The Extent of the Damage
an excerpt

The earthquake was the most obvious reason for my return to the Valley, but the real reason was that on November 8, 2026, Siri told me that she couldn't possibly be in a relationship with me any longer. "I give up," she said, at the end of a long speech that covered such topics as my emotional immaturity, the list of personal rules she should have known better than to break by getting involved with me, and various pieces of advice she claimed to know I wouldn't follow. "I can't keep caring this much about what's wrong with you when you don't even care yourself. I'm just not being fair to myself to keep making myself go through this."

Siri left, and I proved several of her points by drinking the bottle of wine I'd opened for her when she arrived, which she hadn't touched before the evening was destroyed. About halfway through, I sent a voice message to our boss saying I wouldn't be at work the next day. When I'd downed the whole bottle, I sent a message to Siri that included several inexcusable remarks and concluded with, "I don't need your help anyway, so leave me the fuck alone."

I was seeing double by that point, but the alcohol dulled the pain somewhat. I staggered to bed, turned off all messaging, tracking, and alerts, and took enough painkillers that I would have called it a suicide attempt in a client, but knew from experience would only give me about fourteen hours of blissful unconsciousness.

As a result, I was still very deeply asleep at 10:48 the next morning and remained so in the following minutes when every feed filled with news of the earthquake and everyone else in Seattle was debating whether they had really felt a distant effect of the tremor or were only imagining it. I was still sound asleep more than an hour later, until finally Siri's voice repeating, "Nathaniel, are you there?" brought me back to a semblance of awareness.

She'd used, or misused, her professional credentials to open a channel directly into my apartment since she couldn't get through on my fon. "Nat?"

I grunted back at her and didn't even consider opening my eyes.

"Nat? Are you okay? I've been trying to reach you. Have you talked to your parents?"

"What the fuck, Siri?" I managed. "I thought you said you weren't taking responsibility for me anymore."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I still want to help you today. Did you hear from your parents?"

I had a couple hours of pharmaceutical sedation left in my system, and it didn't even occur to me that there might be something in her words that I needed to try to figure out. "No. Leave me alone."

"It's okay, Nat. A lot of communication channels have been interrupted, so no news isn't necessarily bad news." Later on, when I knew what was going on, I realized she had probably said the same thing to dozens of clients before me.

I opened my left eye, looked around at the daylight in my room, and decided that what she was saying still didn't make any sense. "What are you talking about?"

"You don't... You've been completely offline?"

"I've been completely unconscious. What's going on?"

"Vid me in so we can really talk," she said, like I was a client.

"No. Just tell me what you're talking about." I was starting to realize something important was happening and was struggling to sit up.

"Please, Nat. Vid me in. I want to talk to you face to face."

I just wanted to get to the end of the conversation so I could go back to sleep. I activated the screen by my bed, and Siri's face gazed at me with even more concern than usual. "Nathaniel, are you...?"

In the corner of the screen, I saw what she was seeing. The empty wine bottle and half a bottle of pills were spread across my bed covers. "No. Just tell me what you're trying to tell me." My head was throbbing, and I really wanted to swallow another pill, but not while Siri was watching.

"There was a major earthquake in the Bay Area this morning. 7.5 magnitude on the Hayward fault." She put up a graphic, and I squinted at it, trying to focus. It was a color-coded map, with a black line down the east side of the Bay surrounded by a thick swath of dark red, fading into lighter shades. San Jose was red.