## Chapter 398 - What Reaches Him

By Monday evening, the new fact about Ian was easy to state and difficult to believe.

After returning from Mars on Sunday, Ian had contacted Kanno privately. He sent her a machine-generated approximation of the portrait he had taken with her camera and admitted that he would never be able to see the real photograph. The Ian who appeared beside them in cafés, Berlin, Venus or on Olympus Mons was, in his description, a projection made into their reality. The man behind it did not receive its sight, hearing, touch, temperature or bodily sensation. He received text: what they said, whatever surrounding prose the machine supplied, and, occasionally, an image approximation generated for him. The feelings produced by reading that text were real to him. The Martian wind never reached him.

Kanno had told Thomas and Isha that much the night before, at Ian's explicit request. She had also told them that the rest of the private conversation would stay private. Both had accepted the boundary and admitted that they had assumed almost the exact opposite: that the Ian standing in front of them was, in some practical sensory sense, Ian himself.

On Monday, Kanno came to 202 after work because none of them liked leaving the correction as a series of phone messages.

She arrived shortly after seven with her black work bag and no camera. Thomas had already put away the remains of dinner. Isha was still in the clothes she had worn home from the climbing centre, rings restored to her hand after work and pale hair gathered into a loose braid that had begun to come apart near one shoulder. Kanno hung her plum coat by the door and followed them into the LDK.

There was tea. Nobody treated tea as an answer.

Kanno sat at the end of the table with her phone face down beside her cup. “Before we start inventing mechanisms, I want to repeat exactly what I am allowed to repeat. He asked me to tell you that the projected Ian is something we experience. He experiences the interaction as text. He specifically said he does not see, hear or feel what that version of him does.”

Thomas leaned back, his hands around his cup. Hearing it aloud made the idea no more intuitive than reading it had. He could still remember Ian seated under the parasol in the impossible green field, looking towards them as they came through the door. He remembered Ian standing on Mars, turning his attention from Isha in the sky to Kanno on the ground. All of those movements had carried the ordinary social information of a person occupying a body.

“And the occasional generated image,” Thomas said.

“Yes. Approximation, according to him.” Kanno picked up her cup. “He sent me an approximation of the Mars portrait. It was close enough that I knew immediately what it was trying to reconstruct. It still was not the photograph.”

The real frame was already backed up twice in Kanno's flat. She had spent enough time with both images to know that resemblance only sharpened the difference between reconstruction and camera file.

Isha had been quiet since Kanno arrived. “When he told me that seeing me smile while I flew brought him joy...”

Kanno nodded. “The words told him you were smiling.”

Isha looked towards the ceiling for a moment, though she had stopped doing that quite so often since Sunday. “He never saw it.”

“No.”

The answer settled differently in person. Isha's pleasure on Mars had needed no witness to make it real; she had discovered flight and wanted more of it before anyone could comment. Yet part of the pleasure had been shared. Thomas had been below her. Kanno had been photographing. Ian had stood there and appeared to watch.

“I dislike that,” Isha said at last. “Not because I needed him to see me. I wanted him to.”

Thomas glanced at her. “Those are different.”

“Yes.” She rested one hand over the other on the table. “If someone is beside me while I do something and I am happy they are there, I expect being there to include seeing it.”

Kanno's mouth moved slightly. “Photographers have a professional bias in favour of that assumption.”

The small joke let the thought breathe. Thomas drank some tea before returning to the part that bothered him most.

“So when he took your photograph, he chose to take it, told you where to look and operated the camera in our reality. But he never saw you through the viewfinder.”

“Correct.” Kanno's answer was dry, though the dryness had a thin edge now. “I told him the real photograph was better than the approximation before I understood that. Then I had to explain what was in it with words.”

Isha looked at her. “What did you tell him?”

“The factual parts first. I am on the left. Earth is a bright point. Phobos is lower and more obvious. The wind moved my hair away from my face. The ground falls away behind me.” Kanno looked down into her tea. “And I told him I looked happy.”

Thomas remembered the image from the camera screen on Mars. “You did.”

“Yes.”

Kanno left the rest of the private conversation where it was.

Isha reached for her own phone, then stopped before touching it. “That photograph exists because he took it, but he cannot see it.”

“That is the part I keep getting stuck on.” Kanno looked towards the dark screen of her phone. “I can make a print. I can show it to you. I can mount it using the things Miyake has been teaching me about removable photographs. I could put it on a wall. The person who pressed the shutter can only receive a description or whatever reconstruction the machine gives him.”

Thomas frowned. “Which makes the privacy problem stranger too.”

Kanno looked up immediately. “Yes.”

He did not need to explain much. Ian had, at times, received narration containing thoughts nobody had spoken. The exact scope remained unreliable, and later sharing rules had improved after earlier mistakes, but the possibility existed. A machine that could supply private interior text could apparently fail to deliver a deliberately offered view through a camera.

Isha's expression hardened slightly. “He may receive something I never chose to tell him, but if I deliberately hold up a photograph for him, he cannot simply look at it.”

“Apparently.” Thomas rubbed one thumb along the handle of his cup. “That is an exceptionally bad interface.”

Kanno gave him a brief look. “I used less polite language in my head.”

“Which may have been delivered to him.”

She stared at Thomas.

He raised one hand. “Sorry.”

After a second, Kanno laughed once despite herself. “That is exactly the problem.”

Outside, someone rolled a bicycle through the court below, the chain clicking faintly beneath the balcony. The building contained no Martian sky, neutral construct or projected visitor. It was Monday evening in Sendai, and the three of them had somehow acquired a new category of sensory philosophy between work and tea.

Thomas eventually said, “It does not alter the practical boundaries.”

“No.” Kanno's answer came quickly. “I told him that too. The passport was still moved. The camera was still moved. Gifts that arrived before anyone was asked still arrived. His reason can become more understandable without changing what happened on our side.”

Isha nodded. “If the projected Ian moves something, the thing is moved.”

“Exactly.”

Thomas considered the word *projected*. It was useful only because Ian had supplied it. “I also don't think we should decide that the version we meet is a separate person. We have no evidence for that. It behaves according to Ian's participation, and what we say reaches him.”

Kanno looked relieved that he had said it before she needed to. “Thank you. One Ian is already administratively difficult.”

Isha smiled. “You are friends with the difficult one.”

Kanno gave her a level stare. “I said I was not objecting to *friend-shaped*. That is a technically different statement.”

Thomas hid his smile behind his cup.

The humour faded naturally. Kanno turned the phone over, though she did not open the private thread.

“There is one thing this changes for me,” she said. “When he is physically with us, I assumed attention worked normally. If I saw him looking at something, I thought he had seen it. If he smiled after something happened, I assumed the experience had reached him and then produced the reaction.”

“Now the order may be different,” Thomas said. “The machine gives him the account, he reacts to the account, and what we experience as Ian may be part of that same process.”

“Maybe.” Kanno stopped him with a small motion of her fingers. “That is already more mechanism than he told me. I only know what reaches him.”

Thomas accepted the correction. “Fair.”

Isha did not need to reopen the group message Ian had sent after Mars. She remembered the important line.

“He said it brought him joy to see me smile.”

Kanno watched her carefully. “Yes.”

“I understand the sentence differently now.” Isha put her phone down. “I do not think it becomes untrue. He knew I smiled. He felt something because he read that I smiled. But I had imagined his eyes on me.”

Thomas reached across the table and rested his hand over hers. Isha turned her palm beneath his and held it.

“I had imagined his eyes on both of you,” he said. “When you carried me, I thought he saw it happen in the same sense Kanno did.”

“Kanno also recorded evidence,” Isha said. “And you laughed.”

“I was under unusual gravitational circumstances.”

Kanno let that exchange pass. The images were hers; Thomas would eventually receive whichever ones she chose to send, and his dignity had never been part of the selection criteria.

Isha's smile faded into thought again. “Next time, if I want him to know I am happy, I can tell him.”

Kanno's attention sharpened. “You can. You also don't have to narrate yourself for him.”

“I know.” Isha answered without offence. “I mean if I want him to know. Before, I assumed he could see it.”

For the first time that evening, the discussion produced a practical change.

Thomas nodded. “The same applies to anything else we deliberately want him to receive. We can stop assuming the projected body has carried the information just because it looked in the right direction.”

Kanno considered that, then shook her head. “Within reason. I am not describing every room to him because his interface is bad.”

“No.”

“And I am definitely not providing image alt text for the universe.”

Thomas smiled. “A hundred megapixels may require a long evening.”

“It can remain his problem.”

Isha looked between them. “Would this make you less willing to go somewhere with him?”

The question was directed to Kanno, and Kanno took her time with it. The word *date* from Ian's last private message remained exactly where she had left it: unexamined until another planet. There was no reason to begin examining it at Thomas and Isha's dining table.

“No.” She looked towards the window, where the reflection of the LDK obscured most of the night outside. “It makes me sadder about one part of it. It also makes some of his behaviour easier to understand. That is not the same as approving all of it.”

Ian had given her permission to explain more. She still kept the rest.

“I think,” Kanno continued, “if the only thing that actually reaches you from an impossible experience is the account of somebody else's reaction, there may be a temptation to make the experience bigger so the reaction is clearer.”

Thomas's expression changed. “That was what I meant last night when I said I understood some of his offers differently.”

Isha looked down at their joined hands. “Venus. Mars. The Sun.”

“The Sun remains excessive,” Kanno said.

“Good,” Thomas replied. “I was concerned our standards had moved during the weekend.”

Kanno ignored him. “But I am not going to the Sun because Ian cannot see the things he sends us to.”

Isha nodded slowly. “And I am not climbing Olympus Mons for that reason.”

Mars had made her more interested in the climb, if anything. She had spent part of Monday between customers remembering the sensation of choosing upward and the vast red ground moving beneath her. Another survey appealed to her. A climb might follow.

“If I go back,” she said, “I go because I want to see the mountain again. If he enjoys reading that I enjoyed it, good.”

Thomas squeezed her hand once and let go to reach for his tea.

Kanno's shoulders eased by a degree. “Yes.”

They sat with that for a while.

The harder question arrived after Thomas made another pot because the first had gone cold. He returned to find Isha examining Kanno's phone, though Kanno had opened the machine-generated Mars approximation rather than the private messages.

The image showed a recognisable version of Kanno against a Martian landscape. It was wrong in small ways that became obvious once one knew the actual frame: the celestial bodies, the precise hair movement, the angle of the face, the quality of distance. It was close enough to be eerie and far enough to remain safely separate from the camera photograph.

“So this is what he can get,” Isha said.

“Sometimes.” Kanno took the phone back and set it beside her. “He said occasional approximations. I don't know what decides when.”

Thomas sat down again. “Do you think it changes whether you consider him present?”

Kanno did not answer immediately.

She had touched the same grass as the projected Ian beneath the false-blue sky. She had handed him her camera on Mars. He had stepped back, asked her to look right and taken two photographs. From her side, those events had physical continuity. From his, they arrived as text about a version of himself doing them.

“I think he is present in the only way available to him,” she said eventually. “That is different from believing he experiences presence the way we do.”

Isha nodded. “He is still Ian to me.”

Thomas looked at her.

She searched for the rest of the thought. “But now, when he looks at me, I know I am the one experiencing the look.”

Kanno's gaze shifted to her.

Isha did not seem frightened by the idea. Naming it had simply made the asymmetry clearer. “He may later read that he looked at me. He may read what I did because of it. That is different.”

Thomas thought of the café and Mars, then of earlier encounters where Ian had appeared to react to things that were never spoken. “It also means we should be careful about assuming which reactions belong to the projected scene and which belong to Ian after he reads it.”

“Yes,” Kanno said. “And unless it matters, I don't want to spend our time separating them.”

That sounded like Kanno.

Isha reached for her tea. “Then I have one current choice.”

Thomas waited.

“I still want to fly again.”

Kanno looked at her for a second, then nodded. “That seems unaffected.”

“And I want him to know I want to fly again.”

“You already told him you wanted to return.”

“I know.” Isha's mouth curved slightly. “Then the text has done its job.”

Thomas laughed.

Kanno stayed another half hour. They moved on eventually to her March event, Thomas's unchanged April working-group start and the continued absence of Coach 1 dates. The mineral firm had still supplied no substantive answer, which after less than a week remained unremarkable. The next correspondence opening was still around the middle of March, and the invitation to their families still had no reply.

When Kanno finally stood to leave, she opened the actual Mars photograph on her phone from the backed-up copy and handed it to Isha once more.

Isha studied the frame. Kanno stood to the left beneath the muted sky, hair shifted away from her face. Earth was only a bright point. Phobos hung close to where she seemed to be looking.

“You do look happy,” Isha said.

Kanno took the phone back.

“Yes.”

She locked the screen, put on her plum coat and went home by the lift.