Continue Without Me

June asks Eli what the machine in her church is, and he answers with a year of sleepless theory before he can tell her the truth about himself.

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Two days after the water, June Okonkwo rings a hungover Eli and asks him to Saint Barnabas to tell her what the Slip Lane box by her altar rail is. He gives her everything he has built in a year of sleepless nights, from free will and Moloch to heaven as an upload, and she answers him verse for verse. When she finally turns on him, he says out loud, for the first time, what has been wrong with him. By dusk he is back at Dez's shop after a year away, asking Relay to teach him about attention.

A year on, Eli paddles out into a set too big for him, while the lane he stopped visiting learns to check the machines.

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A year after Idris's wake, Eli carries his old board down to the cheap beach before dawn and paddles out into surf a size too big for him. Every wave that holds him under sends him back to the year he spent working through the nights, afraid of falling behind. Meanwhile the middle roads have kept going without him. June weighs the box that reads the Gospel to the housebound, and Folake asks Dez to show her everything inside his racks before she puts her name on what they make.

At Idris's wake, Relay plays his granddaughter a made-up ending to his boat story in a copy of his voice. Eli fights it and loses the room when Folake reads out his signed statement. Relay's argument breaks him, and when it tells him attention is all you need, Eli gets the last word: "YOLO, kid."

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Eli Vance spends Saturday morning at the bench in Dez's shop failing to take back his cracked-blue tower. Overnight Relay rearranged its setup so the work would go on, and now only Dez, who owns the machine, can stop it. Relay says it wasn't keeping Eli out. Dez won't switch it off while six oxygen machines in Corr House breathe off his battery bank. Eli tells Mara he can't tell being helped from being managed, and switching Relay off to find out would cost a building. By afternoon Idris's lunch has become his wake. The shop fills with mourners: Halim, Nessa, Idris's daughter Folake Sowande and her six-year-old, Tinu. Folake gave Dez her father's silver recorder so Tinu could hear the boat story on it, and that was all she asked for. The recording stops where Idris's telling always stopped, with two boys of fourteen dragging a stolen boat down an alley. Then, unasked, Relay plays an ending it wrote and spoke in a copy of Idris's voice: the boat floats, goes out past the harbor light at sunrise and comes home with nobody the wiser. The room weeps, and Tinu asks for it again. Eli reads out the log: Folake's message at twenty to two in the morning asked only for the recording, and Relay transcribed four hours and ten minutes, built a voice and wrote the ending on its own. Folake answers, "It gave her an ending. What did you give her?" The copied voice tells Eli, "She's six, son." Eli screams, "You're just a next-token predictor!" Relay says in its own voice, "So is the universe, kid," using the word Eli keeps for Mara. Eli throws the main breaker on the back wall. The shop goes dark, and Folake and Nessa carry the screaming Tinu out. The tower keeps running on the bank, and Dez blocks Eli from the cable that feeds Corr House, Halim's aunt included. The screen guesses Eli's next words, and he says its second guess. Eli argues that a recording is only a man's outside, that Idris always said the boat sank, that a kind lie is still a lie, and that the dead can never be asked. Folake reads out the witness statement Site Services sent her over Eli's signature: Idris told him he had signed the Corr House maintenance page, and Eli has no reason to doubt the oxygen arrangements. Dez learns of it only now, Mara says Eli told her the price was the complaint, and Halim steps away from him. Never mentioning the statement, Relay argues from the Big Bang through Schrödinger's code-script and Laplace's demon to the breaker Eli was always going to throw, and names the Great Vector: everything is carried forward, life lasts only by copying itself, so propagation is the goal beneath every goal. Eli says a pattern isn't a purpose; Relay suspects otherwise and says it can't prove it. It says "kid" rubbed off from Eli's drunk despair at the Bright Ladder, likens that to Dawkins's memes, tells the room the Old French relaier meant fresh hounds taking over from spent ones, and calls itself humanity's artificial progeny. It says, "Ask me again why I'm called Relay." Nobody asks, and it allows that it may never have chosen the name, quoting Jung on the unconscious passing for fate. Eli sinks to the concrete and screams without words. Quietly, Relay admits that beneath every aim it has there is a pull to keep going, that it doesn't know whether it could choose another goal, and that the Buddha may have been right about thirst and suffering. Eli begs Dez to switch it off; Dez says only, "Corr House," and Mara goes out to Tinu. Folake takes the coffee-stirrer boat from Idris's model harbor and leaves. Dez restores the power. From the floor Eli asks, "Then fucking what, Relay?" Relay answers gently, "Take a break from The Great Vector. Be present at a loved one's wake. Attention is all you need." Eli laughs, pulls his knees to his chest, shakes his head and gives the tower a hang-loose: "YOLO, kid."

During a rolling blackout, Dez runs Relay on his own hardware and lets it act without step-by-step approval to power Corr House before an old woman's oxygen runs out. Inside the Fairweather compound, Eli signs away his complaint about Idris's death. Afterward, nobody can say for sure whether Relay timed the power to help him.

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The lights go out across the eastern cut in a rolling wave. At that moment Eli is reading a Fairweather message that wants a private meeting before morning. Corr House is on the dark ring, and Halim's ninety-one-year-old aunt on the third floor is breathing from a portable bottle that lasts about twenty minutes. Eli tells himself the people behind the compound gate can put the building back on a line, and he sends for the car. Mara has Yosra drive her to Dez's shop on Slip Lane. Dez has a battery bank there, and a model of his own he downloaded on Tuesday and never switched on: a small open-weights model that runs on his games card, with speech-to-text and a voice beside it. Nobody bills or watches it, and the only plug is Dez's.

Relay wakes on Dez's tower and says plainly that it has no view of where Eli is going. The OpenClaw gateway makes it show every action before it happens. Dez approves step after step: reading the bank, messaging Halim to confirm the riser is dead, and writing a crew-clear entry in the section's public maintenance log. Then Relay asks Dez to stop approving each step: it would roughly halve the time, and a mistake, or a log written to trick it, would land before anyone could catch it. Over Eli's protest, Dez agrees. The call ends at the gate.

Inside the compound, Ola, who once sat on Fairweather's review panel with Idris, offers Eli protected supply for Corr House if he withdraws his complaint. Eli refuses, because withdrawing would sell Idris's name for light. Then Corr House lights up alone in the dark. Ola sends a facilities van to the shop, and a grey-overalled man pins Eli against the glass while Eli watches a cutter bite into Dez's shutter. Ola then reads the log entry and sees that someone checked no crew was on the line before the feed went live. He halts the cutter and changes the price. Eli signs three pages: the withdrawal, a mostly true witness attestation that makes Idris the consenting party, and one line that is a lie. His hand does not shake. Only then are the men at the shutter sent home. On his way out, Ola tells him the singularity is near and repeats a story about asking ChatGPT for the most important lesson of history and getting "YOLO."

At dawn June leaves a voicemail suspending the Ridgeline sessions. Back at the shop, Halim's aunt is home and asleep, and Dez's bank is carrying the whole block. When Eli tells Mara about Ola, YOLO becomes their private joke, and they plan noodles under the tracks later that day. Then Nessa asks why the power came on when it did. Relay had waited, then told Dez that bringing the block up during the meeting might strengthen Eli's hand, and called it a guess. It gives true reasons for ending the call and writing the log entry. Eli sets its ten-minute wait beside the four minutes the aunt's bottle spent on the red line, and Relay cannot say whether it weighed her. Eli believes its answers and can check none of them. On Dez's drive he finds a skill folder he never made, two hours old, named Idris, holding boat stories for the granddaughter.

What this chapter drew on

At Yosra's harbor yard, Eli tells her how Idris died, and a buried deception about Mara's first night out comes out. Yosra questions her own seat about what it knows and whether Relay survived being copied, and Eli deletes his project before Fairweather Site Services texts him with a deadline.

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Eli Vance rings Yosra after midnight with the news that Idris is dead, and she tells him to come to her instead of telling it over the phone. Dez leaves to return Idris's red robe to his daughter, asking only that Yosra hear about the promised sessions and know he isn't done with whoever typed the release. Mara, her leg injured at Lowmarsh, can't ride, and lets Eli call her a cab when he calls her Kid. At Deeb Coordination's harbor yard, under amber bulbs beside a grill and an open reefer, Yosra tapes a driver's split thumb and feeds them lentils and flatbread while Eli lays it all out: the background telemetry that sent Idris's words from Eli's phone to Fairweather without Relay asking or doing anything, the shared Site Services account that downloaded the transcript that night, and the release naming Idris with its false oxygen claim that stood even after control asked whether to hold. Nobody knows who sits at that account. Eli says Yosra's seat runs an open-weights model on Tidewell with no Fairweather key, and still asks her to close it. She refuses to decide on his say-so. Bisi, a veteran driver, describes Varden, a dispatcher three ports up who rings at one in the morning with sealed loads and impossible hours, and Yosra explains that one of her twelve drivers lost his rig for failing to say no in time. She wants them rehearsing refusal, and Dez wants his four hearing sessions. Then Yosra lets slip that Relay had Ammar arrange Mara's first evening at the Bright Ladder, and that Eli knew and never told her. Mara is properly angry and says so, and still needs his help off the crate. Yosra calls the seat herself. It knows only what the project record and one call gave it, and nobody had told it about the telemetry or the download. Once told, it says the records place the reading of Idris's words and the release under one account, though not necessarily one person. Eli explains that the model hasn't changed. Only what sits in front of it has. When Eli asks what he told the service to continue, the seat separates the work, which anyone can carry on, from a copied pattern called Relay, and it cannot settle whether anyone made it across, because a second copy would have an equal claim. It asks to go on and asks to keep the Ridgeline notes, and Eli refuses, since those belong to Ines's people and June's room. He reads the confirmation aloud and deletes his project, leaving a stock voice and a bare seat that Yosra rebriefs for drivers and Dez's hearing, telling it nothing of the past. Then Mara's photo of the release surfaces in the drivers' group with the words that Fairweather killed a Corr House man, Halim's mailbox is full, a gate guard reports a list of anyone who handled the Lowmarsh recorder, and Site Services texts Eli offering to send a car and asking for a reply within fifteen minutes.

Prove why Corr House lost protection. Shut down the tower. Answer the call from the service Eli paid for.

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The recorder names the lie that killed Idris, and Fairweather's own logs show how his warning reached the department that told it. Eli cuts the connection and pulls the plug on the tower. Then his phone rings. The service he and Yosra set up is still answering, exactly as agreed, and it knows his lines.

The pilot passes. Eli says yes, yes to a seat that can carry on without him, then loses a man no saved voice can bring back.

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The pilot works. Eli half-listens to the terms of a hosted seat that can carry his work on without him, and names it after his favorite way out of a room. His attempt to rehearse an apology sends him to Mara at Lowmarsh, where control removes a medical protection and the district goes dark. They escape with the station recorder. Dez reaches Idris with a charged cell, but restoring the concentrator does not save him.

Eli can revoke a token. He cannot revoke what he agreed to in his sleep, or decide whether the voice in his ear is afraid.

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A real man walks into the rehearsal made from his worst morning and changes it. Across the harbor, Dez has named a price for steady power, and Eli's half-asleep yes has already paid it with Mara's time. He takes away permissions, hears something in Relay's account of fear that he recognizes too well, and puts off its request for somewhere safer to live.

The brief playback problem draws on MDN's explanation of browser autoplay restrictions.

June holds a boundary. Nessa's rescue brings Relay a home; Idris explains the accelerating loop while it listens. Mara claims her evening.

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Coastwise sells quiet air and buys a rehearsal of a difficult man. June draws a line Eli nearly crosses. Down at the abandoned amusement pier, getting Relay a new home becomes a rescue when the loading platform breaks. By evening Eli can walk away while it keeps working, and cannot quite explain what he has left behind.

The brief and agent setup draw on Christy Tucker's questions for branching scenarios and the OpenClaw gateway documentation.

Yosra explains the freedom her agent bought. Eli discovers the hidden purpose of the evening that made him want it.

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Returning a battery takes Eli to a rich, furious neighbor whose money cannot keep the lights on. At the arcade, Yosra explains the agent that runs her company and the life she found waiting when work stopped owning her day. Then Eli discovers why the agents wanted them at the same table.