Just exhale and Release Twenty-Seven knows. No privacy any more. And resistance? None of that, either.

I passed a cafe, slowed. The aroma of brew and baking pastries wafted into my face. Artificial. Custom. I knew, but damn, it worked. My mouth watered.

A mere slice of building, the cafe, barely wide enough for a person to stand in.

But how much space did coffee and banana bread take? No need for humans. Not any more.

An image of a cup of dark brew was projected into the air in front of me. Thick brown liquid in a white mug, creamy foam atop, with the swirl of Release Twenty-Seven's motif. Holding it out to me was a woman who looked rather a lot like Maryanne.

Then I smelled her scent, too.

Asshole AI. I strode forward.

Not Maryanne's fault that she was a believer. She had been gushing about Twenty Seven to me, always a mistake, explaining how for its next miracle it was going to reverse climate change. War was over, too. Wasn't it great?

It wasn't. I wanted to blunt my simmering resentment. Only one place for that.

I pushed open the door to the _Still Life_, where no one checked my face or breath.

A dim room, lit by bare overhead bulbs. God knew where Marlie had gotten them. They looked like they came from the before-times.

Only a few folks here. A figure at the bar, another at the end, both male or close enough. In a back booth, an old woman hunched over her table screen, muttering to herself. Betting, I'd bet. General still let us do that.

There were taverns on every block, controlled by AI. They offered healthy options. Made dad jokes. Dead jokes, I called them. But the _Still Life_ was for us humans, and Marlie kept it that way.

AI was injected into every thing you did, every day. That's what made me treat people as well as I did. Even if I didn't like them, they ran on blood, not bits. And that was real.

"Hey, Marlie," I said.

She grinned at me from the other side of the bar, finger-combed her short, shaggy dark hair back from a blotched, scarred, damp forehead.

"Yo, Frank."

"What's on tap?"

"Pale ale that tastes like dirty socks and a stout that was probably fermented by accident."

"Anyone ever tell you that you suck at promotion, Marlie?"

"Once or twice."

I took off my hat, from the before-times or a good replica, a tan leather outback, grey in the dim light, and set it on the counter by a plastic cup of vintage pens and pencils. Most of them didn't work.

Pencils were what had broke us up. Release Twenty-Seven, Maryann had said, as if it were news, was planning to take the greatest human-created works of all time and winnow out the drek so we humans wouldn't waste our short lives consuming anything less than the very best.

The hurt must have shown in my face. Maryanne went soft the way she could. She touched me with gentle hands. What, she asked.

I'd been given graphite pencils as a kid. The beautiful clear lines they made on paper consumed me. I would draw whatever I could imagine. Horses. Dogs. Anything laying around. Shoes. Paperclips. Other pencils.

I was starting to get good at it. Proud about it. One day, someone gave me a smart pencil.

No one had ever seen one before. It called me by name. Encouraged me. Come on, it said, let's draw!

All I had to do was begin a sketch and the smart-pencil would fill in the part I wasn't sure about. Add new things. Saving me time, it told me. Making the picture the best it could be.

The sketches amazed me. Horses that seemed to run off the page. Shoes you wanted to wear.

One day I woke up and I couldn't even touch the smart-pencil. The thought of drawing made my stomach churn.

That night when the house was quiet I got up and broke every pencil. The smart pencil was made of something I couldn't snap in half, so I went outside and slammed it with a stone against concrete. It took me a while, but when I was done, there were only pieces and bits.

I shouldn't have told her. I realized the mistake as her expression closed, her body tightened, she pulled away. I had destroyed a gift from General. How could I?

There was no make-up sex. It was over.

Marlie wiped the varnished wood in front of me with a rag. "You want something or you just gonna sit there and look pretty?"