His neighbor

He should not have gone across the hall.

He knew this. He knew it the way you know you shouldn't open the second bottle of wine, shouldn't text your ex at midnight, shouldn't scratch the mosquito bite. Knowing and doing are different countries, and arousal had revoked his passport.

He put on a clean shirt. Looked in the mirror. Same face -- dark curly hair, three-day stubble, glasses he should probably replace. But his eyes looked different. Wider. Hungrier. Or maybe that was just the fluorescent light.

He walked across the hall and knocked.

Maren opened the door. She was wearing a silk robe -- emerald green, loosely tied. Her hair was down, dark blonde, damp from a shower. She smelled like coconut shampoo and underneath it something warmer, something that might have been perfume or might have been skin or might have been the sweet undertone that his newly heightened senses were pulling from her the way a dog pulls scent from the wind.

"That was fast," she said. She was smiling, but there was a nervousness in her eyes -- the same look she'd had when she knocked on his door for eggs eight months ago. Like she was doing something she'd decided to do before she could talk herself out of it.

"I brought beer," he said. He had not brought beer.

She laughed. "Get in here."

Her apartment was the mirror image of his but it was alive. Plants on the windowsill -- actual living things, green and thriving. A candle on the coffee table that smelled like fig and cedar. A framed photo of her son Max, gap-toothed, grinning on a beach somewhere. The kitchen smelled like Pfefferminztee. A yoga mat was rolled in the corner. On the shelf, between cookbooks and a stack of Brigitte magazines, a small statue of the Buddha sat cross-legged with an expression that said he'd seen it all and found it mildly amusing.

Maren poured tea. They sat on opposite ends of the sofa. The space between them was three cushions wide and vibrating.

"So," she said. "You built Pleroma."

"Part of it. The front-end. The matching. Not the..."

"The transformation stuff."

"Yeah."

"I signed up this afternoon. After you mentioned it in the stairwell last week." She held her mug with both hands, looking into it. "The quiz was... intense."

"I know."

"'What part of your body would you change if you could?' 'Describe a sexual experience that made you feel ashamed.' 'What would you do if no one could judge you?'" She looked up. "I answered things I've never told my therapist."

"The onboarding is designed to --"

"I know what it's designed to do, Lukas. I read the privacy policy." She smiled, and it was a different smile now. Sharper. "I also know nobody else reads the privacy policy, and that you're collecting biometric data through phone sensors with a consent clause buried in paragraph forty-seven."

He blinked. "You read paragraph forty-seven?"

"I was a corporate lawyer before I became a Pilates instructor. Old habits." She set her tea down. "I signed up anyway. Because I'm thirty-four and I live alone and my son only comes every other weekend and the last man I had sex with was my ex-husband, and he treated it like a bodily function, like flossing."

The candle flickered. Rain tapped against the window. Somewhere in the building, the Müllers' washing machine changed cycles with a clunk.

"Have you used the free transformation?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Which one?"

He said nothing. But his jeans said it for him. The new size was visible through the denim -- a ridge along his thigh that hadn't been there the last time she'd seen him in the stairwell.

Maren's eyes dropped. Rose. Dropped again. Stayed.

A long silence. The candle. The rain. The washing machine through the wall. And beneath it all, the vibration -- the nanobots awake and attentive, as if they could sense the heat coming off the woman sitting three cushions away.

"Lukas," she said quietly. "Is that real?"

"Yeah."

"Can I see?"

The question hung in the air between them like the last second before a glass falls off a table. He could still catch it. Could still say "maybe we should just drink our tea" and go back across the hall to his IKEA apartment and his Post-it note and his twenty-two months.