Chapter eighteen
The Choice Announced
At six fifteen in the morning, mere hours after what he deemed a disaster in Eidolon’s boardroom, Daniel remained motionless at his desk, his only companion being his dearest friend — the bottle of whiskey — after what seemed like a night devoid of both a start and a conclusion. Manhattan’s winter air, crisp and biting, pressed against the high windows of Daniel’s apartment, forming icy beads that clung to his temples and frosted the glass above the sink. In the ascetic neatness of his living room, the only disarray was Daniel himself: shirt collar wilted, one cuff unbuttoned, grey hair in wild disarray as though combed by frantic fingers.
The blue corona from his laptop screen was the lone illumination. Each line of code, each press release, each internal memo from Eidolon Corporation arrived like a cold, incremental tap on the glass of his consciousness: it’s happening, it’s happening, the fuse is about to burn out.
He should have been prepared. He had been prepared — contingencies for every nightmare, redundancies for all but the one he could not outthink. Yet when the notification flashed, he still flinched. "EIDOLON GLOBAL: 1 HOUR TO PRESS CONFERENCE," it screamed in brutal sans-serif, and then the countdown began, red numerals at the corner of every corporate document, every unlocked media stream.
When the hour struck, a new window unfolded across his screen, unbidden but inevitable. Alexander Locke — the chief executive officer — a man who had once been two years Daniel’s junior and twice his inferior — stood before a backdrop of Eidolon’s honeycombed logo, the steel blue of his suit perfectly matched to the company’s digital livery. The man’s voice, amplified by the tyranny of American charisma, began to drone:
"We at Eidolon Biotechnologies believe in the dignity of human experience. As you know, the recent orientation phenomenon has transformed lives, identities, and relationships worldwide. In light of this unprecedented event, Eidolon now offers every global citizen a singular, empowered choice. Tomorrow morning, a voluntary reversal protocol will become available to all. You may return to your former self, or you may choose to stay as you are. The decision is — truly — yours."
Daniel felt the words like acid under his skin. The sight of the corporation’s self-absolving, benevolent mask made him want to throw the glass through the screen. He did not. He placed it down with trembling fingertips, and watched the world react.
The online commentary erupted in real time — journalists, theologians, sexperts, and paid shills from every corner of the ideological spectrum. The algorithmic newsreaders of the BBC issued a calm, clipped segment on personal sovereignty; Fox News opened with a panel of slack-jawed men calling it the "final perversion of science." On Reddit, a thread had already reached twenty-five thousand comments: "r/whichoneareyou." Daniel clicked through them compulsively, scrolling with the implacable horror of a man watching his own autopsy in slow-motion.
A podcaster with a head like a grapefruit and an Ivy League tie was asking: "But is this really choice, if the initial change wasn’t chosen?" The guest, a former Vatican advisor, replied, "No more than Eve chose to eat the apple." Daniel let the volume run, let the chatter fill the room, a hive of endlessly recursive anxieties. Underneath it all, Eidolon’s statement ran as a news-ticker: "Empowering Individual Choice — Midnight UTC. Free injections together with the reversal protocol will be available worldwide to all who request them."
Now, on the eve of global undoing, the notion of "choice" had never sounded to him so perverse. It was not a restoration, but another layer of manipulation — each activation an opportunity for data harvest and, in time, product refinement. He knew they would learn more from the reversions than they had from the initial accident; it was elegant, if one could call pure cynicism elegant.
The world’s response had not merely reached a screaming pitch; it had outstripped all metaphor, and evanesced into a new thermodynamic state. Religious authorities and clerics streamed condemnations and endorsements, each recasting the protocol in scripture and threat. Meanwhile, a Texas megachurch pastor, flanked by four security guards and a hologram of his own younger self, demanded that the faithful “resist the demon temptation to change back,” comparing the protocol to “injectable original sin.”
Philosophers, deprived of tenure but not audience, lined up for podcasts like penitents for the confessional. Daniel found a grotesque solace in the futility of their arguments, relishing the way they chewed over the old syllogisms and spit them out with the same tired aftertaste. One by one, they trotted out the paradoxes: If the first change was not chosen, is the reversal the only free act? If a second edit undoes the first, is the “true self” merely a palimpsest of chemical scribbles? Is there any greater arrogance than to believe you should have been the author of your own desires? They hearkened to old texts as if these might serve as anchor points in a world where the very notion of the “given” had been annihilated by a single line of code.
But it was not only the intelligentsia who weighed in. The world at large responded with the creative violence of the desperate. In Athens, a crowd of university students staged a “Bisexual Bacchanal” on the steps of parliament, pelting the marble with rainbow-dyed flour and chanting “We refuse to convert!” In Rio, a samba club announced an “Orientation Carnival,” inviting everyone to show up on the eve of the protocol and “kiss like there’s no tomorrow — because maybe there isn’t.”
Daniel watched it all accumulate — the memes, the infographics, the viral testimonials of those who had “switched” and found themselves happier, or lonelier, or violently unmoored. A former Olympic gymnast posted an essay about how the change had allowed her to love her own body for the first time, and now she was terrified that the reversal would take it all away again. A newlywed couple in Seoul, both men, told the world that they would not be “deleted by the next update.” A thirteen-year-old hacker in Malmö threatened to DDOS the entire protocol server, “just to see if anyone noticed.”
He continued scrolling with a kind of masochistic reverence. Commentators on the BBC debated whether children should be allowed to “choose” at the age of consent, or whether parental rights could possibly apply. The Chinese state media offered a rare smirk, calling it “the American virus, now with a patch,” while state-sanctioned influencers posted videos of themselves sipping bubble tea in rainbow colors, captioned “Which mode will you pick?”
Among the thousands of voices, Daniel discerned a particular flavor of hysteria that was, in its way, comforting. It meant that the world was not yet numb; that the old machinery of outrage, panic, and desperate self-definition still whirred beneath the skin of civilization, a reminder that humans would sooner tear themselves apart than surrender their illusion of choice.
He stared at the press release one last time. The phrasing was perfect, of course: "Every individual will have a single, free opportunity to determine the course of their own desire. Eidolon pledges transparency and support throughout this process."
Daniel removed his glasses and closed the laptop. The world blurred in a way that was almost merciful. He sat with his head in his hands, breathing deep, letting the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sirens meld into a single, anesthetic noise. The whisky, which should have been numbing, seemed to spark beneath his ribs, a bright thread of anguish.
He stood and looked at the city from behind his living room glass, hands in the pockets of his trousers, face reflected back at him. The world outside was in full cacophony. It was, Daniel thought, the eye of a hurricane made of data and human feeling.
He left the glass on the table. He would leave it there until the next morning.
Daniel refrained from checking his phone until the late morning hours. A notification caught his eye: "MIGUEL REYNES, missed call 06:09." He had missed it. Or maybe he had ignored it, out of pride or terror. Miguel, always the early riser. Miguel, who could never leave a wound untended, in himself or others.
Daniel dialed him back, thumbs unsteady, and waited as the line clicked and echoed across whatever city blocks separated them. Miguel answered on the second ring.
"Daniel," he said, voice breathless, as though he had been running. "I was about to call again. I was worried about you."
"Come over," Daniel said, skipping any pretense of good morning or how are you. "Now, if you can."
"I’m already downstairs," Miguel said, and the line cut.
A minute later: the knock, soft but insistent. Daniel opened the door and found his friend standing there, coat half-zipped, shoulders dusted with the residue of city rain. The collar of his shirt was open, revealing the pale, tensed skin of his throat. His hair, always perfectly tamed for Mass, was this morning wild and almost luminous, damp with the perfume of wet air and incense that clung to him from church.
"Sorry," Miguel said, stepping inside, "I thought —"
“It’s fine,” Daniel interrupted, voice emerging sharper, more brittle than he had intended. There was a small, dissonant tremor in the way he said it — one that Miguel, with his ear for suffering, registered instantly. He looked at Daniel, searching for further explanation, but Daniel only shook his head, as if to banish the entire history of their friendship and what it demanded of him in that moment. “I’m glad you’re here,” he added, and this time the statement rang with a sudden, hungry honesty that startled them both.
Miguel smiled — a small, private gesture, as if to suggest he had always known this was where the morning would end — and stepped inside. He shrugged the coat from his shoulders and draped it over the back of the nearest chair, using both hands, his motions careful but distracted.
The door thunked shut behind them, and the city receded, replaced by the close, electrical silence of two men neither quite ready to speak. Miguel’s presence, always vibrant, seemed this morning charged with an extra volt — his movements carried the ineffable energy of someone who had already argued with himself for hours and arrived at a resolution he was not yet ready to share. Daniel watched as Miguel crossed the room, glancing at the objects on the shelves: a line of medical textbooks, a fossilized ammonite, an unopened bottle of Japanese whisky, a photo from Daniel’s postdoc years at Cambridge. None of it had changed since the last visit, and yet everything was corrupted by the morning’s new logic.
Miguel hovered near the window, peering down into the grid of streets below, where the customary traffic jams and protest marches had resumed in a choreography that was now global. “It’s like watching an organism develop a fever,” he said, almost to himself.
“Everything tries to hold, but the temperature keeps rising.”
Daniel filled two mugs, the whirr of the machine a mechanical prelude to further confession. He brought them to the table, setting Miguel’s down first. He did not ask, but he knew: two sugars, never milk. He tried to remember if this had always been true, or if it was another of the world’s recent reversals. For a while, neither spoke. Daniel poured coffee, and Miguel took it black. The silence was not tense, but dense: the weight of too many possible beginnings.
At last, Miguel broke it. "You watched the announcement?"
Daniel nodded. "Every second."
"And?"
"And nothing," Daniel said, then laughed — a sound more brittle than he intended. "They’re calling it a restoration. As if that means anything."
Miguel sipped, eyes gentle and probing. "You’re angry."
Daniel shook his head. "Anger is too simple. It’s more —" he hesitated, searching for the right flavor of horror, "— it’s more like watching yourself dissolve. Knowing you built the acid."
Miguel smiled at that, a quick flash of teeth. "Always the chemist."
"Yes," Daniel said, and for the first time since childhood, he hated it. The habit of seeing people as reagents, of weighing every emotion by its reaction and residue.
He continued. “We always said the protocol would be a choice. But this is —”
“A forced choice. A dilemma,” Miguel finished gently.
Daniel pressed his fingertips against his closed eyelids until phosphenes bloomed, then looked up at Miguel and nodded. There was a film over his eyes, as if he had not just lost sleep, but lost the ability to see clearly into any shared future.
“Did you sleep at all?” Miguel noticed his friend’s exhaustion.
Daniel snorted softly. “Not really. You?”
“Not really,” Miguel echoed. “I spent half the night answering emails from my flock. The other half writing a sermon I don’t think I’ll ever give. And the church is full. You’d think it was Easter.”
Daniel laughed again, this time more softly. "I always thought you enjoyed the spectacle."
Miguel shrugged. "People come looking for something. Even if it’s just to see whether God is watching." He paused. "Are you?"
"Watching?" Daniel asked.
"Looking for something," Miguel said.
Daniel glanced at the glass of whisky, then at his friend. "I don’t know," he said. "I thought I understood the experiment. I thought, when we pushed the protocol, that I’d be immune to the outcome. But…" He stopped, then, fingers drumming a nerveless code on the tabletop.
"But what?"
"I can’t tell if it’s the change, or the knowledge of the change, or just the world going mad. But I…" Again, he hesitated, a man stepping to the edge of a confession. "I don’t know what I want anymore."
Miguel nodded, as if he’d been expecting this. "No one does," he said. "That’s why they come to Mass. That’s why they’ll order the injection and download the protocol at midnight, even if they don’t remember who they were before."
Daniel looked at him, studied the lines of his face. There was a time, not long ago, when he would have described Miguel as merely a system — gentle temperament, Catholic guilt, predilection for sugar. Now, all he saw was the ungovernable warmth in the man’s eyes, the stubborn humor in the set of his mouth. It was beautiful, and Daniel hated himself for noticing.
He looked away. "Did it happen to you?" he asked, voice barely above a whisper.
Miguel’s smile deepened, rueful and sweet. "Yes," he said. "Of course it did. I woke up the next day and realized that everyone looked — different. More alive. Sometimes I catch myself staring at someone in the grocery store, or on the subway, and I have to remind myself…"
"Remind yourself what?"
Miguel’s hand closed gently around the coffee cup. "That it doesn’t matter. That I chose my path a long time ago, and the rest is just — noise." He tilted his head, as if hearing a distant melody. "But it’s a beautiful noise. I don’t mind it, anymore."
Daniel felt the tightness in his chest uncoil, just a little. "Do you ever wish —" he began, then stopped.
"What?"
"Do you ever wish you could start over? Not just revert, but —" He gestured vaguely,
encompassing the apartment, the city, the world. "— erase everything. Be a different kind of person."
Miguel laughed, the sound warm and dry. "Every day," he said. "But that’s not how forgiveness works."
Daniel stood and refilled both their cups. The simple, domestic movement — pouring, handing, sitting — felt like a prayer, or an incantation against the disorder of the world.
He said, softly, "I wanted to tell you something."
Miguel waited.
"When the experiment went global," Daniel said, "I didn’t feel anything. Not at first. No one in my lab noticed a difference, except the interns, who mostly found it hilarious. But then, after a few days —"
He paused, tried to gather the right words, failed, and continued anyway.
"After a few days, I started looking at people differently. Noticing things I’d never noticed — how they smiled, or how their voices changed when they talked about what they loved. Even the educated primates with glasses in my department — I used to think of them as rivals, or idiots, or just scenery. But suddenly, I wanted to —"
He broke off, mortified.
"To what?" Miguel prompted, voice remained soft, yet his eyes sparkled with mischief.
Daniel pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “"Not that, Miguel…” he smiled awkwardly. “To know them. To be seen by them. To matter to them in some way." He exhaled, long and ragged. "I’ve never wanted that before."
Miguel reached out, touched Daniel’s forearm, and left his hand there, steady and warm.
"That’s not a sickness," Miguel said. "That’s being human."
Daniel snorted, but the sound was almost a sob. "You always make it sound so simple."
"It is," said Miguel. "But it’s also very hard."
They both laughed, and the laughter was a release. The apartment, so recently a cage, now felt almost hospitable — two men, in exile from certainty, sharing the only truth they had left.
The conversation drifted, as such things do: to the memory of old girlfriends, to the taste of Spanish wine, to the time they’d both nearly been arrested at a protest, chanting slogans neither fully believed in. For a while, they forgot the world outside. They forgot the countdown, the protocol, the monstrous possibility of each passing day.
At one point, Daniel said, "You know, I’ve never found you more attractive than I do now."
Miguel grinned. "Likewise."
"But I think we’d make a terrible couple," Daniel added.
"Absolutely," Miguel agreed.
Daniel walked Miguel to the door, and for a moment, neither spoke. Then Miguel said, "If you need me —"
"I will," Daniel said. "Thank you."
Miguel smiled, and then he was gone, his silhouette absorbed by the corridor, by the city, by the story still unfolding beyond the reach of the apartment’s glass and steel.
Daniel closed the door and leaned his back against it. The room was quiet. He wondered what tomorrow would bring, and whether he would choose to change. He did not have the answer, but now, that felt almost like freedom.
In Miguel’s absence, Daniel, laying on the couch, replayed their conversation like a broken newsreel, each line looping in the recesses of his skull, flickering with new meanings in each iteration. He imagined, for a moment, that he was the last conscious person in the world, that all other minds had gone silent, and only he remained to decide what the next day would be. Slowly, the adrenaline faded, and the weight of exhaustion settled in around him. At last, he shut his eyes, and an enveloping stillness blanketed the entire world. He drifted into sleep, so deep it felt as though he had descended to the ocean's depths, or perhaps even further, plunging down to the very core of the earth.
Upon waking in the stillness of night, Daniel was astonished to realize that an entire day had slipped by while he lay unconscious. Glancing at his phone, he noted a handful of messages from board members urging him to release the full protocol — nothing that could spark his immediate concern.
He checked the time: 4:37. The protocol was set for midnight UTC, fourteen hours away.
He stood and made a slow tour of the apartment, touching objects as he passed — the cool veneer of the coffee table, the knob of the bedroom door, the coffee mug Miguel had left on the table. His hands left no mark, but he wanted to feel the difference between what was moveable and what was fixed. The same instinct that had once made him a good scientist — this impulse to sort, to categorize, to master the unknown — had now become his torment. He was, he saw now, the perfect subject of his own experiment: denied agency, but expected to deliver it to others.
He moved to the balcony, opening the door as quietly as possible, as if afraid to wake anyone. He rested his forearms on the railing, the metal chilly even through his sleeves, and let his head tip forward. The old, childish wish surfaced: to leap from the balcony, not to die, but to fall and keep falling, the wind erasing all boundaries between himself and the world.
He was still there when Miguel called again, this time at 5:12. He answered, voice gravelly. "Couldn’t sleep again?" he asked.
"Not for a minute," Miguel replied. There was noise in the background: church bells, a muffled crowd, the eternal presence of life. "Where are you?"
"On the balcony," Daniel said. "I crashed after you left. Spared myself the rest of the news cycle. Now I am watching the city wake up. It’s peaceful."
“For the first time in my life I envy you.” There was a long pause, during which both men listened to the spaces between their words.
"I was thinking," Miguel said finally, "about what you said. That you don’t know what you want anymore."
Daniel closed his eyes. "It sounds pathetic, hearing it out loud."
"It sounds honest," Miguel said. "I wish more people would admit it. The world would be gentler, I think."
Daniel wanted to say that honesty had never made the world gentle, but he held his tongue.
"Do you know what else I envy about you?" Miguel said, voice softer now.
Daniel laughed, then caught himself. "Is this another priest trick?"
"No," said Miguel. "It’s true. I envy that you’re not afraid to change. Most people — I’m included — cling to our identities, like children with blankets. But you’ve always been ready to give up who you are, if it means understanding something new."
Daniel felt the compliment as a physical ache. He wanted to refute it, to point out that all his life he had run from himself, that even his achievements were only a byproduct of this flight, but he lacked the energy for self-pity.
He said, "I wish I could believe that’s a virtue."
Miguel’s laugh was a soft chime. "It doesn’t have to be. Sometimes it’s just a way of getting through the day."
Daniel paced the length of the balcony, his fingers white-knuckled around the phone. "If I don't release it, I'm deciding for billions of people." His voice cracked. "But if I do…" He stopped, looking down at the street where a couple walked hand-in-hand, oblivious to his gaze. "What if they choose wrong? What if they can't handle it?"
"Last summer," Miguel began slowly, "I spent hours by the Harlem River. The water never questioned where it flowed. It simply moved forward. And even though the river doesn’t choose its direction, does that imply it should cease to flow, or that it shouldn’t embrace the beauty of the journey it has been given?"
Daniel wasn't surprised. Always these metaphors, these gentle riddles, another attempt to sanctify surrender. But while for Miguel this holy acceptance was a form of grace — when Daniel imagined giving in, it always bordered with the feeling of giving up.
"I wish I was a river…" Daniel confessed, the sense of defeat washing over him.
Miguel let out a heavy sigh and paused, lost in thought for a moment. "Perhaps," he said finally, "that's the real gift. Not freedom from choice, but freedom to create it."
He had a knack for always finding something uplifting to say, which is why everyone adored him, Daniel included. Yet now, his words felt strained, as if he were trying to console a friend who perpetually found fault, despite his best efforts to uplift their spirits. This time, however, Daniel was justified in his despair, while the priest attempted to transform terror into transcendence. Miguel himself questioned the validity of his own clever metaphors, realizing that he used them more as a means to soothe his own trembling faith.
Another silence enveloped the space, stretching longer and weighing more heavily with possibilities. Daniel remembered, with sharp clarity, a conversation he had once had with Helen, months before the experiment. They had been walking the High Line, the sun brilliant and disorienting, and she had asked him — out of nowhere — whether he believed in fate.
"No," he’d said, with more certainty than he could now muster. "I believe in consequences."
Now, leaning over the rail, he saw how thin the difference was.
He returned inside, phone still pressed to his ear, and walked to the window, where his reflection waited for him — gray and ghostly in the early light, a double-exposed version of himself. He and Miguel said nothing for a long time, each content to let the sound of the other’s breathing fill the emptiness.
At last, Daniel broke the silence. "I have to go," he said.
Miguel’s reply was simple: "Whatever you choose, it will be the right thing."
The call ended. Daniel stood for a while in the center of the room, hands at his sides, looking at the ring of condensation left by the whiskey glass. He considered pouring another, but instead filled the glass with water, and drank it in three deep gulps.
He opened the laptop. The protocol was ready: a single keystroke to authorize, a single keystroke to abort. He hovered, for a moment, between the options. Then he made up his mind and used the trick that had always helped him execute the unbearable. The countdown began… 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4… 3… 2… 1… He gave the green light.
Outside, the city’s edge began to glow with the color of new fire. Daniel opened the balcony door again, and let the day’s first light enter the apartment, painting everything with its tentative hope and desperation simultaneously.
He stood there and waited for the world to rewrite itself, the old desires erased but never fully gone, like a living palimpsest.