture of my arm.

The dark etching was gone, though the pale lines were still there, if you really looked.

I swiped

between the before and after picture, the phoenix fading, then reappearing, over and over.

I sent her both images.

incredible

And a few seconds later, one more message:

can’t wait to help you with your next one

What was happening?

I still don’t know, still don’t understand what our relationship is exactly.

I thought rewriting the events

might help me figure it out.

But I am left more confused, and also now flushed, lightheaded, craving—not just her, that rush

of feeling, the intensity, the flash of pleasure followed by the surge of power from having grandmother’s words so close to

my heart.

I ran my hand over my new scars, a ghost compared to grandmother’s.

I thought back to the moment of Reforging.

There had been

a lot of other distracting thoughts at the time, but there had also been grandmother’s clear voice.

For a brief moment—how

to explain?

I felt like I really, truly, understood her.

Words are so difficult to parse, so imprecise.

I’m starting to think they’re a ridiculous form of communication.

Totally unlike

computers, which can understand one another perfectly via APIs and established network protocols.

But humans are so different

from one another, all with our own stories and interpretations.

Especially grandmother—the careful phrases she has adopted

to cross our language barrier, massaged to make sense across generations.

Even me and Louise, both of similar backgrounds

and age.

I constantly wonder how she will interpret my words, worry if they will make the impression I want.

And yet, when I Reforged, I felt close to truly understanding.

If the goal is to totally, completely know someone as they

want to be known, the way computers can know one another, Reforging is it.

Grandmother’s words were right there, as if lifted

from my own head.

And even though she had written the one sentence, somehow I felt all the hope she pinned on it, that she

pinned on me.

This is what EMbrS also strives for, to share totally and completely, forge a real connection.

But EMbrS is

a poor imitation of what I felt.

I went downstairs.

Grandfather was nodding off on the sofa, his chin drooped onto his chest.

Grandmother was next to him,

watching television.

She lowered the volume when she saw me.

“Let’s get ice cream,” I said.

And even though it was mid-November, and the meteorologists were threatening another snowy Boston winter, grandmother’s entire face lit up.

She shook grandfather awake, and we all pulled on our jackets and scarves and marched to the grocery store, grandmother’s arm looped through mine.

To understand somebody else so thoroughly, no matter how briefly—it truly is magic.