The Unedited Guest

"Nobody took anything *out*," Aria said. "That's the marketing. They turned things down. Volume knobs, not amputations." She looked at the piano. "I was tuned away from despair. The package was called *Resilience.* My parents wept in the clinic when they bought it — happy tears, the brochure says. They didn't want me to hurt the way they had." "And do you?" Dev asked. "Hurt?" "I worry," she said carefully. "I grieve. I felt it when my grandmother died — for about a day. Then a floor came up under me, very gently, and held. It always holds." She turned her flawless eyes on him. "You played that funeral for a week, didn't you. The unedited ones always do. You fell all the way down." "It nearly broke me." "Yes," Aria said. "That's the part we don't have. We don't fall all the way down." She said it lightly, but her hands had gone still in her lap. "So we don't write the song that comes from the bottom either. I play everyone else's music perfectly. I have never once needed to make my own. There's nothing down there I had to climb back out of and turn into anything." Around them the Cohort laughed their warm, punctual laughter. Dev understood, finally, what the room was missing. Not joy — they had plenty. What it lacked was the strange productive ruin that comes from people who have been genuinely, dangerously sad and made something to survive it. "They optimized away the