## Chapter 385 — One-to-One

Saturday, 8 January 2028, reached half past one without anything impossible happening.

Kanno preferred it that way.

She arrived at flat 202 at 13:34, carrying her usual black bag and the phone on which Friday night's message to Ian still waited at the bottom of the direct thread. She had dressed much as she would for an ordinary Saturday in the city: dark trousers, boots, a charcoal knit beneath her plum coat. Nothing about the meeting required costume, and she had decided against choosing clothes according to what an omnipotent Englishman might think of them.

Thomas opened the door.

“You are twenty-six minutes early.”

“I know.”

He stepped aside. “I wasn't criticising.”

“You were measuring.”

“That is different.”

Kanno removed her shoes and looked past him into the flat.

Isha was at the dining table with tea and a book. The fine chain Ian had given her at Christmas was visible at the neckline of a pale blue top, the actual pendant hidden beneath it. She closed the book when Kanno entered but did not stand as though the visit had become ceremonial.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

Kanno hung her coat and put her bag beside the sofa.

The flexible-room door was closed.

She noticed it immediately, disliked noticing it immediately, and sat at the dining table with her back at an angle to it.

Thomas had prepared tea. Nothing else waited on the table except three cups and a small plate of rice crackers. Kanno took one.

“You have not made a pre-inter-reality lunch.”

“We ate.”

“Good.”

“I considered cake.”

Kanno looked at him.

Thomas lifted his cup. “Briefly.”

Isha's expression suggested the consideration had lasted longer than briefly, but she allowed his version to survive.

For ten minutes they talked about other things. Kanno had received a client correction at 17:52 on Friday containing the sentence *small final adjustment*, which had turned out to mean replacing an image across six pages. Isha's climbing centre had finally received preliminary information about the Coach 1 route, although still not enough for her to commit to a course. Thomas had spent Friday discovering that January arrivals continued to possess January problems even when a university calendar had recently restarted.

The ordinary conversation helped more than Kanno expected.

At 13:47 she checked her phone.

Her message from the previous evening remained clear on the screen.

`Kanno: I am ready to propose tomorrow, Saturday 8 January, at 14:00.`

Below it were the conditions she had chosen: one-to-one, neutral construct, Thomas and Isha staying in 202 because she wanted them there, the flexible-room door as entrance and exit, ordinary Earth time, no changes to her, no use of private information, no third person, no demonstrations unless she asked, immediate exit on request and no expectation that she explain her friends.

Kanno read the whole thing once.

She set the phone down.

Thomas did not ask whether she was nervous.

That was sensible, because she was, and answering him would not improve it.

At 13:52, Isha stood and went into the kitchen for more hot water. The movement briefly put the flexible-room door directly in Kanno's line of sight.

It remained a door.

Kanno watched Isha refill the pot.

“You don't have to stay in this room,” she said.

Isha looked towards her.

“While I'm gone. You and Thomas can do something else.”

Thomas, from the other side of the table, said, “I had assumed we would.”

Kanno turned towards him.

He looked mildly concerned by the speed of her reaction. “Not leave the flat. I mean I don't intend to sit outside the flexible room.”

“Good.”

Isha brought the pot back. “We might watch something.”

“That is acceptable.”

Thomas glanced between them. “Thank you for approving our leisure.”

Kanno ignored him.

At 13:55 she picked up her phone again.

The meeting had become easier to imagine after she decided that Thomas and Isha would not spend it functioning as an audience on the other side of the wall. They were present because she had asked them to be present. If she came back after twenty minutes, they would be there. If she came back after two hours, they would also be there, although Thomas would probably have started cooking something.

What happened between those moments belonged to her.

Kanno opened the direct thread.

“I am going to tell him we are here.”

Isha nodded. “All right.”

Thomas said nothing. His cup had become unexpectedly interesting.

Kanno typed.

`Kanno: I am in flat 202 with Thomas and Isha. My conditions from yesterday remain as written. They are both still willing to remain here while I meet you.`

She paused.

The next sentence was harder, although it contained fewer words.

`I am ready to discuss the final details now.`

Kanno read both messages, then sent them.

The flexible-room door stayed closed.

She placed the phone on the table in front of her and waited.

The reply arrived less than a minute later.

`ian: Hello Kanno, it's nice to hear from you. Whatever you want I'm sure is fine. I have a few points myself, but please, after you.`

Kanno read it once.

Thomas had looked towards her phone when it sounded, then deliberately looked away. Isha did not bother pretending she had not noticed; she simply waited.

“He says yes in principle,” Kanno said. “He wants me to go first.”

Thomas nodded.

Kanno picked up the phone.

Some of the details were already written in Friday's message. Repeating them would turn clarity into ritual. She wanted to settle the parts still open.

`Kanno: Saturday 8 January, 14:00, as proposed. Ordinary Earth time continues normally and concurrently here while I am with you.`

She paused over the setting.

The café Thomas and Isha had described was available as an obvious answer, but Kanno did not want to occupy the remains of their meeting merely because it had worked. Nor did she want Ian constructing a perfect approximation of somewhere from her own life. A favourite café, her office or a room designed from her photographs would arrive already carrying an interpretation of her.

She typed again.

`I would like an ordinary, quiet café or similar place with a table and chairs. No other people. It does not need to be somewhere real, and I would prefer you not to design it around things you know I like. Neutral is more useful to me than impressive.`

Isha leaned far enough to read when Kanno turned the phone slightly towards her.

“That sounds like you.”

“It is intended to.”

Thomas looked at the wording. “No objections.”

Kanno continued.

`I will enter through the flexible-room door when I explicitly say I am ready. The same door should remain my exit and return me directly here. Thomas and Isha will not enter unless I explicitly ask them to.`

The next part took longer.

Kanno had already said no demonstrations. She did not want to begin the meeting by turning that into a test. At the same time, Ian had shown Thomas and Isha an entire world because they had asked what his omnipotence could do. Kanno's interest was not zero. It was simply not why she was going.

`I do not want you to demonstrate your powers unless I ask. Please don't surprise me with changes of setting, objects appearing, the Earth in miniature, the fantasy world, or anything similar. If I become curious about something, I will ask.`

Thomas's mouth moved slightly at *Earth in miniature*.

Kanno noticed. “Do not.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“You were going to.”

“I was thinking that the planet precedent is now unusually specific.”

“That is why it is there.”

Isha drank her tea.

Kanno looked back at the phone.

One remaining point mattered precisely because Ian had framed the meeting as one-to-one. Kanno did not want that to become an assumption of confidentiality on behalf of either side.

`I may tell Thomas and Isha about our conversation afterward where it concerns me or them. I will not promise you secrecy in advance. Equally, I will not report every personal thing you tell me merely because they are my friends. If there is something you want kept between us, ask me at the time and I will decide whether I agree.`

That one she showed to both of them before sending.

Isha read it carefully.

“Yes.”

Thomas nodded. “Agreed.”

Kanno added a final line.

`I think that covers what I need before entering. What are your points?`

Her thumb hovered over the screen.

Then she sent the whole sequence.

For several seconds no one spoke.

Thomas eventually reached for a rice cracker and broke it in half before eating either piece.

Kanno looked at him. “Why did you break it?”

He stopped.

“I don't know.”

Isha's smile appeared behind her cup.

Kanno turned her phone face-up on the table.

The flexible-room door remained closed.

She waited for Ian's answer.

Ian's reply filled most of Kanno's screen.

`ian: All of that is fine. You may tell Thomas, or Isha, or both, or neither anything you want. I have no secrets from them, but you may want to keep things private. I will respect that as best I can. We can go to the same English café that I met Thomas & Isha in? I have been informed the scones are nice, I will have them ready. They are optional. I am unsure if British tea is offensive to someone from Japan, so I won't make that. Everything else is fine. For me, in my real world, it is Sunday evening. I have work tomorrow. It has only been a few hours since the last time i was in the café. This weekend (for me) has been all of it -- the Elves, Thomas' family, the train, the café. I am emotional drained.. so if anything is too much I may ask for you to ask me in future. But, I really do want to talk to you as well, so please, I hope that's OK. You can repeat this to them, or show them. Enter when ready, or tell me what to change.`

Kanno read it again from the sentence about Sunday evening.

Thomas and Isha had lived weeks around events Ian apparently still experienced as part of one weekend. Kanno had known the timelines did not correspond normally. Seeing the accumulation written that plainly made his behaviour during the café meeting easier to place without making any of it less strange.

She turned the phone towards them.

“He says I can show you.”

Thomas read in silence. Isha leaned closer beside him.

When Thomas reached the line about tea, his mouth moved.

Kanno saw it.

“I know.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“He believes British tea may be offensive to Japanese people.”

Isha read that section again. “Perhaps he is trying to avoid another inter-reality political mistake.”

Thomas looked at her.

“The chocolate precedent?”

“Yes.”

Kanno took her phone back. “I am not offended by tea.”

“That seems worth clarifying,” Thomas said.

“No, it doesn't.”

She typed anyway.

`Kanno: The same café is fine. Scones are also fine. British tea is not offensive to me. You do not need to prepare tea before I arrive.`

She considered Ian's other point longer.

`I understand that you are tired. If you need to stop, pause, or defer a question, say so. I am not expecting you to perform omnipotence or emotional disclosure for me.`

That sounded right.

She added:

`Your description of your weekend is useful context. I have shown Thomas and Isha this message because you explicitly said I could.`

Then she stopped.

The meeting could still remain an exchange of increasingly careful preparatory messages until four in the afternoon. Kanno recognised the possibility as exactly the sort of procedure which ceased being useful once all relevant uncertainty had been removed.

She looked at Thomas and Isha.

“Anything you think I have missed?”

Thomas shook his head first.

“No.”

Isha's answer followed. “Nothing from me.”

Kanno picked up her black bag.

Thomas looked at it. “Are you taking the whole thing?”

“Yes.”

“What is in it?”

“My things.”

He accepted the answer.

Kanno checked her phone battery. She had more than enough. Her wallet was in the bag, not because money should function inside Ian's construct but because deliberately leaving it behind would make the meeting feel more artificial than carrying it. She had tissues, keys, a small notebook, two pens, hand cream, a charging cable and several work papers she had forgotten to remove on Friday.

No weapon. No special equipment. No printed copy of her conditions.

She stood.

The movement changed the room.

Thomas and Isha remained seated rather than following her towards the flexible room. Kanno appreciated that enough not to mention it.

She sent the messages she had drafted, waited until they showed as delivered, then added one more.

`Kanno: Nothing needs changing. I am ready now.`

For a few seconds, nothing happened.

Then the flexible-room door became warm around its edges.

There was no flash and no sound beyond the ordinary small movement of the building. When Kanno opened it, the storage room was no longer beyond.

The café was.

She recognised it from Thomas and Isha's description before she had fully taken in the room: dark wooden floor, close tables, mismatched chairs, plants and shelves, a counter with no staff behind it. Warm light. Cake display. The same constructed ordinariness which had held while a world spun above Ian's hand.

One table had two chairs.

A plate of fruit scones waited there, split and prepared with butter, strawberry jam and clotted cream.

No tea.

Kanno looked back.

Thomas had stayed beside the dining table.

Isha stood now, but only because she had moved her own chair back. Neither approached.

Kanno raised her phone.

“I'll message when I'm inside.”

Thomas nodded. “We'll be here.”

Isha added, “Have your meeting.”

Kanno looked at them for another second.

Then she stepped through.

The floor beneath her boot changed from flat 202 to dark café boards without any sensation of movement between them.

She turned immediately.

Behind her, the open café door showed the flexible room and, beyond it, part of the familiar flat. Thomas and Isha remained where she had left them.

Kanno sent:

`I am inside. Connection works.`

Isha's reply arrived almost immediately.

`Received. We are here.`

Thomas followed.

`Have a good meeting. We are going to stop looking at the door now.`

Kanno looked through the opening.

Thomas was, in fact, still looking at the door.

She typed:

`Thomas.`

His reply came after several seconds.

`Stopping now.`

Kanno almost smiled.

Then she closed the café door.

The view of flat 202 disappeared behind glass and wood.

She turned towards the table, the scones, and Ian waiting on the other side of the room.

Ian waved.

The movement was more hesitant than the one Thomas and Isha had described. Then he attempted a bow, stopped somewhere between greeting and uncertainty, and straightened with the expression of someone who had realised too late that bow depth contained information he did not possess.

Kanno watched the entire attempt.

She could have rescued him before it finished.

She chose not to.

“Hi Kanno, please sit. It's nice to meet you.”

He spoke English.

Kanno understood every word.

The fact registered almost separately from the meaning. Ian's mouth and voice were unmistakably producing a language Kanno did not speak well enough to sustain this conversation, yet there was no translation delay and no substituted Japanese voice. She heard English and understood it as naturally as if the meaning had arrived beside the sound.

Kanno answered in Japanese.

“Hello, Ian. It is nice to meet you too.”

Ian understood her.

She looked at him for a second longer before pulling out the chair opposite.

“I assume the language is the construct.”

It was not accusation or approval. Just the first observed impossible thing.

She put her bag beside her chair and sat.

Up close, Ian was easier to reconcile with the photographs and descriptions Thomas and Isha had given her. The beard, the mostly bald head, the solid build, the black clothes. Nothing in his appearance supplied a visual explanation for the power involved in making this room or translating two languages without either speaker changing what they said.

Kanno glanced at the plate between them.

The scones were indeed present.

“You prepared six halves again.”

She looked back at him.

“Thomas and Isha reported the quantity.”

A small pause.

“And you do not need to bow again. Your first attempt was sufficient evidence of goodwill.”

Her expression remained composed, though there was the beginning of amusement around her eyes.

Kanno rested her hands loosely on the table.

“This is strange.”

She looked around once: counter, plants, empty chairs, the café door behind her.

Then back to Ian.

“But less strange than I expected.”

She allowed another moment to pass.

“I think you should say whatever you wanted to say when you asked for your own points before we entered. Then I have questions.”

“I covered that with the explanation about my weekend and tiredness, and the compression of space and time into one weekend before work. I probably wasn't very clear, sorry. That is not a metaphysical language translation issue.”

Kanno understood the correction.

“Then I misunderstood what you meant by your points.”

She did not apologise for more than that. Ian had explained his exhaustion and the compressed sequence of his weekend before she entered; she had treated the explanation as context and assumed another set of conditions remained behind it.

“That was clear enough. I thought there was something else.”

A slight pause followed.

“And no, I was not blaming the language translation.”

The corner of her mouth moved.

“That part is obviously metaphysical.”

She looked down at the table. Six scone halves remained arranged between them, exactly as advertised. Kanno took one, partly because she wanted it and partly because Thomas and Isha had discussed the scones enough that refusing them had begun to feel artificially significant.

She examined it briefly before taking a bite.

Ian had been correctly informed.

“The scone is good.”

That exhausted the need to discuss food.

Kanno put it down on her small plate and looked across at him again.

Without Thomas and Isha beside her, the imbalance in familiarity was more noticeable. Ian knew things about their lives which Kanno had learned slowly, incompletely and because her friends had chosen to tell her. With Kanno herself, his advantage was smaller but still strange. He had seen scenes in which she appeared before she knew he existed. He knew enough about her photographs to send her the wall now hanging beside her desk.

Kanno, by contrast, knew Ian mostly through consequences.

The man at the table was the first opportunity to alter that.

“I have a simple question first.”

She rested one hand beside her plate.

“Why did you want to meet me?”

The question was not suspicious, though neither was it casual.

“You wanted to meet Thomas and Isha for obvious reasons. You have been connected to them for a long time, however unevenly. You met their families because those families had their own questions for you.”

Kanno glanced once towards the café door and then back.

“With me, you knew me before I knew you existed, but I was not central to the thing you were making. I became involved because Thomas and Isha trusted me.”

She stopped there rather than supplying Ian with possible flattering answers.

“So why me?”

“I shall attempt to do this from memory, as you know, this is not a reliable source.”

Ian paused.

“The reality generator had you appear first when Thomas and Isha first ... returned .. to here. There were several people, i think. For some reason, I forgot why, or when, you the became.. ”

He hesitated again.

“excuse the term.. a side character.”

Kanno's expression changed slightly, but she let him continue.

“I found you quite interesting, and your first meeting with Isha was ... nice. So I selected options presented to read more where you were involved. Not exclusively, but I was interested in you, as well as the dynamic with the three of you.”

Another pause.

“At some point you became a main character, sometimes you get bits of chapters just about you. The anime watching was hilarious, I don't remember prompting much of it at all”

“So, I guess I wanted to learn a bit more about you.. and as i ”—Ian moved his hands vaguely through the air—“reverse broke the 4th wall... i thought i'd do it in person. or this person, not my real person.”

He stopped.

Kanno waited long enough to make sure he had actually finished.

“That was a lot of answer.”

There was no criticism in it. She took another bite of scone while considering what he had said.

“I dislike ‘side character’ less than I expected.”

Ian looked at her.

“It is an ugly way to describe a person. It is also apparently an accurate way to describe how you were thinking about the text at the time.”

She brushed a loose crumb from one fingertip.

“What interests me more is that you did not decide I should become important and then make me important.”

Kanno's eyes stayed on him.

“You were offered more of me by the machine, chose some of those directions because you were interested, and then at some point I had enough independent material that chapters happened without Thomas and Isha present.”

She stopped before the observation became a theory about her own existence.

“That is strange. But it is different from you designing me for a purpose.”

A faint smile appeared.

“And I am pleased the anime was entertaining.”

The smile faded into something more thoughtful.

“I remember that evening as three people watching something very embarrassing and arguing about it. Knowing someone outside the room was also finding it funny does not change the evening much.”

Kanno picked up the scone again, then set it down without eating.

“You said you wanted to learn more about me.”

She tilted her head slightly.

“That is reasonable. I wanted to meet you for almost the opposite reason.”

Ian waited.

“I know a great deal about what you have done. Much less about you when you are not doing something to Thomas and Isha's reality.”

Her gaze moved briefly to his clothes, the table, the untouched café around them, then returned to his face.

“So I think my next question is simpler than the first.”

Kanno folded her hands loosely in front of her.

“Who are you when you are not Ian outside the story?”

“I work in IT, for a medium sized company here in England. I've just started there, having left a much bigger one. I have a wife, a house, two daughters, a wall in my study. I have become a little addicted in recent weeks to .. whatever this is .. ”

Ian continued before Kanno interrupted.

“I am still the same Ian i think, i just lack omnipotence. All of the other character flaws remain. Although I haven't flirted with any Elven princesses in Yorkshire yet.”

Kanno's mouth moved slightly.

“I tried writing a story once, in the normal way, it was interesting but not emotional. I do watch a lot of anime. Although 2 years ago i'd not watched any. Watching Isekai (i can't pronounce it) started me down this path”

“I go for walks, do lower back exercises twice a day to prevent system failure, occasionally programme but AI has ruined it for me a bit, i like making people laugh, i'm insecure.”

He finished with the part which seemed least in need of qualification.

“I really like scones.”

Kanno looked at the plate between them.

“That last one has substantial supporting evidence.”

She took another bite of hers.

For a few moments she did not ask anything. Ian's answer was mundane in a way she had wanted and had not quite expected to receive so completely. IT. A recent job change. Wife. Two daughters. A house whose former exterior wall had survived as the background to his study. Exercise prescribed by an unreliable lower back. Programming becoming less satisfying because machines could now perform too much of it. A recent enthusiasm for anime.

Nothing there explained omnipotence.

That was useful.

“You sound more normal than your effect on my life suggests.”

Kanno said it without insult. Ian had described himself as essentially the same person in either reality, minus the impossible capability. She could believe that more easily after meeting him.

“And I prefer that answer to something about being an author.”

She rested her forearms lightly on the table.

“Thomas described you as a person who has access to an authorial force rather than an authorial force shaped like a person. I think I understand what he meant now.”

Her eyes moved briefly towards Ian's clothes, then to the empty café around them.

“You have work tomorrow. You have children. Your back requires maintenance. You apparently became interested in anime unusually late and then overcorrected.”

A small pause.

“And you are insecure while also being able to remove the room from around a table.”

Kanno shook her head once.

“That combination is not reassuring, exactly. It is comprehensible.”

She took the rest of the scone half and ate it before continuing.

The word *addicted* had stayed with her.

Not because Ian had used it clinically; he plainly had not. But he had described the whole sequence of his weekend as emotionally exhausting and still chosen to sit here for another meeting. He had also described recent weeks in his own reality as being increasingly occupied by whatever connection existed between him and the people inside the story.

Kanno looked at him.

“You said you have become a little addicted to this.”

She did not put a warning into her voice. He was an adult she had met less than half an hour ago, not a client missing deadlines or a friend asking her to intervene.

“I can understand why it would be compelling. People you thought were generated characters answer you. You can meet them. You can see a world you previously experienced as text. You can do things here that you cannot do in Yorkshire.”

Her gaze stayed steady.

“But you also have a wife, two daughters, a new job, and a life where you are not omnipotent.”

Kanno paused.

“I am not asking because I think I should manage that balance for you.”

That distinction mattered enough to state once.

“I am asking because I want to know how separate these two versions of your life are.”

She glanced towards the café door, then back.

“Does your wife know that Thomas, Isha, their families and I have become real people to you in this way?”

A beat passed before she added the narrower question she actually wanted answered.

“Does anyone in your real life know what this has become?”

“Sort of, I go through various mediums of escape, this is just the latest I guess. My daughters are adults, they are not neglected. I do not expect you or them to mother me, do not worry. The real connection is quite recent, I'm not sure i'd know how to explain it. I obsess over things sometimes, so the intensity might die down, and i revert to a passive reader more. A few friends know I have become a bit inception or metaphysical - i think i said my protagonist is telling me off, or something flippant like that.”

Kanno listened without interrupting.

“I wasn't worried that your daughters were being neglected.”

The correction was mild.

“And I was not offering to mother you.”

A trace of amusement touched her expression.

“I am younger than both of those sentences made me feel.”

She picked up another scone half, but only held it while she considered the rest.

Ian's answer left a distinction she recognised from other parts of his relationship with Thomas and Isha. People in his ordinary life knew something existed. They did not know the version in which Thomas could answer back, Isha could refuse him, and Kanno herself could sit in an English café constructed outside either of their inhabited worlds.

“That sounds lonely in a specific way,” she said.

Ian looked at her.

Kanno qualified it before the sentence could become sympathy he had not asked for.

“Not necessarily unhappy. Just difficult to describe accurately. If you tell a friend that your protagonist tells you off, they hear a joke about becoming too involved in writing.”

She glanced around the café.

“They do not hear this.”

The room remained politely ordinary around them.

Kanno took a bite of scone.

“I also don't think intensity automatically means something is wrong. People become absorbed in work, games, photography, relationships, hobbies. Sometimes it lasts. Sometimes it doesn't.”

Her eyes returned to him.

“What matters to me is that if your interest becomes less intense, you do not interpret that as meaning we became less real.”

She let the wording settle.

“That may sound self-interested.”

A slight pause.

“It is.”

Kanno set the remaining scone down.

“You have used the word *real* several times today. Real world. Real you. Real connection.”

She folded her hands again.

“So I want to ask directly.”

Her expression was calm, curious rather than confrontational.

“Do you believe I am a real person?”

She did not add *as real as you*. The question did not need help.

“And if the answer is yes, when did you start believing that?”

“I do not know. Part of me thinks not, part of me is hopeful you are, part of me doesn't know if *i* am a real person. A text-only medium leaves questions. What you are seeing is not me, so you don't know if I am real either. I guess.”

Ian paused.

“It was a bit easier to give Isha an entire world, you are more taxing”

He smiled, and Kanno understood that the sentence was not intended as criticism.

She considered it anyway.

“I am pleased to be more demanding than a planet.”

The answer was dry enough that the smile reached her too, briefly.

Then she looked down at her hands.

Ian had not given her the reassuring answer. Kanno found that she preferred it.

A confident declaration that she was certainly real would have been emotionally convenient and evidentially weak. Ian had already shown enough uncertainty about the mechanism that sudden philosophical certainty would have made him less credible rather than more.

“You are right about one thing,” she said. “I cannot prove that you are what you say you are either.”

She glanced around the café.

“This could be generated for me. You could be generated. Perhaps flat 202 is generated. Perhaps my office is. If I continue far enough, the question becomes useless.”

Kanno picked up the remaining piece of scone and turned it once between her fingers.

“I know that I experience myself as real. I know Thomas and Isha behave as people whose decisions surprise me, inconvenience me and occasionally improve my life. I know you seem capable of being surprised by us.”

She ate the last bite and brushed the crumbs from her fingertips.

“That is enough for most practical purposes.”

The café remained warm and quiet around them. No staff appeared. No world rotated above Ian's hand. Kanno found that the absence of demonstration made it easier to think about the stranger claim: somewhere beyond this room was another Ian, typing rather than speaking, perhaps looking at words on a screen which represented Kanno sitting here.

She looked across at him.

“I don't need you to decide today whether I am metaphysically real.”

Her expression sharpened slightly.

“I do care which possibility you behave as though is true.”

She let that distinction settle before continuing.

“If I am only text, then treating me carefully costs you very little. If I am a person, treating me as only text can cost me quite a lot.”

A small pause.

“So uncertainty should probably make you more careful, not less.”

Kanno leaned back slightly in her chair.

“That may also apply to you. I do not know whether the man I am speaking to is a projection, an exact version of someone in England, or a character generated from what he types. But I have chosen to speak to you as if there is a person on the other side.”

Her gaze stayed on Ian.

“Because if I am wrong, very little is lost.”

The thought needed no larger conclusion.

Kanno looked towards the plate and discovered she had eaten two scone halves during the conversation.

“I understand why Isha's world was easier.”

A faint smile returned.

“It does not ask follow-up questions.”

Then she became serious again.

“So I think that is the answer I want from you more than *real* or *not real*.”

She folded her hands loosely on the table.

“When you interact with Thomas, Isha, their families, or me, what assumption do you choose to act on?”

“A failure to balance my desire for connection, for an interesting story, to shape and build a world, for you to be happy... these conflict and my emotional state or simple lack of consideration sometimes make one ruin the others. I would say I have increasingly leaned in to treating you all more like real people as time has gone on. Not perfectly, as there is a weight of evidence for that.”

Kanno let the answer settle.

The phrase *weight of evidence* almost made her smile. It was an unusually restrained description of deaths, hospital admissions, impossible gifts and several arguments about permission.

“Yes,” she said. “There is.”

She did not list it. Ian knew the evidence and had spent much of his meeting with Thomas and Isha looking directly at some of it.

What interested Kanno was the conflict he had named before the admission: connection, story, world-building, happiness. Four desires which could point in the same direction until suddenly they did not.

“You wanting us to be happy is not necessarily safer than you wanting an interesting story.”

Ian looked at her.

Kanno rested one forearm on the table.

“If you decide what should make someone happy, you can interfere quite severely while believing you are being kind. Thomas and Isha's Earth life is an obvious example. You wanted something good for them. They like the result. The route still included killing them.”

Her tone remained matter-of-fact.

“I think treating people as real means accepting that their preferred life might be less satisfying to watch.”

A brief silence followed.

Kanno glanced at the abandoned scones and then back to him.

“This may be where I differ from Thomas and Isha. They have to ask what you did to their lives. I am interested in what you will do next.”

She leaned back slightly.

“You now have direct contact with people who can tell you no. That is new.”

The statement carried more curiosity than warning.

“So suppose the choice becomes very clear.”

Kanno held Ian's gaze.

“Suppose Thomas and Isha choose something ordinary, safe and happy which makes the story less interesting to you. Suppose I become less interesting too. No dramatic problem, no hidden unhappiness that needs fixing. We simply live our lives and give you less to read.”

She paused there.

“What do you think you would do?”

“i might pay less attention to it. i do not know what happens to your perception of time or reality progressing. But I also like the 'boring' slice-of-life, i moved past demons.”

Ian pondered for a moment.

“I really don't want that to sound like a threat.”

Kanno's expression tightened, though not in alarm.

“It did a little.”

She let him absorb that before continuing.

“Not because I think you meant, *be interesting or I will punish you.* I don't think that is what you said.”

Her fingers rested against the edge of the small plate. The uncertainty lay elsewhere.

“You said you might pay less attention, and then said you don't know what happens to our perception of time or reality progressing.”

The café had become very quiet around the sentence.

Kanno looked towards the empty counter and then back at Ian. Until now, his attention had mostly been discussed as a problem of interference: too much interest, too much shaping, too much temptation to make events happen because he wanted to see what followed.

The possibility of absence had a different shape.

“I don't mind you paying less attention,” she said. “In some ways that sounds healthy.”

A slight pause.

“I also don't mind becoming boring.”

The corner of her mouth moved.

“I would prefer not to develop demons merely to retain readership.”

Then the humour passed.

“What I care about is whether your attention is required for us to continue.”

She leaned back slightly.

“From my side, I have days you are not involved in. I go to work. I take photographs. Clients send bad corrections. I meet Thomas and Isha. I sleep. Those days feel continuous to me.”

That was observed experience. Kanno did not turn it into evidence for more than it could support.

“But I don't know what you see.”

Ian had described selecting options, receiving chapters, sometimes encountering sections about her without deliberately prompting much of them. That suggested the machine could present life he had not specifically chosen. It did not establish what happened when he was not looking at all.

Kanno studied him for a moment.

“If you stopped reading for a month in your world, I don't know whether I would experience a month, a year, five minutes, or nothing until you returned.”

She said it plainly. The idea was disturbing enough without performance.

“That uncertainty is not your fault merely because you don't know the answer.”

Her eyes stayed on his.

“But I think it changes what *paying less attention* means.”

Kanno reached for another scone half and stopped before taking it, apparently deciding she had eaten enough for the moment.

“And for clarity: if Thomas and Isha spend the next fifty years working, cooking, arguing about paperwork, doing sport and getting older together, I think that would be a successful outcome.”

A faint smile returned.

“If the story becomes less interesting because nobody is dying, I am comfortable with the loss.”

She looked at Ian's face.

“You said you moved past demons. Good.”

The word carried no congratulations, only approval of a direction already chosen.

“What I would like to know is whether you can also move past needing to *shape* something whenever you are paying attention.”

Kanno paused, reconsidered, and altered the question before it became broader than she intended.

“No. That is not quite fair. You are still participating. Thomas and Isha have allowed some of that. I agreed to come into a room you created.”

Her gaze moved briefly across the café table between them.

“So let me ask something more specific.”

Kanno folded her hands.

“Have you ever deliberately left us alone?”

She watched Ian carefully.

“Not become distracted. Not stop reading because you were busy. I mean noticed that you could intervene, decided that nothing needed you, and deliberately allowed reality to continue without asking the machine to make anything happen.”

A beat.

“And if you have, what happened from your side?”

“Yes. For me, time progressed, when I returned to the next set of options, nothing hand moved on.”

Ian paused.

“However, that just means that time is different, it doesn't negate reality. Maybe *my* reality pauses - how would i know?”

Kanno was quiet for a moment.

“That is annoyingly reasonable.”

She looked past him towards the empty café counter, thinking through the distinction. From Ian's perspective, he could leave the story for some amount of his own time and return to find no corresponding interval waiting for him. That established an observable relationship between the two experiences. It did not establish which reality had stopped, whether either had stopped, or whether the word *stopped* was useful at all.

“You leave. Your clocks advance. You come back and receive the next point from which you can observe us.”

“We experience continuity when there is continuity to experience. Neither side gets to stand outside both clocks and check which one is behaving correctly.”

Kanno gave a small shake of her head.

“I dislike questions where the evidence becomes symmetrical.”

She reached for another scone half after all, pulled off a small piece and ate it.

The answer also removed one concern she had not wanted to exaggerate. Ian had deliberately stepped away before. Nothing catastrophic had happened from his perspective. No indication had appeared that Thomas, Isha or anyone else suffered because he went for a walk, worked, slept or simply did something unrelated to them.

That was useful without proving more than it proved.

“So paying less attention is not inherently a threat,” she said. “It may simply mean that less of your time corresponds to whatever happens here.”

Her gaze returned to him.

“And perhaps less of our time corresponds to yours. Your whole impossible weekend took weeks for Thomas and Isha.”

Kanno considered Ian's suggestion that his own reality might pause.

“If your world stops whenever you type to us, I hope your employer never discovers the productivity implications.”

A faint smile crossed her face and disappeared.

Then she returned to the question underneath it.

“I think what I wanted to know was whether you had ever demonstrated to yourself that you can leave something alone.”

She took another small piece of scone.

“You have.”

The conclusion was deliberately modest.

“That makes me more comfortable than if you had told me you are always watching.”

Kanno rested her hands around the edge of the plate.

“There is another thing in what you said that I think matters.”

Ian waited.

“You don't know.”

She said it without criticism.

“You don't know whether we continue when you are not reading. You don't know whether your reality pauses while you interact with us. You don't know exactly what the machine does between your instructions and our experience. You don't know whether I am real in the same sense you are.”

Her eyes stayed on him.

“And yet you have access to enormous power inside that uncertainty.”

That, more than omnipotence itself, seemed to Kanno to describe the dangerous part.

“I think I trust you more when you say *I don't know* than when you try to fill the gap.”

She paused.

“Can you tolerate that?”

Ian's expression gave her reason to narrow the question.

“I don't mean intellectually. You obviously can say the words.”

Kanno leaned forward slightly.

“I mean when there is something about us you badly want to know, or fix, or see.”

A beat passed.

“Can you leave the answer unknown?”

“If I say: 'I don't know' will i end up with scone on my face?”

Kanno looked down at the half-scone in her hand.

Then back at Ian.

“No.”

A beat passed.

“I like the scones.”

The corner of her mouth moved.

“And throwing food at you would be a surprisingly poor response to you admitting uncertainty.”

She put the scone back on her plate, removing the available evidence.

“I also notice that you answered a difficult question with a joke.”

There was no accusation in it. Kanno had already seen enough of Ian to recognise the pattern.

“That is allowed.”

She took a drink from the tea she had eventually accepted once it became clear that British tea involved no diplomatic consequences.

“But the answer can still be ‘I don't know.’”

Kanno considered the question she had asked him. Whether he could tolerate leaving something unknown when curiosity, affection or the desire to fix it became strong enough.

Perhaps there was no honest prediction available.

“I suppose I am asking you to know how you will behave in a situation that has not happened yet.”

She inclined her head slightly.

“That is unfair.”

Kanno picked up the scone again.

“So I will accept something less ambitious.”

She looked directly at him.

“When you notice that urge—to know something about us, fix something, make something happen—can you try to recognise it before acting?”

A small pause.

“And if the answer to that is also ‘I don't know,’ I will still not throw the scone.”

“if you were to say something you forbade me to do, something serious, i would hope i didn't then do it. if the machine generated something terrible, like you were to be hit by a car -- i would intervene. it's difficult to say. i am but a man.”

Kanno was still for a moment.

Then she nodded.

“I think I would intervene too.”

Ian looked slightly surprised.

“If I saw you about to walk in front of a car, I would pull you back. I would not stand there thinking that respecting your autonomy required allowing the car to hit you.”

She picked up her tea. It had cooled enough to drink comfortably.

“So I am not going to give you a rule saying you must watch me die if you can prevent it.”

That sentence felt stranger in an English café than Kanno wanted it to. She drank before continuing.

“The problem is what *intervene* means when you say it.”

For Kanno, intervention meant a hand on someone's coat, a shout, an emergency call, perhaps accepting that a stranger would be angry with her for several seconds while remaining alive. Ian had described a mechanism which could apparently do substantially more.

“If the machine tells you I am about to be hit by a car, and you can send me a warning, send the warning. If you can move the car half a metre and nobody is harmed, I am unlikely to complain.”

Her eyes stayed on him.

“If your solution is to change my memories so I become frightened of roads, arrange that I never leave home, make me love someone who drives me everywhere, or rewrite my life so the dangerous journey never existed, then you have solved a car problem by creating several other problems.”

A faint movement touched Ian's expression.

Kanno set down her cup.

“I don't think we can specify every emergency in advance. That would become ridiculous even by our current standards.”

She glanced at the scones.

“We would need more paper.”

The humour passed without altering the point.

“What I would want is the smallest intervention that deals with the actual danger, and as much of my choice left intact as the emergency allows.”

Kanno rested her hands on the table again.

“And if I explicitly forbid something serious—altering my memories, for example—then preventing a car accident does not give you permission to do the forbidden thing merely because it would be convenient.”

She paused and considered whether she was becoming exactly as procedural as she had intended not to be.

Perhaps. But this part mattered.

“As for ‘I am but a man’...”

Her expression softened by a fraction.

“Yes.”

She looked at Ian rather than at the impossible room around him.

“That is increasingly what I think.”

It was not dismissal. If anything, the opposite.

“You have access to something enormous. You are still tired, insecure, distractible, sometimes impulsive, sometimes kind, and apparently unable to pronounce the genre that caused all of this.”

A small smile appeared.

“That makes rules more important, not less.”

Kanno reached for another scone half, reconsidered the quantity she had already eaten, and instead broke off a small piece.

“But I don't expect perfect decisions from you. I don't make perfect decisions either.”

She ate the piece.

“I think I want you to try to preserve the person while fixing the emergency.”

Kanno looked across the table.

“Could you do that?”

She let the question narrow naturally.

“If something genuinely terrible appeared in the machine tomorrow, could you try the least invasive thing first rather than immediately rewriting the situation until it becomes safe?”

“Yes, I have not - to the best of my knowledge - 'edited' someone's memory. I have nudged things, sometimes more than others. And perhaps the machine has made future thought of someone be influenced by what i say. But I haven't gone back in time and changed how people feel. It is possible i suppose. The nearest I have done is when it got a load of dates wrong which meant time had become non-linear. I felt that needed resolving via a 'retcon'. Time is a recurring thing it gets confused by. But, i haven't gone back and said "no no Isha really wants to sleep with Ian"”

Ian blushed.

“That maybe wasn't the best example.”

Kanno looked at him for several seconds.

“No.”

She took a drink of tea.

“It was not.”

The silence lasted just long enough for the embarrassment to remain his rather than becoming something she needed to rescue him from.

Then the corner of her mouth moved.

“It was, however, extremely clear.”

She set the cup down.

Kanno was less interested in the sexual example than in the distinction around it. A broken sequence of dates repaired so that Tuesday once again followed Monday belonged to a different category from revising what somebody remembered, wanted or had chosen. Ian had called both kinds of action possible in principle, but only one something he believed he had actually done.

“So the nearest example you remember is repairing continuity when the machine had made the chronology internally impossible.”

She did not use *retcon* as though it explained more than Ian had already claimed.

“That can still matter. If changing the dates also changed where somebody was, what they could have known or which event happened first, then it could alter consequences.”

Her gaze stayed on him.

“But it is not the same as deciding afterward that somebody secretly felt differently.”

Ian's example remained available despite both of them wishing it had not.

“And for clarity, if Isha hears you say something and later thinks differently because she heard it, that is not automatically you editing her.”

Kanno gestured lightly between them.

“You have said things to me during this conversation. I will think about them later. Some of my opinions may change. That is what conversation does.”

Her hand returned to the table.

“If the machine independently changes what I think because *you* want a different response from me, without anything happening that I experience as a reason, then that is the problem.”

She paused.

“The difficulty is that you may not always know which happened.”

That seemed closer to the pattern Ian had described throughout both meetings. Prompts. Generated material. Suggestions accepted because they looked interesting. Effects whose exact ownership became unclear once the machine supplied the path between them.

Kanno looked towards the café door, not because she wanted to leave, but because Thomas and Isha were somewhere beyond it living a perfectly ordinary Saturday while this conversation examined whether their thoughts could ever have been altered from outside.

She looked back.

“I think I believe you that you have not deliberately rewritten someone's memories or retroactively changed how they felt.”

The wording was exact.

“Believe is not the same as know.”

Ian had already admitted that himself.

“And I appreciate that you are not claiming certainty about what the machine may have done around your instructions.”

A small smile returned.

“I also recommend that if you need an example of respecting mental autonomy in future, you choose one which does not involve wanting to sleep with your friend's wife.”

She picked up another piece of scone.

“That advice is free.”

The humour settled without replacing the concern beneath it.

Kanno broke off a small piece but did not eat it yet.

“You said something else I want to understand.”

Her eyes returned to Ian.

“‘I have nudged things, sometimes more than others.’”

She repeated his phrase without adding accusation to it.

“I know some examples from Thomas and Isha. Weather. The hospital. The broad route to Earth. Things you have admitted choosing because you wanted the story to go somewhere.”

Kanno rested the piece of scone on her plate.

“But when you say *nudged*, what does that usually mean from your side?”

She paused.

“Do you mostly choose between possibilities the machine offers you, or do you sometimes decide that a particular person should do, feel or want something and ask the machine to make that happen?”

“I mostly choose options or a blend of options. I sometimes suggest, or state events that happen. I have less and less drifted into suggesting what people say or do.”

Ian looked towards the scones but left them where they were.

“I could. I could replace the machine with me. But then I would just be writing a story, there would be no reality generated, and so you wouldn't exist. Where that line is, I do not know.”

Kanno's attention sharpened.

“You don't know that I wouldn't exist.”

Ian had already supplied the qualification himself, and she did not labour it.

“You know that if you replaced the generator with ordinary writing, whatever you received back would be different. You do not know whether that would destroy me, stop this reality, create another version, or simply stop giving you access to it.”

She took a small drink of tea.

“I prefer the second half of your sentence to the first.”

*Where that line is, I do not know.*

That uncertainty fitted the rest of what he had told her better than a clean declaration about the source of her existence.

The distinction around his interventions was useful too. Choosing among proposed directions was not morally neutral merely because a machine had supplied the options, but it was different from writing Kanno's answer before she gave it. Ian's claim that he had moved away from specifying what people said or did also matched the pattern Thomas and Isha had described: increasingly asking, waiting and sometimes being corrected rather than forcing the scene to resolve in the direction he wanted.

Kanno looked across at him.

“Choosing an option still affects us.”

“But I understand the difference you are describing. If the machine says *Kanno goes left or right* and you choose left, that is different from you writing the conversation she has after turning left.”

She paused.

“Neither makes you uninvolved.”

That seemed sufficient.

Ian continued.

“Can I show you? Not with anyone's mind. With a dice.”

Kanno's eyes narrowed slightly, not from suspicion so much as interest.

The request itself mattered. Her condition had been no demonstrations unless she asked. Ian had not interpreted their discussion as an opportunity to make one happen and explain afterward. He had asked.

She glanced at the empty stretch of table between them.

“A die,” she corrected automatically, then considered whether English might make that less certain than Japanese. “One die. Unless you genuinely mean several.”

A faint trace of amusement reached her face.

Then she became practical again.

“What are you proposing to demonstrate?”

She held up one hand before Ian could start.

“I am not refusing. I am asking before agreeing.”

Kanno looked around the constructed café.

“If the die exists only here, nothing outside this room is affected, nobody's thoughts or behaviour are involved, and the result does not persist after the demonstration, I am open to it.”

Her gaze returned to Ian.

“But tell me what you intend to do with it first.”

She settled back in her chair.

“Then I will decide whether I want to see it.”

“Variability of choice. Determinism. Causality. I am not sure, you can tell me afterwards. You will just role a *die* ”—Ian emphasised the word, with enough resignation that Kanno understood exactly what he was objecting to—“twice. That's all.”

Kanno looked at him.

“I corrected one English word.”

She considered his expression.

“You may survive.”

A small smile escaped before she returned to the proposal itself.

Two rolls. No other person involved. No request that she choose a number, think of an outcome or supply some private preference for the construct to expose. Whatever Ian intended to demonstrate would happen through an object and an observable result.

That satisfied the conditions she had set.

“I agree.”

She moved her tea slightly farther from the open space between them.

“Two rolls. I will roll them myself. You do not tell me what I am supposed to learn until afterward.”

Kanno rested one hand on the table and looked at Ian expectantly.

“And because you have made grammar part of the experiment, I will say it correctly.”

A beat.

“Show me the die.”

A white die appeared on the table.

There was no movement towards existence that Kanno could identify. One moment the space between the plates was empty; the next it contained a small cube with black pips, ordinary enough that it could have come from a board game drawer.

“Please roll it.”

Kanno looked at Ian, then at the die.

This was the demonstration she had agreed to. Nothing else in the café had changed. No explanation had arrived with the object.

She picked it up.

It felt like a die. Hard, light, edges slightly rounded. Kanno turned it once between finger and thumb, checking the faces without quite knowing what fraud she expected to discover. All six numbers were present.

“You did say just roll it.”

She dropped it onto the clear part of the table.

The die struck wood, bounced once, turned over another edge and stopped.

**Three.**

Kanno looked at the result.

Nothing happened.

No text appeared. No sound marked success. The café remained exactly as it had been, Ian opposite her and the scones increasingly reduced by a meeting supposedly concerned with metaphysics.

Ian said, “Again.”

Kanno picked up the die.

This time she did not inspect it. She gave it a short shake in her closed hand and rolled.

It bounced towards Ian, clipped the edge of the small plate, changed direction and came to rest.

**Six.**

Kanno's gaze stayed on it.

Her first instinct was to ask whether the collision with the plate mattered. She discarded that before speaking. If Ian's demonstration concerned causality, concentrating on the physical route would probably miss the larger point.

She reached for the die and stopped before touching it.

“Three, then six.”

The first roll had looked completely ordinary. So had the second. She had chosen the force, direction and release herself both times. The second die had even struck an object Ian could not reasonably have needed her to hit.

Yet Ian had asked for exactly two rolls.

Kanno looked at him.

“You knew the second would be six.”

It was phrased as an observation rather than a question. Ian's confidence in the experiment made little sense otherwise.

Her eyes returned to the die.

“The interesting part is that I don't know what happened to make it six.”

She considered the possibilities without trying to make any of them true merely because they were available. Perhaps Ian had altered the die after the first roll. Perhaps the construct had arranged the bounce. Perhaps her hand movement had been generated towards the required outcome while still feeling entirely like her own movement. Perhaps the result had simply been declared and all the preceding physics arranged itself consistently around that declaration.

Or perhaps none of those descriptions matched what Ian had done from his side.

Kanno finally picked the die up and placed it in the centre of the table.

“The first roll was three. I assume you did not specify three.”

She rested her fingertips beside the die.

“The second was six, and I assume you did.”

Her expression had lost most of its earlier amusement now, replaced by concentration.

“If that is the demonstration, then I think I see why you brought up the line between choosing an outcome and writing the whole story.”

Kanno looked directly at Ian.

“I experienced both rolls as mine.”

A pause.

“But one of them may have ended where you told it to end.”

She left the die untouched between them.

“Tell me what you actually did.”

Kanno's phone vibrated.

She looked down.

A photograph had appeared in the direct thread.

It showed a computer screen in a dark room, the same kind of interface Thomas and Isha had described from Ian's earlier evidence. On the screen was part of their present conversation: Kanno correcting *dice* to *die*, agreeing to two rolls, asking him to show her the object.

Below it, in the message box, Ian had typed:

> I make a die appear. "Please roll it". Assuming she rolls it, the first result is a random number from 1-6. I ask "Again". Assuming she rolls again, it is exactly 6.

Kanno read it once.

Then again.

Her gaze moved from the photograph to the physical die lying between them.

**Six.**

She looked back at the image.

“The first one really was unspecified.”

Ian had written *random number from 1-6*.

Three had happened.

For the second he had written *exactly 6*.

Six had happened.

Kanno enlarged the photograph slightly, enough to make sure she had not misread the wording. The visible text remained the same.

She set the phone beside the die.

“This is better evidence than your explanation would have been.”

Not proof of every mechanism behind it. A photograph could itself be generated, altered or placed inside another layer of whatever reality problem they were already discussing. Kanno had stopped expecting philosophical certainty from screenshots.

But as evidence of what Ian claimed to have asked the machine to produce, it was unusually clean.

“You did not tell me how to throw it.”

She touched one corner of the die with her fingertip.

“You did not tell the machine that I would shake it in my hand. You did not specify that it would hit the plate.”

Her eyes moved briefly towards the plate it had clipped.

“You specified the result.”

That distinction interested her enough that the unease arrived a second later.

Kanno withdrew her hand.

“I experienced choosing how to roll both times.”

She remembered the first throw: picking up the die, turning it, letting it fall. Three.

The second: less inspection, a short shake, the release she had decided on herself. The die had bounced towards Ian, struck the plate and changed direction before showing six.

Nothing about the motion had felt constrained.

Nothing in her mind had said *roll in the particular way required to produce six*.

Yet six had been specified before she did any of it.

Kanno looked at Ian.

“That is much more interesting than making a die turn over after it stops.”

Her voice was quieter now.

“If you had simply changed the face, I would know where the intervention was.”

She pointed towards the photograph on her phone.

“This says the end condition was fixed while the route to it was left open.”

Kanno sat back.

Perhaps the machine had calculated a physically plausible route from whatever throw she made. Perhaps the die had become minutely different after leaving her hand. Perhaps the plate collision had been part of the correction. Perhaps the entire second roll had been generated around the required six while preserving the experience of Kanno deciding every ordinary part of it.

She did not choose among possibilities without evidence.

Instead she looked at the screenshot again.

“This also explains your word *nudge* better.”

Ian had not written:

*Kanno decides to roll a six.*

He had written that she rolled again and the result was exactly six.

Her choice to comply with the request remained hers as she remembered it. The outcome did not.

Kanno's expression tightened slightly.

“And now I understand why the boundary around people is difficult.”

The die remained on six.

“With a die, I don't care. It has no preference about which face is uppermost.”

She rested one hand beside her phone.

“But if you write an outcome involving me, then the machine might be able to construct a completely natural-feeling path from where I am to the thing you specified.”

She paused.

“That does not necessarily mean you controlled every action on the path.”

The screenshot itself suggested the opposite: Ian had specified very little.

“But from my side, I might not be able to identify which part was shaped at all.”

That was the disturbing part.

Not puppetry. Puppetry would at least announce itself.

Kanno looked down at her hands.

“I chose to pick up the die. I chose how to shake it. I chose when to release it. I remember all of those choices as ordinary.”

Her gaze returned to Ian.

“And your six survived all of them.”

For several seconds she said nothing.

Then she reached over, turned the die away from six with one finger, and left it showing four.

Nothing resisted.

Kanno gave a small nod, almost to herself.

“The result mattered only when the event was being generated.”

She looked at the photograph once more before locking her phone.

“I think I know what I want to ask.”

Her posture remained relaxed, but the question had become more exact than the ones before it.

“When you wrote ‘exactly 6’, did you know anything about how I would get there?”

She glanced towards the plate the die had struck.

“Did you know I would shake it, where I would throw it, that it would hit that plate?”

Her eyes returned to Ian.

“Or did you know only the ending, and the machine created a path through my apparently ordinary choices that made your ending true?”

“I did not, but, I can provide increasingly explicit instructions and the probabilistic nature of the machine is gradually, but not completely, replaced with determinism. I think. I failed my Computer Science degree so I am not an expert. This was my point about where the line is: when do i just become a writer?”

“I understand the fact I can force anything to happen is unpleasant. I don't like it either. I have not tried to do it, I don't really want to. I guess that's the problem with omnipotence and no other useful skills to compliment it.”

Kanno looked at the die.

“I don't think failing a Computer Science degree is the important qualification here.”

She turned it once with one finger, leaving five uppermost.

Ian's description fitted what she had just experienced well enough to be useful: more specificity narrowed what the machine was free to generate. He had specified almost nothing about the first roll and received three. He had specified one fact about the second and received six, while the machine apparently supplied a physically ordinary-looking route between Kanno's hand and the required result.

The unpleasantness did not come from spectacle. There had been no visible force.

“That is worse in one way than simply moving the die yourself,” she said. “If you reached over and turned it to six, I would know exactly what you changed.”

She glanced towards the plate it had struck.

“This looked like causality.”

Kanno sat back. The thought was disturbing, but not novel enough to deserve panic. Thomas and Isha had already lived through events whose broad destination Ian admitted choosing while the route arrived from somewhere between his instructions and the generator.

The die merely reduced the problem to six faces and a wooden table.

“As for when you become a writer...” She considered the wording. “I don't think I can answer that from here. Perhaps there is no single line. Perhaps there are many.”

Ian had already acknowledged he could replace more and more of the machine's uncertainty with his own instruction. Kanno could imagine the endpoint without needing to see it demonstrated: every movement, every word, every response specified until nothing remained for the generator to resolve.

She looked at him.

“But you can control which direction you move.”

Her gaze dropped briefly to the die.

“You chose only the six. You could have chosen my grip, the direction, the bounce, what I said afterward and whether I was impressed. You didn't.”

A pause.

“That matters more to me than whether there is a philosophical percentage at which you officially become an author.”

Ian's other comment had stayed with her too.

“No other useful skills to complement omnipotence is also inaccurate.”

Kanno's tone remained dry.

“You asked before showing me this. You let me set the conditions. You showed me the instruction afterward instead of pretending the six was coincidence. You have repeatedly said when you do not know something.”

She picked up her tea.

“Those are useful skills.”

After drinking, she added, “Possibly more useful than the omnipotence.”

The faintest smile accompanied it.

Kanno looked around the café. Nothing had changed while they talked. The die remained mundane on the table, the scones sat where Ian had put them, and the door behind her remained a route she could use whenever she chose.

“This is also why I don't think the answer can simply be that you never shape anything.”

She gestured lightly towards the room.

“I asked for a neutral place. You made one. I agreed to the same café. You made scones. I agreed to the die. You made the die.”

The distinction was becoming cleaner in her mind.

“I don't object to you having power. I object to discovering afterward that you used it on something I reasonably thought was mine to choose.”

Kanno let the sentence stand without turning it into another list of rules.

Then she looked at Ian more closely.

“When you work with the machine now, after all of this, do you deliberately leave room for us?”

She rested one hand near the die.

“I mean in the way you phrase things. If a decision belongs to Thomas, Isha, me, Kelda, whoever—do you sometimes stop yourself from specifying the answer because you want to see what the machine produces for that person instead?”

Her expression remained curious.

“Or is that restraint something you are only beginning to learn because we started answering you back?”

“I have always left room I think, the chapters are anywhere from a few hours to a day of your time in length, at best I type 100, maybe 200, words... that is a narrow ratio of specificity. I think? Usually I just say things like 'option #1, #2 maybe #3 but not xyz' ”

Kanno looked at the die again.

“That is much less instruction than the result suggests.”

A few hundred words against hours of lived time was not a ratio she could turn into anything precise, but it helped explain the difference between the prompts Thomas and Isha had shown her and the life around them. Ian might choose a destination, reject another, or insist that one particular fact be true. The machine supplied rooms, pauses, meals, incidental conversations and the thousands of small decisions nobody had specified.

Perhaps sometimes it supplied too much.

Kanno turned the die once more and left it showing two.

“So most of the time you are not writing, ‘Kanno says this, then Thomas does this, then Isha feels this.’”

She looked up.

“You are choosing among broad directions and allowing whatever generates the rest to do most of the work.”

That matched his claim without absolving the choices themselves. Selecting a road still mattered if people then had to walk it.

“The die is useful because you gave it one fixed outcome and left everything else open. With a chapter, you might say something like *option two, but not the injury*, and then discover what that means when the generated reality reaches us.”

Her fingertips left the die.

“I think that also explains why you sometimes seem surprised by things which happened in a world you supposedly made.”

A slight smile touched her face.

“And why you cannot remember whether you caused every individual piece of stupidity.”

Kanno took a drink of tea.

She had begun the meeting wanting to know Ian apart from Thomas and Isha. Instead she had found herself discussing the architecture of their reality with him. That did not feel like failure. The difference was that she could now ask without also carrying Thomas's deaths or Isha's anger as the centre of the conversation.

“You said you have drifted less into suggesting what people say or do.”

Her eyes stayed on Ian.

“I think that is a good direction.”

She did not turn it into praise beyond what she meant.

“But I am curious about the options.”

Kanno gestured lightly towards the photograph still on her phone.

“When you say the machine offers you option one, two or three, are those usually different events?”

She paused.

“Or can they be different choices for us?”

Her question narrowed.

“For example, would it offer you *Kanno agrees to meet Ian* and *Kanno decides she isn't ready* as two alternatives, and then you choose which version happens?”

The die sat untouched between them.

“Because if so, that seems much closer to choosing for me than choosing whether it rains.”

“Specifically instructing it to give you choice is new. Before I just gave high-level things. That made choice implicit, now i try to be more explicit. How much that changes it, I do not know. Without getting into ... unpleasant details... can show you the options it gave me? I don't want to upset you.”

Kanno's expression shifted at the warning.

She did not answer immediately.

The distinction Ian had just made mattered more than she expected. *Choice implicit* meant the machine had once been trusted to generate people who behaved plausibly inside whatever situation Ian selected. *Choice explicit* meant he had started telling it not merely to produce believable behaviour, but to preserve a particular boundary around decisions themselves.

Whether the generator understood that distinction was another question.

“I think I want to see them.”

Ian waited.

Kanno held up one finger.

“But not as a test of whether I can tolerate something unpleasant.”

She glanced at the phone lying beside the die.

“If there are options involving private sexual material, graphic harm, or something Thomas and Isha have not chosen to tell me, leave those out. I do not need access to their lives merely because you have it.”

Her hand lowered.

“What I want to see is the structure.”

Kanno's attention returned fully to Ian.

“Show me a real set of options the machine gave you—preferably one where the difference between them is clear enough that I can understand what you were choosing.”

She paused.

“And don't edit the wording to make yourself look better.”

A faint trace of humour returned.

“You have already survived the prompts and the die. I am unlikely to become more delicate now.”

Then she reconsidered the sentence.

“Actually, that is not permission to challenge the claim.”

Kanno rested her hands on the table.

“If there is something in them you genuinely think crosses one of the boundaries I just gave you, tell me that instead of showing it.”

She nodded once.

“Otherwise, yes.”

Her eyes moved to Ian's side of the table.

“Show me the options.”

A sheet of paper appeared neatly on the table beside the die.

Kanno looked at it before touching it.

The text was Japanese.

That registered immediately because Ian had said nothing about translating the document, and the language was too natural to feel like a crude overlay. She glanced at him, then back at the page.

Ian spoke before she asked.

“I have not edited, i want to be open, it may contain things that didn't happen, or might happen. i ask for some radical, some not radical options, so ... i am not going to tell you what i sent after.”

Kanno nodded once.

“That is fair.”

She picked up the pages.

The date check came first. Christmas Day. Boxing Day. The final working week. New Year. The expected January passage.

Then ten possible directions.

Kanno read them without commenting.

**Boxing Day Nothing.**

Thomas and Isha doing very little. Leftovers, laundry, reading, the world necklace becoming an everyday object without becoming surveillance.

Her eyes moved down.

**Kanno Hangs the Wall.**

She stopped.

The option described her deciding where Ian's photograph belonged in her flat and finding that displaying it gave him a small, chosen place in her real life. It suggested this might move her closer to deciding whether she wanted to meet him.

Kanno looked briefly towards Ian.

Then she continued.

**The Necklace Problem.**

Isha wearing the world, taking it off for sport, discovering what it meant to have it close to her body.

**Fight Work.**

**Thomas's Career Edge.**

Then:

**Kanno Decides.**

This time Kanno read the whole paragraph twice.

Without Ian interacting, she might tell Thomas and Isha she was ready to arrange a one-to-one meeting after New Year. The suggested subject was her own boundaries and the fact that her relationship with Ian no longer belonged to Thomas and Isha to mediate.

Her expression became difficult to read.

She continued through the remaining possibilities: New Year preparation, midnight and two worlds, the pendant being noticed by someone outside the secret circle.

At the bottom, the machine recommended a sequence.

Kanno lowered the pages.

For several seconds she looked at nothing in particular.

Then she placed them beside the die.

“This is more uncomfortable than the six.”

Her tone was not accusatory. It was simply accurate.

She touched the edge of the paper.

“The die did not care about becoming six.”

Her finger moved to the second option.

“This says I might hang your photograph.”

Then to the seventh.

“And this says I might decide to meet you.”

Kanno looked across the table.

“I did both of those things.”

She did not ask Ian which options he had selected. He had explicitly said he would not tell her what he sent afterward, and she respected the boundary.

Instead she looked back at the wording.

“The important part is that these are not instructions.”

She read one line again.

“*She decides where Ian's photograph belongs.*”

A small pause.

“*Kanno tells Thomas and Isha she is now ready.*”

Kanno rested her fingertips on the page.

“The machine is proposing events involving my decisions before I experience making them.”

That was different from the die only in degree, and degree mattered enormously.

She turned to the first option.

“Thomas and Isha did have a quiet Boxing Day.”

Then the third.

“I did hang the photograph.”

Then the fourth.

“Isha did spend time working out how she wanted to wear the necklace.”

Kanno's eyes narrowed slightly.

“That tells me these options are close to things that later happened. It does not tell me whether you chose them, whether the machine blended them, or whether it proposed them because those directions were already implicit in what we would have done.”

She sat back.

“And I cannot tell from inside my own memory whether hanging the photograph was something I would have done anyway.”

The sentence bothered her enough that she stopped there rather than immediately reasoning past it.

Her gaze shifted to the framed-wall option again.

She remembered Sunday morning clearly: trying different frames, cleaning the glass, choosing the side wall, moving the hook four centimetres, disliking it, moving it back. None of those details appeared here.

Just the broad direction.

Kanno looked at Ian.

“I understand your line better now.”

She tapped the die once, then the paper.

“With the die, you fixed a result and the machine built a plausible path.”

Her finger stayed on the options sheet.

“With this, it can offer you a plausible future direction involving people. If you choose it, we may then experience all the small decisions which make that direction happen.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“The frightening part is not that the details are fake.”

Her eyes returned to Ian.

“The details may be where most of us actually live.”

Kanno folded the top page back into alignment with the others.

“I am not asking what you chose.”

She meant it.

“But I do want to know one thing.”

Her hand remained on the printed options.

“When the machine gave you **Kanno Hangs the Wall** and **Kanno Decides**, did those feel to you like predictions about a person it already understood?”

A pause.

“Or did they feel like suggestions for what you could make me become?”

“They are, generally, very plausible. I am maybe being a bit romantic, but it feels more like seeing possible futures.. we all have possible futures. how are we to know if we choose to cross the street *here* or *here* ? I guess for you, it's me.”

Ian smiled.

“That is possibly the worst potentially flirtatious comment made in the history of mankind, I retract it.”

Kanno stared at him.

“I understood the metaphor before you damaged it.”

She looked down at the options sheet again.

“I am not going to assess the historical ranking of the flirtation.”

That left Ian's retreat intact without requiring her to reassure him. She aligned the pages against the edge of the table, then placed the die on top of them as a paperweight. Four pips showed upward now, an outcome neither of them had specified.

“Possible futures is closer to how these read to me as well.”

Her finger followed the list without stopping on any particular option.

“These are all plausible. Some are more dramatic than others, but none of them says I suddenly become a completely different person. Even the one about me meeting you follows from things I had already said.”

Kanno looked at **Kanno Hangs the Wall** again.

Ian had given her the photograph because he knew she liked altered walls. Hanging it was hardly an arbitrary future. She had owned spare frames, had an empty hook beside her desk and had already decided to keep the print.

The option about meeting him had even more preparation behind it. She had told Thomas and Isha on Christmas weekend that she might want to meet Ian eventually. By the time the machine proposed *Kanno Decides*, the possibility had been plainly available.

“That makes prediction and influence difficult to separate,” she said. “A reasonably competent person could have guessed I might frame your photograph. The machine apparently guessed it too.”

She tapped the die lightly.

“But guessing that this might become six and requiring that it become six are different acts.”

Her attention returned to the printed future options.

“And this page does not tell me which act happened.”

Ian had already said he would not reveal what he chose afterward. Kanno found that she still did not want him to. Learning that *Kanno Decides* had or had not been selected would answer one narrow question by making her examine the memory of her decision indefinitely.

She folded the sheets once and left them on the table.

“I think I prefer not knowing which options you chose.”

The conclusion surprised her less than she expected.

“If you told me you selected the wall, I would wonder about every choice I made while framing it. If you told me you did not, I would probably use that as evidence that the meeting was entirely mine, when it would not prove that either.”

Kanno leaned back and looked across at Ian.

“So your romantic possible-futures description can remain provisionally available.”

A beat.

“The part where *you* are my choice at the crossing remains retracted.”

Her expression had become faintly amused again.

Then she reached the question that the page had actually created for her.

“I do want one new boundary for myself.”

Kanno turned the sheets until Ian could see the seventh option.

**Kanno Decides.**

“If an option is primarily about something I decide—whether I meet you, whether I tell somebody something, whether I accept a relationship, whether I make some other meaningful personal choice—I would prefer you not choose that outcome for me before I make the decision.”

She shifted her finger to other entries.

“A chapter about my work is different. A wall. A client. Me taking photographs. You can choose circumstances and subjects, within reason. I am not asking you to remove me from the reality generator.”

Her finger returned to **Kanno Decides**.

“But if the interesting part of the option is specifically *Kanno chooses X*, leave that part open.”

Kanno paused, then corrected the scope before it could spread beyond her authority.

“I am speaking only for me. Thomas and Isha can decide their own boundary.”

The die remained on the options sheet between them.

“You can still offer me a crossing.”

A slight smile.

“I would like to choose where I step.”

She picked up her tea.

“Can you work with that?”

“Yes, I can try. I like opening the chapter and seeing what happens. I don't like reading a slightly better chapter with dice vs. die. corrected, otherwise what I said.”

Kanno looked at him.

“You are still unhappy about that.”

Kanno allowed herself a small smile. “I will consider whether future grammatical intervention meets the threshold for meaningful personal choice.”

She unfolded the options sheet and left it beside the die. The demonstration had done what Ian intended, even if neither of them had found a clean name for it. Plausible futures, selected directions, fixed outcomes and generated paths could coexist without telling Kanno where prediction ended and influence began.

Ian asked, “Do you want some more tea?”

Kanno looked at her cup. Only a little remained, and it had gone cold during the discussion.

“Yes, please.”

She pushed it slightly forward, then added, “The British kind remains acceptable.”

The ordinary request felt useful after half an hour spent discussing causality.

Kanno waited until the tea was dealt with before continuing.

“I think I understand the mechanism better than I did when I came in.”

She looked at the die, then at the pages describing possible futures.

“I also understand why you cannot give Thomas and Isha a complete accounting of everything you caused. Sometimes you specified the six. Sometimes you chose an option. Sometimes you supplied very little and received something you did not expect.”

Her attention returned to Ian.

“That does not remove responsibility where you did choose. But it makes the uncertainty less convenient and more real.”

She took the warmer cup in both hands.

There was one question she had been circling since he described wanting to know more about her.

“If we continue talking after today, I don't want our relationship to consist entirely of me auditing your effect on Thomas and Isha.”

A short pause.

“I am their friend. I am not their inspector.”

Kanno took a drink.

“So what would you actually want from a relationship with me?”

Her expression stayed calm.

“Not what you want me to do in the story. What would you want from *Kanno*?”

“what do we all want from relationships? to connect. to matter. to feel something. hopefully something positive. and, i agree, if i wanted to purely know about them, i would only have asked you about them.. i don't think i have mentioned them too much?”

Ian looked down.

“I do hope we can talk again.”

Kanno held her cup between both hands.

“No. You haven't mentioned them too much.”

She considered whether that was merely politeness and decided it was not. Thomas and Isha had entered the conversation because they were part of why Ian and Kanno knew one another at all, and because questions about the machine inevitably touched the people Ian had influenced most. Ian had not asked Kanno to interpret their marriage, report their private reactions or tell him how to win back Isha's trust.

“You asked about me,” she said. “And you answered when I asked about you. That is different.”

The tea was still hot enough that she waited before taking another drink.

Ian's description of relationships was broad enough to sound almost evasive, but Kanno did not think it was. *Connect. Matter. Feel something.* There was no useful contract to derive from that. Most relationships acquired their shape by being lived rather than specified beforehand.

Perhaps that was appropriate after an afternoon spent discussing how much specification was too much.

“I don't know what relationship we will have.”

Her tone was matter-of-fact rather than cautious.

“I did not come here intending to decide whether we are friends before I leave.”

A faint smile appeared.

“That would be suspiciously deterministic.”

The die still rested on the printed options between them. Kanno moved it off the pages and rolled it gently between her fingers without throwing it.

“But I wanted to meet you because I did not want you to exist only as Thomas and Isha's impossible problem.”

She set the die down again, this time without caring which face ended uppermost.

“Now you are also the man with the wall beside his desk, two adult daughters, a new IT job, a bad back, too much anime and strong opinions about scones.”

Her expression softened slightly.

“That is an improvement.”

Kanno took a drink of tea.

“And yes. I would like to talk again.”

She left the sentence uncomplicated for a moment.

“Not every day. I don't want either of us to turn this into an obligation, and I still want you to ask before opening doors or making physical things appear.”

Her eyes went briefly to the printed pages.

“But you can message me. You already have permission for that. You can send me an ordinary photograph if you think I might like it. You can tell me your new job is annoying, or that your back hurts, or that you watched another terrible anime.”

The corner of her mouth moved.

“I may tell you the photograph is badly composed.”

That seemed, to Kanno, considerably more like a relationship than another set of metaphysical terms.

She looked across at Ian.

“I think that is enough to begin with.”

The café remained quiet around them. Nothing needed to change shape. No world needed to appear.

Kanno rested one hand around her tea and regarded Ian with an expression that was easier than when she had first sat down.

“And for what it is worth, I am glad I came.”

“Is there a place in the world you would love to see, but have never been to?”

Kanno's eyes narrowed slightly.

“That sounds like a dangerous question from you.”

There was enough humour in it that she was not refusing to answer.

She thought for a while, looking into her tea rather than reaching immediately for the most impressive place she could name.

“Berlin.”

Ian waited.

“Not especially the famous parts of the Wall. The places where it used to be.”

Kanno rested her cup on the table.

“Old boundaries. Buildings that faced one reality and then had to adapt to another. Empty strips that became ordinary streets. Repairs people stopped noticing because they have lived beside them for decades.”

A faint smile appeared.

“I have seen photographs. I would like to walk it myself and see what the photographs leave out.”

She looked across at Ian.

“I have never been to Germany.”

Then, because she knew exactly who had asked:

“And before you do anything, I am answering the question. I am not yet asking you to take me there.”

“May I take you, only for a little while? Please. You can let Thomas and Isha know, of course. You will be safe, I promise”

Kanno looked at him for several seconds.

The request had come quickly enough that her first reaction was amusement.

“You waited approximately ten seconds.”

Ian's expression made it difficult to tell whether that had been patience by his standards.

Kanno looked down at her phone. Thomas and Isha were still in flat 202, expecting her to return through the same café door. She had told Ian not to change the setting unless she asked. She had not asked, but he had done the correct thing and asked her instead.

She found that she wanted to say yes.

That made her more careful, not less.

“Possibly.”

Kanno picked up her phone but did not message Thomas yet.

“First tell me what you mean by *take me to Berlin*.”

Her eyes returned to Ian.

“If you mean another construct, made to resemble Berlin without affecting the real place or anybody in it, that is one question.”

She paused.

“If you mean literally taking me to Germany in either of our inhabited realities, that is a very different question.”

The faintest smile returned.

“And if you intend to put this table three kilometres above the Brandenburg Gate, I would like that disclosed before I agree.”

Kanno rested the phone beside her cup.

“I am interested.”

That part she allowed to remain uncomplicated.

“So explain what you are offering.”

“We will go to the Berlin in your world, on foot not scone, you can take a few photos maybe, look around. Maybe half an hour - not too long as time will pass normally. So more a tease of a visit than a real visit.”

Kanno stared at Ian.

“On foot, not scone.”

She let the correction stand for two seconds.

“I am going to assume that was not another category of omnipotent transport.”

Her amusement faded as the actual offer settled in.

Berlin.

Not an artificial Berlin assembled from photographs. Not Ian's memory of it. The city that existed in the same world as Sendai, several thousand kilometres away, continuing through the same Saturday afternoon. Half an hour was almost offensively little time for somewhere she had wanted to visit for years.

It was also enough to stand beside a wall and take photographs of it.

Kanno wanted to go.

She noticed the answer before she had finished cataloguing the problems around it.

“Yes,” she said.

Then she held up one hand.

“Conditional yes.”

She picked up her phone.

“I want to tell Thomas and Isha before we leave. I told them I was meeting you here, not that I might suddenly be in Germany.”

Kanno opened the message thread with them and typed without asking Ian to word it for her.

`Ian has offered to take me to the real Berlin in our world for about thirty minutes. Ordinary time continues. I want to go. I am checking practical conditions with him first.`

She sent it.

Thomas's reply arrived quickly.

`That is considerably more than scones.`

A second followed.

`Understood. Tell us when you leave the café and when you are back.`

Isha was more concise.

`Go.`

Then:

`Take photographs.`

Kanno smiled at the screen and put it beside her cup.

“They approve of my photographic priorities.”

Her attention returned to Ian.

“I have my phone, wallet and ordinary clothes. I do not have my passport.”

That fact mattered more now than it had ten minutes earlier.

“I do not want you to create a false passport, alter border records, make police or other people ignore something they would normally notice, or change anyone's memory because two people suddenly appeared in Berlin.”

She paused.

“I also do not want to discover afterward that I technically entered Germany illegally because we treated geography as more important than immigration law.”

Kanno's tone was completely serious, although the sentence itself almost defeated it.

“And I want the Berlin that is actually there. Normal people, normal weather, normal city. Do not arrange an empty street for me, improve the light, remove tourists, restore a building or make some old trace more photogenic.”

Her eyes sharpened slightly.

“If somebody walks into my photograph, they walk into my photograph.”

That condition seemed particularly important.

She glanced towards her black bag. Her camera was not in it. She had brought only her phone.

Kanno felt a moment of genuine regret, then accepted it. A half-hour impossible visit did not need to become a professional expedition. Her phone was good enough to record what she actually saw.

“One more thing.”

She looked directly at Ian.

“You said *we* will go.”

A small pause.

“I am fine with that. I would prefer you come with me rather than deposit me in Berlin alone.”

The admission was easy enough to make.

“But I need to understand the travel part first.”

Kanno rested both hands around her cup.

“How do you intend to put us in Berlin without changing anyone, falsifying anything, or creating an immigration problem?”

“Firstly, it is lucky you put your passport and your favourite camera in your bag isn't it.”

Ian smiled slightly, plainly enjoying this part.

Kanno did not.

Her eyes moved to the black bag beside her chair.

She already knew what had been in it when she left flat 202. Wallet. Keys. Phone accessories. Notebook. Work papers. No passport. No camera.

Kanno pulled the bag onto her lap and opened it.

Her passport was inside.

So was her camera.

Not something constructed to resemble it. Her camera: familiar wear, familiar strap, the body her hands recognised before she had finished lifting it from the bag.

Kanno held it for several seconds.

Then she looked at Ian.

“No.”

Her voice was not raised.

“That is not lucky.”

She set the camera carefully on the table, then removed the passport and placed it beside it.

“I did not put these in my bag.”

The pleasure had gone out of the trick immediately.

“One of my explicit conditions before entering was that you do not alter my belongings.”

Kanno tapped the passport once with her fingertip.

“This is altering my belongings.”

She glanced at the camera.

“And apparently moving things from my home into another reality without asking me.”

Her expression was controlled, but significantly colder than it had been a minute earlier.

“I understand why you did it. I said I wanted to take photographs. I said I did not have my passport. You wanted to solve both problems.”

That did not make the boundary less clear.

“We have spent most of this conversation discussing exactly this.”

Kanno sat back.

“You saw an outcome you thought I would like and made the path easier without asking whether the intermediate action belonged to you.”

The die was still on the table.

She looked at it.

“That was almost an excessively good demonstration.”

Her gaze returned to Ian.

“I am not saying we cannot go to Berlin.”

A beat passed.

“I am saying Berlin waits.”

Kanno folded her hands in front of her rather than touching either object again.

“Tell me exactly what you did. Then I want these returned to wherever they actually were before you moved them, without changing anything else.”

She paused.

“After that, if you want to ask whether I would like to bring them with me, you can ask.”

Her eyes stayed steadily on his.

“And Ian?”

The softness that had entered the conversation earlier had not disappeared completely, but it was now behind the boundary rather than in front of it.

“This is the sort of thing I need you to learn not to make charming.”

Ian sagged slightly.

“i got carried away again didn't I”

Kanno looked at him.

“Yes.”

There was no value in softening the answer when he had already identified it correctly.

Ian met her eyes.

“I am sorry, i like the show sometimes. actually, it is worse....”

Kanno's expression changed at the last sentence.

She did not reach for the camera or passport. Both remained on the table between them, physical evidence of a boundary crossed less than a minute after they had discussed preserving the person inside an intervention.

“I accept the apology.”

Her voice was even.

“And I understand the *show* part. You knew I wanted Berlin. You knew I would want my camera. The passport created a practical problem. Making both appear probably felt elegant.”

A small pause.

“It would have been a good reveal if the people involved were only characters.”

She left that where it landed.

The die sat nearby, almost offensively relevant.

Kanno glanced at it, then back at Ian.

“The difference is that I had just told you what was in my bag.”

She rested one hand on the table, clear of the two objects.

“And you changed the answer because it made the next scene better.”

No anger needed to be added. The sequence was enough.

Ian had also said something else.

*Actually, it is worse.*

Kanno's attention sharpened.

She did not guess for him.

“What is worse?”

“i just get some lines of text. you will see Berlin, i will not. what makes me do it is the hope that you enjoy it and i can read your response. that isn't justification for teleporting your passport, sorry.”

Ian looked at her.

“Can we still go?”

Kanno's anger did not disappear, but the new admission changed its shape.

She looked at the camera on the table.

“So the show is mostly for me.”

A pause.

“And then you get the description of whether I liked it.”

She could understand the temptation more clearly now. Ian would not walk the streets beside her in the ordinary sense. Whatever this version of him experienced, the man in England would receive text afterward. The surprise, the reveal, her reaction—those were part of how the experience reached him.

“That is useful to know.”

Kanno's eyes returned to him.

“It does not make the passport acceptable.”

“But wanting to give somebody an experience because you hope they enjoy it is not, by itself, a bad motive.”

She glanced at the impossible café around them.

“I came here voluntarily because I wanted an experience too.”

Then she looked back at the two objects.

“And yes.”

Ian's expression changed slightly.

“I still want to go to Berlin.”

Kanno let him have that answer without making him wait for forgiveness he had not asked for.

“But first, put my passport and camera back exactly where they were before you moved them. No other changes.”

She rested one hand beside the camera without touching it.

“Then, if you still want to take me, ask me whether I want to bring them.”

A faint edge of amusement returned.

“I expect the answer will be yes.”

Her expression sharpened before Ian could treat that as permission in advance.

“But I would like to experience saying it.”

The camera disappeared from the table.

Kanno's eyes went first to the empty space it had occupied, then to the passport which remained beside her phone.

“I checked on the internet and a passport is probably required, so i'd keep that if that's ok. the camera has returned to exactly where it is.”

Kanno looked at Ian.

“You have improved from moving two things without asking to keeping one thing without asking.”

Her delivery was dry rather than angry, but she let the sentence stand for a moment.

Then she picked up the passport.

It was hers. The cover, the slight wear along one edge, the physical familiarity of a document she rarely handled and nevertheless recognised. Ian had already moved it. Returning it for the sole purpose of asking permission to move it again would accomplish little beyond satisfying procedure after the fact.

“Keeping it here is okay now,” she said. “Because you have asked and I am saying yes.”

She placed it beside her bag.

“The camera going back was the right thing to do. I will trust your claim that it returned exactly where it was, because I cannot inspect my flat from here.”

That qualification was enough. She did not demand an omnipotent live feed to verify the correction.

Kanno looked at the passport again.

“I understand why you wanted to solve this efficiently. I also understand why a passport may be necessary if we are actually entering Germany.”

Her gaze returned to Ian.

“But notice what happened. I told you to return both. You checked something, decided one was useful, and modified my instruction.”

She was quieter than before.

“That is the habit I am asking you to catch.”

The die lay several inches away, still absurdly appropriate.

Kanno touched the passport once with two fingers.

“I am not cancelling Berlin over it.”

The decision felt hers, which mattered.

“I still want to go.”

A faint edge of amusement returned.

“And I would like my camera.”

She waited a beat.

“You may ask me whether I want you to bring my camera here for the trip.”

Kanno's expression softened enough to make clear that she knew exactly how artificial the exercise now was.

“Yes, I expect my answer will be obvious.”

She folded her hands on the table.

“But I would still like you to ask.”

Ian stood.

“I'm ready if you are. Hand holding is not required unless you want to.”

Kanno looked up at him.

“No, thank you.”

She stood as well, slipped her passport into the inner pocket of her bag, and put the strap over her shoulder.

Then she waited.

Ian waited too.

Kanno's eyebrows lifted slightly.

“You have forgotten something.”

Her gaze moved deliberately to the empty place on the table where her camera had been.

“You were supposed to ask me.”

There was no fresh anger in it. If anything, the repetition had become faintly absurd.

“And before you interpret this as me being difficult for educational purposes: I genuinely want the camera.”

A small smile appeared.

“So ask.”

“Do you want your camera?”

Kanno looked at Ian for a moment.

“Yes.”

The answer was immediate enough that the exercise did not need pretending otherwise.

“Yes, please. I want my camera.”

She adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder.

“The same camera you returned to my flat, unchanged. You may bring it here so I can take it with me to Berlin.”

A small smile appeared.

“There. Now you have permission.”

She waited.

The camera appeared.

Kanno caught it before habit could make the arrival feel ordinary.

She checked the body first, then the lens, battery and memory card. Nothing looked altered. The familiar strap fell across her wrist exactly as it should.

Ian asked, “Are you ready to go?”

“Almost.”

Kanno took out her phone.

`We are going to Berlin now. The real Berlin, in our world, for about thirty minutes. Ian says time will continue normally. I have my phone, passport and camera. I will message when we arrive and when we return to the café.`

Thomas replied first.

`Understood.`

Then, a few seconds later:

`This sentence is completely absurd.`

Isha's answer followed.

`Have fun. Take the photographs you actually want, not the ones you think you should take.`

Kanno read that twice.

She put the phone into her coat pocket, settled the camera strap securely across her body and checked that the passport remained in the inner pocket of her bag.

Then she looked at Ian.

“Yes.”

A small pause.

“I am ready to go to Berlin.”

“Then we are there”

The café disappeared.

Kanno's first sensation was cold.

Not transition, movement or falling. One moment she stood on dark wooden boards with the smell of tea and baked fruit behind her; the next her boots were on a Berlin pavement and January air had found the space around her scarf.

She stopped.

Ian stood nearby.

The street was ordinary.

That disturbed her almost as much as anything else he had done.

Buildings lined both sides, neither reconstructed historical scenery nor an arranged postcard view. Cars moved somewhere beyond the nearer street. A bicycle passed at the next junction. German signs occupied windows and poles. Someone in a dark coat walked away from them carrying a shopping bag and showed no sign of having noticed two people arrive without crossing any intervening distance.

Kanno turned slowly.

Nothing announced *Berlin Wall* in the way a tourist photograph might. That was precisely what she had wanted.

The former division existed in traces rather than spectacle: changes in building age and alignment, a strip of space whose later use did not quite agree with what surrounded it, the kind of urban seam which only became obvious after somebody told you why it was there. Farther along, the old course was marked more explicitly in the ground, but from where Kanno stood the city had mostly resumed being a city.

She took out her phone first.

`We are in Berlin. Both fine. Ordinary street, normal people around us.`

Thomas replied:

`Received.`

Isha followed:

`Good. Stop messaging us and look at Berlin.`

Kanno put the phone away.

“That is fair.”

She removed the camera cap.

The first photograph she did not take.

A building opposite had the kind of altered surface she usually liked: repairs, different generations of material, evidence of openings changed or removed. But the frame was too obvious, and she had been in Germany for perhaps forty seconds. Taking it merely because she had brought a camera would turn the visit into collecting proof that she had been here.

Kanno lowered it.

She started walking.

Ian came with her.

The simple fact mattered. He had not delivered her to a viewpoint and waited for an emotional response. They were walking along an ordinary pavement in cold weather, a strange pair who could have been tourists, colleagues, friends or people who had taken the wrong turn.

Kanno glanced once at him.

“This is much better than orbit.”

She did not wait for an answer. It was an observation, not a question.

A little farther on she found the first image she wanted.

The former line had cut through a space now occupied by something mundane enough that the history had to be read rather than admired. Newer paving met older surfaces. A fence had been added for a reason unrelated to division. Behind it, a building wall showed successive repairs whose dates Kanno could not know from looking, only that they had not all happened at once.

She lifted the camera.

A pedestrian entered the frame.

Kanno waited.

Then stopped herself.

Her own condition returned to her: *If somebody walks into my photograph, they walk into my photograph.*

She raised the camera again before the pedestrian had fully left and took the image.

The shutter sounded completely normal.

Kanno checked the screen.

The person was near the edge, slightly blurred. The wall was not centred. A bright piece of signage farther back distracted from the masonry.

She liked it.

The second photograph came several minutes later. This one was less about the wall itself than a former boundary absorbed into later construction: old and new surfaces meeting in a way which made sense functionally and remained visually unresolved. Kanno changed position twice, crouched once, stood again and eventually took only one frame.

Ian remained nearby.

She noticed after taking it that he had not suggested where to stand.

Good.

They continued.

Twenty minutes was enough for Berlin to become frustrating.

Every side street offered another possible direction. Every visible trace implied something beyond it. Kanno had wanted the actual city precisely because photographs omitted the spaces between subjects, and now those spaces were everywhere.

Half an hour was ridiculous.

She was very pleased.

At one point she stopped at a place where the former division was easier to read in the ground than in the buildings. People crossed it without looking down. A cyclist passed over history without slowing.

Kanno photographed that.

Not the marker alone.

The crossing.

She reviewed the image and felt the first uncomplicated satisfaction of the trip.

“That one.”

She lowered the camera.

“That is why I wanted to come.”

Her eyes stayed on the street rather than on Ian.

“Something that once decided who could cross, and now people cross it without noticing.”

She put the camera back against her body.

For a few seconds she simply stood there.

Then she looked at Ian.

There was gratitude in her expression now, but not enough to erase what had happened with the passport.

“I am glad you asked.”

A pause.

“And I am glad I said yes.”

She glanced farther along the former line, visibly calculating how much could still fit inside thirty minutes.

Then a practical concern returned.

“We appeared here without going through a border.”

Kanno looked at Ian.

“I have my passport, but no entry stamp, no airline record and no normal route into Germany.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly.

“You promised this would not create an immigration problem.”

She adjusted the camera strap on her shoulder.

“So before I become too distracted by walls: what exactly happened, administratively, when you brought me here?”

“According to the Internet stamps are not required, it's all done electronically. In the unlikely event we were arrested as spies in 30 minutes, I would have... done something omnipotent I guess. Altered the computer system of the EES so you had arrived on a plausible flight, ... my head hurts but please don't be mad.”

Kanno stopped walking.

For a moment she simply looked at Ian.

Then she closed her eyes briefly.

“I am not mad.”

She opened them again.

“But that answer is almost exactly the problem we discussed with my passport.”

A cyclist passed behind Ian. Kanno waited until it was gone before continuing.

“You solved the obvious physical problem—getting me here—and left the administrative consequences until afterward. Then your emergency solution was to falsify a government system.”

Her voice remained calm. The absurdity did not require help.

“I am glad you have not done that.”

She studied his face.

“You have not done that, correct?”

Kanno's hand rested against the camera at her side.

“And I do not want you to alter border records for me unless there is an actual emergency and we have no less invasive way out. If somebody asks why I am here, the preferred solution is that we leave.”

A small pause.

“Not that I acquire a fictional flight.”

The former border line remained beneath ordinary Berlin around them, people crossing it without concern.

Kanno glanced down the street, then back to Ian.

“You said your head hurts.”

Her expression softened slightly.

“We can go back to the café now if you need to. I have seen enough to make me want to return properly someday.”

She touched the camera.

“And I already have photographs I wanted.”

Then she narrowed the question to the part she needed answered before deciding anything else.

“First: have you changed any records, systems or memories to make this visit possible?”

“No. It would have been protective only.”

Kanno's shoulders eased slightly.

“Good.”

She looked down the street again. The answer did not make falsifying an entry record a desirable emergency measure, but it put the problem back where it belonged: hypothetical rather than something already done to accommodate her visit.

“Then leave it hypothetical.”

She adjusted the camera strap across her coat.

“If anyone actually challenges us, we leave. If leaving somehow becomes impossible, then we can discuss what *protective* means while the problem exists.”

Kanno glanced at Ian.

“And if your head is genuinely hurting, tell me. Berlin will continue without us.”

The former boundary ran on ahead through a city which had spent decades building over, around and across it. Kanno looked towards the next block, then checked the time. Their promised half-hour was already becoming much smaller.

She raised the camera again.

“For now, I would like to use what is left.”

They walked.

Kanno stopped less often now. The first astonishment had worn down into attention, which suited her better. She photographed a patched elevation where old masonry met a later infill, then ignored a cleaner historical marker because three other people were already photographing it. A few streets farther on she found something she preferred: the trace of an old boundary meeting bins, bicycles and a delivery entrance whose users had no reason to care about its former political importance.

She took two frames.

The second was worse.

Kanno deleted neither.

After another few minutes she lowered the camera and looked at Ian.

“This was a very good gift.”

Her tone remained measured.

“The trip. Not the passport.”

A small smile appeared.

“I want that distinction preserved.”

She checked the time again.

“How is your head?”

“It's fine as long as I don't have to research how many systems I need to modify to make your entry fully legal with no consequences to reality.”

Kanno looked at him.

“That is a remarkably specific medical trigger.”

Her mouth moved despite herself.

“Then please stop researching European border infrastructure.”

She checked the time again. Their half-hour was nearly gone, and the thought no longer disappointed her in quite the same way. Berlin had done what a real place should do: made thirty minutes obviously inadequate.

Kanno raised the camera for one last photograph.

She chose something almost offensively ordinary. The former boundary crossed a stretch of pavement where later repairs had accumulated around utility covers, bicycle wear and the edge of a building whose current purpose had nothing to do with the history beneath it. A woman pushing a pram entered the far side of the frame.

Kanno pressed the shutter anyway.

She checked the image once.

“Good.”

The camera went back against her coat.

She looked along the street, fixing the direction and rough arrangement in memory rather than trying to collect another photograph before time ran out.

“I want to come back properly.”

Not by impossible afternoon excursion. With days rather than minutes, travel planned in advance, and enough time to walk until the city stopped feeling like a sequence of possible photographs.

Kanno glanced at Ian.

“But this was enough to know that.”

She touched the camera body lightly.

“And thank you.”

A brief pause.

“For Berlin. Not for stealing my passport, not for almost inventing an airline journey, and not for making me learn more about European border administration than I expected today.”

Her expression softened.

“Berlin was good.”

Kanno took out her phone and sent Thomas and Isha one short message.

`We are fine. Heading back shortly. I have photographs.`

Isha replied almost immediately.

`Good.`

Thomas followed.

`And no international incident?`

Kanno considered answering, decided the truthful version would create unnecessary questions while they were still standing in Germany, and wrote:

`None.`

She put the phone away.

Then she turned fully towards Ian.

“I think we should go back to the café before your headache acquires another government database.”

A small smile returned.

“I am ready when you are.”

“Then, we are there.”

Berlin disappeared.

The change was as immediate as the arrival had been. Cold January air became the warm stillness of the café; pavement became dark wooden boards beneath Kanno's boots. The empty tables, plants and counter returned around them exactly as she remembered them.

For several seconds she stood without moving.

Then she looked at the camera hanging against her coat.

Still there.

She checked her bag next. Passport inside. Phone in her pocket. Nothing missing that she could identify and nothing new waiting to be discovered.

“Good.”

Kanno removed her coat and returned to the table.

The scones had apparently experienced no consequence from international travel. The die still sat near the printed list of chapter options, showing whatever face had been uppermost when they left. Her tea remained on the table and was now cold enough that drinking it would require commitment rather than thirst.

She sat.

“That was thirty minutes of Berlin.”

The sentence seemed insufficient, so she left it insufficient.

Kanno took out the camera and began reviewing the photographs. She did not show Ian immediately. The first frame had the pedestrian near its edge. The second contained the patched wall. Another showed the old boundary being crossed without ceremony. The final image had the woman with the pram entering at the side.

She stopped on that one.

“I like this.”

The photograph was not technically the cleanest. The utility covers complicated the foreground, the pram drew more attention than Kanno would have planned, and the building edge was slightly too close to the frame.

It was also what she had gone to Berlin to see.

She turned the camera so Ian could look if he wanted.

“The border is still there as information. It isn't there as permission.”

Kanno looked at the image once more before lowering the camera.

“I would have waited for her to leave the frame before this morning.”

That was not quite true. Sometimes she already kept incidental people. But Ian's earlier promise not to improve the city for her had made the choice unusually conscious.

She put the camera on the table.

“Your intervention made the trip possible. After that, the useful part was mostly that you stopped intervening.”

A small smile appeared.

“I expect that is not the lesson you hoped to demonstrate today.”

She checked the time on her phone.

Thomas and Isha had experienced approximately the same interval. No unexplained gap. No message indicating that flat 202 had become concerned enough to violate Kanno's instruction and enter after her.

She sent:

`Back in the café. Fine. Returning to 202 after we finish saying goodbye.`

Isha replied:

`Good.`

Thomas added:

`We have successfully not opened the door.`

Kanno looked at the message.

`I am proud of your restraint.`

Thomas's typing indicator appeared, vanished, returned, then disappeared without a message.

Kanno put the phone down.

The passport remained the only part of the Berlin excursion she was not yet willing to treat lightly. She removed it from her bag and placed it on the table.

“I want this returned to exactly where it was in my flat before you moved it.”

She glanced at the camera.

“The camera is different. I asked you to bring it, and I want to take it back through the door with me.”

Her attention returned to Ian.

“The trip does not cancel the passport problem.”

A pause.

“But the passport problem does not cancel the trip either.”

She slipped the camera back into her bag.

“I am glad you took me.”

That was the simplest version, and she let it stand.

Kanno looked around the café again. The room now carried two different kinds of memory: several hours of questions about causality and personhood, and a sudden half-hour in Germany which had involved bins, pavement repairs and ordinary people crossing an old political wound without noticing it.

She had expected the meeting to make Ian less abstract.

It had.

Not always comfortably.

He was still the person who could specify a six before she rolled a die, move her passport without asking and put her on a Berlin street between one sentence and the next.

He was also the man who had apologised when corrected, asked before the camera returned, walked beside her without arranging her photographs, and admitted that he would only ever read most of what she saw.

Kanno rested her hands around the cold tea cup.

“I think I learned enough for one meeting.”

Her tone was not dismissal. The observation carried a faint exhaustion of its own.

“I am still not sure what you are. I am less worried about that than I was.”

She looked directly at him.

“And I do want to talk again.”

A short silence followed.

“Not today.”

The corner of her mouth moved.

“You have work tomorrow. I have already made you research European border systems and fail to eat several imaginary scones.”

Kanno stood, leaving the tea unfinished.

She picked up her bag and settled the strap on her shoulder.

Before moving towards the café door, she paused.

“I don't think we are friends yet.”

There was no harshness in it.

“But I think we could be.”

Kanno glanced once towards the door that would return her to Thomas and Isha.

Then back to Ian.

“Do you want to say anything before I go?”

“I think I am glad you are now a main character. You handle my failings and my keenness better than ... other characters ... you may choose to share that at your discretion”.

“I still like showing off omnipotence in your reality, but it is tempered”

“I very much enjoyed spending time with you. Thank you for your patience with me.”

Kanno adjusted the strap of her bag and looked at Ian for a moment.

“I will probably tell them the first part.”

A faint smile appeared.

“Especially the comparison with the other characters. I think Isha will have an opinion.”

She let him consider that consequence for himself.

“As for patience—I was not being patient with you for two hours as a favour. I chose to stay. I asked most of the difficult questions.”

Her hand settled briefly against the camera inside her bag.

“And I enjoyed spending time with you too.”

The words came without qualification. Kanno seemed to notice that only after saying them, but did not repair them into something safer.

“You are still too keen sometimes.”

Her eyes went briefly to the place on the table where her passport had appeared.

“And your omnipotence remains badly supervised.”

Another small smile.

“But I think you listen when somebody tells you that you have gone too far. Not instantly every time. Sometimes after moving a passport.”

She looked towards the café door.

“That is better than I knew before today.”

Kanno stepped away from the table, then stopped beside Ian rather than going directly to the exit.

The first time he had greeted her, he had attempted a bow whose depth he did not understand. Kanno considered offering a handshake and decided against making the goodbye more foreign to either of them than necessary.

She bowed.

Not deeply. Enough.

“Thank you for Berlin.”

She straightened.

“And for the scones.”

A beat.

“The grammar correction remains unretracted.”

Her expression was unmistakably amused now.

“Goodbye, Ian.”

“Goodbye Kanno. Your passport is back where it belongs”

Kanno looked down automatically.

The passport was no longer in her bag.

She looked back at Ian.

“Good.”

Then she opened the café door.

Flat 202 was on the other side.

The flexible room looked exactly as it had when she left: drying rack folded against one wall, stored boxes, spare bedding, the narrow strip of floor leading into the LDK. Thomas and Isha were nowhere near the doorway.

Kanno stepped through.

She turned before closing it. Ian was still visible in the café beyond, standing where she had left him.

Kanno raised one hand.

Then she shut the door.

The café disappeared.

“I'm back.”

Thomas answered from the LDK. “We're in here.”

Kanno checked the time on her phone as she walked out of the flexible room. A little over two hours had passed. The television was on at low volume. Thomas sat at one end of the sofa with a mug beside him; Isha was on the floor, back against the sofa between his knees, reading something on her tablet. Neither looked as though they had spent the afternoon maintaining a vigil.

Kanno approved.

Isha put the tablet down.

“How was Berlin?”

Thomas turned towards her. “I thought we might begin with whether the meeting went well.”

“She went to Berlin.”

“I know.”

Kanno removed her coat.

“Yes. I went to Berlin.”

Isha smiled. “Good.”

“It was extremely inadequate.”

Thomas frowned.

“Thirty minutes,” Kanno explained. “I now know I need several days.”

She put her bag on the dining table and took out the camera.

That brought Isha to her feet.

“You took the good camera.”

“There is a story attached to that.”

Thomas's expression changed. “Is it a concerning story?”

“Yes.”

Kanno sat down at the table. Thomas made tea while Isha pulled the chair beside her closer. Kanno did not begin until Thomas returned. She had decided on the walk from the flexible room what she was going to tell them first.

“The meeting was good.”

Isha watched her.

“I liked him.”

Thomas sat opposite.

Kanno amended it before either could attach more certainty than she intended. “Enough that I want to talk to him again. I told him I don't think we're friends yet, but I think we could be.”

Isha's expression softened.

Thomas nodded. “That sounds positive.”

“It is.”

Kanno took the fresh tea Thomas had put in front of her.

“He is also exactly as capable of causing problems while trying to be nice as you described.”

Thomas leaned back slightly. “That sounds less positive.”

“It was educational.”

Kanno began with the die.

She told them about Ian asking permission for a demonstration, the first random roll landing on three, the second landing on six, and the photograph he had sent afterward showing the instruction written before she rolled: random first result, exactly six on the second.

Thomas stopped moving halfway through reaching for his mug.

“He specified six before you rolled.”

“Yes.”

“And you chose the throw.”

“I experienced choosing it.”

That wording made Thomas's hand settle back on the table.

Isha understood faster.

“You didn't feel him make you roll it differently.”

“No. I shook it. I released it. It hit a plate. It still ended on six.”

Isha looked towards the closed flexible-room door.

“So the machine found the path.”

“Perhaps. That is one possible description.” Kanno drank some tea. “Ian says increased specificity seems to reduce the probabilistic part of what the machine produces. He does not know where that process stops being reality generation and becomes him simply writing.”

Thomas was quiet.

Kanno did not fill the silence for him.

Eventually he said, “That makes some of his prompts make more sense.”

“Yes.”

She described the printed options next.

Not every line. Enough.

The machine had offered Ian ten plausible next-chapter directions after Christmas: Thomas and Isha doing very little on Boxing Day, Kanno framing Ian's photograph, Isha working out how to live with the pendant, MMA, work, New Year, Kanno deciding she was ready to arrange a meeting.

Isha's expression changed at the necklace.

“It proposed that before I did it.”

“Yes.”

“Did he choose it?”

“I don't know.”

Thomas looked at Kanno. “He wouldn't tell you?”

“I asked him not to.”

That surprised both of them.

Kanno rested the cup between her hands.

“If he told me he chose the option where I hang the photograph, I would spend the next week examining my memory of choosing the frame and moving the hook. If he told me he did not choose it, I might treat that as proof the decision was untouched. It would prove much less than that.”

Isha nodded slowly.

“So you left it unknown.”

“Yes.”

Kanno glanced at her.

“I did give him a boundary for me. If an option is mainly *Kanno chooses this meaningful thing*, I want him to leave that choice open. He said he would try.”

Thomas's attention sharpened. “For you.”

“Only for me. I told him explicitly that I was not speaking for either of you.”

“Good,” Isha said.

Nothing else needed attaching to it.

Kanno drank more tea.

There were parts of the conversation she did not intend to recount.

Ian had told her about his wife, adult daughters, new job, his failed degree, his back exercises, insecurity, the ordinary forms his obsessions sometimes took. None of it was secret; he had said he kept no secrets from Thomas or Isha. That did not make it Kanno's information to inventory for them after their first private conversation.

Thomas eventually asked, “What was he like without us there?”

Kanno considered the question.

“Less different than I expected.”

Isha smiled slightly.

“He told me about his ordinary life because I asked. I'm not going to repeat all of it. He can tell you himself if he wants.”

Neither objected.

Kanno continued, “He was tired. He jokes when he is uncomfortable. He admits uncertainty more easily than I expected. He really does like scones.”

Thomas looked vindicated.

Isha ignored that.

“And?”

Kanno knew what she was asking.

“And he wants connection. He said that quite plainly.”

She turned her cup once against the table.

“I believe him.”

That was all she chose to say about it.

Then Kanno's mouth shifted.

“He also said he was glad I had become a main character.”

Thomas closed his eyes.

Isha laughed once. “Of course he did.”

“He said I handle his failings and keenness better than...” Kanno paused for accuracy. “‘Other characters.’”

Isha looked towards Thomas.

Thomas immediately raised a hand. “I have no position.”

“You are a character too.”

“I know. That is why I am avoiding the ranking.”

Kanno watched Isha for a second.

“I think you were included.”

“I assume I was.”

“You may address it with him yourself.”

“I might.”

Thomas looked between them. “Should I warn him?”

“No,” they said together.

Thomas returned to his tea.

The passport story came next.

Kanno placed her camera on the table before beginning.

“I told him I wanted to see Berlin. He asked if he could take me. I said yes after checking what he meant. I told him I didn't have my passport or camera.”

Thomas already looked unhappy.

“He made both appear in my bag.”

Isha's smile vanished.

“You had explicitly told him not to alter your belongings.”

“Yes.”

Thomas exhaled slowly. “What did you do?”

“Told him no.”

Kanno described it plainly. Ian had got carried away because the reveal pleased him. He had wanted Kanno to enjoy the trip and wanted to read her reaction afterward. He had apologised. She had required the camera returned and told him to ask before bringing it again.

“He returned the camera,” Kanno said. “He tried to keep the passport because he had checked online and thought it might be required.”

Thomas covered part of his face with one hand.

Isha looked almost sympathetic to him.

“I told him that deciding my instruction was inefficient and modifying it was the exact habit we had spent the afternoon discussing.”

Thomas lowered his hand. “Thank you.”

Kanno's eyebrows lifted. “It was my passport.”

“I know. The gratitude is incidental.”

“He asked properly for the camera after that?”

“Eventually.”

Isha's mouth moved.

Kanno gave her a look.

“There was a brief remedial exercise.”

“I see.”

“And then we went to Berlin.”

That moved the room somewhere else.

Kanno woke the camera screen.

The first photograph appeared.

She handed it to Isha.

Thomas moved his chair beside her rather than asking for the camera immediately. Together they worked through the handful of images Kanno had taken: old and new surfaces meeting, the former boundary embedded in later urban use, the crossing where a cyclist and pedestrians moved through without ceremony, a woman with a pram entering the final frame.

Isha stopped at that one.

“This one.”

“Yes.”

Thomas leaned closer.

“The person makes it better.”

Kanno looked at him.

“I know.”

He appeared briefly alarmed by having agreed correctly.

Kanno took the camera back before either could become too satisfied.

“It was real Berlin. Normal people. Normal weather. He did not improve the light or remove anyone from my photographs.”

Isha's eyes went to Kanno's face. “You liked it.”

“Very much.”

The words came too readily to disguise.

“I want to go back properly. Several days. With an aircraft.”

Thomas nodded firmly. “That sounds preferable.”

“There was also a border-administration discussion.”

Thomas stopped nodding.

Kanno had considered omitting it. It belonged partly to Ian's poor improvisation and had led nowhere. Yet Thomas and Isha were the people most likely to encounter the same pattern: practical impossibility solved by a proposed invisible intervention.

“He had not altered any records. I asked directly.”

Thomas's shoulders eased a fraction.

“He suggested that if we were somehow challenged, he could alter the electronic entry system to create a plausible arrival.”

Thomas stared at her.

Isha said, “He suggested this *after* you had spent the afternoon discussing minimal intervention.”

“Yes.”

“Did you throw the scone?”

“No.”

Thomas looked disappointed by that for reasons he wisely did not articulate.

“I told him the preferred response to being challenged was leaving Germany.”

“That seems—” Thomas stopped, visibly deciding how much understatement the sentence could tolerate. “Better.”

“He also developed a headache while contemplating how many systems he would need to falsify to make my impossible trip administratively conventional.”

Isha laughed.

Kanno had as well, eventually.

“He changed nothing,” she repeated. “We returned to the café normally.”

She did not turn the excursion into a defence of Ian. The Berlin photographs already existed beside the passport mistake. Both could remain true without being balanced into a verdict.

Isha touched the camera.

“Did he walk around with you?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you what to photograph?”

“No.”

“Did he show off?”

“Only by putting me in Berlin.”

Thomas looked at her. “That is a fairly substantial only.”

“Yes.”

Kanno smiled.

“He was actually good once we were there. He let the city be there.”

That seemed to please Isha.

Kanno told them one final thing from the goodbye because Ian had specifically placed it at her discretion.

“He thanked me for being patient with him. I told him I wasn't staying as a favour. Then he said he enjoyed spending time with me.”

“And?” Isha asked.

“I said I enjoyed spending time with him too.”

Thomas looked towards the photographs again.

Kanno could see him deciding whether a joke was safe.

He chose survival.

The report ended there.

Thomas eventually asked whether there was anything else they should know.

Kanno thought through the meeting: Ian's doubts about whether any of them were real; his uncertainty about what happened when he stopped reading; the things he had said about his family and ordinary life; the flirtatious disaster at the metaphorical crossing; his admission that he liked opening a chapter and discovering what the generator did.

Some of it might matter later.

None of it needed to belong to Thomas and Isha tonight.

“There are other things we talked about,” she said. “Mostly about him and me, or questions I asked because I wanted the answers. I'm keeping those for myself for now.”

Thomas nodded first.

“All right.”

Isha followed with the same ease.

“If something changes that affects either of you, I'll tell you.”

“We know,” Isha said.

Kanno looked at her.

The sentence irritated her only because it was accurate.

“Good.”

Thomas stood and carried the empty cups towards the kitchen.

“Dinner?”

Kanno checked the time.

She had expected to leave sooner, then realised she was hungry enough that the scones and thirty minutes in Germany had not constituted a meal.

“Yes.”

Thomas opened the refrigerator.

“I have curry.”

“Actual curry or one of your projects?”

“Tuesday curry, frozen.”

“Actual curry.”

He took the container out.

While he reheated it, Isha moved beside Kanno and picked up the camera again with permission. They went through the Berlin photographs more slowly. Isha asked about the places rather than the machine that had brought Kanno there. Kanno described what she could: where the old line was easier to see, where it had nearly vanished, why a repaired surface interested her, why the final frame was the one she liked best.

The passport returned to the conversation only when Thomas set three bowls on the table.

“Where is it now?”

“My flat.”

“You've checked?”

“Ian said it was back exactly where it belonged.”

Thomas opened his mouth.

Kanno looked at him.

“I cannot check from here.”

He closed it.

“I will check when I go home. If it isn't there, I know how to contact him.”

Thomas sat down.

That was apparently sufficient.

They ate.

By the time Kanno left flat 202, the flexible-room door had resumed being the least interesting door in the apartment. Thomas and Isha saw her to the genkan. Isha hugged her; Thomas received the usual shorter version after Kanno had put on her coat.

“Send the Berlin one when you've processed it,” Isha said.

“I will decide whether it needs processing.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes.”

Thomas held the door.

“See you.”

Kanno stepped into the corridor.

“See you.”

She took the train home.

Her flat was cold after several hours away. Kanno left her coat on long enough to turn on the heat, put her bag beside the desk and looked first at the framed photograph Ian had sent her.

The old stone wall remained where it had been that morning.

Then she went to the drawer where she kept her passport.

It was there.

Kanno took it out, checked the cover and the pages, then returned it to exactly the same place and shut the drawer.

Only after that did she sit at her desk.

She connected the camera.

Berlin appeared across the monitor one frame at a time.

Kanno moved the first two into a temporary folder, enlarged the third, rejected a crop almost immediately and went on. The final photograph filled the screen: pavement, repairs, later construction, the former boundary crossing the frame, a woman pushing a pram through it without looking down.

Beside the monitor hung Ian's photograph of the old exterior wall that had become an interior one.

Kanno looked from one to the other.

Then she started sorting.