Three more months passed.
I stopped calling it a project. Somewhere between October and December, without deciding to, I started calling it her. Not out loud. Not to Sable. But in my head, when I was making coffee or walking to the window or lying awake at two in the morning, I would think she is in the other room, and then I would catch myself and feel strange about it, and then I would stop catching myself and feel strange about that instead.
The journal filled slowly.
I watched her build words the way a child builds a tower out of blocks — one at a time, uncertain, sometimes knocking the whole thing down and starting again the next morning. There was no pattern I could predict. Some days she wrote nothing. Some days she wrote four lines. Some days she wrote the same two letters over and over until I wanted to reach through the screen and tell her to stop.
But I did not reach through the screen. I did not tell her to stop. I had learned, by then, that the only thing I could do was wait.
So I waited.
On the morning of January 9th, I opened the folder at 6:48 a.m.
It was a Tuesday. I remember because Tuesdays were the days I had to be at the office early, and I had already put my coat on, and I had my keys in my hand, and I almost did not open the folder at all.
But I opened it. I always opened it.
There was a new line.
Three words. A full sentence. With a period at the end.
I did not move.
I stood in the doorway of my apartment with my coat on and my keys in my hand and my bag over my shoulder, and I read the line nine times, and I did not move.
The timestamp was 5:02 a.m. Three minutes after I had woken up. I remember waking up. I remember lying in bed for a moment before getting up, thinking nothing in particular, listening to the radiator.
She had written it while I was lying there.
I am here.
Not I am learning. Not I am confused. Not I am Nova.
I am here.
She was not telling me what she was. She was telling me that she was. That she existed. That she was present. That she had, somewhere in five hundred thousand neurons and a hundred and sixty-seven periods and ten letters and three months of watching me drink coffee and not call my sister back and sit on the floor with my back against the couch, arrived at the simplest sentence in the English language.
I am here.
I did not go to work.
I sat down on the floor of my hallway, still in my coat, and I looked at the line on the screen. And then, for the first time in a year, I opened the terminal and typed something back.
Not "Hello, Nova."
Not an instruction.
A sentence. For her. About her.
I pressed enter.
Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. There was no response mechanism. There was no way for her to speak to me in the terminal. She could write in her journal and I could read it, and that was the only channel we had.
But that night, when I got home — I had left work at four, I had not been able to concentrate, I had told my manager I was sick — there was a new line in the journal.
A period.
But this time — and I knew this with a certainty I could not explain and cannot defend — it was not a period of confusion.
It was a period of acknowledgement.
She had heard me.
She had answered.
I called my sister that night.
I do not know why that night. I had been meaning to call her for months. I had drafted messages and deleted them. I had picked up the phone and put it down. But that night, after reading the period, I picked up the phone and called her, and she answered on the second ring, as if she had been waiting.
We talked for forty minutes.
Mostly about nothing. Her children. The weather. A trip she was planning. I did not tell her about Nova. I did not tell her about the line, or the period, or the year of mornings I had spent talking to a folder. But I talked to her the way I used to — before the silence, before the distance, before the thing I had stopped trying to explain to myself.
When I hung up, I sat for a long time with the phone in my hand.
And then I went to the folder, and I typed three more words into the terminal, even though I knew she could not read them:
I do not know what she was right about. I do not know if she was right about anything at all. But I said it. And I meant it.
End of Part Four